by Marc Rainer
“A good place. A good find,” Lynn said as she pulled out of the parking lot.
“We’ll be here a lot,” Trask agreed.
He turned to look into the back seat. Boo and Nikki were already sound asleep. Trask looked down at Tasha. She kissed his chin again and settled into his lap.
“Want to drive by the other park on the way home?” Trask asked.
“Not today,” Lynn said. “Let’s not mess with perfect.”
A couple of miles away, Marylou Monaco put on her protective glasses and ear covers before stepping into the range.
She had three boxes of ammo today and intended to use them all. She didn’t really believe that an extra fifty rounds of practice would make a measurable difference; she just had the ammo and intended to shoot it. She didn’t know when or if she would have another chance.
Her groupings were tight enough to earn a compliment from the guy in the lane next to her.
“Looks like he’s dead,” the man shouted over the racket.
Marylou turned and smiled faintly. She nodded, then turned back toward the cardboard target. An ugly cartoon mug stared back at her from the target a few yards downrange. The fictional thug had a series of holes in his heart and another tight group of perforations in his head.
That’s the whole idea, she thought. She emptied her last loaded magazine.
Kansas City, Kansas
Jasper Dellums pulled back the blackout curtains and looked out the front window of the old house, watching for the car.
“He’s late.” Jasper’s twin brother Jamarcus snorted, pacing around the kitchen.
“He’s on Delroy time. He’s always late,” Jasper replied. “Don’t sweat it. He’ll be here. Probably hit traffic gettin’ out of Liberty.”
“You want a smoke?” Jamarcus asked. He sat down at the little table just outside the kitchen. “I’m rollin’ one.”
“Sure. Why not?” Jasper spread the tools of his trade across the coffee table in front of the couch. He put the digital scales to one side, the razor blades and small plastic bags in front of them.
Jamarcus brought the joint over, already lit.
“Damn, man,” Jasper protested. “You done burned five bucks worth just walkin’ it over from the dining room. Shoulda let me light it over here.”
“Quit your bitchin’.” Jamarcus looked up as a car’s headlights shot a ray of light through the open slit between the curtains. “Looks like cuz is finally here.”
Jamarcus walked over to the front door and unlocked the deadbolt. He peeped outside. The car was familiar. He pulled the door open as the figure approached it and locked it again once the man was inside.
“You’re late again, dude,” Jasper barked from the couch. “What was the hold-up?”
“I had to fight traffic, Jazz. It couldn’t be helped,” Delroy Dellums told his cousin. “Tried to get off a little early, but we got slammed. Sammy’s got a buy-three-tires-and-get-the-fourth-one-free sale goin’ on right now. I had to stay a few minutes late, then I swung by the apartment to get the shit, and that put me right in the middle of the rush goin’ back to KC.”
“How’s it look?” Jamarcus asked.
“Funny thing,” Delroy shrugged as he answered. “It looks exactly like the stuff we used to get from the Gonzalez boys. Wrapping’s the same, the little stamp on it’s the same. Probably from the same cartel, if you ask me. It’s good and white, too, like the last couple of batches we got from the Gonzalez brothers; it’s not the old black tar shit.”
“Good. Maybe the quality’s the same, too,” Jasper said.
“It might be better if it’s a little weaker,” Jamarcus said. “The Mexicans been lacin’ it with too much fentanyl lately. We had another customer OD last time.”
“Tell ’em to watch it and go light with the doses,” Delroy said. “Better to be careful than to never wake up. They can just use a little less.”
“That’s just gonna screw up all the sales figures, Del,” Jasper complained. “They’re used to buyin’ a certain amount, and usin’ a certain amount, and payin’ us a certain amount. It’s harder to sell smaller bags, too. That puts us out on front street more often as well. We have to sell it more often, and that’s just another chance for the cops to be watchin’.”
