Scotty and Cruz stood by as Del Rio sawed through the tar paper, the old layers of asphalt roofing, and the plywood below that, cutting through sheetrock that had little resistance to the blade.
Roofing fell through the opening and clattered down. They listened to the ensuing silence, and then Scotty opened his bag of tricks.
He put on his miner’s lamp and took out a thirty-five-foot length of marine-grade one-inch poly line. He tied one end to a brick chimney, put some knots into the rest of it, and approached the hole.
Del Rio said, “Take it slow, ” and Scotty grinned, jazzed up with nervous energy.
He pulled the knotted rope taut, then lowered himself down from the roof to the kiln room, where the clay pots were fired. Del Rio followed and Cruz was last to come down the line.
As soon as his feet touched the floor, Cruz went to the office and found the wireless alarm backup system next to the circuit box. He took out the batteries and set up the cell phone signal jammer in case the wireless signal went active again.
Del Rio, meanwhile, left the kiln room and went to the back-right-hand corner of the warehouse proper, where Scotty had seen the van. But Del Rio didn’t see a van. He saw racks and racks of flowerpots.
He didn’t want to believe this.
Private investigators had watched the damned warehouse, three shifts a day every day, for the past week. Had the van been dismantled, taken out in parts, or driven intact into a big rig?
Del Rio was ready to call Jack, when Scotty walked past him, catlike on rubber soles, and showed him where the van was hidden behind the racks, pretty much barricaded in.
Scotty said, “What do you think, Rick?”
Relieved that Jack wasn’t going to have to tell Noccia that the van had disappeared, Del Rio said, “We’re good.”
CHAPTER 102
The van was a late-model Ford transport, white with vegetables painted on it, two doors and a slider on each side, cargo doors at the back, tinted glass all the way around.
It was parked fifty feet away from and facing the roll-up doors at the far end of the warehouse. Whoever had parked the thing had meant to hide it. The driver’s side and rear were against the corner walls of the warehouse. The other two sides were hemmed in by metal racks of flowerpots two deep and seven feet high.
Del Rio squeezed around to the driver’s-side door and tried the handle, but the door was locked. So were all of the others.
Fucking A.
He had a short crowbar in his bag. He took it out, staved in the passenger-side window, reached in, and pulled up the handle. He brushed the glass off the seat with his gloved hand, threw his bag into the passenger-side foot well, and slid behind the wheel.
After flipping on the dome light, Del Rio looked at the ignition. He wanted to see a key dangling there. That would have been nice, but no, the only thing on the ignition was blood spatter. It was on the wheel too, sprayed all inside the windshield, and there were some bits of bone and brain matter too.
Noccia’s wheelman’s remains.
Del Rio looked for the keys under the mats and up under the visors. No luck. He called out to Scotty to check the tops of the tires, just in case, and when Scotty said, “Nope. Nothing,” Del Rio opened all the doors with the lock release.
He got out of the van and squeezed past the racks of flowerpots, hitting one of them with his shoulder. The rack shimmied as if it weren’t sure if it was going to fall, giving him a shot of adrenaline he didn’t need.
He imagined Cruz calling Jack: “Jack. Ricky had a heart attack, man. What should I do?”
Cruz called out, “You okay, Rick?”
“Fine. Fine. Emilio, let’s see how quick you can start this engine.”
Cruz squeezed along the racks, got into the van, and used the screwdriver attachment on his knife to remove the guard plate from the ignition tumbler. While he stripped the wires, Del Rio groped his way to the rear of the van and checked the cargo.
He counted the stacks of cartons, did the math, came up with four hundred cartons, all but one of them still sealed. Each carton was marked with the number of bottles per carton, so many pills per bottle, so many milligrams per pill. He took out one of the bottles, shook it, put it back.
This was a ton of Oxy. If there wasn’t thirty million in this van, it wasn’t his fault.
Scotty called to him, “Houston. We’ve got ignition.”
Del Rio closed the cargo doors, came out from behind the van, and got in the passenger side. Scotty wedged himself between the seats.
Cruz put the transmission into drive and turned on the headlights. At that moment, there was the loud, brassy roar of a motor coming from outside the building. The lights in the warehouse flickered and then they came on. It was like daylight inside the Red Cat Pottery.
Fucking A, for sure.
CHAPTER 103
Cruz yanked the wires apart, cutting the engine. He snapped off the headlights too. He sat there, gripping the steering wheel, staring through the tinted windshield, thinking, Sure, there was a generator. Red Cat had a generator in case the power went out while they were making the flowerpots.
Cruz turned to Del Rio, same instant as Del Rio grabbed his arm and ordered, “Get down.”
Cruz did what Del Rio said, thinking, Now what? There was roofing on the floor of the kiln room, rainwater was maybe dripping down. If that was discovered…They were walled in, couldn’t even attempt a break for it.
Whatever getting caught red-handed meant, this was it. Literally. He had a dead mobster’s blood on his palms. He knew what to say when they got dragged out of the van and shoved facedown on the concrete floor.
You got us. We give up.
Scotty said quietly, “Hear that?”
Cruz heard men talking over the roar of the generator. Their voices were getting louder as they came through the office door and into the warehouse proper.
Cruz hoped that they weren’t going to check the ovens, that they wouldn’t look at the van. But the voices were getting closer.
“You see it? Because I sure don’t,” said one of the men. “Where’s the goddamned van?”
“It’s here. Stop worrying, Victor. It’s hidden in the back here. Right there. Behind the frickin’ racks.”
It was about the van after all. Whoever was leasing the space, storing the van, he was looking to make sure his millions were still safe. These weren’t cops. They were hoods.
Cruz got his piece out of his waistband. Del Rio was doing the same.
The first voice was saying, “Okay, okay. Just be glad, Sammy. I want to move this thing in the morning.”
“You say so.”
“I say so. Sammy, you and Mark…”
The men’s voices faded as they turned and headed back toward the office.
Cruz thought about that one guy saying Sammy. It clicked. Sammy, with the goatee and the piercings-a guy he’d known for years as an almost-dead druggy-was moving up. This was the same Sammy who had taken twenty bucks in exchange for sending a text message and said it was common knowledge that the drug van was inside a warehouse.
Common knowledge?
It was inside knowledge. He had fucking known.
