by Marc Rainer
“What if one of the Dellums boys is there to take the dope?” Velasco asked.
“Good question,” Furay said. “If that happens, we take them down, too. No other way to do it. We still want it as quiet as possible, but we’d separate the arrestees, and Jeff still wants first crack at Collavito. If one or more of the Dellums boys is there, then Jose gets to question them. He knows that end of this case the best.”
“What’s the entry plan?” Land asked.
“As soon as Cannon is clear of the front door on his way out, Foote sits on him again, then we go in. Velasco has point, Tommy, you and Billy follow him in. I’ll watch the left side of the house, and Ronnie will watch the right, just in case he tries to toss the dope. We’ve assured Jeff’s boss, my boss, Tommy’s boss, and every other boss on the planet that we would not lose control of this heroin for any reason.
“We get control of Collavito, bring him back here as quietly as we can, and sit him down with Jeff so that we can see if he’s going to shed any more light on the local conspirators.”
“How about the non-local part?” Billy Graham asked. “The New York part?”
“If everything goes smoothly,” Furay replied, “we’ll be doing some road trips. Jose Velasco will be staying here to supervise the arrest of the Dellums crew. Billy, you and John will be going to Dallas to execute a consent search on Cannon’s house. He’s already signed the forms for that, and we have his keys. Tommy, Ronnie, Bubba and I will be doing a long, fast, drive with Mr. Cannon to the east coast. I’ve already been in touch with our Brooklyn office. They think they know who our targets will be there, based on some bottom-up investigations they’ve been doing there, kind of like what Jose has been doing on the Kansas side with the Dellums distribution ring.”
“Who gets the New York defendants for prosecution?” Land asked Trask.
“I talked to a guy I know in our Brooklyn office,” Trask said. “They’ve had jury-tampering issues in the past with this crew. They’re busy as hell anyway with their MS-13 problem, and they’re more than happy to send their defendants our way for trial, assuming we can do a good delivery up there and tie it together. Barrett double-checked it with the attorney general, and he’s signed off on it, too, since we have the bigger dope amounts and part of the supply side. Dallas wants to keep the case on the Mexicans who’ve been supplying Cannon. We should have a very entertaining trial between the local mob and their friends from New York.”
“Everybody clear on everything?” Furay asked. He saw nothing but affirmative nods. “Good. Let’s do this.”
Gladstone, Missouri
Trask sat in the passenger seat of Foote’s car. Cam was in the back seat. They watched Cannon pull up in front of Collavito’s house in the Camry. Collavito got out carrying a small paper sack and headed up the sidewalk to the front door.
“The real stuff goes in?” Foote asked.
“This time it does,” Trask answered. “First of all, we really didn’t have time to make a dummy sample; second, Cannon said that Collavito would expect it to be wrapped a certain way; and third, it makes charging simpler. We hit Collavito with a charge of possession-with-intent-to-distribute, because he takes possession of the real stuff. We don’t have to fool with a charge of attempted possession based on what he thought he was getting, like we would if we sent fake dope in. He eats all the weight in the packages at his sentencing, too.”
“He’s in,” they heard Furay say over Foote’s radio. Two minutes later, they saw Cannon coming out the front door. He reached the Camry. “Go!” Furay’s voice ordered over the radio.
From his van parked above Collavito’s back yard in the school parking lot, Detective John “Bubba” Smith watched the back door of the residence. He still wore the beard and leather biker vest of his last undercover assignment. He took a long, easy breath, and told himself to relax. He didn’t really expect to have to do anything regarding the arrest.
Odds are that he eats carpet the minute he sees all those people and badges coming into his living room at eleven-thirty at night. I’ll just shoot the video of the search of the house after he’s in custody.
Bubba looked down at the digital movie camera on the seat beside him.
Yep, all set …
His eyes returned to the back door just in time to see Collavito bolting out of the house holding the bag with the heroin.
“Shit!” Bubba exclaimed.
He flew out of the driver’s door of the van and started racing down the incline toward the back of the house.
Collavito froze in the center of his backyard. He knew that the house behind him was suddenly full of cops. Now there was a huge, badass-looking biker type running toward him, straight toward the gate in his wooden privacy fence. Collavito darted to his left, but saw another cop running toward the fence in that direction. He heard the voices and footsteps behind him getting closer, so he froze again. Bubba changed direction and began running directly toward Collavito.
Five feet away from the fence, Bubba—still running at full speed—came to a realization. He realized that he was going too fast to stop, and that his days of vaulting over a five-foot-high wooden privacy fence were ten years and thirty pounds behind him. Accordingly, he did what any self-respecting grizzly bear of a man would have done: he lowered a massive shoulder and ran through the fence, taking out an eight-foot section where the cross-boards on either side had been nailed into the vertical posts. As the fence hit the ground in front of him, he ordered Collavito to freeze.
At that point, Sammy Collavito, The Kansas City Mafia’s understudy to capo Paul Beretta, simultaneously (1) froze; (2) dropped the bag containing the heroin; and (3) shit his pants.
