Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,81

ball cap. One distinctive feature, not visible from the front, was a thin scar that crossed his back at the level of the shirt collar, the product of RPG shrapnel that he’d picked up in Syria.

He sat next to Lucas in the rented Volvo and said, “I couldn’t do what Virgil’s doing. You know what happens when I get in a swimming pool? I sink. I’m told I’m too dense to float.”

“Some fat does help, I’ve heard,” Lucas said. “The only pools I get in have ice on the top.”

“Never understood hockey,” Devlin said. “You gotta be born further north than I was.”

Devlin was from Normal, Illinois, and had gone to college at Purdue. Purdue had a hockey club, rather than a full-blown team, he said, and he’d never gone to a game. “You gotta drive all over the countryside to see them play. I’d rather watch wrestling.”

“You have low taste in sports,” Lucas said. “Though I have a friend who was a big-time college wrestler at Minnesota. And of course, Bob . . .”

“Yeah. Bob.” They thought about Bob for a moment.

They’d been tracking the Mafia guys for more than a month, along with two selected FBI agents, and were running out of conversational gambits. On this day, Lucas had opened the talk with a couple of minutes of vulgar, detailed speculation about why Devlin wasn’t all over Rae, since they were both marshals and stationed at the same facility, and Devlin had asked, “Why should I be? Because we’re both black?”

“Because she’s . . . Rae,” Lucas said. “You even look at her?”

“Fuck you. Of course I looked at her and she’s definitely Rae,” Devlin said. “But, you know, I have a taste for those Mississippi blondes.”

“Blondes are good,” Lucas said. “You get their clothes off and they look really, really naked. Of course, the way young women get around with their razors these days . . .”

“You think black women don’t shave a little off the top?”

“I don’t really . . . um . . .”

Devlin snorted and said, “I’m just fucking with you, man. But Rae . . . Rae’s out of my league. I got a degree in mechanical engineering, for Christ’s sake. I fix old motorboats and Hammond organs. She’s about art and literature and all that.”

“Offer to change her oil,” Lucas said. “Even artists need regular maintenance.”

* * *

Devlin sat up. “Here we go.”

Lucas got on a handset and said, “We’ve got Lange and Regio.”

“We see them. We’ll wait for Cattaneo.”

The three were walking out of Behan’s condo. Lucas and Devlin were two blocks away, watching.

“Want to go after them?” Devlin asked.

Lucas considered it, then got back on the handset to the FBI agents in a second car, who were two blocks on the other side of the condo. “Let them go. Track them on the slates.”

“You sure, boss man?” the surveillance agent asked.

“Yes. Give them at least five minutes before you pull out. If anyone is watching their backs, that’ll be enough of an interval. We’ll pick them up later.”

Devlin was typing on an iPad, noting the time and character of the surveillance for a later formal report, along with Lucas’s decision not to try a close tail.

Lucas was looking at an iPad-type device that showed Regio’s Lexus on one screen, and Cattaneo’s on another. “I think they’re all headed back to their apartments. We’ll pick them up at Virgil’s place in . . . two hours.”

Devlin made a note on his draft of the day’s activities.

* * *

Rae was starting to freak, pacing around the apartment. “I could do a joint for real,” she said.

Virgil was working out the various tethers for the scuba gear. He would keep the lift and cargo bags rolled and tied to his backplate until he needed them; that was simple enough. Less simple would be attaching tethers once the cargo bags were full of dope canisters, and he was towing the bags while trying to control the DPV, which would be on a different set of tethers. If he had trouble untangling things, working with flashlights in pitch blackness a hundred and fifty feet down, then he had serious trouble.

So he was carefully packing the tethers, as though he were packing a parachute, taking his time with it. To Rae, he said, “If it’d help, go for it. More authenticity for the goon squad.”

“Ah, it wouldn’t help,” she said. Then, after a minute, “What’s it like down there, in the night? When you get way