Pied Piper lbadm-5

by Ridley Pearson

  The radio traffic delivered no surprises. Three separate surveillance teams tracked any and all movement surrounding the target while six unmarked patrol cars worked the surrounding blocks alert for the arrival of the meth lab cookers.

  “Stay loose,” Ustad said, addressing Devon Long, worried about him. More than any other, his squad-“the ramrods”-worked with precision timing, striking a target with a fierce intensity and heavy firepower. There was no room for a straggler, no room for error.

  The regular radio reporting of the various units rolled through predictably. There were good raids and bad raids, and Ustad expected the current one to fall in the latter category because it had been conceived hastily by a group of desk jockeys in desperate need of “warm ink”-favorable publicity to feed the media monster. He knew all the warning signs, multiple command being at the top. A woman captain and an admitted drunk were running this one. Ustad needed little more than this to fuel his concern. “Stay alert, people,” he told his troops. “I think we’ve got a live fish.” He pressed the earpiece farther into his ear and listened.

  In proper order, each unit responded, Ustad taking his turn. His elite unit looked up at him as he spoke into the small microphone positioned by a flexible boom in front of his lips.

  Besides the various shooters in the Trojan Horse and adjacent buildings, ERT had a six-man unit in a black panel van two blocks away, ready to strike within one minute of a summons. Ustad knew the ERT leader unit well and respected him. Together, their squads would constitute the advance strike. Ustad to the rear, the ERT boys at the front door. If all went well, a swarm of Narcotics officers would follow and actually lead the hit behind the protection of the two squads. The choreography and timing were rehearsed regularly in a police-confiscated warehouse on the south end of Boeing Field, inside of which stage sets of house and apartment interiors had been constructed. Amet Ustad was a believer in such mock exercises, and his team was so well trained that they were the advance unit of Washington State’s elite Quick Response Police Squad. QueRPS, consisting of various units from a variety of state and city law enforcement agencies, traveled to crisis scenes-terrorism, hostage or armored drug raids-and put out the fire.

  SURVEILLANCE 2: We’ve got Joy.

  SURVEILLANCE 3: Tally-ho. I count four going in through the back door.

  SURVEILLANCE 2: Roger that count.

  OPERATIONS: We’ve got four birds, people. Vehicle’s tag number does not check as the owner of the house. We’ve got a green light from the top.

  SURVEILLANCE 3: Door is shut. They’re inside.

  OPERATIONS: This is it, people. Let’s look alive and end up that way. Okay? Allied, it’s your lead.

  USTAD: Copy that. Our lead.

  Ustad looked to each of his rangers-his nickname for them-and silently made contact. Each of his boys nodded in return. They knew the drill. They had heard the words “our lead,” and understood it was time. Training had its rewards. Devon Long’s eyes were dead, void of the fear his squad leader wanted to see there. If a person didn’t find some form of terror in the prospect of ramming down a door and charging into a darkened house filled with bad guys, then Ustad didn’t want him along. Ustad told him softly, “Long, you’re doorman here.”

  The rest of the squad glanced at the man, knowing it meant he was being left behind, and obviously curious as to why. Long, for all his personal problems, was one of Ustad’s two or three natural leaders.

  “Yes, sir, Squad Leader,” Long returned in a hushed voice in true spirit and form, although Ustad saw something else entirely in his eyes, something he didn’t like.

  Ustad told his team, “We go on three. I want this done smart. We’ve got a lot of firepower out there so watch what the hell you’re doing, verify targets and don’t shoot any yellow letters. We’ve got four birds in the roost,” he said, lifting his right hand and holding up four fingers. “Four!” he repeated. “Give it back.”

  “FOUR in the roost, sir, Squad Leader!” the squad whispered in unison.

  “On the count of?”

  “THREE, sir, Squad Leader!”

  “Radio check,” he demanded.

  Each of his men counted down into their headsets.

  “Ram up,” he ordered.