“Do what you want, then. I don’t care, as long as you move it and we can pay the dude,” Delroy said. “There’s always another junkie willin’ to step in if we lose one here or there.” He looked at the ash tray in front of Jasper. “You got enough to roll another one of those?”
Kansas City, Missouri
From a top floor window in the FBI building at 1300 Summit, Detective Jose Velasco of the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department trained his binoculars on the old house across the freeway.
They’re back. Must’ve found another plug.
He lowered the binoculars, hearing someone open the door to the tech room behind him.
“See anything good?” Supervisory Special Agent Mike Furay asked.
“I think the Dellums boys are back open for business.” Velasco handed the glasses to Furay.
“Same car as before?” Furay asked.
“Yeah, that’s their cousin Delroy,” Velasco said. “He works up in Liberty.”
“This is kind of weird, isn’t it?” Furay mused.
“How’s that?”
“It just hit me. Because you’re one of our Task Force Officers now, here you are on the Missouri side of the line looking across the loop into your town on the Kansas side of the line, staring at targets in one of your old cases.”
“That thought had crossed my mind,” Velasco said. He had fought the assignment to the Bureau with his captain, but it was his turn, and his objections had fallen on deaf ears. He had wanted to see the Dellums twins locked down for selling the heroin that he knew had already killed, and to be pulled off the case at a time when he felt himself getting close had made his blood boil.
“Tell you what,” Furay said. “With all the new emphasis on the opioid crisis, if you can line up your sources and make some buys, we’ll open it as a federal case—assuming there’s enough weight to justify our time—and we’ll take it to an AUSA on either side of the line, whichever is a better fit. That work for you?”
Furay handed the binoculars back to Velasco.
“Yeah, that works for me,” Velasco said, surprised and grateful for the concession. He had assumed that all his prior work would just be handed off to a new guy in his old department. “That works fine. Thanks, boss.”
Furay slapped him on the shoulder. “Looks like we won’t need a pole cam on this one. You can just set up a telescope and video recorder at the window here. We’ll see just as much as if we put mechanical eyes on a power line, and we don’t even have to pay the power company to raise a cherry picker. Get with Drew Henderson—he’s one of the tech guys—and he’ll sign the equipment out to you.”
“I will. Thanks.”
Velasco brought the binoculars back up to his eyes and stared at the house.
This might work out better than I thought. Federal time is stiffer than in the state system, too. They’d be out of the Lansing pen a lot sooner than they’d be leaving Leavenworth. Hell, I might even like it here.
Kansas City, Missouri
Monday morning started with Trask’s first real setback. Papi’s lawyer filed a motion challenging Heidi Hamilton’s initial ruling that Papi should be detained without bail, and Judge Hamilton blinked.
“She set bail at $50,000 cash after granting the defense motion,” Trask informed the team. “He’ll post that by noon, if he hasn’t done so already.”
“How does she justify that?” Cal asked. He hadn’t seen the judge’s order yet. Trask had just printed it off his email feed.
“The usual misread of the detention statute,” Trask replied. “She follows the old ‘bursting bubble’ method regarding the statutory presumption favoring no bail. He has local ties, has been a resident for more than twenty years, is th
erefore a reduced flight risk—”
“He’s still a danger to the community,” Foote noted. “That’s the other test.”
They were all sitting around a large table in one of the United States Attorney’s office’s conference rooms. The team—which now included Trask, Cam, Foote, Graham, Veronica, and Bubba—was just too big to fit in Trask’s office anymore.
“I completely agree, and her approach on this issue ignores the plain language of the statute,” Trask responded.
“You should have written the motions,” Cam snorted. “She seems to like you best.”
Trask laughed. “I don’t think that would have made a bit of difference. She might have been even more inclined to demonstrate her independence from all us evil good old boys. Your motion was well-written and included the Sazenski case from the 8th Circuit.” Trask looked at Cam as another thought crossed his mind. “How would Judge Brooks rule if we appealed her order?”
