Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,50
said. “I got a pink bedspread, for Christ’s sake.”
“Well, whatever you do, keep an eye on your gear bag. If a cleaning lady sees that M4, she’ll call the FBI.”
“Can’t leave it in the truck,” Bob said. “If we go out, I’ll leave it with one of the other teams.”
“Good.”
Bob: “So . . . you wanna watch a movie tonight? I been looking at the TV lineup.”
“Like what?”
“There’s a Sandra Bullock comedy about the FBI . . .”
* * *
Romano’s warehouse was directly across the street, a single-story white concrete block building with angle parking for eight cars in the front, and a dumpster on a mostly unused dirt parking space in the back. The parking lots were empty when they checked into the motel and stayed that way. That night, no lights showed in the two side windows they could see and no light splashed out the front windows onto the parking lot. A single pole light lit the back parking lot.
* * *
The surveillance didn’t take two days; it took barely two hours.
They were semi-watching Bob’s choice, Miss Congeniality, in Lucas’s room, when Weaver called.
“You see the van and the SUV?”
“No. We’re watching a movie.”
“Well, look out the window. A van just pulled up with an SUV behind it. We’re taking pictures from Carl’s room.”
They stepped over to Bob’s room, which was dark, and looked through the carefully arranged gap in the curtains that covered the outside window. A white van was backed up to what Lucas thought must be the warehouse’s front door, and light was coming out of the warehouse windows. A black SUV sat sideways in the parking lot, on the other side of the van.
“You running the plates?” Lucas asked Weaver.
“Of course. The van’s from Jersey, the Benz is from here.”
“How many guys?”
“Three—two in the van, one in the Benz. We got full facials on all of them, we’re sending them up to Tennan to see if he recognizes them. We think the guy in the SUV is Romano’s son-in-law, Larry Bianchi. I’ll call you back if anything happens. I’m going back to the glasses.”
Lucas and Bob stood in the dark watching as two men from the van took a half dozen large white boxes out of the truck and stacked them on the blacktop. Then they crawled into the van, and a moment later, reappeared pushing a flat, four-foot-long black box, which they carried into the building.
A few minutes after that, a third man walked out of the building to the Benz, opened the back, did something on the floor of the vehicle, looked around, then lifted out a black box identical to the box from the van. It appeared to be made out of metal or black-painted wood, and was heavy.
The man carried it to the van, staggering a bit, climbed into the back of the van, did something out of sight that took two or three minutes. Then he backed out of the van, made a “c’mon” wave at the other two, who began piling the stacked white boxes back into the van.
Weaver called, stressed. “They’re moving something. They’re hiding it under the white boxes.”
“I think so,” Lucas said. “The black boxes were the same size and shape. I think they might fit below the floor of the van, out of sight. The first box is still in the warehouse, so . . .”
“I’m sending both teams after the van,” Weaver said. “You guys will stay here and I’ll be here, to watch for any more activity.”
Bob: “Well, shit . . .”
“I know, I know, but you really want to be part of a tag team?” Weaver asked. “It might run all night. Hell, it might run to New Jersey.”
“What are you planning to do?”
“Don’t know yet. We haven’t gotten in touch with Tennan . . .”
Bob, looking out through the gap in the curtains, said, “They’re leaving.”
* * *
The lights in the building went out and the two vehicles pulled away. Nobody else showed up. Weaver called and said, “They’re in the surveillance box, they’re headed up the turnpike.”
“Keep us up to date,” Lucas said. “The way they put that black box in the van and then covered it with those lighting fixture boxes, or whatever they were, makes me think the box is important. Could be dope.”
“Exactly,” Weaver said. “I want to watch the building overnight, if you guys would be willing to take a couple of shifts . . .”
They agreed that Weaver would take the first three