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“Absolutely,” said Castle with a grin. He had sandy blond hair and freckles and an instantly engaging manner. The other Pine Deep cops just nodded and kept to the background, clearly intimidated by the big dogs from Philly.
“Okay then,” said Terry, looking around at the faces. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, where do we stand?”
Gus opened his mouth to speak, but Sergeant Ferro beat him to it. “If I may? Your Honor, the situation is this—we have three suspects, part of a small team that had worked out a drug buy with your generic Jamaican heavies. Nothing unusual, usually no hitches in an operation like this. A standard midvolume buy staged in an empty warehouse, happens all the time, every day of the week. These things generally don’t get messy because that interrupts the regular flow of trade. The product has to flow smoothly in order for everyone to get rich. It’s all business. ”
“Okay, I’m with you so far,” Terry said as he settled his muscular rump on the corner of Gus’s desk and listened attentively. He composed his face into a stern, slightly superior frown but raised his eyebrows to show that he was ready to hear their report. It was a tactic that worked pretty well on the town council, and seemed to work well enough with Ferro. Inside, Terry’s heart was hammering against his chest, beating out a rhythm of excitement and apprehension. He just didn’t let it show.
The cop said, “The buy was set up in Philly, which is why Detective LaMastra and I were in on the case. Our narcotics unit is a division of East Detectives, and we sometimes work with state and federal narcotics offices to stop interstate flow of drugs. Now, since there was a shoot-?out and one of our officers was killed, we would like to be actively involved in this investigation. ” His eyes were hard as he said this and the room was very quiet. “I’ve asked Chief Bernhardt if he would mind if I called in some Philly blues with their units to help with the search. They’ll be here within the half hour. If…that is acceptable to you, sir. ”
Terry almost asked if Pine Deep would have to foot the bill for the overtime the Philly cops would be working, but thought the questions would be both in poor taste and poorly timed. “Of course,” he said, softening his frown to a helpful smile. “Bring in the National Guard if it’ll help. Anything that’ll clean this up and get it off my streets. ”
“Thank you, sir. Anyway, we weren’t expecting this to go down…it was pure coincidence that our team had this particular band of Jamaicans under surveillance for the last few months. I won’t bore you with all the details, but the Reader’s Digest version is this—we’ve been tracking a pipeline from the islands to Miami and from there to Philly. Coming up I-95 on what we call Cocaine Alley. They use family cars, you know, station wagons and such, driven by clean-?cut regular-?looking folks who pony the stuff to Philly, and then use the parking lots of strip malls just off the interstate to offload. ”
Detective LaMastra spoke up for the first time. “We were backtracking from the street and thought we could tag a couple of the ponies. ” He gave a fatalistic wave of his hands. “But that’s for shit now. ”
Ferro nodded. “We had a team, just two guys in a van a block from the site, and another officer outside with a fiber-?optic camera and portable recorder. We had audio and video plants in the warehouse where the buy was going down, but we didn’t have a full team there because we weren’t expecting to make any arrests. We just wanted pictures, data, hoping to tail some of the players back to whomever they worked for, going up the food chain. So our team was unprepared for what went down. ”
Detective LaMastra snorted. “No shit. ” Ferro shot him a brief look, which LaMastra appeared to ignore.
“In any case,” Ferro continued, “the buyers were a car full of local boys. Five South Philly thugs, low-?level tough guys. I had a chance to look over the videotape with a couple of other detectives and we managed to ID all five. The odd thing was that these boys are not part of the drug game. They usually do roughhouse stuff, like collections for loan sharks and that sort of thing. The drug buy was a new career venture for them, and they completely screwed it up. The buy started to go down, business as usual, but then the South Philly boys pulled some guns and suddenly everyone was shooting. ”
“You should have seen the video,” LaMastra said with a twisted smile. “Looked like a Quentin Tarantino film. ”
“Jesus,” breathed one of the law students. Terry glanced at her. At twenty-?one and five feet four, she looked like a scared kid dressed up for Halloween in a cop uniform and gun belt. He wondered if she had ever even fired the heavy automatic strapped to her young hip. He wondered if any of Gus’s people ever had.
Ferro pulled a notepad out of his pocket and consulted it. “The suspects were identified as follows. One Nicholas Scilini, thirty, and Lenny DiCavellio, twenty-?eight, both dead of multiple gunshot wounds. The three that got away included Kenneth Boyd and Tony Macchio, both relatively small fish and barely worth the effort it would take to yank the switch on them. ”
“And the third? You said there were three?”
Gus Bernhardt looked uneasily at Terry and then at Ferro, and the cop’s dour face looked even more mournful and even more like Morgan Freeman’s. The grimmer Morgan Freeman, circa Seven, not the older, jollier Freeman from Bruce Almighty. “The third gunman is the real problem, Mayor Wolfe. He is one of the reasons we are going to be handling this situation very, very carefully. ”
Terry grinned. “Who is he? Jack the Ripper?”
No one laughed; no one else so much as smiled.
“We should be so lucky,” said Ferro.
“What does that mean?” Terry asked, losing his grin. He didn’t like the shifty, scared looks everyone was covertly exchanging, and it wasn’t helping his stress level one little bit. The hammering in his chest was turning into an improvisational drum solo. He hoped he wasn’t visibly sweating.
“His name,” continued Ferro, “is Karl Andermann Ruger. ” He looked significantly at Terry, but he only shrugged and shook his head.
Gus bent over and said, softly, “Cape May Lighthouse. Last Summer. ”
Terry stared at him and slowly, very slowly he felt the room turn as cold as a meat locker.
Everyone in the room looked either stricken, or scared.
“That’s who we think Karl Ruger is,” said Ferro quietly.
“Oh my God,” Terry whispered.
5
Val left the soup on the stove to simmer and went up to her room to take a nap. For the last two weeks she’d been extremely tired. Not just from managing the farm—she had plenty of help for that—but just plain exhausted. And then there was this morning. After Crow had gone downstairs to have breakfast, Val had thrown up.
It was the second time this week she’d done that and she was starting to worry. There was an EPT kit in her purse, but she hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to use it. She was on the pill, and she and Crow even used condoms. Surely she couldn’t be pregnant with that much birth control running interference.
She took off her jeans and shirt and slid into bed in bra, panties, and socks, pulling the big comforter up to her chin. Val lay there and listened to the wind stir the corn. A storm was coming and the wind had freshened and the illusion of sea surf that the blowing corn made was even more pronounced. The steady rhythm of it lulled her to sleep within minutes.
