Hannibal Read Free

front.
    Tragic experience had taught the value of the plate inthe 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 thecover 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.”
    The light changed and at 2:57 P.M. , exactly three minutes before zero hour, the battered undercover van stopped in front of the Feliciana Fish Market, in a good spot by the curb.
    In the back they heard the ratchet as the driver set the hand brake.
    Brigham relinquished the periscope to Starling. “Check it out.”
    Starling swept the periscope across the front of the building. Tables and counters of fish on ice glittered beneath a canvas awning on the pavement. Snappers up from the Carolina banks were arranged artfully in schools on the shaved ice, crabs moved their legs in open crates and lobsters climbed over one another in a tank. The smart fishmonger had moisture pads over the eyes of hisbigger fish to keep them bright until the evening wave of cagey Caribbean-born housewives came to sniff and peer.
    Sunlight made a rainbow in the spray of water from the fish-cleaning table outside, where a Latin-looking man with big forearms cut up a mako shark with graceful strokes of his curved knife and hosed the big fish down with a powerful handheld spray The bloody water ran down the gutter and Starling could hear it running under the van.
    Starling watched the driver talk to the fishmonger, ask him a question. The fishmonger looked at his watch, shrugged, pointed out a local lunch place. The driver poked around the market for a minute, lit a cigarette and walked off in the direction of the café.
    A boom box in the market was playing “Macarena” loud enough for