by Marc Rainer
“We ought to put a bug in that place just to watch.”
“Don’t tempt me. Anyway, Velasco and Foote are heading to Dallas to see what they can find out about our pickup and delivery boy, Cannon. Trask thinks he’ll be the best link in the chain to break once the time is right. He could give us the supply side of this thing, the operation here, and any customers he has in other cities.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Bubba looked to his right as another unmarked car pulled in beside him. He nodded at the driver. “Furay just showed up. Didn’t know you were ordering FBI supervisors around now.”
“He likes to get his hands dirty once in a while—just like me. Go home, Bubba.”
“On the way, boss.”
Kansas City, Missouri
“I’m really concerned about letting any of that heroin walk, Jeff, especially if it’s still being laced with fentanyl,” J.P. Barrett told Trask. He turned and stared out his office window, looking across the river. “That’s why I called you in. I know you guys are busy as hell, and normally I wouldn’t bother you, but I don’t want to see any more OD’s on the Medical Examiner’s table if we can prevent it. If it was a few pounds of weed, even a kilo or two of coke, we might ask Main Justice to approve letting it hit the street, but this stuff is so dangerous …”
“My thoughts as well,” Trask responded. It was time for him to reassure the boss and let him know that they had that base covered. “That’s why I told Velasco and Foote to take off this Cannon guy if they thought he was on the way up with a load. We’ll spin him if he’s willing to cooperate, and we’ll have him make a controlled delivery to his customers here. We don’t know where the rest of the load is going yet, but we might be able to make deliveries in some other locations as well. The stuff that Mrs. Monaco left us shows him returning to Little Dom’s bar three-to-four days after he made the drops there, probably to get paid. He could have gone to a lot of other locations in that time. It all depends on how quietly we could do the take-downs here. There’s certainly a risk that our local dealers could tip-off the pushers in other cities, if they’re connected.”
“If he made Velasco before on the earlier surveillance, how can we be sure we won’t lose him this time?”
“We can never be completely sure,” Trask answered, “but we sent Foote and Velasco down with an approval for a GPS to slap on Cannon’s truck. The battery life on those things is a lot better than it used to be, and it’ll let our guys tail him without getting too close. If they can put him to bed one night or catch him hitting a rest stop on the highway, putting it under his bumper should be pretty simple.”
“Excellent. It seems you’ve thought of everything. I don’t mean to micro-manage—I used to hate that when it happened to me—but I just didn’t want to have to answer questions from either the Department or the press on why we let any of this poison hit the street when we knew how deadly it was. And even if we didn’t have any new bodies going to the morgue—”
“We’ve had more than enough already, and it’s a national issue in the press. We’ll do our best not to let any of this stuff walk.”
“Very good.” Barrett turned back toward Trask and away from the river view. Trask had noticed that Barrett preferred to window gaze when he was more concerned about something. The next point—whatever it was—would probably not be contentious at all. “How are the pleas going on the Michoacán conspiracy case?”
“We’re running through them pretty quickly. As I expected, we’ll only have one left for trial, and that’s Papi himself. He’s made it known to everyone who’d listen to him that he’s never going back to prison. We’ve had a couple more defendants roll over on him, in addition to our original spinner Arturo, so I don’t see how he’s going to avoid the sentence. He filed a speedy trial motion, but we were ready for that. We’re due to start trial next week in front of Judge Brooks.”
Barrett nodded. “Great work, Jeff. Keep me posted.”
“Certainly.”
Gainesville, Texas
Tyler Cannon pulled the pickup into the motel parking lot in front of Room 105 and next to a Toyota Camry, which was parked in front of Room 106. He walked to the bed of the truck and reached into the toolbox mounted behind the cab. He pulled out the duffel bag and walked to the door of Room 105, the key in his hand.
