St Kilda Consulting 02 - Innocent as Sin

the dudes fight back?” he asked. “Look at the firepower they had. Those things are more than a match for shotguns, aren’t they?”
    “The mopes on the ground are pros, just like the cops,” Faroe said.
    “How can you tell?”
    “They survived a felony takedown.”
    “Huh?”
    Faroe put his hand on Lane’s shoulder and continued teaching his son the things that someday might help him to survive when others died.
    “Note the jailhouse tattoos and the iron-pile physiques on those cuffed arms,” Faroe said. “Pros know when to fight and when to fold. It was folding time. If there are six cops here now, there are eighteen more on the way, and the clowns on the ground want to live to fight another day.”
    “How did you get them to send six cops in the first place?” Lane asked. “Mom wasn’t sure the desk sergeant would respond at all.”
    “I made sure that the police got two different calls, both with pretty much the same level of detail,” Faroe said. “A single call about a Mexican in a van brandishing a long gun might have gotten the dispatcher to send a car or two. That would have tempted the bad guys to try something, which would have been messy but would have kept Gabriel off Kayla.”
    “Messy was what Mom was afraid of.”
    Faroe shrugged. He hadn’t been thrilled with the odds, but he hadn’t had a lot of time for finesse. “I made the first call and she made the second. Both of us specified the vehicle and the kinds of weapons, which brought the threat level way up. Then we had Javier Smith—the tall guy pretending to be a gardener—call the cops and give them a heavily accented tip about a gang hit going down in Chandler Mall.”
    “Awesome.” Lane’s eyes were bright with excitement.
    “It got the job done. Cops usually do the right thing if they have enough information at the beginning. It’s only when they start fumbling around in the dark, hunting rattlesnakes withtheir bare hands, that things go to hell real quick. Today was one of the good days.”
    Lane watched as the cuffed men were levered to their feet.
    “C’mon,” Faroe said. “Recess is over. Time to go back to the Krebs cycle.”

53
    Chandler Mall
Sunday
11:45 A.M. MST
    T he instant Foley answered his cell phone, Bertone began talking.
    “I’m four rows down from the restaurant’s front door. White Toyota rental sedan with California plates. You have three minutes to find me.”
    Bertone punched out and waited. While he waited, he watched while a former Ukrainian army sniper and his spotter, a Latino gangster named Gabriel, were stuffed into separate squad cars. Bertone wasn’t worried about what they would tell the Chandler Police Department. Both men had already proved their ability to shut up many times.
    And if they did talk, there were always men in prison who were eager to kill. The Ukrainian knew it. Gabriel knew it.
    But the person Bertone really wanted to kill was walking away, laughing with a teenage boy. Bertone didn’t recognize the boy, but he recognized Faroe as a man rumored to be a St. Kilda operative.
    St. Kilda Consulting, which had been hired several months ago by John Neto to get revenge on Andre Bertone.
    It could be simple coincidence.
    Bertone wasn’t going to bet his life on it.
    He was still thinking about the unhappy implications of Faroe’s appearance when Steve Foley knocked on the passenger-side window. Bertone hit the unlock button.
    Foley took one look at Bertone’s face and really wished he could be somewhere else. But he couldn’t, so he slid in.
    “I didn’t hear any shots,” Foley said.
    “Be grateful. If you had, you’d be dead.”
    “Listen, I haven’t done anything but follow your—”
    “Shut it.”
    Foley swallowed hard. On the way from the restaurant to the car, he’d thought about his own situation. He wanted out.
    Alive.
    He was just a banker, no more or less honest than his corporate bosses and his wealthy clients required him to be. The money-laundering laws were flexible. They seemed designed more to shield clever bankers than to prevent illegal or immoral financial transactions. But at the same time, the laws provided steep penalties for bankers and banks that got caught sneaking around them.
    Kayla had been his cover. As long as she was alive and talking, he was on short time as a free man.
    “Did you correct the problem?” Bertone asked coldly.
    Foley reached underneath his shirt and ripped out the wire, transmitter, and tiny microphone.