by John Lansing
“Follow them,” Jack said. “Stay in touch. We’ll catch up with you later.”
Mateo waited until the two luxury vehicles hung squealing lefts onto Pomona Avenue before putting the Ford into gear and following a safe distance behind.
“Scared the shit outta me,” Cruz said, smiling nervously as he hugged the pole, tossed Jack his bag of tools, and jumped down the last five feet. With the state of Jack’s back, that jump would have sent him to the chiropractor, he thought. He’d already downed four Excedrin with cold coffee while sitting surveillance. He shied away from Vicodin when he was doing this kind of work, but he’d pay in the morning for not staying ahead of the pain.
The two men walked to the BMW, parked on the suburban street that ran perpendicular to the alley and had afforded them an unobstructed view.
“You did real good, Cruz. Real good. You saved my ass.”
The neighborhood was closed up and fast asleep. No movements or sounds except for the distant thrumming of a helicopter’s rotors, a wailing siren in the distance, and the odd bark of a family dog.
“What now, Jack?”
“Gotta talk to a man about a boat.”
Both men piled into the Beemer, and Jack swung a U-turn and powered off into the night. Jack had a strong feeling that if they could find berth 207 at the marina, it would give up its secrets.
* * *
Mateo followed the Yukon and Porsche to an upscale parking company that shuttled business travelers to John Wayne Airport, filled their gas tanks, and detailed their cars, all for a hefty fee. It was situated in the Irvine Towers, next door to the Irvine Marriott.
Both cars entered the garage, and after fifteen minutes the Porsche exited the building with the dark-haired man in the passenger seat.
Mateo texted the info to Jack and then followed the men back to the club, where the passenger got out of the car, patted the roof of the Porsche, and disappeared inside the club.
The Porsche peeled out of the strip mall lot, laying down twelve feet of black rubber and smoke before rocketing away.
Good riddance, Mateo thought as he headed back to the parking structure to keep an eye on things and wait for his crew.
* * *
The number 207 wasn’t marked on the six-foot fence meant to keep out anyone who wasn’t a member of the yachting community, but rusted plaques for 205 and, farther down, 206 were still attached to the chain links. The next number in line was conspicuously missing in front of the last slip. Coming closer, Jack noticed a clean rectangular space on the weathered fence where a plaque had once been attached. Definitely 207. Brilliant deduction, Sherlock. You’re one hell of a detective, Jack thought, almost laughing through his fatigue.
He powered down the windows, clicked off the car’s lights, and took in the scene. The heady smell of salt water was mixed with the chemical odor of gasoline that bled off the motors, leaving an iridescent sheen on the brackish water.
Slip 207 had easy access from the parking lot, yet it was far enough away from the retail stores and restaurants to be safely hidden from prying eyes. The clacking of halyards against aluminum masts and water lapping on the sides of the yachts, cabin cruisers, and high-end powerboats that filled the marina was all they could hear. At three o’clock, the lot was empty, but live-aboards might well be sleeping on their crafts.
A canvas enclosure hid whatever was docked in slip 207, but Jack could see what looked like a hydraulic lift sticking out of the far edge. The last time Jack had seen a rig like that, he was chasing down go-fast boats bringing cocaine into Miami in the dead of night.
A corrugated metal shed the size of a cargo container stood just beyond the canvas tent. It was secured with a heavy-duty Master Lock padlock.
As Jack stepped out of the car, the safety light on the bottom of the door panel illuminated a small pile of cigarette butts. He picked one up and examined it. The ash was still intact and the paper was clean. Jack knew it had been smoked in the past few hours. Cruz vaulted over the low fence on a one-count. Jack followed suit and stopped in place to make sure they were still alone. He gave Cruz the all-clear sign and walked over to the canvas enclosure as Cruz headed for the shed.
Jack pulled back the canvas flap. He wasn’t surprised, but he still got a thrill when he was in the hunt and downwind of his prey.
