Noah shrugged. “Just keep watching the cameras at her house, I'm pretty sure we’ll know when things hit the fan.”
An hour passed by, and Neil reported seeing a few cars coming and going from the Gomez place. Mrs. Gomez’s Lexus had returned, so the visitors were probably friends and associates who had heard about the children’s abduction. Noah nodded. “Let’s go ahead and order some flowers from the other shops in town. Do it in Spanish, so that it sounds like it’s coming from some of their own people.” He turned to Moose. “I think it’s safe for you to go ahead and take some flowers over there. If they seem surprised, just shrug like you don’t know anything.”
Moose nodded. “Hey, all I know is I get paid to drive the truck. They tell me where to deliver flowers, and I go do it. What do I do if they want the office number?”
“Good question,” Noah said. “Give them Sarah’s phone number. She can pretend to be the receptionist if they call.”
“You got it,” Moose said, and then he got up and left.
Neil watched as first Moose, and then two other delivery vans delivered flowers to the Gomez household. The occasional vehicle was still stopping at the house, but didn’t stay very long. It was just over an hour later when he reported that cars began converging on the Gomez house and staying there.
“Sounds like it’s about to begin, then,” Noah said. “Neil, get into the security company’s video server and make sure there’s no trace of Moose making any deliveries there. Cops and feds are going to be all over that footage in just a little while, we don’t want anything tying us to it.”
He rose from his chair and looked at Sarah.
“That's our cue,” he said, and she got up without a word to follow him to the car. Moose went to open the overhead door, and Sarah backed out and turned onto the street. She began making her way toward the house while Noah pulled out his phone and got Neil on the line.
“It'll take us about fifteen or twenty minutes to get there,” he said. “I'm going to keep you on the line and on speaker, so give me a running count on targets.”
“Will do,” Neil said. “It looks like Mr. and Mrs. Perez and their daughters, and the entire Hernandez clan have arrived. Wait, there's another car pulling up now—it's Menendez, with all of his sons. There's a lot of people there, already, at least twenty or more. Hold on—okay, there's Armando Rodriguez and his bunch. Boss, you got the whole kit and caboodle in there right now. Oh, shit, wait a minute—there’s a couple of people that aren’t on our list. What about them, Boss?”
“We try to minimize collateral damage, Neil, but it’s a safe bet that anyone associating with these people is somehow involved in the things they do. If you start seeing more who aren’t on the list than the ones who are, I might have to rethink this.”
“Damn. No, it’s just a couple people, so far. Everybody else that I see is part of one of the families.”
“They're moving pretty fast, then,” Noah said. “Keep me posted. If anyone leaves, let me know immediately.” He looked over at Sarah. “Get us there as fast as you can,” he said.
Sarah grinned, and the car launched itself forward. Within seconds she was doing more than sixty miles an hour down the narrow street, and narrowly missed crashing into a car that backed unexpectedly out of a driveway. She had two wheels up on the curb, but managed to get around it without hitting anything.
It took eight minutes to get to the street where the gathering was taking place, and Noah had her cruise past the house once. More than a dozen cars were in the driveway and lined up along the street, so Noah told her to go to the next intersection and turn around, then stop the car.
She did as he instructed her, and Noah noticed that she was breathing heavily as he pulled the detonator remote out of his shirt pocket. He pressed the button for channel 7, looked straight ahead at the house and dropped his thumb onto the trigger button.
The house disintegrated. A ball of flame suddenly came into existence, and a moment later there was a fair-sized mushroom cloud over where it had stood. Debris flew in every direction, and even though the neighboring houses were some distance away, many of their windows shattered instantly. There was considerable heat damage to their exteriors, but the most extensive devastation went straight upward with the heat of the explosion.
“Oh, my God,” Sarah breathed. She sat there staring, her eyes wide, as the fireball rose into the sky. “That almost looked like a nuclear blast,” she said.
Cars had been thrown around in front of the house like plastic models, and alarms were sounding all over the place. People from surrounding houses were hurrying out to look in the direction of the explosion. Noah reached over and touched Sarah's shoulder.