Weaver said, “For sure? He owns a chain of donut shops.”
“Donut shops?”
“Mama Ferrari’s Donuts. Ten shops. The OC unit did some checks on his income taxes, and they tell me he’s the most successful donut seller in New Jersey,” Weaver said. “People come in the door at the donut shops and pay with small bills. Mama Ferrari discourages credit cards—if you pay in cash, you get an extradonut, supposed to offset credit card fees. That means they have large amounts of small greasy bills...”
“A laundry,” Chase said.
“That’s what OC says,” Weaver said. “On the other hand, they sent one of their Jersey people out to buy a box of donuts, to see if the shops were legit, and word came back that they’re damn good donuts.”
“How sure are you that Sansone’s group is behind the Coast Guard shootings?” Chase asked.
“Eighty-six percent,” Weaver said. “We started watching those guys down in Miami, best we could without a full surveillance team, and they’re not doing much. They seem to be... waiting. For something. They can’t go after the dope with the Coast Guard sitting out there, checking every boat.”
With three deadCoast Guardsmen, a dead marshal, and a badly wounded FBI agent who might never fully recover from his wounds, neither Mallard nor Chase had needed much persuading. They’d approved a working group, to be run by the New York AIC out of Manhattan and Weaver out of South Florida, with the objective of identifying and then taking down the entire Sansone operation.
Walking out of the meeting, Weaver said, “I thought I was fucked. Now, I’m sorta a semi–big shot. I mean, I called Louis, Louis, instead of ‘sir.’”
“You called him ‘sir’ about twenty times,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, but I also called him Louis.”
“That’s great,” Lucas said. “You can write it down in your diary.”
Working with Chase and the Manhattan agent in charge, Weaver had put together a working group of carefully chosen surveillance specialists who were told the assignment required the deepest secrecy: they were to be ghosts.
Sansone was not to know that he’d come under any special scrutiny. Stalking them with extreme care through November and December, the group identified more Sansone operators in the Newark area and on Staten Island, with associates as far north as Boston and Bangor, Maine. The South Florida group was believed to be coordinating narcotics purchases for distribution in the Northeast.
By the third week of November, Lucas had returned to Minnesota and a day later drove to Virgil Flowers’s girlfriend’s farm, where Virgil lived, to recruit him for the working group. Frankie, Virgil’s girlfriend, had sat in on the talk, sleeping twins on her lap.
“I’m not complaining, Lucas, but every time I see you, you’re pulling poor Virgil in over his head,” Frankie said. She was a striking woman, as blond as Virgil, short, busty, wickedly intelligent. She and Lucas tended to knock sparks off each other; Lucas liked her a lot.
“You should look a little closer. Virgil doesn’t tend to get pulled unless he wants to go,” Lucas said.
“What are we talking about this time?” Frankie asked.
“Can I talk?” Virgil asked.
Frankie turned her head to him and said, “No. Think of me as your agent.”
“Virgil would technically be part of an interagency federal taskforce working out of Fort Lauderdale,” Lucas said. “Nobody would know about him except me and Rae and one other marshal and a couple of FBI agents.”
“Man, I’m not a diver,” Virgil interjected. “I only took lessons because I couldn’t afford to fish all day. Since I was off the boat in the afternoons, I got certified. In a week. In a swimming pool, mostly, with two open water dives. I dove a few more times, rental equipment, but I’m not competent. I’m a tourist.”
“We can fix that,” Lucas said. “You’re almost as athletic and smart as I am...”
“That’s what everybody says,” Virgil agreed.
“... Best of all, you’ve got that hair and that natural, built-in stoner look,” Lucas continued. “By the time we send you down there, in a month or two, you’ll be the best diver in the United States. Thirty, maybe forty days of training.”
“Seriously, no way that could happen, that I’d get that good.”
“Okay, I exaggerate,” Lucas said. “But you’ll be very, very good.”
“But...”
Lucas turned and gazed out the living room window, over the November fields at the back of the house. They showed a bit of snow from an early storm, a hint of the coming Minnesota winter. He turned back to Virgil and said, “I talked to the people at the Marshals Service and they understand that you’ve got a family and kids. You could take Frankie and the kids with you. You’ll get an Airbnb house, I don’t know about the view. You’d leave here around the first of December...”
“But...”
