“Let’s go back to the chase,” Lucas said. “You see four guys. The fourth guy was spraying gasoline around?”
“Yeah. The guy I shot.” Hall closed his eyes again. “The Mako went into the pier . . . let me see, the fourth guy tied it off, real quick, like he was a boat guy. Then he got the gas . . . He had a five-gallon can, but not the kind you’d have on a boat. It was plastic, it was more the kind you’d use for a lawn tractor or something. They recovered it from the boat when they brought it off the bottom. It was melted, but they could see what it was. I told the FBI guys I think they had it there for exactly how they used it—in case they had to burn the boat. That boat was probably worth a couple hundred thousand and they burned it without thinking twice.”
Lucas: “So you’re closing in. What did the guys look like?”
“Three of them were big guys, including the guy I shot. The fourth one was quite a bit smaller, he was the guy who got the car. Ten kilos is about twenty-two pounds, plus there was the weight of the buckets, or pipes, and these guys were climbing out of the boat onto the pier and running to the car carrying two buckets, so maybe . . . fifty pounds? They had to be a little strong.”
“Hair color, or anything like that?” Bob asked.
“The small guy had black hair, I want to say, maybe Latino. The other three guys look like these snowbirds we get down here in the winter, from New York and New Jersey. Kinda burned-looking. I don’t know about their hair, but on those guys, it’s usually black.”
Lucas: “Clothes?”
“Shorts, and you know, tropical-like shirts, like New York guys buy when they get down here. They go to a Tommy Bahama store, first thing. Get parrots on their shirts. Orange and bright yellow, neon stuff. Except the small guy, he was wearing black pants and a dark-colored shirt. Yeah. Dark-colored.”
Bob: “New York and New Jersey.”
Hall, who’d closed his eyes again, opened them now, and said, “Yeah. Those guys have a look. You see it all the time down here. Wraparound sunglasses, short hair, big guys, square faces, chewing gum, making it snap. They had the look.”
“The small guy . . . how small? Let’s say the other guys were six feet. How big was the small guy compared to them?”
“Oh, I don’t . . . Jeez, now that you ask it that way, about half their size,” Hall said. “Skinny. I don’t think he came up to their shoulders. I guess that’s why I’m thinking Latino.”
They talked a while about the recovery of the sunken Mako. The Coast Guard and Lauderdale cops sent divers down to recover what they could, before the remains of the boat were brought up with a crane. Among the recovered items were two scuba tanks, a badly burned buoyancy control vest, and other scuba gear.
“They found the diver’s wet suit, but it got melted into a lump,” Hall said. “I guess the guy peeled it off as soon as he got on board the Mako.”
“Any fishing gear on board?” Bob asked.
“Yes. They found rods and reels, ordinary stuff, cheap for a boat like that,” Hall said. “The FBI tried to trace it to a specific outlet, but . . . nothing came of it. There wasn’t much on board the boat. It’s like they used it for this one thing, and maybe fishing.”
“Maybe kept the personal stuff down to make it harder to identify them, if they got stopped and weren’t able to burn the boat,” Lucas said. “Even the fishing gear might have been stage dressing, so they’d look like they were doing something legitimate out there.”
“Don’t know about that,” Hall said.
* * *
They talked for a while longer, until Hall ran out of things to say. Bob asked, “You feel bad about shooting that guy?”
Hall shook his head. “Nope. They killed three of our guys. I thought maybe I would feel bad, but . . . you know, it’s back there in the past now. I don’t feel it much anymore. I don’t get all moody.”
“You’ll be okay, maybe you’re already okay,” Lucas said. “It’s a lot easier to live with killing somebody when you did the right thing and when good people agree that it was the right thing to do.”
“I think so,” Hall said. “My wife’s okay with it, and that helps. Then, I asked one of the FBI guys if they thought these dope guys might come after us, and he said these guys were just criminals, not the CIA. How would they even find us? We live in a trailer park, we don’t even have an address on our trailer, only on the mailbox out by the street.”
* * *
When they got up to go, Hall asked, “What’re you going to do now?”
Lucas said, “The FBI has identified some people that might know something, even if they don’t know much. We’ll find them, step on their toes. See what they have to say.”
“Good. I want them caught. Our guys never had a chance, they just mowed them down.”
“We’ll get them,” Bob said.
“Listen, long as you’re here, you oughta go look at the boat show, if you haven’t seen it yet,” Hall said as they walked back to the equipment-sales pavilion. “I live down here and I’ve been every year for the last four. Can’t get enough of it.”
* * *
Hall went back to work and Lucas and Bob spent an hour wandering through the maze of docks, looking at the boats. The megayachts had garage-door type openings on their sterns, open so passersby could have a look. Nestled inside one was a submarine; another had a “skiff” that was twice as big as Lucas’s fishing boat; in a third, five women danced and lip-synced to a Rihanna song, like fake-blond Supremes.
Bob: “Wonder if the women come with the boat?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised if it was an option,” Lucas said.
One of the yachts had fuel tanks with a forty-thousand-gallon capacity. At Lauderdale prices, a single fill-up would cost a hundred and sixty thousand dollars, another gawker told them.
Lucas: “I’m a long way from being a commie, but . . . I mean, Jesus H. Christ. A hundred and sixty thousand for one fuckin’ fill-up?”
As they walked back to the car, three fruit-colored Lamborghinis—banana, cherry, and green apple—lurched by, one after the other. Average traffic speed was perhaps a mile an hour.
* * *
“That was nice,” Bob said. “Now, where do we find the guys whose toes we’re going to step on?”
“We need to talk to Weaver some more, without all the other people around,” Lucas said, referring to the head of the task force. “I don’t want a lot of . . . you know . . . pushback from the Millennials.”