"No," Marcus corrected him with surgical precision. "You asked if I expected you to believe I was with the FBI. I told you I expected you to think before touching me. You chose not to think."
Across the parking lot, the steel rear door of the convenience store alley swung wide as Special Agents Miller and Jenkins escorted Elliot Crane back onto the main pad between the fuel islands. Crane’s hands were cuffed behind his back with federal flex-cuffs, his expensive gray merino wool jacket soaked dark across the shoulders from where he had gone down onto the wet grass of the median strip when Miller tackled him.
Behind them walked Special Agent Foster, carrying the heavy black canvas duffel bag by its handles. During the sprint across East Broad Street, the top zipper of the duffel had burst half-open under the strain of its contents. Protruding through the gap were thick, vacuum-sealed bricks of hundred-dollar bills wrapped in heavy millimeter plastic sheeting, alongside the stubby rubberized antennas of four Motorola APX encrypted tactical portable radios.
As Miller and Jenkins marched Crane past Pump Four toward the waiting black Tahoe, Crane lifted his wet, bruised face and saw Officer Daniel Keller standing un-cuffed beside Marcus and Lena near Cruiser 419.
Crane stopped dead in his tracks. His aristocratic features twisted into a mask of livid, incandescent betrayal.
"You son of a bitch!" Crane shouted across the twenty feet of wet concrete, his voice echoing off the brick facade of the 7-Eleven. "You said nobody was watching the units today!"
The entire parking lot seemed to go dead silent beneath the patter of the rain. Even the cashier inside the store, who had been peering through the glass door, froze.
Keller spun toward Crane so fast his boots slipped an inch on the wet oil slick. "Shut up! I never said that! I don't know this man!"
Crane let out a jagged, bitter laugh, shaking his wet head as he glared at the uniformed officer. "You called my burner twenty minutes ago! Right before I drove over here!"
Lena slowly turned her head and looked at Marcus.
Marcus gave a single, slight nod.
There it was. Six months of empty warehouses, scrubbed audit trails, and ghosts slipping out of back alleys before the battering rams could swing—all converging onto a thirty-foot square of wet concrete beside Pump Six.
Keller took two stumbling steps backward until the small of his back hit the driver’s side mirror of his own patrol cruiser. "This man is lying! He’s a suspect trying to flip on a cop! I’ve never spoken to him in my life!"
Crane wasn't listening to Keller’s denials; he was an educated white-collar criminal who knew within thirty seconds of seeing six federal agents emerge from blind cover that the first person to talk to the Assistant U.S. Attorney got the fourteen-year deal while the last man standing got thirty. He kept talking before anyone even read him a Miranda warning.
"You texted me at six-twenty-two when I told you there was a black sedan sitting at Pump Six!" Crane yelled, nodding directly at Marcus. "You told me a Black guy was watching the storage units from the pumps, and you said you were two blocks away and you’d handle him while I cleared the ledgers and the cash out of the back office!"
Panic completely overrode Keller’s remaining discipline. His right hand snapped up toward the Motorola speaker-mic clipped to the left lapel of his rain jacket, his thumb pressing toward the transmit bar.
Lena moved faster. In two strides she was inside his reach, her left hand clamping down over his wrist to pin his hand away from the mic while her right hand remained hovered near her sidearm.
"Keep your hands visible and away from your equipment, Officer Keller!" Lena ordered sharply.
"I have a right to contact my shift sergeant and my FOP union representative!" Keller barked, straining against her grip without daring to pull his arm free.
"You will not transmit on any radio frequency or make any cellular calls until we secure every electronic device on your person and inside this vehicle," Lena said.
"You can’t confiscate municipal police equipment from an on-duty officer!" Keller shouted.
Marcus walked slowly around the hood of his Impala and stopped three feet in front of Keller, his towering frame casting a long shadow across the officer’s chest under the canopy lights.
"You used municipal police equipment and your color of authority to obstruct a federal investigation and warn a conspiracy target during the commission of a felony," Marcus said, his voice quiet and final. "At this moment, Officer Keller, your cruiser and everything inside it is a federal crime scene."
"You have zero proof of that!" Keller spat, beads of sweat rolling down his temples. "You have the word of a guy caught running with a bag of cash!"
Ten feet away, where Special Agents Miller and Jenkins were waiting beside the open rear door of the Tahoe, Elliot Crane shook his head with a tired, cynical smirk.
"The texts and the voice logs are on the secure phone," Crane said, nodding his chin toward the duffel bag in Agent Foster’s hand. "Outer left zippered pocket. Passcode is four-four-one-two."
Marcus turned his head toward Agent Foster.
Foster set the heavy duffel bag on the dry concrete beneath the awning, pulled on a pair of blue nitrile evidence gloves from his vest pouch, and unzipped the outer left side compartment. From inside a Faraday-shielded nylon sleeve, he removed a compact, matte-gray ruggedized smartphone with an encrypted military-grade messaging operating system installed on its flash memory. He held it up for Marcus to see.