Once inside, he took the heavily-wrapped packages out of the duffel and transferred them to a briefcase that was already waiting in the room. He changed clothes, leaving his jeans, western-style hat, and jeans jacket in the closet. He checked the mirror. The chinos and leather jacket he now wore were a sharp contrast to his earlier outfit. He was no longer a Texas ranch hand; he was a young businessman—maybe an IT nerd—off on some errand for a corporation. He checked his watch. It was just after 7:00 p.m., and it was dark now. He decided to wait about an hour.
He sat and watched the news on a cable channel, switched to a sports channel for part of a football game, and then decided he had waited long enough. He opened the door that allowed him to pass between the two rooms and entered Room 106. He took a peek through the curtains just to make sure, then laughed at himself for doing so. There was no structure between his rooms and the highway, nowhere for anyone to sit and watch the entrances to the rooms unless they were in a vehicle on the shoulder of the interstate. He didn’t see any cars there. He was okay, and his truck would be okay until he returned later in the week. He had paid the manager a little extra to make sure of that, and he had both rooms rented for eight days.
Ducking his head, he left Room 106 with the briefcase and got into the Camry. Within minutes he was back on Interstate 35, heading north toward Kansas City.
“I told you he was good,” Velasco said to Foote, looking out the window of their SUV as they rolled past the motel. “The only way we’re going to be able to see the front of that damned room is to keep flipping on the highway and driving past it, and he’s got me so paranoid I don’t want to do that more than once every half-hour or so.”
“Let’s do this, then,” Foote suggested. “We can see the on-ramp to 35 from the lot of that fast food joint at this exit. We park over there, grab a burger, and just wait to see if the motel stop is a decoy. If we don’t see him in an hour or so, we figure he’s in for the night, and we can sneak over and slap the GPS on his truck and be in good shape for tailing him tomorrow. We can grab a room at this other motel down the street just in case he’s paid off the desk clerk at his place to tell him if anyone looking like a KCK cop or a poster boy for the FBI checked in.”
Velasco laughed. “Works for me. How long you been with the Bureau, anyway?”
“Twenty-two years now.”
“Any time on the job before that?”
“Yeah. Five years with the Wyandotte County Sheriff’s Office.”
Velasco did a double take. “You’re from the ’Dotte?” he asked, referring to the county in which his own Police Department and the city of Kansas City, Kansas, were located.
“Born and raised,” Foote said. “I just had to leave before I lost what I.Q. I was born with.”
Velasco laughed again. It was a standing joke among those from other areas of the Kansas City metro that one would lose an I.Q. point for every hour spent in Wyandotte County, one of the more depressed areas in the vicinity before its economy was revived by a casino, a racetrack, and some high-end shopping.
“I had to do one of those famous ‘big-office’ tours after I got out of Quantico,” Foote said, referring to the FBI Academy, “went to New York for a while, but I got back here as fast as I could, and sunk roots back in the old home turf. We live down in Johnson County, now. Overland Park.”
“Of course you do,” Velasco said. “Too good for the ’Dotte now?”
“You have kids?” Foote asked him.
“Not yet.”
“Where would you want ’em to go to school if you did?”
“Yeah, I hear ya. Your schools are much better down there.”
“There you go.”
Velasco checked his watch. “It’s a little after eight now. I think I can stroll through his parking lot. Anyone who sees me will just see a middle-aged Mexican and think I’m part of maintenance or housekeeping.”
Foote chuckled. “That’s exactly what I’d think, being all Johnson County now. Be careful. Here’s your present.”
Foote handed Velasco the GPS transmitter. “Damn, these things are tiny now,” he said. “I remember when they were the size of a freakin’ brick.”
“And weighed as much, too,” Velasco said. “I’ll be back in ten.” He tucked the transmitter under his windbreaker and got out of the SUV.
Kansas City, Kansas
Special Agent Drew Henderson picked the lock on the back door of the house while Supervisory Special Agent Michael Furay focused the beam of a small flashlight on the door knob. They both heard a barely audible click, and Henderson smiled as he turned the knob.
“We’re in,” he said.
