Taking On Lucinda

by Frank Martorana

  “This is Police Chief Merrill Stephenson in Jefferson, New York. I’d like to speak to whoever handles animal cruelty investigations, please.”

  “That would be our legal department. Hold, please.”

  On hold, Merrill listened to a message about clubbing baby seals in Alaska and one on the wanton destruction of the Everglades. A plug to spay and neuter one’s pets was just coming on when the secretary cut in to tell Merrill she was connecting him with Al Kirms, USAPC’s lawyer.

  “Officer Stephenson, is it?” Kirms asked in a mellifluous voice that made Merrill suspect the guy was pretty high up the food chain.

  “Yes. Chief of police, Jefferson, New York.”

  Before Merrill could state his business, Kirms took control. “I have an apology to make to you folks in Jefferson.”

  The lawyer’s sudden admission of error caught Merrill off guard. “What?”

  “I—we at USAPC—apologize.”

  Merrill envisioned Kirms smiling at the other end, enjoying the confusion he was creating. “For what?”

  “For having you discover us on your own instead of us coming forward, of course.”

  “Well,” Merrill said, trying to figure out what Kirms was pulling, “it is rather disconcerting.”

  “Actually it’s a result of good police work on your part.”

  “Small town, undermanned, but we get the job done.”

  “It appears that way.”

  “So. What exactly is going on? Details, I mean.”

  “What do you know about our setup to this point?”

  Merrill bluffed carefully. “In a nutshell, we have information that USAPC has been investigating a dogfighting ring that we are about to take down, and we don’t want any screw-ups that could jeopardize a lot of work.”

  Merrill heard a soft laugh at the other end.

  “No, chief. We at USAPC wouldn’t want that either. Neither would the FBI.”

  The chief’s eyebrows rose at the mention of the FBI. “What’s the FBI got to do with anything?”

  “They’re one of the agencies involved in our investigation, which has come to overlap your investigation. Along with the US attorney general’s Organized Crime Task Force, the US Department of Agriculture, and police forces in several states, including New York.”

  Merrill bristled. “All this shit is going on, and you’re keeping us locals in the dark?”

  “Let me explain,” Kirms said.

  Merrill was back in character, no longer walking softly. “Whatever happened to interagency communications?”

  “I was getting to that, if you’ll give me a chance.”

  “This kind of crap really pisses me off.”

  “Look, I said in the beginning we owed you an apology. Part of it is your own fault, though.”

  “Our fault!”

  “Yes, for figuring us out too soon.” The lawyer tried to make it sound like a backward compliment. “We were going to come to you. We always work through proper channels and jurisdictions, but you came to us first.”

  Merrill took a deep breath. Kirms was an experienced appeaser. “Okay then, Al,” he honked the man’s name. “Tell me what has been going on under my nose without my knowledge.”

  “With pleasure. Except, like you, I do not want to jeopardize our investigation. Suffice it to say for now that we have had a multiagency, interstate investigation in progress for many months, and it seems as though the whole thing is heading up in your backyard. For details, though, which you are definitely entitled to, I am going to have one of our agents meet with you in person. He’s in Jefferson as we speak, but it will take some time to contact him and make the arrangements. I’ll have him fill you in completely, and you can ask whatever questions you want person to person. “You a hunter, Merrill?”

  “What?”

  “Do you hunt? For sport.”

  “Occasionally,” the chief said, confused by the question.

  “Ever hunt rabbits?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Tomorrow morning around eight o’clock, park your car where the old train track crosses West Hill Road and hunt the railroad bed south. My man will meet you.”

  Merrill hesitated, impressed by Kirm’s knowledge of Jefferson geography. “What’s with all the cloak-and-dagger stuff? Can’t we just meet and talk?”

  In his imperturbable tone, Kirms said, “It’s taken over a year to get this man placed where he is. Being seen with you could destroy all that work.”

