White Collar - as an unofficial novel - part 6

Messing with the mob

Neal opened the locker, took the cover of the briefcase, and placed it inside. Then locked and left. He took a detour, taking a coffee watching the view from the table, checking if he saw someone following. Then he got inside the van.

"Has he picked it up yet?"

Peter and Jones sent him a quick glance, while Diana's eyes never left the monitor.

"No, not yet," Peter said.

Neal pulled out a chair and sat down. This was far from his favorite place in the world, but he could manage. He and Peter had spent a whole day in the van at the beginning of their partnership, just to see how he reacted to confined spaces. Four people made the van crowed. He smiled when he remembered that they had been six inside the same space when Peter had set the trap for him. Four of them had had body armor too.

"Peter?"

"Yep?"

"When you arrested me the first time, why did you bring four guys in body armor with you?" The other three in the van stared at him for a second before Diana's eyes returned to the monitor again. "I mean, you must have known I was unarmed. You and Jones would've been enough."

"Yes, I was certain you were unarmed," Peter nodded, eyes back to the monitor. "But I didn't know how you would react in a tight spot. I wanted to make sure you didn't have a chance to run."

"So that's why you came just you the second time? Because you knew me better?"

"No," Peter smiled, "that was because I didn't know you were in the apartment. I just went in to see if we could get a clue to where you went next."

"You would still use an armed vanguard if you had to arrest me?"

"I haven't so far." The other two agents chuckled at this. Peter turned his head. "Are you up to something, Neal?"

"Do you think I would tell you if I were?" he grinned back at his friend. They all smiled at this and then fell back into silence. Neal found a pair of handcuffs and studied their simple but effective mechanism when he found Peter watching him.

"Would you've run?" his handler asked. "If just me and Jones walked through that door, would you still have yielded as you did?"

Neal watched the cuffs in his hands. It was not an obvious answer to that question. He had run before, but never when they were that close.

"If you had come unarmed, maybe," he thought aloud.

"So guns make a difference?"

"Of course it does, Peter. With a gun, you could kill someone without any effort at all."

"True. So you would've tried to run if I had been more low-key with the arrest?"

To tell the truth, he had not checked who came through the door before raising his hands in surrender.

"No, Peter." He saw his friend gave him that are-you-sure-you're-telling-the-truth look. "I knew it was a trap the second Kate told me she didn't sell stamps. If you had set a trap you had every escape route covered. It would just have been embarrassing to even try."

Once again this caused quite an amusement in the van. And Neal thought he saw a hint of pride in Peter's face.

"I wish more criminals were thinking the same, Caffrey," Jones said.

"Bobby said the same."

"Who?"

"Guard at the prison." Bobby had stopped cuffing him when he has taken to solitary confinement because there was never any need. Neal had proved he was not violent. But those memories reminded him too much of his current location for him to want to continue on the subject.