“Was that part of your tech agent training, or just part of your seedy past?” Furay asked, whispering.
“We black bag guys are sworn to secrecy,” Henderson answered. “Let’s get this over with. You sure nobody’s home?”
“Velasco said that the only time the Dellums boys use this joint is when they’re prepping or selling. We haven’t seen them in at least two days, so Velasco said they’re most likely between loads.”
“‘Most likely,’ he says,” Henderson quipped. “Where the hell is Velasco tonight? Why are you here instead of him?”
“He’s with John Foote down near Dallas somewhere. Road trip.”
“A road trip with John Foote,” echoed Henderson. “Maybe I’d rather be doing this. It’s a lot shorter. Shit, it stinks in here. Smells like a year’s worth of stale weed.”
They walked quietly into the living room.
“Up there,” Henderson said, pointing to a corner where the rear walls of the room met the ceiling. “That’s perfect. It’ll give us a view of the whole room. You said Velasco’s source saw them cutting and wrapping in here?”
“Yep. What do you need?”
“Just that stepstool and this.” Henderson took the stepstool that Furay had carried in with them and opened it in the corner. He stepped to the top of the stool and pulled a small power drill from his jacket pocket, using it to make a tiny hole precisely in the corner where the walls and ceiling met. He then pulled a device from his shirt pocket about the size of a large nail and inserted it into the hole.
“See anything?” he asked Furay.
Furay stepped back into the middle of the room. “Not really, looks like the paint may have just flaked out of the corner. I wouldn’t notice it if I wasn’t looking for it.”
“That’s the whole idea,” Henderson said. He checked the feed on his cell phone. “We’re up and running.”
Furay turned to leave, but stopped, seeing a television set in the corner of the room. “Any issue having it so close to that?” he asked.
“Shouldn’t be. We’re on our own frequency with the transmitter. It’s shielded.”
Furay shrugged. “Okay. Let’s get out of here.”
Kansas City, Missouri
“Whatever he’s up to, I already hate him.” Velasco, sitting in a chair in Furay’s office, shook his head in a combination of frustration and disbelief. “First, he makes me at the tire store, then he keeps us babysitting that pickup and an empty motel room for a day-and-a-half. Not that I mind Foote that much, being as he’s actually from the ’Dotte and all—”
“You’re from Wyandotte County?” Furay asked Foote incredulously.
“Thanks for blowing my cover,” Foote said to Velasco.
“You should be proud of it, like me, not ashamed of your roots,” Velasco replied.
“I’m not ashamed of it,” Foote said. “I just don’t want to be called in to every post-arrest debrief involving a Wyandotte suspect. Now our boss here knows who to call in case he needs an interpreter who speaks ’Dotte.’”
Furay laughed. “Yeah, you’re burned on that, now. Let’s get back to Mr. Cannon.”
“We did a pretext call to check his room at the motel—at least the one he went into. He never answered the room phone. Odds are he used the pickup as a decoy and made his run in another set of wheels,” Velasco said. “Did you get the video bug put in the Dellums’ stash house?”
“We did,” Furay answered. “It’s a real shithole, by the way. Smells like they’ve been burning weed in there to stay warm.”
“That’s what my informant told me, too,” Velasco said. “The smell, I mean. At least we have a loose timeline working. If Cannon made it in with another load, we should see some action over there pretty soon now.”
“And if Billy and Veronica aren’t too busy actually playing house, they should see Cannon in the back of McElhaney’s in a day or two, and they can tell us about the new load car,” Foote observed, “unless he’s doing a double-switch on his car on the way out of town.”
“I doubt that. Even dopers have budgets,” Furay said. “Drew said he could babysit the Dellums video feed for a while today. I’ll take over that chore from him this afternoon.”
“Count on me being here on that tonight, too,” Velasco said. “Their pattern in the past has been to meet over there after they get off work at the tire store in Liberty. If the load got dropped last night, odds are we’ll see them cutting the stuff and wrapping it for sale tonight. If Jazz and Jamarcus don’t have it, their cousin Delroy will. We just don’t know if the hand-off to them was in Liberty at the store or someplace else.”