Kansas City, Missouri
“He smells a lot better, now,” Foote told Trask. “I think the shower and the ride back here gave him a little time to think, too. I think we’re ready for you now.”
“Good,” Trask said. “He was pretty rank when I first saw him in the house.”
Foote laughed. “Everybody else get off okay?”
Cam Turner nodded. “The caravan is rolling toward New York. Two cars. Cannon’s Camry and the chase car. They’ll have to burn some rubber to make up time and stay on schedule. They’ll be trading driving and sleeping shifts. They left from Gladstone rather than coming back here first. Furay had ’em in motion before your guy got out of the shower.”
“Hope their get-away bags were packed,” Foote said. “They didn’t have much advance notice.”
“Let’s see what other surprises we have to deal with,” Trask said.
They entered the interview room, and Trask repeated the pitch that he’d given to Cannon, adding segments of the Drew-vision video of the Dellums’ smoking session in their living room across the highway. At the end of the presentation, Collavito—like Cannon before him—signed off on the cooperation agreement, his rights waiver, and the proffer letter.
No surprise there, Trask thought. This one had to change his diaper earlier tonight. He’s not really a tough guy.
Foote first asked Collavito who had been working for him. It was a good tactical move, since Collavito had already seen the Drew-vision video. Collavito readily admitted that the Dellums brothers and their cousin had been handling the street distribution of the heroin ever since he’d picked up that function from Little Dom.
Collavito hesitated a little before finally giving up his association with Paul Beretta. The photos of Little Dom and his father lying on the floor of Beretta’s office didn’t have much shock value, since Sammy had seen those corpses in person. Collavito finally admitted being at the Bottoms club when the shootings occurred. He said he had put his ear to the door, and heard Beretta tell Big Dom that he had shot the Gonzalez brothers and “some guy from one of the boats.”
Trask made a mental note to get a copy of the homicide files from the homicide squad.
Trask asked Collavito one question about the shootings that made Sammy think:
“How much time pass
ed between the first shot in the office and the second one, Sammy?”
Collavito paused before answering.
“It wasn’t like, bang-bang—not like one right after the other,” he said. “There was a minute or so between ’em.”
“And how long did it take for Beretta to open the door to the office after the second shot?” Trask asked him.
“I was kinda scared myself, so I didn’t call or knock for a little while. When I finally did, Paulie opened the door and told me to go call the cops.”
Trask looked at Foote and Cam. They were all on the same page. Even if it had been a murder-suicide, they’d put the seed of doubt in Sammy’s mind. He was now thinking of how safe he could ever really feel around Beretta. The mental wedge made opening Collavito’s mouth easier for them.
Over the next half-hour, Collavito outlined how he had been recruited by Beretta to replace Little Dom in taking the deliveries from Cannon, and how Beretta had admitted setting up the deliveries in New York.
“Any more discussions we need to know about?” Foote asked him. “You and Paulie?”
“He told me last night in a phone call that he was going out of town for a few days.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“No. He just said he had to catch a flight.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
“Not really.”
Collavito paused. Trask studied him.
He’s thinking, really trying to help himself here.
“He just thinks he’s a history buff,” Sammy said. “He can give you chapter and verse on every family in the outfit since Lucky Luciano. Pretty boring stuff.”
Interesting, Trask thought, mentally filing it away for reference.
“I did have a conversation about you,” Collavito told Trask. “It was with Dom, though, not Paulie. Dom told me that he’d shot up your house.”
Trask shrugged as he stared hard into Collavito’s eyes.
“He made a mistake,” Trask said. “He missed.”
Lee’s Summit, Missouri
It was after four in the morning when Trask finally pulled into his garage. He tried to be as quiet as possible to avoid waking Lynn or the pups. He was successful with all but Boo.
The big dog met him at the door into the house from the garage. She had heard the garage door closing. Trask bent down and accepted the face bath when he saw the light blue eyes in the doorway. Boo made her wookie noise and trotted off back toward the bedroom, satisfied that her castle was not being invaded by a hostile force.
Trask threw his clothes into a hamper in the closet and crawled into bed beside Lynn, pushing one leg on each side of little Tasha, who was sleeping at the foot of the bed.
Lynn raised her head just enough to read the clock on her bedside table.
“God!” she said.
“He was with us tonight,” Trask replied.
Kansas City, Missouri
It was mid-afternoon before Trask made it back to his office. He stopped by Barrett’s office to brief him on the events of the evening before, then headed to his own desk to try and catch up on some things.
He turned on his desktop computer and inserted a thumb drive. He watched the video file for a moment or two, then he started laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
Cam Turner was standing in the doorway.
“Come look at this,” Trask said.
Turner walked around the desk so that he could see the computer monitor over Trask’s shoulder.
“Let me run it back to the beginning,” Trask said, cueing the video. “This is the footage that Bubba shot while we searched Collavito’s house last night. It beats anything I’ve ever seen before.”
Trask hit the start symbol, then narrated as the video began playing.
“Look. Here’s the living room, and there’s the bag with the two keys of heroin on the table. He pulls the kilos out of the bag so we can see the wrapping clearly.”
