“No way,” Wells said, not following that his lawyer was pressing us. “I want you.”
Frank looked from Wells to the lawyer. “What more can you tell us before we agree to terms?”
Wells ran his tongue along his front teeth and made a smacking noise. “The guns are in a row house in Foggy Bottom.”
Foggy Bottom was a neighborhood in D.C., bounded by the Potomac River to the west, Constitution Avenue to the south, and Pennsylvania Avenue to the north.
Frank glanced at me. The area was home to the Federal Reserve, the US Department of State, and the World Bank.
“I don’t know the exact street number,” Wells said, “but I know people who do.”
“You’re sure about that neighborhood?” I asked.
“A hundred percent.” He nodded.
I had done nine months in D.C., but Frank had worked there for two years. If someone was storing munitions in a home in Foggy Bottom, they could walk directly across the National Mall to the US Capitol. They could be outside the White House in even less time.
“What’s the plan with these guns?” Frank asked.
“I don’t know that part of the op,” Wells said. “But let’s just say there’s some supporters who think January Sixth would’ve gone a helluva lot different if there were less yahoos wearing funny hats, and more true patriots.”
“What’s it gonna take to get an exact address?” I asked.
“Two, three days.”
We would need to follow Wells. Maybe even embed someone with him. It couldn’t go down like Freddie Pecos.
“I don’t like it,” I said to Frank. “Not if he has to travel to Georgia.”
“Hold up,” Wells said, his eyes on me. “One of my dogs is right here in town. Not twenty minutes away. If he hasn’t split with the next shipment, I can probably get the address tomorrow.”
The lines across Frank’s forehead read like skepticism. “What are we talking about?” he said. “A dozen guns? Doesn’t sound like much of anop.”
“A dozen?” Wells laughed. He bit at his chewing gum again,moving it in and out of view between his teeth. “More like two hundred, old man.”
Richie had lost track of a shipment of weapons on this case, and I wondered if these gunswerethat shipment. Or perhaps we knew less about Sandoval’s operation than we thought, and multiple shipments had already made their way to D.C.
“There’s about fifty handguns that are subcompact, so they’re easy to conceal,” Wells continued. “A hundred or so break-action and semiauto rifles. And a dozen AR-15s.”
It was hard to get my heart rate up, but that many guns that close to key targets in our nation’s capital did the job.
We needed to get there before they were gone.
“Best part for J.P.,” Wells continued, “all that shit’s in D.C. Ready to roll. This next run is straight ammo. So… they already got the guns. Soon they’ll have the ammunition. Then it’s just a matter of go time.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Frank stared at Travis Wells. We had left the room to confer and come back.
“Your release would be heavily supervised,” he said. “A device in your phone to track and listen. Daily check-ins. An agent watching you.”
“I’ll get what you need, boss,” Wells said. “You just make sure I’m in Baja before you guys start knocking down doors.”
I studied Wells. If not for us picking him up at the bar, he was facing life in prison. But a good lawyer could get him out of the DUI. Had his public defender told him this?
Perhaps. But sometime in the last hour, he’d gambled that it didn’t matter. With what we knew of Sandoval’s operation, he’d be going down anyway, sooner or later.
I put out my hand. “We get the address, and we have a deal.”
