Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,58
both of you get back here soon as you can depending . . . on what happens there. Parker—lights and siren the whole way.”
Weaver turned back to Lucas: “It’s the only vehicle we have with lights and siren. Take off.”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Parker was a steady driver, even in the gargantuan Suburban, but had never driven a cop car. Halfway to Miami, pushing an elderly Buick down the highway, he said, “I’ve never run a car with lights and siren going. It’s weird. Some of the cars scatter in front of you, some never see you at all. The ones that don’t see you, shouldn’t be on the road. There are some other ones that are just friggin’ ignoring me.”
Lucas said, “Yeah.” Not up for idle conversation.
“I’m sorry about Bob. You okay?”
“No, I’m not,” Lucas said. “I can’t get it out of my head. I’m fucked up here.”
After a long silence, Parker asked, “Are you sure you should be doing this? We could get a couple of guys from downtown . . .”
“I’m sure,” Lucas said. “I need to find out what happened. Did Elliot see us coming? Were we set up right from the start? Were we set up at all . . . No, we were set up. No question. I need to know how Elliot was involved. If he was . . .”
* * *
As they got off the expressway and headed east, Lucas took a call from Washington, from Russell Forte: “Lucas, I got a plane ticket down there, I’ll see you this afternoon. Are you still at that TRYP place?”
“Yeah, we never checked out. Why are you coming?”
“To see about Bob, for one thing. And to see about you. I need to talk to you about what you’re doing and what you’re planning to do. I’ve got a guy picking me up at Fort Lauderdale, I should be at your hotel by three o’clock.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do. Right now I’m headed north with one of the task force agents to see if we can find the guy who put us on Romano.”
“I can hear the siren . . .”
Lucas told Forte about the emerging theory that they’d all been chumped, that Bob and Lucas were set up to be killed on Romano’s doorstep.
“And we don’t know who’d do that?”
“If we knew that, we’d know who the drug runners are and who killed the Coast Guardsmen,” Lucas said. “Who benefits from Romano going down? Whoever set us up were tracking Bob and I, and they didn’t expect the FBI teams to be there. If it had gone as they expected, Bob and I would be dead and Romano would be toast.”
“This Elliot guy—don’t get hurt, man. I’m fairly screwed up myself,” Forte said. “Bob was one of my favorite people of all time.”
“Have you talked to Rae?”
“Somebody’s doing that now. I expect she’ll be calling you,” Forte said.
“Ah, Jesus.”
* * *
They were halfway across Miami when Rae called. Lucas looked at his phone, didn’t want to answer it, but he did: “Rae.”
“Lucas. I needed to tell you, I talked to Russell. This wasn’t your fault and I don’t blame you in any way, shape, or form.”
“Ah, jeez, Rae . . .”
Lucas let her go, his eyes closed, as she began to cry. When she could speak again, she said, “Russell said you were there with a whole bunch of feds, so this wasn’t some crazy Davenport cowboy thing.” She said something else, but Lucas couldn’t make it out as her voice squeaked higher as she began to cry again. “I should have been there, if I’d been there he wouldn’t be dead . . .”
Lucas said, “Rae, your being here wouldn’t have changed anything except you might be dead yourself. The shooters came out from behind us and started spraying bullets. We were set up. We didn’t have a clue. If one of the feds hadn’t see them come through the motel door with guns and hadn’t yelled at them and opened up . . . I’d be dead, too. I never even saw the fuckers until they were down.”
“Was Bob . . .”
“Ah . . . Goddamnit, this is hard, Rae. We never saw it coming. Bob was here and then he was gone, no pain, no fear, no warning. He was hit twice . . . Listen, I’m not going to talk about this anymore. I’m trying to run down the guy who set us up.”