  Four of the men took hold of the heavy device termed “the big dick” by his squad. It was a steel battering ram with rubber-padded handles on the side and a wedgelike tip carrying four one-foot stripes of luminescent paint that sharpened to its point like an arrow. It was scuffed and scarred from its many operations, both practice and real-life. The four men on the handles had the weight and size to deliver the big dick with the force of a small truck. Ustad’s squad was anything but dainty.

  Officer Devon Long moved past Ustad to the back of the trailer to take care of the trailer’s large door.

  Ustad turned around, away from his other men, and switched off his mike at his belt. “You okay, son?” he asked Long.

  “Roger that, sir,” the boy answered in a hushed voice.

  “Stay alert,” Ustad ordered.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ustad switched on his radio and contacted operations. Blood pulsed loudly in his ears as his remaining men came up off the steel bench behind him. He counted down in rehearsed rhythm, “One … two … three …”

  Long threw the two halves of the trailer’s reinforced doors open and the squad disembarked as silently as a snake. Ustad took the lead, followed by the big dick and then the remaining two rangers. Ustad turned sharply left, having memorized the route: straight down the driveway into an overgrown backyard, up the steps and right through that door. No turns, no tricks. Surveillance reported his squad’s actions, the only other sound the uniform rhythmic crunching of gravel beneath his team’s feet. Halfway there and closing, he lifted the shotgun he carried, silently reminding himself he had five rounds to use before abandoning it for his side-arm. He mentally rehearsed his every footstep as he gained on the house ahead of him. Seconds to go.

  He knew that the Trojan Horse and the snipers were prepared to provide cover, to defend them if needed. One of his rangers would let ERT in through the front door, Narcotics to follow his own ERT unit. He brushed his thumb against the protective vest just to assure himself he had remembered to wear it. Drug labs were the absolute worst. If the small weapons fire didn’t take you out, the fire would.

  He bounded silently to the platform of the back porch, his crew coming to a halt below. He hand-signaled their surveillance technician forward. The man snaked a thin tube of fiber-optic wire beneath the crack in the door, viewed a small monitor strapped to his chest, withdrew the wire and pronounced a thumbs-up to his squad leader.

  Ustad signaled the two trailing rangers to break formation. Armed with a bolt cutter, they would attempt an incursion through the locked storm cellar on the building’s south side, but only in the event of weapons fire.

  So far, so good. The back of the house was empty. The intelligence was proving sound. The lab was believed to be in the basement.

  From that moment out, Ustad feared a shooting gallery. The key element missing was the floor plan. They had no idea of it, other than a generalized opinion that similar structures of a similar era accessed the basement from a door in or near the kitchen. That was the door they’d be looking for.

  Ustad waved the big dick up the stairs. Leaving the device to two men, the two others readied their weapons. He held his five fingers out straight and folded them in, thumb first, one by one until his hand became a fist. As he began his count, the ram swung back once, forward once, back again and then blew the door, frame, hinges and all, right to the kitchen floor. The team flooded into the kitchen. Within seconds, Officer Randy Deschutes signaled that he had found the basement door.

  The big dick rocked once, twice and smashed into the door.

  It held, reinforced.

  Back it came, the glowing arrow on its nose aimed for the doorknob. Again the huge ram lunged into the door. Splinters of wood flew
through the air, but again the door held. Ustad cursed in Arabic. Sitting ducks-the worst of situations.

  On the third attempt, the doorjamb dislodged. The next two collisions drove the door down the basement stairs in a cacophony of destruction. Ustad heard the all too familiar hand clap of small weapons fire, and saw a member of his team spin and fall to the floor. The man rolled over, wincing in agony, but not bleeding; the vest had saved his life; he had four broken ribs.

  Ustad shouted, “Police!” stuck the barrel of the shotgun down the dark hole and fired off two rounds. Three to go.

  Weapons firing. Voices shouting.

  The sound of banging metal told Ustad the storm cellar had been breached as well. They had them from two perimeter positions. The Bad Guys were pinned.

  “Drop the weapons!” echoed from below.

  More gunfire, short and percussive.

