“Come out to the range and I’ll explain it to you, Officer.”
Brigham broke it up. “Bolton, I coached Starling when she was interservice combat pistol champion three years straight. Don’t worry about her weapon. Those guys from the Hostage Rescue Team, the Velcro Cowboys, what did they call you after you beat their ass, Starling? Annie Oakley?”
“Poison Oakley,?
? she said, and looked out the window.
Starling felt pierced and lonesome in this goat-smelling surveillance van crowded with men. Chaps, Brut, Old Spice, sweat and leather. She felt some fear, and it tasted like a penny under her tongue. A mental image: her father, who smelled of tobacco and strong soap, peeling an orange with his pocketknife, the tip of the blade broken off square, sharing the orange with her in the kitchen. The taillights of her father’s pickup disappearing as he went off on the night-marshal patrol that killed him. His clothes in the closet. His square-dancing shirt. Some nice stuff in her closet now she never got to wear. Sad party clothes on hangers, like toys in the attic.
“About another ten minutes,” the driver called back.
Brigham looked out the windshield and checked his watch. “Here’s the layout,” he said. He had a crude diagram drawn hastily with a Magic Marker, and a blurry floor plan faxed to him by the Department of Buildings. “The fish market building is in a line of stores and warehouses along the riverbank. Parcell Street dead-ends into Riverside Avenue in this small square in front of the fish market.
“See, the building with the fish market backs on the water. They’ve got a dock back there that runs all along the back of the building, right here. Beside the fish market on the ground floor, that’s Evelda’s lab. Entrance here in front, just beside the fish market awning. Evelda will have the watchers out while she’s cooking the dope, at least three blocks around. They’ve tipped her before in time for her to flush her stuff. So—a regular DEA incursion team in the third van is going in from a fishing boat on the dock side at fifteen hundred hours. We can get closer than anybody in this van, right up to the street door a couple of minutes before the raid. If Evelda comes out the front, we get her. If she stays in, we hit this streetside door right after they hit the other side. Second van’s our backup, seven guys, they come in at fifteen hundred unless we call first.”
“We’re doing the door how?” Starling said.
Burke spoke up. “If it sounds quiet, the ram. If we hear flash-bangs or gunfire, it’s ‘Avon calling.’” Burke patted his shotgun.
Starling had seen it done before—“Avon calling” is a three-inch magnum shotgun shell loaded with fine powdered lead to blow the lock out without injuring people inside.
“Evelda’s kids? Where are they?” Starling said.
“Our informant saw her drop them off at day care,” Brigham said. “Our informant’s close to the family situation, like, he’s very close, as close as you can get with safe sex.”
Brigham’s radio chirped in his earphone and he searched the part of the sky he could see out the back window. “Maybe he’s just doing traffic,” he said into his throat microphone. He called to the driver, “Strike Two saw a news helicopter a minute ago. You seen anything?”
“No.”
“He better be doing traffic. Let’s saddle up and button up.”
One hundred and fifty pounds of dry ice will not keep five humans cool in the back of a metal van on a warm day, especially when they are putting on body armor. When Bolton raised his arms, he demonstrated that a splash of Canoe is not the same as a shower.
Clarice Starling had sewn shoulder pads inside her fatigue shirt to take the weight of the Kevlar vest, hopefully bulletproof. The vest had the additional weight of a ceramic plate in the back as well as the front.
Tragic experience had taught the value of the plate in the back. Conducting a forcible entry raid with a team you do not know, of people with various levels of training, is a dangerous enterprise. Friendly fire can smash your spine as you go in ahead of a green and frightened column.
Two miles from the river, the third van dropped off to take the DEA incursion team to a rendezvous with their fishing boat, and the backup van dropped a discreet distance behind the white undercover vehicle.
The neighborhood was getting scruffy. A third of the buildings were boarded up, and burned-out cars rested on crates beside the curbs. Young men idled on the corners in front of bars and small markets. Children played around a burning mattress on the sidewalk.
If Evelda’s security was out, it was well concealed among the regulars on the sidewalk. Around the liquor stores and in the grocery parking lots, men sat talking in cars.
A low-rider Impala convertible with four young African-American men in it pulled into the light traffic and cruised along behind the van. The low-riders hopped the front end off the pavement for the benefit of the girls they passed and the thump of their stereo buzzed the sheet metal in the van.
Watching through the one-way glass of the back window, Starling could see the young men in the convertible were not a threat—a Crip gunship is almost always a powerful, full-sized sedan or station wagon, old enough to blend into the neighborhood, and the back windows roll all the way down. It carries a crew of three, sometimes four. A basketball team in a Buick can look sinister if you don’t keep your mind right.
While they waited at a traffic light, Brigham pulled the cover off the eyepiece of the periscope and tapped Bolton on the knee.
“Look around and see if there are any local celebrities on the sidewalk,” Brigham said.
The objective lens of the periscope is concealed in a roof ventilator. It only sees sideways.
Bolton made a full rotation and stopped, rubbing his eyes. “Thing shakes too much with the motor running,” he said.
Brigham checked by radio with the boat team. “Four hundred meters downstream and closing,” he repeated to his crew in the van.
The van caught a red light a block away on Parcell Street and sat facing the market for what seemed a long time. The driver turned as though checking his right mirror and talked out of the corner of his mouth to Brigham. “Looks like not many people buying fish. Here we go.”