At the slip,Virgil, now dressed in street clothes, helped pile the scuba gear into Regio’s Lexus, and Regio drove them back to the apartment. “Tomorrow at the same time?” Regio asked, as they carried the gear up to the apartment.
“Yeah. I’ll call around, see what I can find out about Trimix. I don’t really need it at two hundred, unless I need to stay down.”
“You gotta get into the computer age, Willy,” Regio said. “I’ll get back to my place and check dive shops. I can call you tonight with a Trimix shop.”
“That’d be awesome,” Virgil said.
Regio said to Rae, “Don’t talk him out of it. Eight thousand five hundred dollars per can. If he gets eleven cans like he did the first night, that’s a hair less than a hundred grand.”
“It’s ninety-three five, which is a couple of hairs less than a hundred grand,” Rae said. “And we don’t get nothin’ if he’s dead.”
“Neither will we,” Regio said. He turned to Virgil: “You’re doing good, Willy. Gotta keep it up.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
Staten Island:
They’d waited a long time in the FBI suite on Staten Island, but as Cattaneo’s boat was pushing out of the Atlantic through the entrance to Port Everglades, the surveillance guys in the truck called and said, “Look at this, look at this.”
A Chrysler sedan rolled past the truck, paused at the cross street, and then rolled into the car wash parking lot. The overhead door on the garage went up and the Chrysler went inside. The door came down and one of the computer operators was already running the license tag.
“This is one of the prime dealers,” she said. “Jerry Poole, AKA the Hat. He wears hats.”
“What’s his file look like?” Lucas asked. He’d been sitting on a couch, reading a batteredNew Yorker, and came to look at the computer screen.
“He’s bad. Bad enough? Maybe,” Kate Orish said.
“If he’s only a ‘maybe,’ then let’s wait,” Lucas said. “Can we track him?”
“We can. I seriously doubt that he’ll put anything on the street tonight. He’ll want to get it cut, talk to his people...”
“Are we covering his phone?”
“One of them: but he has another and we don’t know what it is. He mostly talks to his wife on the iPhone.”
“Damnit. Stay on him, and let’s wait.”
“Your call,” Orish said. “For now, anyway.”
“There’s still somebody in the garage. You can see the light under the doors. There are more people on the way,” Devlin said.
Rae called. “We’reback at the apartment,” she said. “Virgil brought up another five cans. You’ll have to talk to the surveillance guys to find out where they went. But: Regio shot the Coast Guardsmen. He didn’t admit it, but he did. Cattaneo was on the boat and I think Lange was there, too.”
She told him about the short conversation on the boat, and how Cattaneo had cut it off.
“Don’t push it,” Lucas said. “We don’t want them pissed or suspicious.”
“They’re too greedy to suspect anything. We’re going back out tomorrow night, unless you say otherwise. They’re pushing Virgil.”
“Watch your phones. We’ve got people picking up the dope now. You get the red flag, you bail, okay?”
“Got it.”
After a brief silence, Lucas added, “Tomorrow could be the last dive. I think we’ll be grabbing them tomorrow, probably tomorrow night. Watch the street tomorrow, and when you see them coming to pick you up, call me. I may tell you to bail right then.”
Another car pulledinto the car wash, which was now dark. The car disappeared into the garage, as the others had, and when the computer operator ran the New Jersey license tag, it came back with Salas Zamora, a street dealer with a half dozen low-level drug busts.