“Then I’ll be here, too,” Foote said. “A little quality television will be a welcome change from all the ’Dotte I’ve had to listen to the past couple of days.”
“Why don’t you haul your privileged white ass back to Johnson County and just—” Velasco snorted.
“What he is saying in ’Dotte can be translated as ‘You can’t really play that funky music after all, white boy,’” Foote said to Furay.
“Nice to see the team interacting so well,” Furay said. “I’ll see you both tonight.”
J.P. Barrett wasn’t happy, with the situation or with Trask.
“I thought we had a lid on any of this stuff hitting the street.” Barrett was looking out his window again.
“That’s what we thought as well,” Trask told him. “Unfortunately, our man Cannon seems to be pretty adept at losing tails. I don’t think, however, that it’s all bad.”
“Why do you say that?”
“We still have the GPS on his truck,” Trask reminded him. “With some help in Dallas, we might well be able to track him to his source of supply. If we can ID his other vehicle, we can slap one on that car and follow him to his other drop points. We’ll still try and pick him off and spin him on the next trip. Our problem for now is that if we move on that part of his load that went to the Dellums, we’re missing a chance to neutralize the whole supply chain, at least that part of it that’s based in Dallas.”
“And in the meantime, the Dellums get to sell this junk, and someone else might die.”
“That’s the lousy part of the situation.”
Barrett stared out the window for another moment before swiveling around in his chair.
“I don’t like it, but you’re right. There’s too much to lose if we move prematurely. Is the Bureau on board with this?”
“They are locally. I talked to Mike Furay, and he’s calling his folks in D.C.”
“Then I’ll call ours. Let’s hope they agree.”
FBI Special Agents Henderson, Foote, Furay, and Detective Velasco sat in a semi-circle of folding chairs on the top floor of the building housing the Kansas City Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Pointing out the window, across the Kansas-Missouri state line and the interstate—and toward the house used on occasions such as this by the Dellums twins—was a telescope which fed one video feed to one of two television monitors that sat on a folding table in fr
ont of them. A second TV monitor to the right was displaying the video transmitted by the FBI’s bug from inside the Dellums house’s living room. Each video feed was also being digitally recorded.
The first monitor showed the area outside the front of the house. There was one vehicle parked in the driveway.
“How long have they been in there, Drew?” Furay asked Henderson.
“They arrived about four-thirty,” Henderson said. “Must have taken some personal time.”
“Time to get stoned as hell,” Foote remarked. “I can barely see across the room for all the damned smoke.”
“Just be glad you didn’t have to smell it,” Henderson said.
They all watched as Jamarcus Dellums rolled anther sizable joint from the loose pile of marijuana leaves spread across the coffee table in front of the couch.
“That’s a helluva marijuana cigarette,” Henderson said.
“More like a marijuana cigar,” Foote said. “How do these clowns make any money moving the other crap if they’re this high?” he asked Velasco.
“Beats me. That’s probably some of the high-grade, hydroponic, ‘medicinal’ weed we’re seeing coming in from Colorado,” Velasco said. “Our weed dealers are getting rich going to Denver and stocking up. They come back here and sell it with a 100% mark-up. It’s a lot more potent than the usual ditch weed. It has almost three times the THC content.”
“I thought that marijuana was illegal under federal law,” Henderson quipped.
“Only where there’s a will to enforce that law,” Furay observed. He pointed toward the monitor on the left. “Looks like somebody just pulled up.”
“Welcome back, Delroy,” Velasco said. “We should see some action now.”
They watched the right monitor as Delroy Dellums got out of his car and walked to the front door. They shifted their gazes to the right monitor and watched him enter the living room, a small duffel bag in his left hand. To their collective dismay, he just put the duffel on the coffee table beside the pile of marijuana.