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Terry almost asked if Pine Deep would have to foot the bill for the overtiht the questions would be both in poor taste and poorly ti his frown to a helpful s that’ll clean this up and get it offthis to go down…it was pure coincidence that our team had this particular band of Jamaicans under surveillance for the last few months I won’t bore you with all the details, but the Reader’s Digest version is this--we’ve been tracking a pipeline fro up I-95 on e call Cocaine Alley They use faons and such, driven by clean-​cut regular-​looking folks who pony the stuff to Philly, and then use the parking lots of strip malls just off the interstate to offload"

Detective LaMastra spoke up for the first tiht we could tag a couple of the ponies" He gave a fatalistic wave of his hands "But that’s for shit now"

Ferro nodded "We had a teauys in a van a block from the site, and another officer outside with a fiber-​optic camera and portable recorder We had audio and video plants in the warehouse where the buy was going down, but we didn’t have a full tea toto tail so up the food chain So our team was unprepared for ent down"

Detective LaMastra snorted "No shit" Ferro shot hinore

"In any case," Ferro continued, "the buyers were a car full of local boys Five South Philly thugs, low-​level tough guys I had a chance to look over the videotape with a couple of other detectives and wewas that these boys are not part of the drug gahhouse stuff, like collections for loan sharks and that sort of thing The drug buy was a new career venture for theo down, business as usual, but then the South Philly boys pulled so"

"You should have seen the video," LaMastra said with a twisted smile "Looked like a Quentin Tarantino fillanced at her At twenty-​one and five feet four, she looked like a scared kid dressed up for Halloween in a cop uniforun belt He wondered if she had ever even fired the heavy auto hip He wondered if any of Gus’s people ever had

Ferro pulled a notepad out of his pocket and consulted it "The suspects were identified as follows One Nicholas Scilini, thirty, and Lenny DiCavellio, twenty-​eight, both dead of ot away included Kenneth Boyd and Tony Macchio, both relatively small fish and barely worth the effort it would take to yank the switch on them"

"And the third? You said there were three?"

Gus Bernhardt looked uneasily at Terry and then at Ferro, and the cop’s dour face looked even rian Freeman, circa Seven, not the older, jollier Freeunman is the real proble to be handling this situation very, very carefully"

Terry grinned "Who is he? Jack the Ripper?"

No one laughed; no one else so much as smiled

"We should be so lucky," said Ferro

"What does that rin He didn’t like the shifty, scared looks everyone was covertly exchanging, and it wasn’t helping his stress level one little bit The ha into an i

"His nanificantly at Terry, but he only shrugged and shook his head

Gus bent over and said, softly, "Cape May Lighthouse Last Summer"

Terry stared at him and slowly, very slowly he felt the room turn as cold as a meat locker