  Ustad heard a sliding sound directly overhead followed by the distinct snap of a marksman’s rifle. He turned in time to see a body tumble off the roof into the backyard. The cookers had placed a lookout on the top floor. Watching the street instead of the backyard, he had missed the approach of the ERT unit and was hellbent on escape. Coming to his feet, he spun and let loose automatic weapons fire. Ustad was clipped in the shoulder by a bullet. Charged with adrenaline, he barely felt it. Instead, he hoisted his shotgun, got off a round and watched the fleeing man stagger with the hit. The escapee limped away following the same route Ustad and his squad had used.

  Ustad depressed his radio-com button and shouted, “Devon, armed bird coming right at you!” Lightheaded, he sank to his knees, his full attention fixed on the shooter limping at a run toward the Allied moving van.

  The back door of the trailer swung open and Devon Long jumped out, weapon in hand. Ustad saw him open his mouth to shout a warning but did not hear him over the surrounding chaos.

  The escapee came to an abrupt stop and raised his weapon at Long.

  Ustad mumbled, “No! No!”

  Long elevated the barrel of his assault rifle but immediately identified that his weapon was trained in the direction of his own people. He could not fire at the escaping shooter without risk to his colleagues. Overeager, he had jumped from the trailer too soon.

  Long dove to the dirt and rolled for a safer angle as the sniper unloaded his weapon wildly. A volley of muzzle flashes followed. The sniper spun and fell to the dirt. Long, favoring his right side and obviously hit, was over the man in an instant, kicking the weapon away and one good boot toe into the man’s ribs.

  Ustad smiled. He slumped forward, and passed out.

  No deaths, Boldt reminded himself as he patiently waited for Lofgrin’s SID technicians to finish with the downstairs so he could examine the second floor. No deaths. Four wounded-two on each side. But the bad guys were worse off, and the meth lab was the second largest lab bust in the city’s history, netting huge quantities of meth and LSD.

  The kitchen and basement were disaster areas of splintered wood, blood, discharged weapon shells, glass and debris. All was marked. All recorded. There would be more reports, more internal hearings than could possibly be justified to anyone outside the system. They would still be sorting things out on the Fourth of July. Labor Day if they weren’t careful.

  The kitchen was an evidentiary wasteland. Lofgrin wasn’t going to find anything of interest to Boldt there. The grounds surrounding the house were no better, thanks to the army that had come and gone.

  “When?” he shouted ahead at Lofgrin. It was three in the morning. He was going to need a cup of tea soon.

  “You kept everyone out of there for a reason,” Lofgrin reminded, meaning the upstairs. A pair of ERT officers had conducted a body hunt upstairs and then Boldt had sealed the area. He was anxious to get up there, but only behind Lofgrin’s evidence technicians. With this extreme contamination, he wanted to maintain the best crime scene possible.

  According to the evacuated neighbors, the house had been lived in by an elderly couple without children. The wife had recently died, sending the husband into a nursing home and leaving the place all but abandoned for the past few months. The neighbor to the east had removed the junk mail and tended to the flower beds. Newspapers found downstairs suggested the basement had been in use as a drug lab for the last six weeks, pointing Narcotics into a new area of investigation: meth cookers in decent neighborhoods.

  Boldt walked a block and a half to air out his head, picked up a tea for himself and an armful of coffees and donuts and returned to the crime scene where press and the department’s people of power shared microphones. Mulwright and Hill were there, as was Dunkin Hale from the FBI and a deputy prosecuting attorney. Boldt steered clear of all of them.

  He passed out the coffees, winning points with the ID technicians, and then joined Lofgrin on the back porch. The man was smoking a cigarette.

  “Since when do you smoke?” Boldt asked, astonished.

  “Don’t start, okay? I got enough with Diane.”

  “I’ve known you twenty-some years.”

  “I turn fifty next week, okay?”

  Boldt knew about the birthday. He and Dixie had once planned to take Bernie to Victoria for a men-only jazz weekend, but Liz’s illness and the task force had put the plan on hold. “Okay,” Boldt said, making it sound as if he didn’t know about this birthday in case they could still cook up a surprise.

