An afternoon in late August, a Thursday, four hours and sixteen minutes left on Day watch, cruising down the A1A twenty miles south of St. Augustine in an unmarked shark-gray Crown Vic, Sergeant Jack Redding of the Florida Highway Patrol and his rookie trainee were watching a black Suburban with heavily tinted windows and Missouri plates. They were watching the black Suburban because it was lurching across two lanes of heavy traffic like a wounded rhino.
Far out over the Atlantic a tsunami of storm clouds was filling the horizon. An onshore gale gritty with beach sand was lashing at the rusted flagpoles over the tired old lime-green and pink stucco motels—Crystal Shores, Pelican Beach, Emerald Seas—the gale fluttering their faded awnings. The air smelled of ozone and sea salt and fading magnolias.
Redding looked over at his trainee, a compact sport-model blonde by the name of Julie Karras. Since she was fresh out of the Academy and this was her first day on the job, she was on fire to pull the truck over and carpet bomb the driver’s ass.
“What do you think, boss? Can I hit the lights?”
Redding went back to the truck. It had eased up on the lurching. It was now more of a wobble. Maybe the driver had been fumbling around in the glove compartment or checking his iPhone and had finally stopped doing that. Or maybe he was totally cranked out of his mind and had just now noticed a cop car riding his ass. Whatever it was, the guy was slowing down, doing a little less than the 60 per allowed.
“Grounds, Julie?”
He could see her mentally running the Traffic Infractions List through her mind. She was too proud to check the sheet on her clipboard. Although he’d only met her at 0800 hours, when Day watch started, Redding liked her. She had...something.
Style was the wrong word.
No. She had bounce.
“I Five,” she said, after a moment, “Improper Change of Lanes.”
Julie Karras was in Redding’s unmarked cruiser because her regular training officer—who had been born in Chicago, the frozen attic of the nation—had confused Canadian ice hockey with a real American sport, such as football, and had gotten all of his upper front incisors duly redeployed. So the CO had handed her off to Redding for the week.
“Try not to get her killed on her first shift,” said the CO, whose name was Bart Dixon but everybody called him, inevitably, Mason, often shortened to Mace. “It’s bad for recruitment.”
Dixon, a bullet-shaped black guy with a shaved head and bullet scar on his left cheek, had grinned at him around an Old Port cheroot that smelled like burning bats. The part about not getting her killed wasn’t entirely irrelevant because Redding’s main job wasn’t Patrol.
He worked Serious Crimes Liaison with the State Bureau of Investigations. He’d killed five men and one woman while doing that because, while he didn’t go looking for gun fights, he didn’t do a whole lot to avoid them either. And in a hellhole city like Jacksonville, gun fights were always on the menu.
Redding didn’t mind taking on Julie Karras. She was crazy pretty, it was a fine summer day—or had been up until just now—and late August was slack time for the SBI, with most of them off on vacation. So if you were a career criminal and you desperately wanted to get your ass busted you were going to have to wait until after the end of the month.
Karras was from up North he remembered her saying. Charleston or Savannah so she had that sweet Tidewater lilt in her voice. She had the infraction number wrong though.
“I Six, you mean,” he said, but gently.
I Five was Improper Backing. Both infractions, but when he’d been in Patrol that’s where you started off, with a possible infraction. It hardly ever stayed there, but you had to have probable cause before you could make a stop. Otherwise everything that flowed from the stop—drugs, guns, illegal transportation of underage gerbils across state lines—would get thrown out of court.
“How about you run those plates first? Let’s see what we’re getting into here.”
Karras swiveled the MDT display around on its base, punched in 407 XZT, hit the search tab.
The Suburban had steadied and was now doing the speed limit. Exactly the speed limit. Redding’s unmarked was several cars back, in heavy traffic. Maybe they’d been seen and maybe not. But something was going ping in Redding’s cop brain.
He didn’t like big black SUVs with dark-tinted windows. Most cops felt exactly the same way. Big Black Boxes packed with Explosive Situations.
A gust of wind blew a cloud of beach sand across all four lanes of A1A and everybody’s brake lights flared as the drivers reacted. Grains of sand were peppering the glass at his shoulder and he could feel the car rocking. He looked east past the roofs of the beach houses that lined the coast, and there it was, heading their way, a white squall.
Karras looked up from the computer screen.
“Comes back with a Gerald Jeffrey Walker. DOB November 10, 1971. Address of 1922 Halls Ferry Road, Florissant, Missouri. No Wants No Warrants.”
Redding started to back off, letting his ping fade. Not every black Suburban was full of—
“Now this,” said Karras, giving him a puzzled look. “It just popped up on the screen. A ten-thirty-five? What’s a ten-thirty-five?”
Redding kept his eyes on that black Suburban. It had suddenly become much more interesting.
“That’s the code for Confidential Information.”
“What does it mean?”
“You’ll see in a moment,” he said, letting the Suburban drift farther ahead, falling back out of the guy’s rearview, if he was watching the cruiser at all. Which he sure as hell was because everyone did. A cop car in your rearview was like a scorpion in your martini. People noticed. He heard the MDT chirp, and Karras read off the radio code.
“It says ten-seventy-six?”
Redding was expecting that.
“It means switch radio channels,” he said, leaning over to click the channels controller to Tactical and picking up the hand mike.
“Central, this is Jax 180. Come back.”
“Jax 180, this is Six Actual.”
Six Actual was Mace Dixon.
“On that Suburban you just posted, St. Louis PD is asking for a ten-seventeen on that. Can you give us your twenty?”
Karras was getting a little bug-eyed but Redding didn’t have time for that right now. A 10-17 code meant maintain surveillance but do not stop the vehicle.
“Roger that, Central. Our twenty right now is southbound on A1A at Cedar Point Road. What’s up, Six? Plates come back No Wants No Warrants.”
“Roger that, Jax 180, wait one.”
Silence on the radio, and outside the windshield the weather was building up fast, the way squalls do along this coast. The traffic had thinned out, people looking at the skies and running for cover. In this part of the North Coast the A1A ran right along the shoreline, the ocean maybe a hundred yards away, booming and roaring.
On the west side, sprawling residential blocks, a few gated but mostly not, and beyond them, scrub forest, swamp and wetlands and then the Intracoastal Waterway, the inland canal that ran all the way from the Chesapeake to the Florida Keys.
The Suburban was speeding up, starting to pull away, which was okay with Redding. There was nowhere for it to go but south on the highway or turn off onto a side road, and they were all dead ends, either into the swamps to the west, or turn east and drive into the ocean.
“What’s going on, Sergeant Redding?” Karras asked in a tight voice.
“Call