“So, what do you think?” Michaels said.
“Either it’s that one or the Horowitz place,” Howard said. “Rich bankers and rich movie stars might use dope, but they don’t need to sell it.”
“Just FYI, General, they found a bug on your car. That’s how the shooter kept from losing you.” Jay pointed at the flatscreen. “Also, Mr. Lee, who as we all know couldn’t have been said shooter, called in sick today.”
“Something fatal, I hope,” Howard said.
“And to keep things interesting, Mr. Zachary George is on vacation this week and next,” Jay said.
Michaels said, “Anything on the searchbots for Mr. Horowitz here yet?”
“Nope,” Jay said. “But I don’t think we need it.”
“And why would that be?”
“Take a look at the death-warmed-over stick in black walking along the road there, coming from the sandwich place,” Jay said.
“So?”
“Look again, boss.”
Michaels did. He frowned.
“Yeah,” Jay said. “Kind of hard to picture him beating the crap out of a room full of bodybuilders and trashing a gym, isn’t it?”
Michaels nodded. “But that’s the guy.”
“Never thought I’d see an actual match to a police ID composite,” Jay said. “All we have to do is watch and see if he chooses door A or door B. Whichever one he picks, I’d bet my next month’s salary against a bent quarter that’s our dealer’s house.”
The three watched the man, who looked as if he might fall down any second, as he shambled along. It took him a while to get there, but he finally did.
“And we have a winner,” Jay said. “It’s the surfer dude’s pad. Net Force rules!” He looked at Michaels. “Now what, boss? We gonna go kick ass and take names?” He held up his air taser and waggled it.
Both Howard and Michaels laughed.
Michaels said, “I see your experience in the field didn’t teach you anything. We’re not going anywhere. We’re calling the FBI. They’ll go in.”
Drayne parked the car and went in. He saw one of the bodyguards skulking behind the banana and short palm trees nod and wave at him. Good to know they were watching the place like they should.
Inside, Drayne walked out to the deck. Adam was there, looking at the ocean. “Where’s Tad?”
“He stepped out, said he was going to his car,” Adam said. “Said he’d be back in a few minutes.”
Drayne nodded. Tad would be self-medicating as soon as he was ambulatory again, and his pharmacy would 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.