Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,29

the group, so maybe . . . ten million each, after expenses? Twelve million? One of the guys was an attorney and another one was an accountant. Gentry had run a construction company before he got into the dope business. I looked him up once, a few years after the case, and he was building homes again. I think just enough to give himself a cover for the money he was spending.”

* * *

The drive to Coconut Grove ate up most of an hour. Gentry lived in a tall, two-story yellow-painted stucco house with a red-tile roof on Gifford Lane. The house had an attached garage with a five-foot-tall steel-bar gate across the driveway, and another steel-bar gate across the sidewalk leading to the front door. The small yard was crowded with palm trees, including one with coconuts.

They parked on the street and walked back to the house. Bob looked up at it and said, “If I owned this place, I’d tell the Marshals Service to kiss my ass and send the pension checks to Coconut Grove.”

The sidewalk gate was unlatched. They went through, up to the front porch, and pushed the doorbell. A dog barked—a small dog from the sound of it—and a moment later, Gentry pulled the door open and frowned at them. “Cops? What’d I do?”

Lucas said, “Nothing, as far as we know. Mac Campbell said to say ‘Hi.’”

Gentry laughed and said, “I wouldn’t mind talking to him someday, maybe buy him a beer, when enough time’s passed. Maybe it already has. Anyway, what do you want?”

Gentry was a solidly built balding man in his middle sixties, wearing white shorts and a pale blue golf shirt. He had a white brush mustache, a short pink scar below his left eye, and a cleft chin. He had smile lines on his face, and to Lucas looked like he might laugh a lot.

“We need to talk for a couple of minutes,” Lucas said. “We’re not here to arrest you, we’ve got no warrants or anything. We can talk out here if you like, but it’d be friendlier inside.”

Gentry hesitated, then said, “Well, what the hell. Come on in. Watch that first step, there’s a crack . . .”

Gentry took them through the house, across a burnt-orange shag carpet to what he called a Florida room, a screened-in porch that looked out over a narrow strip of grass to the near-identical Florida room on the house on the street behind them. A knee-high refrigerator was set under a countertop, and Gentry asked, “Beer, Diet Coke, lemonade?”

Lucas, keeping it congenial, took a Diet Coke and Bob went for the lemonade. Gentry popped open a beer for himself, and he asked, again, when they were all sitting down, “What’d I do?”

“Is there a wife around somewhere? A girlfriend?” Bob asked.

“Wife. She’s down at Dinner Key—that’s a marina—with a couple of friends.”

Lucas said, “What you did, is, you stopped in at the Baily Hotel in Miami Beach a few months back to have a beer. You had a little talk with a dope dealer . . .”

Gentry held up a hand. “Nothing illegal about a beer,” he said. “I don’t deal dope, no way, shape, or form. I’m well out of all that. The bad old days.”

Lucas said, “Okay, but this guy knew you, and you got to talking about that Coast Guard shooting up in Lauderdale. You told him the diver on the boat was a woman. We’d like to know where you heard that.”

Gentry was sitting on an old-fashioned glider that creaked, eek-eek, eek-eek, as he rocked it with his toes. He leaned back into a cushion and closed his eyes, and after a moment he said, “That fuckin’ Morris.”

“Who?” Lucas asked. In his own ears, he sounded less than convincing.

“You know who,” Gentry said, opening his eyes. “I don’t expect you to admit it, but the only guy I talked to about that shooting was Morris. I didn’t talk to anyone else at the Baily about it.”

“What’s Morris’s first name?” Bob asked, taking a notebook out of his pocket.

Gentry shook his head. “What’d you do, get his ass in a crack? Squeeze him?”

“We don’t know a Morris, but we’d like to,” Lucas lied. “That’s not really the point. The point is, where’d you hear about a woman diver? Where’d she come from?”

Gentry leaned back and closed his eyes again, while Lucas and Bob waited. Then he said, “Before we got busted by the DEA, back in the nineties—we were totally