  “When I quit this shitty habit twenty-seven years ago, I promised myself that for the week leading up to my fiftieth birthday I could smoke. Then not again until I’m sixty-five, when I earn an entire month. At eighty, if I make it that far, all bets are off: no time limits. Smoke as much as I like, nonfilter or whatever. And to hell with anybody who has a problem with that, including Diane.”

  Boldt tried the tea. It was strong and to his liking despite the Styrofoam cup. “You’re about as strange as they come. You know that?”

  “Yeah, I know it. So what?”

  “So nothing,” Boldt replied. He returned to his tea. Lofgrin smoked the thing like it was his last on earth.

  “You got lucky,” the man said, exhaling a cloud. “If you could call it that.”

  “Extremely,” Boldt replied. “A little bit this way or that and I’m responsible for a screwup.”

  “Learn anything?” Lofgrin asked him.

  He couldn’t tell if the man was serious or not. As a civilian, Lofgrin operated under a different set of rules than sworn officers. Boldt replied, “Only that I’m not looking forward to turning fifty.” He finished the tea as Lofgrin laughed through his smoke and coughed until he had tears in his eyes. They returned inside together.

  “Lou, you can come on up,” Lofgrin told him forty minutes later. The sky was lighter in the east. A few birds made song in anticipation of dawn.

  The second story contained old furniture, worn carpeting and tired wallpaper. There were two bedrooms, a bath and a linen closet. The rear-facing bedroom had been used as a sewing room and faced a slowly rising hill that offered a view of dozens of other homes. At four-thirty in the morning these homes were dark, streetlights etching their outlines in the fog.

  Boldt heard heavy footsteps approaching and knew immediately that they belonged to LaMoia’s ostrich boots. John stopped at the doorway and leaned against the jamb. Boldt was on his hands and knees engaged in carpet patrol.

  “You know,” LaMoia said, “if someone had bet me, I would have put big money on us tagging this asshole before he went for another one. Now we’ve lost Weinstein and I’m worried about a third.”

  “Don’t think like that,” Boldt warned. “Deadlines make you crazy, especially when the deadline passes.”

  Motioning for LaMoia to join him, he said, “Carpet patrol.”

  “What about ID?”

  “Busy with the mess downstairs. Bernie asked us to take the carpet. What we’ve got is slightly confusing,” Boldt explained. “We think the lookout for the cookers primarily used the front room. He’s a smoker and that room reeks of
it and there are butts and roaches everywhere. This room smells clean, and no butts. And yet that,” he said, pointing out a cane seat chair by the window, “seems to indicate someone spent time at the back window.”

  “A different sentry. They took turns up here. One smoked, one didn’t,” LaMoia hypothesized.

  Boldt had not shared Raymond’s bit about the possibility of an exterminator on the premises with anyone. If he stumbled onto supporting evidence then it was admissible, but to do what he had done-use Narcotics to assist his own needs-was an outright manipulation of the system. To inform LaMoia would make him subject to the same risks that Boldt was taking. He said, “ID found some peat moss kicked up on the sill.”

  “In the rocker with his feet up,” LaMoia suggested.

  “Exactly. And peat moss?”

  “Flower beds.” LaMoia’s jaw dropped. “Why do I get the feeling a bunch of meth rats would not be tending the primroses?” He sagged to his knees and joined Boldt in fingering through the carpet.

  Boldt said, “P.S. No peat moss was found in the front room.”

  They worked methodically, using coins to mark the areas they searched.

  “You know what I got to ask myself?” LaMoia said, busy with his fingers.

  “What’s that?”

  “What the hell a lieutenant-Intelligence, no less-is doing on carpet patrol at four in the morning on a drug bust. Or are you just a Renaissance man?”

  “The same could be asked of a Homicide sergeant running a task force investigation.”

  “Yeah? Except I’m here because you rudely woke me up and told me to get my butt down here.”