that pipe, either. Bianchi says the same thing and they actually seemed kinda . . . confused. We put the pipe in front of Bianchi and he said he had no idea what it was and he looked like he really didn’t. The thing is, finding that pipe was awful convenient. They should have gotten rid of it months ago. Should have thrown it out the car window into a ditch, or into the ocean, not dropped it in a dumpster behind their store.”
“I gotta think about it,” Lucas said. “Where are Romano and Bianchi now?”
“Still inside. They’ll be here for a while and then we’ll transport them up to the federal lockup . . . You want to talk to them?”
“I want to think first,” Lucas said. “But yeah—I want to talk to them. I gotta make a phone call first.”
* * *
Lucas walked past the spot where Bob had been lying, blood on the blacktop looking now like a routine oil spot. He continued to the motel, asked the clerk if people were barred from the second floor, and was told that they weren’t, that the fire had been smoky, but was confined to a single room.
“There’s a lot of FBI up there, and the firemen, it’ll be noisy . . .”
“That’s okay . . .”
He went up to his room, which was undisturbed except for the stink of the smoke. He lay on the bed and called Russell Forte, his boss in Washington.
Forte picked up and said, “If you’re calling before daylight, it’s gotta be really bad or really good.”
“It’s really bad,” Lucas said. “Bob got shot and killed this morning.”
“Holy shit! Holy shit! Lucas! What happened?”
Lucas told him about the stakeout—at one point, Forte said, “Hang on a minute,” and then Lucas heard him talking to a woman, and Forte came back and said, “My wife wanted to know what was going on . . .”
The woman called from the background, “I’m so sorry, Lucas.” She started to cry.
Forte said, “Keep talking.”
Lucas told him about the progress of the investigation, about the arrest of Romano, Bianchi, and the gun smugglers, and the recovery of the dope can. When he ran down, Forte said, “Okay. Listen, we’ve got a guy somewhere around Justice who does notifications and I hear he’s good at it. I’ll have him get to Rae. Didn’t Bob have a fiancée?”
“A girlfriend. I think Rae should go talk to her. That would be best.”
“We’ll check with Rae about it,” Forte said. “What are you going to do?”
“I need to figure out what happened here. Everybody’s confused. If Weaver hadn’t been hidden in that bush, I’d be dead right now. The rest of the FBI guys . . . I mean, they did good, and one of them got shot for his trouble. We don’t know what the fuck happened. I need to find that out.”
“Okay. Whatever you need,” Forte said.
“Russell—don’t let Rae come out here. She’s gonna want to come right out, but I don’t want her here. She couldn’t do any good.”
“Well, I don’t know if . . .”
“Russell—keep her out. I’m telling you, keep her out.”
* * *
Lucas stood in an icy shower for five minutes, letting the water stream through his hair and down his body, a shock that brought him back to earth. He had a hand-sized red spot below his left shoulder blade that would turn into an ugly bruise, and that was it. He toweled off, got some extra-large Band-Aids from his Dopp kit, smeared disinfectant on his knees and elbows and covered the scrapes. That done, he lay on his bed in his underwear, arm over his eyes, and tried to focus on what had happened.
Kept flashing back to the moment Bob went down. He hadn’t seen it, he was already on his stomach and turning, had seen the two shooters dancing in the street, thrashed by FBI bullets. Where the hell had they come from?
Flashed back to the bullet thumping into his back. Got up, found the vest, got a knife from his gear bag, and worked the slug out of the layers of Kevlar, rolled it around in the palm of his hand. Nine-millimeter. He put the slug on the TV stand, dropped back on the bed.
He should be dead. He was hardly injured, but he should be as dead as Bob.
Flashed again to the shooting, to the blacktop, felt the blacktop slicing through his knees and elbows . . . turned to see Bob.
Have