  Merrill had been a cop long enough to be uncomfortable with one-on-one in the boondocks, but his curiosity would not allow him to back out. “All right. I’ll play along, but I’m bringing another guy with me. He’s a local veterinarian who has been involved with our investigation from the beginning.”

  “You vouch for him?”

  “Like he was my brother.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell my guy to expect two. Tomorrow morning at eight. He’ll ask you what kind of ammo you’re using. The answer is ‘Federal.’ Got it?”

  “I got it. Federal. We’ll be waiting.”

  Chapter 24

  At exactly 7:55 a.m., Merrill’s unmarked car pulled to a stop by the tracks on West Hill Road. Kent closed the door with Lucinda inside. She gave him a look of utter dismay. He was going hunting without her.

  He stroked her gently through the cracked window. “You’re all right, girl. This is all a fake.”

  Lucinda whined pitifully.

  “You sure I can’t bring Lucinda along?” Kent asked his brother over the roof of the car.

  “Forget it!” Merrill said. “I don’t want that dog treeing some USAPC agent and screwing up everything.”

  Each man took a side and headed south along the tracks, beating the bushes as they went.

  “If I see a rabbit, am I allowed to shoot it?” Kent asked.

  The tenseness of the situation had drained all of Merrill’s humor. “Don’t even put any shells in your gun, asshole. This is not a hunting trip.”

  “Touchy, touchy.”

  They went through the motions of hunting for a quarter of a mile before Kent noticed a patch of blaze orange against a tree up ahead.

  “I see something,” he said to Merrill in a low hunter’s voice.

  “Keep going steady,” Merrill whispered back.

  As they approached, the orange resolved into a man in hunting garb. He was long, thin, and walnut-colored, like the stock of the shotgun across his body. When they were a few feet away they stopped. Waited for the would-be hunter to speak.

  “Morning, men. Any luck?” he asked in a voice that seemed to arise from a hollow log. His prominent Adam’s apple jumped with each word.

  “Haven’t seen a thing,” Merrill said.

  “Me either.”

  “I think we need a dog,” Kent said.

  Merrill flashed him a this-is-no-time-to-be-a-smartass look.

  The lean black man took the opening. “Maybe it’s your ammo. What you using?”

  Kent thought the question odd. If you hadn’t seen a rabbit, it didn’t make any difference what kind of shells were in your gun.

  “Federal,” Merrill said.

  Kent stared at his brother, baffled.

  “Good.” The man smiled broadly and extended his hand, “I’m agent Dan Rodman.

  Kent, realizing he had been duped by a code, rolled his eyes. He looked at the dark face with its rough scar on the right temple. “Jesus. You look familiar.”

  Rodman rocked his head back and released a low, resonant laugh. “You’re pretty good. Think. Where’d you see me?”

  Kent rolled through his mental file of acquaintances and clients, trying to place the man. “The animal shelter! I saw you get some pups and kittens at the shelter.”

  Rodman’s physical features were the same, b
ut the doltish look he displayed at the shelter was now replaced by keen-eyed savvy.

  “You got it. And where else?”

  “The day of the fire at Copithorn. You were out front in a truck.”

  “Right again.”

  Kent’s recall was on target now. “Then you came into my office to buy some medicine one day.”

  “Perfect. To the dog men, I’m dimwitted Bo Davis, your brother’s hired man.” For just a second he dropped back into his Jim Crow act to demonstrate.

  “Half brother,” Kent said.

  Merrill was eager for information. “So what’s going on, Mr. Rodman?”

  “Please. Call me Dan.”

  “Okay, Dan. Tell us about this investigation you guys have going.”

  The agent stepped over to an outcropping of limestone the size of a tabletop and sat. He gestured for his new companions to join him. Neither moved.

  Rodman ignored the snub and began his story. “We’ve been after these bums for a couple of years. We got a tip there was a large-scale dogfighting ring operating out of Austin, Texas. So we started looking into it and were amazed at how big an operation it really was. Well, for years USAPC has wanted to nail some of these guys, but it’s hard to get a case a DA can prosecute.” He waved his hand in a gesture of frustration. “There’s a lot of gray zone as to whose jurisdiction is whose. And even if you get a conviction, the sentences are light.”