“Don’t waste your time on that,” Cam said. “I’ve tried appealing release orders with him before, and I’ve seen the defense attorneys appeal detention orders. He thinks it’s more important to back his magistrates in the face of challenges than to enforce the statute, so hold your fire unless you’re willing to appeal Brooks, too, and take it to the Circuit.”
Trask mulled that over for a moment. It was the kind of move that he didn’t want to make unless he was absolutely certain of the outcome. Otherwise, he’d just be carving bad precedent into judicial stone.
“We’ll live with it for now,” Trask announced. “If Papi violates any of his conditions of release, we’ll be in a stronger position to revisit it. It’s not like we have a lot of cooperative witnesses for him to try and get to.”
Trask turned to Billy Graham. “Do we have our friend Arturo salted away some place safe?”
Graham nodded. “He’s in a hotel down in Springfield. I called in some favors from some guys on the PD down there. We don’t have anyone with him twenty-four-seven or anything like that, but he’s safe if he stays put and keeps his head down. The cops down there tell me they’re checking on him every couple of hours, and he has numbers to call if he senses trouble. It’s the best we can do without putting a full witness security package together.”
“And we had no reason to do that as long as Papi was behind bars,” Trask noted. “Judge Hamilton has put us behind the eight-ball on that as well. At least she has Papi on an ankle bracelet. Unless he cuts the thing off, he can’t leave his house, and we probably have all his would-be hitmen locked up for now. Let’s hold off on saddling the Marshals’ Service with Arturo Diaz as a protectee unless we see a need to go the witsec route. He’ll be happier in a hotel room anyway where he has a little more freedom. Anybody disagree?”
Trask saw nodding heads around the table. They were all in agreement.
“What’s next on our checklists?” Trask asked
“Four more guilty pleas in front of Brooks this afternoon,” Cam said. “One starting every hour from one to four.”
Trask looked at John Foote. “Where are we on the pickup hauling the heroin? I promised the boss we’d stay on that.”
“Still nothing concrete,” John answered. “The recorded video from Papi’s shop never showed us the plates. We see the white guy—the guerro, as Arturo calls him—in a couple of frames, but his face is never fully shown. He’s either behind Papi, one of the other worker bees, or the angle is partially obscured by the truck on the rack. There’s not enough to do any kind of facial recognition work. Diaz couldn’t remember the plate number, so we’re still stuck with a white pickup from Texas.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” Graham said, smiling. “I’d rather be lucky than good.”
“I’d rather be both.” The quip came in perfect unison from Ronnie and Bubba, and everyone laughed a little.
Kansas City, Kansas
Detective Jose Velasco handed the buy money to the young man sitting in the passenger seat of his unmarked car.
“We recorded the numbers on all the bills, so use it for the dope and nothing else, understand?”
The young man nodded. “Got it.”
“You sure they’ll sell to you?” Velasco asked.
“Yeah. My sis told me their password, the one she used to get her stuff before she died. They don’t know I’m her brother, and I know some of the other users Jacqui hung with. I’ll tell ’em they sent me. It’ll be cool.”
“Okay then, straight in, then straight back here, right? No stops in between. We have other guys who’ll have their eyes on you, too. We straight?”
The young man nodded again. “Got it,” he said again.
He climbed out of Velasco’s car and into his own, parked a short distance away in the supermarket parking lot.
Velasco watched as the old Sentra pulled out of the lot and onto the street.
“He’s rolling now,” Velasco said into his radio.
“Roger. We have him,” the surveillance unit replied.
Twenty-five minutes later, the young man was back in Velasco’s vehicle. He handed Velasco a small paper bag. Velasco looked inside and saw two small plastic baggies. Inside each of the baggies was a small amount of white powder. Velasco nodded with approval.
“You didn’t have to touch these did you, dude?” he asked the young man.
“No, I did like you said. I just held the bag open and they dropped ’em in.”