A tricked-out cigarette boat with three thick stripes, all shades of blue that ran the length of the boat, was perched on the hydraulic lift. It bristled with power and looked like it was doing forty knots standing still. Jack gave the boat a once-over, being careful not to leave any prints. If he could tie the boat to Malic, he’d let forensics check it out. See if any traces of the dead women had been left behind.
Jack snapped some photos of the boat using his iPhone. He felt certain this was the boat Maggie Sheffield had seen powering out of Paradise Cove after someone had orchestrated a young woman’s sadistic murder. She had been chemically paralyzed, wide-awake as the boat she sat in crashed onto the rocks. She was an unwilling witness to her own brutal death.
That’s some sick shit, Jack thought.
He stepped out of the canvas enclosure and found Cruz standing just inside the opened door of the compact metal shed.
Cruz had a silly grin on his face when Jack passed him on the way in.
“Ganja,” Cruz said.
“I defer to your wisdom,” Jack answered, but after twenty-five years chasing down drug dealers, he had no doubt that the shed had been used to store marijuana. And very recently, from the thick pungent smell. Other than a few life jackets, fuel tanks, hoses, and fire extinguishers, they discovered nothing more of interest.
“They were here tonight. My guess is, the Yukon is gassed up, loaded, and ready for a trip to Detroit. It’s time to bring in the law.”
35
“You know if I bear witness to what you’re doing, I’m gonna have to run you all in,” Nick Aprea said with an early-morning rasp.
“Where are we, on the Ponderosa? You’re gonna have to run us all in?” Jack said, straining to extricate himself from the back end of the Iraqi’s GMC Yukon without touching anything. The car was heavy with marijuana ready for transit.
Cruz laughed and then stifled it when Nick leveled his dark gaze in his direction.
“I’m really tired,” Cruz said by way of explanation, and immediately focused back on his laptop, his fingers flying over the keyboard.
The men were standing inside the parking structure, watching Cruz work his technical wizardry. He had already broken into the vehicle electronically and disarmed the alarm. While Jack searched the car, Mateo drank 7-Eleven coffee the guys had brought along while they waited for Nick to arrive.
“From what I could see, there’s gotta be at least twenty bales,” Jack reported while he stretched to one side, then the other, trying to loosen his back. “What are we talking? Five fifty, six hundred pounds. Depending on the grade, it could be a quarter million? Three fifty?”
“Sounds about right,” Nick said, anticipating the righteous bust to come. He was giving off the sweet smell of tequila, and that was the only thing sweet about him. He’d been roused from a liquor-induced sleep and the warmth of his young wife, and he wasn’t an early-morning person.
“I was a little surprised Dick Trammel answered the phone,” he said. “His wife—how should I say it?—was less than pleasant when I knocked on their door. Although at four a.m., who could blame her?”
Dick Trammel was the LAPD’s resident electronic genius and gadget-meister, to whom Nick could reach out in times of need.
“We got lucky,” Jack said.
“Tell that to Trammel,” Nick shot back. “He’s married to the woman.”
Chuckles from the guys.
“I owe him one, and now you owe me a major one, and it’s you who’s gonna pay first. Trammel said if the bust goes bad, I should tell that Be
rtolino fuck that he doesn’t want any blowback.”
Laughing, Jack grabbed a container of coffee and burned his lip on the fucking plastic top.
“You know what I say. If the door’s open, step on through. The drugs will be halfway across the country if we wait on a search warrant.”
No argument from Nick, who turned his cranky gaze in Cruz’s direction.
“So, where did you acquire this particular skill set?”
Cruz thought before he spoke, afraid if he said the wrong thing he might incriminate himself.
“Self-taught,” he ended up with. He quickly changed the subject to what they were trying to accomplish here. “Okay, I finished hacking the OnStar system. So now I’m gonna hijack the ECU—”
“English,” Nick said tightly.
“The electronic control unit.”