  Kent nodded. “Bottom line, everybody realizes it’s a problem, but nobody wants to waste their time if nothing is going to come of it.”

  “Yeah. That’s what it boils down to.” Rodman pulled his hat into his lap as if freeing his mind to work. “That was before these Texas players came along. The more we investigated, the bigger it got. These guys are definitely interstate, and probably international. Hopefully, we’ll know that in a couple of weeks. They gamble serious money. They’ve got illegal firearms out the ying-yang, and at the fights, there are more drugs than in the Miami projects.

  “Now we’ve got something we can really sink our teeth into. USAPC wants the animal abuse angle. But we were also able to convince some other agencies it was worth their effort. The FBI and ATF are in for the interstate transport of firearms and drugs. The attorney general’s office in Washington has offered their Organized Crime Task Force because of the gambling, and the US Department of Agriculture is in because they need someone to string up as an example of how well they enforce the Animal Welfare Act.”

  “I can see the drugs and firearms thing, but if the penalties are so mild for dogfighting, why bother?” Kent asked.

  Dan Rodman opened his mouth as if about to give a glib answer and then stopped. He studied his shotgun, slowly running his fingers up and down its smooth barrel. Then he turned to Kent. “Do you really want to know?”

  There was a sinister tone in the man’s voice that surprised Kent and told him that whatever the real answer was, it was not glib.

  “Yes I do,” Kent said, wondering what can of worms he was opening.

  Rodman set his gun against a tree an arm’s length away. “Okay, I’ll give you the unabridged version, starting with my life history and”—he tapped the scar on his temple —“this little beauty mark of mine.

  “I was born and raised in one of those shotgun shacks you used to see sitting in the middle of the cotton fields all over the Deep South. Ours was just outside a tiny crossroads called Wakefield in north Louisiana, about five miles from the Arkansas line. My mama and daddy were hardworking, church-going, scratch-out-a-living-for-the-family folks. I was the oldest of four kids. We never had nothing. Our idea of a good time was going fishing with Daddy on Sunday afternoon.

  “Now don’t get me wrong with what I’m about to say here, because my daddy was a good man. I loved and respected him till the day he died.” Rodman hesitated, having second thoughts about telling his story. “Daddy had one fault. At the time I didn’t even see it as a fault, since most the other men did the same thing. He used to raise a few pit bulls and do a little dogfighting.”

  Rodman shook his head at the irony of his memories.

  “You know, it sounds weird, but he really liked his dogs and treated them well. Except for letting them get chewed up in a pit. If you can believe that.

  “It was different then. Still wrong as hell, but different. The men weren’t so nasty. They were all good Baptists. You wouldn’t see a drop of liquor or hear a cussword through the whole night of fights. And they called the dogs off as soon as they could tell one had it over the other.”

  “Less bad is still terrible,” Kent said.

  Rodman nodded heartily. “I agree. It was still bad. And I hated watching the fights. I went along and helped my daddy whenever he’d let me, and I loved seeing all the people and the excitement. But I tried not to watch the actual fights if I could help it.

  “Well, one time my daddy took me over into Dawson Grove, a little town just over the line in Arkansas, not much bigger than Wakefield. He told me this fight was going to be different. The crowd would be bigger, and they’d be mean, and there’d be a lot of drinking and swearing and more gambling than usual. He said not to tell Mama because she’d get mad if she found out he went, let alone took me too. He said the only reason he was doing it at all was because he had a dog he thought could win, and we’d have some extra money for Christmas.”

  Rodman paused, his face tightened. “We never should have gone. They were a bunch of white crackers, and I knew a couple of black folks had no place being there. Daddy was right. There was lots of cussing and drinking, and seemed like everybody had a gun or a big knife. More money than I’d ever seen was flying all over the place. Dead and maimed dogs started piling up like cordwood.

