be in his car, parked away from the house. It better be.
The front door opened, and speak of the devil.
“Hey, Bobby.”
“Tad. You all right?”
“Will be in about half an hour.” He headed for the kitchen.
Drayne followed Tad into the kitchen, watched as Tad counted out ten or twelve pills, caps, caplets, and tablets, filled a glass with water from the tap filter line, and washed the drugs down in one big swallow.
“While you were napping, I set up some things,” Bobby said. “I was gonna send one of the bodyguards, but now that you’re awake, you can make the FedEx run.”
“Okay.”
“We’re moving forty-five hits of the Hammer.”
Tad raised an eyebrow.
“Might as well make hay while the sun shines,” Drayne said.
“You mixed it already?”
“Yep. Did the final at the new house, so the stuff is just under an hour old.”
“Got mine?”
“It’s too soon, Tad, you ought to sit this batch out. I’ll be doing another bunch next week.”
Tad didn’t say anything, and Drayne shook his head. “It’s your ass.”
“Such that it is, yeah,” Tad said. “Give me thirty minutes for the stack to kick in, I’ll be ready to roll.”
Drayne shook his head again. “Your funeral.”
“Geez, Boss, you don’t think the three of us could take one surfer dude and a zombie?”
Michaels had already put in the call to the director, and she in turn had called the local FBI shop and started the ball rolling. He said, “Isn’t this the zombie who wiped up the floor with a gym full of guys strong enough to pick up tractor trailers? Didn’t you just bring that up?”
“Yeah, but—”
“And don’t you recall the recordings of a white-haired old man who shrugged off a cloud of pepper gas and air tasers like they were mosquitoes and tossed guards and cops around a casino like a kid throwing toy soldiers? Or a woman who ripped an ATM machine out of a wall with her bare hands?”
“Yeah, but he can barely move now. He can’t be on the drug.”
Howard said, “There are too many things we don’t know here, Jay. Think about it. What is the lay of the house? Can they sneak out the back while we’re climbing the front gate? Are they armed? Who else is in there with them? I’m the only one with a gun here, so do you and the commander run around back and make sure they don’t escape with your tasers while I try to kick in what might be an armored front door? Not to disparage your shooting ability, but even if you hit something, you’ve only got one shot before you have to reload, and the fastest AT reload I’ve ever seen took almost two seconds. I’d guess you couldn’t do it in five or six. In two seconds, a man can run twenty, twenty-five feet, knock you down, and take off. In six seconds, he could be down the road having a beer, figuratively speaking. And that’s unarmed. If the surfer or the zombie have weapons, what do you think they’ll be doing with them if you miss? Or if you yell ‘Stop!’ and they shoot first? They could have a submachine gun in there, and they could take out twenty civilians out there on the beach. That would be after they cut you down.”
“Mm,” Jay said. “That would be bad for public relations, not to mention my personal love life. So why didn’t we call in Net Force troops? We can trust them.”
“That would have been my choice,” Howard said, “but the commander is right. We found them, but it isn’t our operation, we aren’t supposed to even be here, we’re outside our job description. If we had a dozen Net Force military troops kick in the door of a Malibu beach house, we’d all be looking for jobs. Assuming we could even get our people here in the next couple of hours, which we could not.”
Michaels said, “By rights, this belongs to the DEA. Even if the director decides to let FBI agents make the arrests, it’s still a hot political potato. The director can risk pissing off a brother agency, we can’t. We can’t even get warrants, so even if we were willing to get fired, the capture wouldn’t be legal. Even an ambulance-chaser lawyer with a lobotomy could get them off. The arrests would be completely illegal.”
“Yeah, okay, I can see all that,” Jay said. His voice was reluctant.
Michaels looked at his watch. “We should have agents showing up within thirty or forty minutes, if we’re lucky. We do it by the numbers, get part of the credit, and most importantly, the drug dealer is off the street. The end result is the same, no matter who hauls them off.”
“For how long is he off the street?” Jay asked.
“Excuse me?’
“This guy is carrying around a secret that is worth millions, maybe tens of millions, you said so yourself. Won’t the drug companies be falling all over themselves to be first in line to hire him the best legal team in the world? How high can his bail be?”
Michaels nodded. He knew what Jay said was true. “Probably. But that’s not our worry. We were supposed to find him. We found him. We did our part. What happens to him after they catch him isn’t our problem, we don’t have any control over that. We’re just a cog in the big machine, Jay. We do our job, we have to hope the rest of the system does its job. Can’t be everywhere.”
“That sucks,” Jay said.
“Welcome to the real world, son,” Howard said.
35
Drayne gave Tad the minipackets with the Hammer caps, the list of addresses, and pointed him at the door. By now, most of the payments would have already been transferred electronically into the safe accounts. Before Tad stuck a packet into the FedEx clerk’s hands, he’d check again to make sure the payment for it had cleared.
As the door closed behind Tad, the phone rang. It was the business line.
“Polymers, Drayne—”
“If you have a lawyer, call him,” came his father’s voice. “You’ll need him soon.”
His father hung up without identifying himself, and Drayne felt a rush as cold as liquid nitrogen envelop him.
“You!” he said, pointing at the nearest bodyguard. “Go get Tad! Don’t let him outside the gate!”
The bodyguard hurried away.
Drayne’s fear, cold at first, now flushed into an uncomfortable warmth that suffused his whole body.
No. If his father had done that, he wouldn’t have had any second thoughts. The old man never apologized for anything once he decided it was the right thing to do. And though he hadn’t said anything specific, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to read the volumes between those lines.
Drayne was about to be busted. The old man had found out about it, and he’d called to warn him.
Almost more important than getting arrested was that his father had gone against thirty years of duty to tell his son he was in trouble. Couldn’t bring himself to give it all away, of course, but even this much, knowing how smart Drayne was, and that he would figure it out, was nothing short of a miracle.
Drayne went to the security console in the kitchen and looked at the camera focused on the front gate. Nothing there. He touched the controls. The cam was mounted on a gimbal, could look pretty much in any direction. He put the cam into a slow 360-degree pan.
Across the street at the Blue Gull, a car was backed into a parking slot, and a man sat in the passenger seat, the window down, looking in the direction of Drayne’s house.
Drayne stopped the pan and focused the cam on the car.
Okay, that could be somebody waiting for his wife to come out of the bathroom or something.
He hit the zoom. The glare on the windshield wouldn’t let him see inside, but the security folks knew about glass glare, and a dial let him polarize the lens. The windshield cleared to show a second man in the driver’s seat
