by Chris Culver
‘We both know that’s not true,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s also why I’m here. I hear you’re an important man in your gang, one of its leaders.”
“I do what I got to do,” he said, leaning back. “What’s it to you?”
“Then as a smart guy, you understand Carla Ramirez and your uncle Miguel are screwing you, right?”
He shrank just a little, and the bravado I saw in him earlier subsided just the tiniest bit. That told me I was going in the right direction.
“They’re killing witnesses who spoke against Santino Ramirez. Everybody in your gang knows it, so they’re getting all the credit with your friends. But they’re putting these murders on you. You understand what I’m saying? When they’re done with you, you’re never getting out of here.”
He shook his head and pushed back from the table as if he could get away from me. He had nowhere to go, though, and he knew it.
“You’re just talking shit now,” he said, looking half at the floor and half at the table in front of him.
“I’m telling you how it is,” I said. “I’m the only friend you’ve got right now. Whether you believe me or not, your name is on top of every report I write. Carla, your uncle Miguel, Jacob, they’re all pointing fingers at you.”
He looked left and right, cocking his head. “I’m in jail. How can I kill anybody?”
“You wouldn’t be the first guy to set up hits from jail. Maybe you didn’t pull the trigger, but you’re going down just the same unless you help me.”
“I’m not going to help a cop. I do that, I’m as good as dead.”
And that was probably true. Danny Navarra lived in a brutal world, one in which even an accident as benign as spilling your drink on the wrong person in a nightclub could earn you the death penalty. I didn’t know Danny well, but ten minutes in a cage with him, and I could already tell he didn’t fit into that scene. He had some felonies on his record, but he was young enough that he could still make something of himself.
“How about if I offer you protection?” I asked. “Would you talk then? We’ll put you in protective custody, and then, once this is all over, we’ll help you move. You can go to school if you want. You can learn a trade. I know a lot of former gang members. You don’t have to live like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like a guy who’s terrified of his own shadow. You tell me what I want to know, and I’ll make the calls. You’ll be safe.”
He didn’t even hesitate before responding. “I’m not going to turn on my uncle. He’s family.”
If he didn’t want to go the easy way, I could push him down the hard road just as easily. I have a reputation on the streets. I don’t like it, but I can certainly use it. