Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,67
I’m with Rae. We talked to Cattaneo. We got a bite. Cohen was just in there, laying out our bona fides.”
“Excellent. Now we wait. The apartment’s good?”
“We’re gonna fire up some weed tonight, to give it that necessary je ne sais quoi,” Virgil said.
“Hey: no inhaling . . . and what’s with the Latin and fuckin’ French?”
“I’m a high-quality cop,” Virgil said.
When he got off the phone, Rae said, “It’s bona-FEE-days, dumbass. FEE-days does not rhyme with ‘fries.’”
“Maybe not in Rome, but it does in Miami Beach,” Virgil said. “Let’s get on home.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
After the shooting in Florida City, and a series of conversations with Romano and Bianchi, Weaver had set up a surveillance net in South Florida, focusing on known associates of Douglas Sansone.
One of them, James (Jimmy) Parisi, had been identified as a killer, suspected of five murders in New York and New Jersey, carried out with semiautomatic .22 rifles; but he was good, and had never been indicted for any of them. The feds thought he might have been on the boat when the Coast Guardsmen were murdered, not because they had hard information, but simply because of his proclivities.
Six more men were identified as working for Sansone in South Florida, and rumor had it that they had a connection with Mexican heroin importers, but that the Mexicans had begun shifting their support to Hispanic dealers in New Jersey, overlapping Sansone’s territory. Sansone, the rumors went, had looked for an alternate source of heroin, and had found one. Heroin was again flowing into Staten Island needles.
* * *
In mid-November, a week after Bob’s funeral in Louisiana—where Rae had told Lucas in no uncertain terms that she was on this case now, so Lucas could just shut up about it, and so Lucas did and started thinking—Lucas had traveled to Washington to meet with Weaver, who’d come up from Florida, and two contacts high in the FBI, Deputy Director Louis Mallard and an influential senior agent named Jane Chase.
Weaver was impressed: as they walked together down the hallway to the first of the meetings, he’d said in a hushed tone, “Jesus Christ, I didn’t know you were friends with these people. Mallard is like the Archangel Gabriel, right up there next to God.”
“He’s no kind of angel, I can promise you that,” Lucas said.
They met in Mallard’s office, a cluttered double cubicle with piles of books and paper on every flat surface. As they talked, Chase wandered around the office, peering at the piles, occasionally muttering, “No way,” or “Gimme a break,” until Mallard told her to shut up and sit down.
“What do we know about this Sansone guy? Know for sure?” Mallard asked Weaver.
Weaver said, “For sure? He owns a chain of donut shops.”
“Donut shops?”
“Mama Ferrari’s Donuts. Ten shops. The OC unit did some checks on his income taxes, and they tell me he’s the most successful donut seller in New Jersey,” Weaver said. “People come in the door at the donut shops and pay with small bills. Mama Ferrari discourages credit cards—if you pay in cash, you get an extra donut, supposed to offset credit card fees. That means they have large amounts of small greasy bills . . .”
“A laundry,” Chase said.
“That’s what OC says,” Weaver said. “On the other hand, they sent one of their Jersey people out to buy a box of donuts, to see if the shops were legit, and word came back that they’re damn good donuts.”
“How sure are you that Sansone’s group is behind the Coast Guard shootings?” Chase asked.
“Eighty-six percent,” Weaver said. “We started watching those guys down in Miami, best we could without a full surveillance team, and they’re not doing much. They seem to be . . . waiting. For something. They can’t go after the dope with the Coast Guard sitting out there, checking every boat.”
* * *
With three dead Coast Guardsmen, a dead marshal, and a badly wounded FBI agent who might never fully recover from his wounds, neither Mallard nor Chase had needed much persuading. They’d approved a working group, to be run by the New York AIC out of Manhattan and Weaver out of South Florida, with the objective of identifying and then taking down the entire Sansone operation.
Walking out of the meeting, Weaver said, “I thought I was fucked. Now, I’m sorta a semi–big shot. I mean, I called Louis, Louis, instead of ‘sir.’”
“You called him ‘sir’ about twenty times,” Lucas said.