“Okay…” Cam said, obviously looking for a punchline.
“Wait for it,” Trask said. “See? We get about a half a minute of Bubba scanning around the living room, then … here it is … a nice, long, sweeping shot of the hole in the fence that Bubba made when he crashed through the thing.”
Cam chuckled a little.
“There’s more,” Trask said. “Here we have a sweep of the master bedroom. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Then here’s another fifteen seconds of the hole in the fence.”
Cam chuckled some more.
“And here’s the video of the kitchen and dining area.”
“Okay.” Cam was catching on to the theme.
“And here’s another twenty seconds of the hole that Bubba made.”
Cam laughed hard.
“The whole thing’s like that,” Trask said, turning off the video. “A little video of a room, another shot of Bubba’s hole. Bubba was awfully proud of his hole.”
“It was a nice hole.” Jose Velasco was standing in the doorway. He held up a couple of thick notebooks. “You did say you wanted updated copies of these homicide files.”
“Yes, I did,” Trask said. “Thanks for the quick work. Did you get any sleep last night?”
“A nap,” Velasco yawned at the thought of more sleep. “I wanted to get these for you before I headed for the airport. I’m driving Billy and Foote to catch their flight to Dallas.”
“Where do you guys park out there?” Trask asked him.
“We have some reserved law enforcement slots pretty close to the terminal. We just throw a special card on the dashboard in case the airport police check.”
“Would you have time to do us a favor after you drop our friends off?”
“Sure. Name it.”
“Before we left the Bureau last night, I had John Foote run Paulie Beretta in the computer to see what kind of wheels he drives. It’s a fairly new Audi Q7.”
“Nice car.”
“Yes, it is. Anyway, Collavito told us that Paulie just left to go out of town somewhere, and he caught a flight out.” Trask wrote a note on a small pad and handed the paper to Velasco. “Here’s his plate number. Any way you or your friends at the airport could check and see if it’s parked out there somewhere?”
“Sure. Not a problem at all.”
“If you find it, give us a call and let us know where it is, please.”
“Will do. I’ll tell John to call you from Dallas, too, once they see what’s in Cannon’s house.”
“Sounds like a plan. Thanks again.”
“Beretta’s car?” Cam asked after Velasco left.
“A long shot tied to another long shot,” Trask said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“I’d rather be lucky than good,” Cam said.
Kansas City International Airport
“Maybe we are lucky,” Trask told Cam.
They stood under the roof of a covered area of the airport’s short-term parking lot and watched as Velasco directed an FBI photographer who was taking shots of the Audi.
“Have him concentrate on the tires, too,” Trask requested. “I know we can’t move the car for now, but let’s get whatever we can on the exposed areas of the treads.”
Velasco nodded, and knelt beside the photographer, helping to direct the camera from a point just above the pavement to get better angles on the tires.
“I can’t believe he didn’t put mud flaps on a $70,000 car,” Trask said, “but I’m glad he didn’t; it gives us a view of a few more inches of tread. No need here for a warrant, anyway, since it’s parked in a public area.”
Cam nodded. “The tire tread marks from the murder scene? That kid who worked at Harrah’s?” he asked.
“Yep,” Trask said.
“Maybe we are lucky,” Cam said, nodding. “It doesn’t hurt that you’re good, too. I would never have thought of this.”
“It still may be a dead end,” Trask said. “We can’t move the car, we don’t have the entire treads to examine—j
ust the exposed parts—and like I said, it’s a long shot anyway.”
Velasco stood up and nodded. The photographer had all the shots he could take.
“Get those to the crime lab as soon as you can, please,” Trask requested.
Velasco nodded again.
“What’s next, Jose?” Cam asked him.
“Arrests of the Dellums gang,” Velasco said. “Bright and early in the morning. I gotta go brief the teams.”
“Good luck,” Trask said. “Be safe.”
Dallas, Texas
“Now what was it that Cannon said about this place?” Billy Graham asked as he drove the rental up the road toward the house.
“He just said to be careful, and not to mess with the thermostat,” Foote responded.
“He didn’t say why we should be careful?” Graham pressed.
“No, and it did seem like he was messing with us when he said it,” Foote said. “I think this is the place.”
They turned off the road onto what had once been a paved driveway between two fenced pastures. A wooden sign above the drive read “Cannon Ranch,” and a steer skull marked the space between the two words on the arch. The spans of the fencing on both sides of the drive were in severe need of paint, and the driveway itself was a mess of cracked and broken asphalt.
“Our boy Tyler’s been falling down on his chores,” Graham noted.
“He said he inherited the ranch from his parents, and had been having trouble making ends meet,” Foote said. “He offered that as an excuse for why he got involved in the dope business in the first place. He did say he’d made a little money doing what he called ‘lab work,’ but when we asked him what kind of ‘lab work,’ he just said that we’d find out.”
“Lab work, don’t mess with the thermostat, and be careful,” Graham repeated. “Was he cooking meth? Do we need a team in chem suits?”