His phone buzzed and he looked at the screen. Orish. “Yeah?”
“The money man is leaving the car wash. We’re tracking him.”
“Do notlet him spot you,” Lucas said. “Stay way back, all we need to know is that he’s coming this way.”
“We got it, we got it,” Orish said.
“We just pulled up behind Kerry, we’ll tell him,” Lucas said.
Lucas told Kochto stay in the car, while he and Devlin walked to the RAV4 and jammed themselves into the backseat. “Tell me what you want,” Kerry said.
Lucas relayed Orish’s call about the money man, and said, “We need to wait until he gets here. We’ll catch them with the money. I think we should walk the last block or so, quieter that way.”
“I know,” Kerry said. “We drove one time past the shop, to get an idea of the layout.”
“Good.”
Orish called and Lucas touched the speaker button on thephone. “The money’s coming your way,” she said. “Same route as last time.”
They waited. Aman walking a leashed dog went past, blowing puffs of steam into the cold air. He stooped a bit to look at the Toyota, then hurried off. Not a neighborhood where you got curious about four men sitting in a compact car at night.
“Hope he doesn’t call the cops,” Kerry said.
“He might,” Devlin said. To Lucas: “We all know what we’re doing, let’s move back to the other car. It’s getting stuffy with four of us in here.”
Time drags whenyou’re not having fun; they took a call from the leading SSG car tracking the money man. “We’re five minutes away, maybe less.”
Lucas said to Koch, “Let’s go, stop a block out and around the corner from the shop.”
Devlin was on his phone to Kerry: “We’re moving.”
They were less than a minute from the locksmith’s shop. When they pulled to the curb, Kerry pulled in behind. Most of the houses around them showed lights, but there was nobody on the freezing street. Lucas and Devlin walked back to Kerry’s car and got in.
The SSG tracking car called: “One minute.”
“Last time, the driver was only inside a few minutes,” Lucas said.
Devlin: “What if he’s picking up Sansone to take him to the airport?”
“Good thought. If they do that, we jam him with the SSG cars,” Lucas said. To Kerry: “They’re all on radios to Orish. Tell her that the SSG might have to jam them. If we have to do that, we want to do it here where they can’t try to outrun us. Block them on these narrow streets.”
Kerry pushed a button on his phone, and, talking fast, told Orish what they might have to do with the SSG cars and she said she’d call them. “Let me know what’s happening, Christ, I wish I was there, I should be there...”
“You’re fine,” Kerry said, and she went away.
The tracking car called and said, “He’s turning the corner...”
At the end of the next block, headlights turned the corner and crawled toward them.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Lucas said.
The lights eased to a curb, several car lengths away from the front door of the locksmith’s shop. After a moment, the driver got out with a package in his hand, and walked down to the shop. He was a heavyset man wearing a black knee-length overcoat.
“The money,” Devlin said.
The money man walked to the front door of the shop, did something—rang a doorbell?—waited for a moment, then the door opened and he stepped inside.
“We’re on,” Lucas said. To the SSG driver, he said, “Call Orish, tell her to stage the other SSG people in case they try to break out.”
