After I maneuver the Journey into position, I can’t see a damned thing through the branches and bushes. My fingers snake across to the shotgun that rests on the passenger seat and close around it as I ease the driver’s-side door open. Max gave me a ten-minute lesson on how to load and fire the thing. It all seemed simple enough when there were no distractions, no sweaty palms, no shaking hands, and nobody pointing a weapon back at me. It doesn’t seem simple now. I work my way deeper into the trees and part some branches to have a look up the visible portion of the driveway leading to the house. All clear. Same for the intersection where the driveway meets the road. Aside from soaking my head in the bushes, so far, so good. No call to inform my partners is required. We’re operating on the principle that no news is good news. I exhale a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding, creep back to the van, slip inside, towel off, and peek at my watch.
Eleven fifty.
If all is well and the FBI team is on schedule, show time will be in five minutes. I’ll make my next move if and when Jake sends prearranged text C.
Jake Plummer is sweating in the damp, cool night air, despite being soaked from the waist down after the trek through the woods. He’s hunkered down behind a low stone wall about sixty feet from a back door that’s nestled under the rear porch of a white farmhouse. A single, bare incandescent light bulb casts a pool of light around the entrance. With his night vision fully engaged and moonlight filtering through the thin cloud cover, Jake has a decent view of the target building through a small pair of binoculars. The house isn’t particularly well kept up. The white clapboard siding is coated with a layer of grime. The aluminum-framed windows and standard steel door with a glass upper panel certainly look to be at least a couple of decades old. The earpiece from a parabolic directional microphone is tucked into his right ear. It’s capable of picking up sound from as much as 500 feet away. Jake slips the binoculars back into one of the generous leg pockets of his black tactical pants, then picks up the microphone and aims it across a cracked and chipped concrete patio at a sliding kitchen window. It’s cracked open an inch or two. He can hear men’s voices, but not clearly enough to make out what they’re saying or even to be certain how many voices there are. To add to the confusion, the flickering light behind the red-and-white-checkered kitchen curtains is almost certainly from a television, which may account for the voices.
At least we know someone’s in there, he thinks.
Max is in position covering the front door and a black, late-model Ford F-150 pickup truck that is parked about fifteen feet away from it. He and Jake are wearing earpieces that are attached to their cell phones. They’ve dimmed their screens to almost nothing by using settings Jake wasn’t aware of before Max showed him. Who would have guessed Max was a techie?
I hope to hell J.P. remembers to clue us in when they move on Target One, Jake thinks anxiously. That farmhouse is several miles outside Rockford, Illinois, about an hour west of Chicago. Even a few seconds’ advance knowledge might make all the difference if and when the shit hits the fan here. His thoughts then turn, as they often have tonight, to the third member of their team. Or, more accurately, he once again begins to worry about Tony Valenti, operationally and as a matter of conscience. Agreeing to include Tony on the operation went against all of Jake’s instincts. What the hell was he doing putting a civilian in harm’s way?
“Tony’s got more skin in the game than anyone,” Max had told him when he prevaricated over bringing Tony along. “He knows the risks.”
But does Tony really understand them?
“We need him, and I get the sense that he’ll rise to the occasion if he needs to,” Max had concluded.
Jake, thinking back to a year ago when Tony helped his father beat a murder rap, is confident Tony will try to. But going head-to-head against Luciano family soldiers in the wild isn’t quite the same thing as kicking the asses of a prosecutor or two in a courtroom.
Jake’s phone buzzes with a text from J.P. Duclos of the FBI: Moving now. Jake is in the process of forwarding it to Max and Tony when the directional mic feed erupts in his ear.
“Fuck! The cops are raiding Rockford!” a guttural voice exclaims from inside the house. So much for the FBI’s ability to jam mob communications.
“Let’s get the fuck outta here!” another man shouts.
“Fuckin’ right!”
“People inside,” Jake whispers into the microphone attached to the cord of his cell-phone earpiece. “At least two males. They know about the Rockford raid.”
“What about the girl?” the second and younger-sounding
