Cassie stayed in the back with the headphones on, and I moved up front. Frank’s phone was in a cup holder between us, and my eyes watched the GPS dot that represented Travis’s position to make sure he was heading to the same location that we were.
“How did he sound?” Frank asked.
“A poor liar,” I said. “Not adept at disguise.”
“Well, hell,” Frank replied, his eyes rolling as he gripped the wheel harder.
The drive to the cousin’s place took ten minutes, and we watched as the neighborhood became more rural. It was a Sunday, and school-age kids were unattended and smoking cigarettes, sitting on the decks of old swamp boats parked in driveways.
Frank let Travis’s Camaro pass us. As the C.I. pulled up in front of a tan house, Frank increased the van’s speed, and we circled the block.
A moment later, Cassie alerted us that she’d heard the thrum of the Camaro engine.
“Wells is on the move,” she said, and Frank turned the van around, catching the sports car as it followed a black F-150 driving back the way we had come, toward the interstate.
The F-150 in front of Wells was towing a U-Haul box trailer.Along the side was an illustration of a sailfish, flying out of an aquamarine wave. Below it were the wordsGULF SHORES: GATEWAY TO WORLD CLASS SPORTFISHING.
“RT 218,” Frank said, reading the plate number off the trailer. “U-Haul identifier, UV 1448B.”
I took a picture with my phone, and we followed the two cars onto the state highway, then off of it two miles later. The truck pulled into a place called the Van Ness Oversized Storage Facility, and the Camaro did the same. Frank slowed five hundred feet away and parked.
The storage place was blocks long, and I imagined Wells stacking boxes inside the U-Haul as we sat here in the van, trying to listen.
“Cassie and I should go in on foot,” I said, and Frank nodded. He moved to the back, putting the headphones on, while we slid open the door to leave.
Cassie and I walked toward the storage place. A blue Toyota was pulling out, and she ran ahead of me, using her body to trigger the electric eye and force the gate back open.
We made our way inside, and I sized up the place. The facility was massive, with eight lanes of storage garages ranging in size from six-by-tens to much larger, closer to the width of a two-car garage.
“This is the place,” Cassie said, and I cocked my head. “Richie asked Pecos where Sandoval hides his ammo. It was some giant storage lot.”
I nodded, continuing to study the location. All the units were accessed by rolling-type doors made of steel, and each of the ones I inspected had a padlock attached to the bottom.
Cassie had moved about fifty feet from my position, and now she waved me over. I moved closer to her, noticing that every ten sheds, there was a break between the buildings. At each of these breaks, a slim alley, four feet wide, ran between that particular rowof buildings. These were not intended as pedestrian walkways but appeared to serve as areas for drainage.
“I think if we go down these”—Cassie pointed to the alley—“we’ll have a view up and down each row.”
I nodded, and we moved into the corridor-like space. On each side of us, the buildings rose twelve feet high, casting a shadow that left us in darkness.
After twenty feet, Cassie stopped, and we looked out. Up and down the second row of buildings. No Camaro. No truck.
We moved down the next corridor and into the third row. Then the fourth. As we neared the edge of the fifth, we pulled even with the back bumper of the Camaro and glanced to our left down the row.
Parked in front of the sports car was the F-150, and attached to it, the U-Haul with the sportfishing graphic.
I leaned in close to Cassie, whispering in her ear. “I’ll double back and come down the next corridor, one building over. Get a different angle.”
She nodded and held up her phone, indicating she would text me if something urgent happened from her vantage point.
I backed out the way I came. Ran down the next corridor over and slowed before peering around the edge.
While the row where Cassie hid offered an angle behind the cars, I had the opposite vantage point, looking diagonally at the front of the F-150.
I could now see a wide rolling storage door was pulled up in front of it. Inside were boxes of ammunition, stacked eight feet high. The containers were a mix of types. Most were cardboard, but there were a handful of metal canisters, as well as the red translucent polypropylene boxes that rifle ammo is stored in.
All of these were blocked from access by three rolling carts, two of which held saws with diamond blades and one of which held a set of brake rotors, pads, and four twenty-two-inch truck rims.
Regnar’s cousin was a massive man. Six foot four and 290 pounds. He had a thick black beard and wore Lee jeans and a white T-shirt with an illustration of an American flag on the front. He and Travis rolled each of the carts out, one at a time, to gain access to the ammo.