Cruz felt Nick’s eye roll from behind the mirrored sunglasses and pushed on.
“So with the scrambler Dick Trammel provided and my laptop, we now control any function OnStar provides.”
“You’re shitting me,” Nick said.
“We can start the car, turn off the power, lock the doors, unlock the doors, pop the trunk, and deploy the air bags. This bad boy is basically our bitch.”
“Stopping the car is the point,” Nick said. “Popping the trunk could bring it home. And you’re comfortable with the setup?” he asked Jack, knowing this wasn’t his maiden sting.
Mateo jumped in. “We took a million five off a Colombian laundering cell up in Great Neck, same basics. Used a cutoff switch that was attached under the hood. With the new technology, we don’t even have to get our hands dirty.”
“Too late for that,” Nick said without humor. “Guys like you are the reason the cops are always one step behind the scumbags.”
Mateo stiffened. “I thought we were fighting the same war.”
“Right.”
“Maybe we’ll stay lucky,” Jack interjected, trying to diffuse the direction the conversation had taken. His back was knotted up and firing currents of pain up and down his spine. “But in case it doesn’t work”—Jack pierced a rear taillight with a Phillips-head screwdriver—“you can pull him over the old-fashioned way.”
Nick held out his hands, gesturing What the fuck, Bertolino? and shook his head in exasperation. As tired as Jack was, he took the time to enjoy the moment.
“All right,” Cruz said. “I just got the ID on the transponder. Now we’ll be able to pick up the car’s GPS signal.”
“Range?” Nick asked.
“You could be sitting in your living room. As long as you’ve got my laptop, you’re good to go.”
“Let’s wrap it up,” Jack said. And then to Nick, “We’ll track the Yukon, and when we’re a safe distance from the club, so they don’t trip to there being a connection, you give us the go-ahead and we’ll disable the car. Then it’s your scene. We’re only there in case of a fuckup.”
Cruz reengaged the alarm system and locked the doors from his computer while Mateo closed up the back and wiped the car clean of prints.
“This has gotta play out like a bad-luck bust, just the shitty luck of the draw,” Jack said. “We want the gang to go back to doing business as usual. I wanna twist the knife, keep Malic off balance, but I don’t want him running for the exits just yet.”
* * *
Jack had taken the first watch while he let Cruz sleep in the back of the Beemer, and in the end he was in too much pain to fall out himself, so he let him sleep.
Jack never minded surveillance work when he wore a badge. He could sit for days outside a cartel safe house until he had logged the license plates of all the clients and had proven without a shadow of a doubt that the house was loaded. Then he’d call up his team, and they’d execute a warrant and shut down the entire drug or money-laundering cell.
Jack was into career building during his son’s first year of Little League and missed far too many games. He lived with the guilt and was still trying to make up for being an absentee father.
Jack would call him after the game, keeping one eye trained on the drug house, while Chris gave him the cold shoulder over the phone. But Jack could always break through. The love of baseball, and a father’s love for his son, won out.
Chris would loosen up and narrate a play-by-play of every hit, every run, every pitch he threw, every strike, walk, and tag-out he made, like a young Howard Cosell.
Now Jack had second thoughts every time he picked up the phone to call.
Chris had met with Dr. Leland, the shrink, but Jack had no idea how the session had gone or whether he’d even shown up for his second appointment. The cast on Chris’s arm had been realigned in an attempt to stop the night pain, but Jack didn’t know if the procedure had been successful. The neurologist had also prescribed some heavy-duty, non-narcotic pain medication. Jack prayed it worked.
Chris had promised he was clean, and if he wasn’t too far gone, Jack thought, it might be the truth.
* * *
The men were all in foul, pissed-off moods three hours later when they shook themselves awake, revved their engines, and prepared to hit the road. The adrenaline that usually came before a takedown did little to buoy the energy in the three cars.
