Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,59

then, “Oh, my God, I got a call coming in from Shirl. The service must’ve notified her. Hang on, I’m going to her call for a minute . . .”

She went away and a moment later, was back: “Lucas, I need to talk to you some more, but right now Shirl needs me . . .”

“Call me later in the day,” Lucas said. “I’ll have more about the guy we’re looking for.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know—maybe kill his ass,” Lucas said.

“Lucas . . . Lucas, just take him,” Rae said. “Take him and squeeze him. Now I gotta go, I gotta go.”

She was gone.

Parker, who’d heard Lucas’s side of the conversation, said, “Let’s not kill his ass, okay? Let’s have a nice professional arrest and slam his ass in jail.”

“We’ll do what we gotta,” Lucas said. Then, after another moment, “Yeah, we’re not going to kill him. We won’t have to. He’s already dead.”

“Excuse me?”

Lucas shook his head.

* * *

The city was as quiet as it ever got, three o’clock in the morning, the night people sliding along, big coupes with gray primer on their fenders and doors, long-haired guys looking sideways out the windows as they jumped the traffic lights . . .

When they got to Elliot’s house, two Miami-Dade cop cars and a van were parked at the fence, and five cops were standing in the yard, all of them vested and helmeted. They were part of a SWAT squad, the leader told Lucas. “What are we doing here? We understand he’s involved in a shooting . . .”

Lucas gave him a quick recap of the shootout. The cops had heard various versions of the shootout and as he and Parker filled in the details, the cops all shaking their heads, the leader asked, “If this Bob was your partner, what are you doing here? I mean . . .”

“I know what you mean,” Lucas said. “I’ve got the background on Elliot and we didn’t have time to fool around. Have you knocked?”

“Yeah, we knocked, no sign of life. We’re told there might be a warrant, but we don’t know about that.”

“I think we’re good. You guys got a ram? This place is a fort, you’re gonna need one.”

“Yeah, but I’d like to know for sure that we got a warrant.”

Lucas told the cop who Weaver was, then called him, leaving his phone on the speaker function, and Weaver said, “Yes. We have a warrant. Under the circumstances, you can go in right now. Knock the door down.”

“You got it,” the cop said.

* * *

Both the front and back doors had steel cores. The doorframes were made of steel bolted to the concrete block walls. After a few attacks on the two doors, the cops knocked out a window, and the least senior cop crawled into the house and unlocked a door from the inside.

On a fast walk-through, they found nothing except a couple of large cockroaches sitting on the kitchen table and then scuttling out of sight. The house was silent: the television was off, so was the air conditioner and all the lights, until the cops turned them on. There were two clean dishes in the sink.

“There was an alarm, but it was turned off,” the SWAT leader said.

“Because the guys who took him out of here didn’t know how to set it,” Parker said.

The bedroom closets were full of clothes, as was a bedroom bureau. The bathroom showed a razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, and shaving cream on a counter next to a sink, and a drawer, partly opened, revealed a half-empty Dopp kit inside. The bureau had a jewelry tray that contained a couple of rings, a diamond earring, two gold bracelets, and a gold Rolex. Two suitcases and a duffel bag were piled atop one another, in a hallway closet, under a line of jackets.

After walking through, Lucas stopped at the table next to the front door and pulled open the drawer. The .45 was there, reassembled and loaded. Parker looked at it, and at Lucas, and asked, “What do you think?”

“What I thought in the car. He’s gone. If he’d walked away on his own, he would have taken some of his stuff. I don’t know how much that Rolex is worth, but I’d guess between ten and twenty thousand, maybe more.”

“So you think he’s . . .”

“Dead.”

The SWAT squad leader came into the living room from the back. He’d taken off his helmet to reveal a shaved head, and from