  “Then, to make a long story short, Daddy’s good dog got matched up with a real popular pit bull owned by a farmer named Milton Ross. Turns out Daddy’s dog won, but ol’ Milton had a snake-mean son named Lester who didn’t like the outcome and accused my daddy of using a rub—cheating.

  “They argued and things got nasty. I was scared to death. So Daddy takes me by the arm and backs out the door, figuring we better forget the money and get out while the getting was good.”

  Rodman’s voice choked with bitterness. “They jumped us out by our truck. They pushed me around a little, but they really went after my daddy. They had him on the ground and just kept kicking him and hitting him with clubs. I thought they were going to kill him, so I jumped at Lester, and that’s when he gave me this permanent reminder of that night.” He tapped his scar with a finger.

  “When I woke up, I found Daddy. He was breathing, but that was about all. They beat him up real bad. Somehow I got him loaded in the back of our old pickup and brought him home.”

  Rodman sighed deeply.

  “In one short night, Daddy lost his money, the best dog he’d ever had, and his health. He lived, but he was never the same. After that night, he was kinda simple and moved real timidlike.”

  Kent remembered the loss of his own father. Rodman’s story made his skin crawl. “Being in the South,” he said, “nothing ever happened to the cracker’s son who did it to your dad. Right?”

  “Ol’ Lester? No. Cops never arrested him. Hell, they probably never heard about that night. We didn’t press charges. We were too scared. It was a secret, illegal gathering. There wasn’t anything we could do.”

  Rodman’s voice took on a faraway dreamy tone, yet at the same time it quivered with a vicious rancor. “No, ol’ Lester hasn’t paid for what he did—yet.”

  “Yet?”

  Rodman nodded and let his face form a smile, but it held no humor. “The story’s not over. A few years later, I went to Louisiana Tech and got a degree in law enforcement. I figured I’d become a cop. Except what I never realized was that ol’ Lester gave me a partially detached retina in my right eye the same time he gave me the scar. So I couldn’t pass the phy
sical.

  “One thing led to another, and eventually I ended up going to work for Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the ATF, out of Austin, Texas. Lo and behold, a couple years later I’m on an illegal firearms investigation, and whose name should come up?”

  “Lester Ross,” Kent said.

  “Right. From then on I was a man possessed. Like a beagle on a rabbit, I wasn’t stoppin’ for nothin’. Not till I had him.”

  “Did you get him? Eventually?”

  “Not yet.”

  “There’s more?”

  “Federal budget cuts being what they were, I eventually got ‘severed’ from ATF, before I had a chance to get Lester.”

  “But you weren’t about to give up on him, so you joined USAPC.”

  “You got it. And I brought my pet case with me. Pardon the pun.”

  Neither of the brothers laughed.

  “Tough break,” Merrill said. It was obvious he considered moving from ATF to USAPC a demotion.

  “Not really,” Rodman said. “For me, the switch was easy. Like I said before, I loved and respected my daddy except for one thing—dogfighting. I hated everything about it back then, and I hate everything about it now. I’d rather chase bad guys abusing animals than gunrunners anytime.”

  Kent wasn’t about to be left hanging. “So what happened to Lester Ross?”

  For a moment, Rodman’s eyes shifted back and forth from Kent to Merrill, dangling a secret before the brothers. “He’s coming to Jefferson.”

  “No kidding!”

  “Yep. He’s into dogfighting in a much, much bigger way now. See, ol’ Lester went on to get real rich with computers. But you can’t change a leopard’s spots, they say, and he still likes to fight those pit bulls.”

  Kent remembered what Tammy had told him about how May-May was in over his head with big-money types, possibly gangsters. “Lester Ross must be one of the backers for the national championship.”

  “That’s right. He’s behind it. And Lester’s connected to some even bigger guys who are watching really close. They’re using the nationals as a testing ground. It’s downright scary, because if they like what they see, they’re going to use syndicate connections to market dogfighting way beyond anything that ever went on in this country.”