Mateo was parked around the block, reclined behind the wheel of his Explorer, and Nick was in his mammoth black Expedition on Airport Way, surly, hungover, and waiting for a go signal. Each car was equipped with a walkie-talkie provided by Dick Trammel. Jack made a mental note to take the man out for a steak dinner when the dust settled.
Normally, Jack would have run a classic progressive surveillance on the Yukon, stagger their three cars and when one driver radioed the Yukon’s position, that car would leapfrog ahead of the target and be replaced by the next member of the team. That way if the target became suspicious of being followed, he’d never make the tail, because it was constantly changing.
Now that the GPS signal had been hacked by Cruz, the group could hang back at a safe distance and wait until it was time for the takedown.
The first complication appeared after the silver Porsche roared by and entered the parking structure. A Jaguar XK that Jack had taken a photo of outside the Iraqi social club was trolling down Von Karman Avenue, checking the parked cars, looking for anything suspicious.
Jack caught the maneuver in his rearview, turned off his engine, and slid down in his seat. While hunched down, he warned Mateo. Cruz didn’t have to be told and Nick wasn’t directly in the line of fire.
After the man in the Jag had made a full sweep of both sides of the block and was satisfied all was clear, he pulled to a stop outside the enclosed parking structure at Irvine Towers with his engine idling. Jack saw him raise a cell phone to his ear and a few seconds later lower it.
The silver Porsche barreled out of the enclosure with the black Yukon so tight on its bumper it looked like a killer whale closing in on a seal. The Jaguar squealed away from the curb and assumed the rear position. The three-car motorcade traveled northeast on Airport Way and hung a tight left onto MacArthur Boulevard.
Nick reported that he had a visual and followed five cars back as Jack and Mateo played catch-up.
In the wee hours while the others were asleep, Jack had pulled up on his laptop three main routes to Detroit, highlighted on MapQuest. His guy would likely take one of the two overlapping routes because they both passed through Vegas and Denver before splitting off toward the Motor City. And Jack had never met a gangster who could pass up a night on the town in Vegas.
After talking with Nick, they decided that they would pull the trigger where the I-15 crossed I-10 in Ontario. Nick knew the local cops and could call for backup if needed.
They hoped that the trailing cars would carry the Yukon until Jamboree turned into the CA-261 N, a toll road and then drop off when it crossed under the I-5. That didn’t happen, and Jack and
the men started to worry. Engaging the armed entourage would be a total cluster fuck. They might have to rethink their strategy and let the drugs slip through their fingers.
The only thing that made sense, unless all three cars were going to Las Vegas, was that the Iraqis would now peel off when CA 91 E crossed the I-15, which was a straight shot to Vegas. And that’s exactly how it played out.
Jack’s heart rate quickened, and Cruz’s foot tapped nervously on the floorboard as they watched the two exotic cars disappear down the exit ramp—heading for home, Jack expected.
With approximately five miles to go, Nick backed off the gas and Mateo sped past the Yukon. He would stay a few hundred feet ahead and then pull over when he got word that the target was disabled and he was out of the Yukon’s line of vision.
Jack would pull to the side of the highway a few hundred feet behind and raise his hood, feigning motor trouble.
Nick would arrive a few minutes later and engage the driver. Ask if he could be of service. Bad luck breaking down on the highway, that sort of thing. Keep it light. Then he’d flash his badge and ask to see license and registration. As soon as the bearded Iraqi opened the door, the smell of marijuana would give Nick probable cause, and he’d slap on the cuffs. No muss, no fuss. A clean bust.
That was the plan.
Jack’s BMW pulled about ten car lengths behind the Yukon, and when the I-15 approached I-10, he gave the go signal.
Cruz tapped a few strokes into the computer.
He banged Enter.
The Yukon shuddered, swerved, and then started to decelerate. The driver frantically tried to merge to the right. With his power steering gone, the wheel leaden in his hands, he fought to navigate a safe exit from the freeway.
Jack pulled onto the shoulder with the Yukon still in his line of vision but far enough back to assuage suspicion.