I pictured the detail, a memory from the mobile home where I had been a week ago. But as I turned to look for a walkie, everyone who had one was down on the street.
I ran out the double doors to the lobby and sprinted, taking the stairs two at a time, a bigger story building in my head.
First—the words that the lead CIRG agent had just said.None of this includes the twenty-two cases of ammo that just got here. That’s still unloaded.
I pushed out the front door and ran right into a barricade. Got up and moved around it.
D.C. police had blocked access onto New Hampshire Avenue, and I took in the activity. Portable lights had arrived, and the night was so bright that the row house glowed fluorescent pink. Tow trucks hooked up cars to pull them away from the front of the house, and cops swarmed the sidewalks.
“Hey, buddy,” one yelled at me. “You can’t be out here.”
The automatic garage door under the pink row house was beginning to close. Inside, I could see our lead CIRG agent.
“Wait,” I yelled. But the noise of a police helicopter overhead drowned everything out.
The garage door was halfway down. I took off across the street toward the row house, running as fast as I could.
“Hey,” I hollered, but no one could hear me above the noise.
A cop’s hand touched my shoulder. I shrugged it off, ran down the incline toward the closing door, and dove to the ground, my body rolling under the garage door just before it shut.
Inside, the CIRG agent was twenty feet in front of me, and I got up. Began running toward him.
The cases of ammunition that we’d seen from the storage unit had been taken from the U-Haul and left by a service elevator, piled in a cube-like shape. Looking at them, I recalled the question that Travis Wells had asked yesterday—about the ammunitions trip to D.C.
And should I go with? You know—in case your cousin needs help?
But Regnar had told him his help wasn’t needed. That there was a protocol.
Cases get unloaded right away. Brought upstairs and broken down.
But the ammo was not upstairs or broken down. It had been left here in the garage, the F-150 and U-Haul parked three feet away.
The CIRG agent’s shoulder blade lifted in slow motion, his hand close to the cube.
And I reached out, grabbing at the back of his vest.
He turned on me fast, maneuvering my hands off his body. His Glock 23 found its way to my chin, and he held me up, his other hand grabbing my neck and squeezing painfully.
“It’s a trap,” I said, my voice hoarse.
The soldier’s blue eyes passed over me, and he relaxed his grip, recognizing my face.
“J. P. Sandoval,” I said. “He’s a perfect tactician. Never makes a mistake.”
The bearded soldier stared at me intensely. Then let me go. “Well, he did today.”
“No,” I said. “In the mobile home I burned down, there were six rolls of monofilament fishing wire. A fifty-pound test, too heavy for fishing. In a neutral color not good for South Florida swamps.”
“I’m not following,” the CIRG agent said.
“Our C.I.,” I said. “They told him there was a protocol. Everything gets unloaded and brought upstairs the minute the U-Haul gets to the house.”
“So if that didn’t happen,” the soldier said, “there might be a new order in place from Sandoval?”
I nodded. “An extra level of caution. Maybe ’cause Sandoval got spooked. Same time he made the decision to kill Wells at the storage place.”
We both turned to the cube of ammunition, our eyes moving along its perimeter.
