“You see the van and the SUV?”
“No. We’re watching a movie.”
“Well, look out the window. A van just pulled up with an SUV behind it. We’re taking pictures from Carl’s room.”
They stepped over to Bob’s room, which was dark, and looked through the carefully arranged gap in the curtains that covered the outside window. A white van was backed up to what Lucas thought must be the warehouse’s front door, and light was coming out of the warehouse windows. A black SUV sat sideways in the parking lot, on the other side of the van.
“You running the plates?” Lucas asked Weaver.
“Of course. The van’s from Jersey, the Benz is from here.”
“How many guys?”
“Three—two in the van, one in the Benz. We got full facials on all of them, we’re sending them up to Tennan to see if he recognizes them. We think the guy in the SUV is Romano’s son-in-law, Larry Bianchi. I’ll call you back if anything happens. I’m going back to the glasses.”
Lucas and Bob stood in the dark watching as two men from the van took a half dozen large white boxes out of the truck and stacked them on the blacktop. Then they crawled into the van, and a moment later, reappeared pushing a flat, four-foot-long black box, which they carried into the building.
A few minutes after that, a third man walked out of the building to the Benz, opened the back, did something on the floor of the vehicle, looked around, then lifted out a black box identical to the box from the van. It appeared to be made out of metal or black-painted wood, and was heavy.
The man carried it to the van, staggering a bit, climbed into the back of the van, did something out of sight that took two or three minutes. Then he backed out of the van, made a “c’mon” wave at the other two, who began piling the stacked white boxes back into the van.
Weaver called, stressed. “They’re moving something. They’re hiding it under the white boxes.”
“I think so,” Lucas said. “The black boxes were the same size and shape. I think they might fit below the floor of the van, out of sight. The first box is still in the warehouse, so...”
“I’m sending both teams after the van,” Weaver said. “You guys will stay here and I’ll be here, to watch for any more activity.”
Bob: “Well, shit...”
“I know, I know, but you really want to be part of a tag team?” Weaver asked. “It might run all night. Hell, it might run to New Jersey.”
“What are you planning to do?”
“Don’t know yet. We haven’t gotten in touch with Tennan...”
Bob, looking out through the gap in the curtains, said, “They’re leaving.”
The lights inthe building went out and the two vehicles pulled away. Nobody else showed up. Weaver called and said, “They’re in the surveillance box, they’re headed up the turnpike.”
“Keep us up to date,” Lucas said. “The way they put that black box in the van and then covered it with those lighting fixture boxes, or whatever they were, makes me think the box is important. Could be dope.”
“Exactly,” Weaver said. “I want to watch the building overnight, if you guys would be willing to take a couple of shifts...”
They agreed that Weaver would take the first three hours, Lucas would pick it up from one to four a.m., and Bob would take it from four until seven.
“We’ve still got twenty-five minutes on the movie,” Bob said, when Weaver rang off. They watched the movie to the end and a few minutes of a sports talk show, and then Bob went back to his room to catch some sleep. Lucas was a night owl and spent an hour reading a Lee Child thriller.
Weaver called Lucas at 11:30 and said, “We’re gonna grab the truck the first time it stops. Tennan identified both the driver and the passenger. The driver is on probation in Jersey and didn’tbother to get permission to travel, so we can take both him and his passenger and search the truck. The passenger is a leg-breaker from Staten Island. Depending on what we take out of the truck, we’ll see if it’s enough to get a warrant for the warehouse. We’ve got an overnight judge ready to sign it, depending.”
“Am I still staying up?”
“Yeah. We need to watch. I’ll call if we get any changes, but if you could still go on at one o’clock, that’d be great.”
“Go to bed now, you need the sleep,” Lucas said. “I’m up anyway.”
“Thanks, man,” Weaver said. “Oh. I called the rest of the task force down from Broward, we’re staking out Romano’s house and his son-in-law’s place, just in case.”
At midnight, Weavercalled back, sounding stunned. “I no more got to sleep than I got woke back up. The van stopped at a Pizza Hut at a service plaza on the Florida Turnpike and we grabbed the guys and the van. The black box was hidden in a slot under the floor of the van. We opened the box and it’s full of handguns, a hundred and twenty of them.”
