Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,88
suit was squeezed and wiped dry with paper towels; the towels were wadded around a bolt and dropped over the side. The wet suit was draped over the bicycle in the forward cabin; the bathing suit and towels went in the clothes dryer.
When it was all done, Virgil came back up on deck. Cattaneo, at the wheel, said, “We’ll give you that package of peas when we get back.”
“Hope you’ve done this right,” Rae said. “Hope there are no cops on the dock.”
“That’s not a likelihood at all,” Cattaneo said. “We’ve got a man watching the dock from a condo parking lot across the water, haven’t heard a peep.”
Regio asked, “You talked to the guy yet?”
“Not yet. Not calling until we get inside the port. I don’t want any calls from my phone coming out of the Coast Guard search area.”
They were an hour and a half getting back to the Port Everglades cut, taking it easy; Lange broke out a Whole Foods salad and a bundle of chicken-salad sandwiches, and beer; Cattaneo turned down the beer in case they were boarded by the Coast Guard, but they made the food and beer cans prominent on the dining table: party boat, coming back from Boca Raton.
“We need to talk about something,” Cattaneo said to Virgil and Rae. “You guys don’t seem like the type that might have a lot of cash around—the kind of cash we’re talking about here.”
“We do all right from time to time,” Rae said.
Lange: “This is more than all right.”
Cattaneo: “Way more than all right. What we’re trying to say is, don’t go flashing that cash all over town. Most people buy stuff with bank loans and credit cards and so on. If you go into a car dealer and try to buy a car with thirty thousand in cash, they’ll call the cops. They’re going to be thinking ‘dope money.’ You want to buy a little toot, or a little weed, cash is fine—but don’t go buying a kilo or something. Keep it small.”
“I need some more shoes,” Rae said.
“Shoes are fine. Couple dresses, no problem. You want to buy a car, you take the cash out to Vegas, tell the car dealer that you hit a number. They’ll take the cash, but you might have to fill out some forms and pay taxes on it. Be better to buy used, a private sale, but, you know, what happens in Vegas . . .”
Virgil said, “I love that place. I once took two thousand golf balls out of a pond out there. Did I ever tell you about that?”
Rae said, “Ah, for Christ’s sake, Willy, don’t tell that story . . .”
Instead of telling that story, Virgil told the others about the dive, and that he thought he’d cleared out the south end of the string. “With eleven cans, you should be able to map out where the new south end is. The cans were maybe twenty feet apart. We’ll need new GPS numbers for the next drop.”
“Got it all on my laptop at home,” Cattaneo said. “I’ll figure it out tonight. Goddamnit, Willy, you really don’t appreciate what you’ve done here. I’m so fuckin’ excited, I mean, this is large.”
* * *
Coming into Port Everglades, Cattaneo made a call, which was picked up instantly. He said one word, “Eleven,” and clicked off. At the dock, they spent a half hour tying up and cleaning up the boat, bagging trash. Cattaneo told them to leave the trash on board, “I’m going to need it later.”
As they were about done, a tall, heavyset man came walking down the dock under the overhead lights. Cattaneo looked up, surprised, and said, “Hey, man.”
The tall man looked at Virgil and said, “You must be Willy.”
Virgil nodded and said, “Yup.” He recognized Behan from surveillance photos.
He asked, “You get your peas yet?”
Virgil held up the pea package full of cash and said, “Right here.”
The man handed him an envelope. “No way we thought you’d get eleven, so the pea package is a little short. This is the rest of it. Another forty grand; a bit more than that, actually.”
Virgil took the money then passed it all to Rae, who said to the tall man, “You are a class act. We thank you a whole fuckin’ lot.”
“There’s much more where that came from,” the tall man said. “If this works out as well as we think it should, you might have a permanent gig down here.”