“Good,” Velasco said. “If this shit is laced with fentanyl, just touching the bags could put you down if there was enough residue on the outside. We always make sure we glove up before touching these things. Nice work.”
He looked at the young man, reading his face intently. “Any problems at all?”
“Nah. It went down like I thought it would. I just mentioned Dewayne, one of the other junkies that my sis used to hang with. He’s probably the one who got Jacqui hooked in the first place. The guy at the door—I think it was Jazz—just nodded and asked me how many I wanted. I said I needed two and gave him the money. I held the bag open when he came back to the door and he dropped ’em in.”
“Could you do this again next week?” Velasco asked.
“Sure. However many times it takes. I owe that to Jacqui.”
“I’ll call you. Stay safe and let us know if you hear from anybody about this. Anybody. They could always ask this Dewayne about you.”
“I know. Even if they do, he’s too wasted most of the time to put two thoughts together. It’ll be cool.”
“Keep your phone handy then, and if you see my number call me back when it’s safe.”
“Sure,” the young man said. “Got it.”
North Kansas City, Missouri
Benny Collins stood up from his desk in the monitoring room.
“Heading home, Ben?” Jerry Dalton asked him.
“Yeah. Shift’s finally over. I’ll see you tomorrow night, Sarge.”
“Tomorrow night. Stay safe.”
Collins took his time striding to his car, parked in one of the Missouri Gaming Commission slots. He looked at his watch and nodded with approval.
It’s payday, and I’m on schedule.
He crossed the river, drove to the road that ran along the south riverbank, and turned into the entrance to a riverfront park. He pulled his car far enough in to be out of view from the road, then turned around so that he was facing the entrance. He checked his watch again. It read 2:07 a.m.
I’m three minutes early.
He sat and waited. The other car appeared and pulled up beside him, the driver stopping so that his window was beside and inches away from Benny’s. They both lowered their windows.
“Nice work, Ben. Here’s your money,” the older man said, passing an envelope to Benny’s waiting hand.
“Thanks,” Benny said. He felt the wad inside the envelope, and he knew not to look inside. There’d be time to count it later, it had never been short before, and he could never risk insulting the man who had given it to him.
; He reached over and opened his glove compartment, putting the envelope inside it.
He turned back toward the open window, intending to just tell the man that he’d see him again the next time. Instead, his mouth froze open as he stared into the barrel of a gun in the older man’s hand. It was the last thing he ever saw.
Kansas City, Missouri
Sergeant Micky McPhail of the Kansas City Missouri Police Department’s Homicide Unit stood by the dead man’s car and watched as the crime scene techs took casts of the tire marks in the dirt beside the parked BMW. A voice from behind McPhail made him turn.
“Mornin’, Mick.”
“Dave.” McPhail recognized the Medical Examiner’s chief investigator. The ME always sent one of her guys out on any suspicious death. The ME’s focus was on cause and manner of death, which in this case would be no mystery. The dead guy in the driver’s seat of the BMW had been murdered, and the cause of death was the two bullet holes in his head. Suicide could easily be ruled out since there was no weapon on the scene, and because there was more than one hole in the guy’s head.
McPhail and his cops would have another focus, that being the identification of the shooter. McPhail had another question for Dave Shepherd, who had been doing the work for decades, and knew his stuff.
“Dave, when you can, give me an estimated time of death.”
“Sure,” Shepherd said. “Okay if I look him over?”
“Yeah. We have all our photos. Soon as you’re done with yours, you can move him.” McPhail knew that the ME would want her own set of pictures. He heard a vehicle approaching behind him and turned to see a van pulling to the side of the dirt road behind one of the marked patrol units. He turned back to Shepherd. “Your contract guys are here to transport him, anyway.”
The ME had a standing contract with a local company to pick up and transport dead bodies to the morgue.
Shepherd finished photographing the body and the scene, then walked to his car and put the camera inside. He returned to the BMW and looked closely at the body. He checked his watch before looking back up at McPhail.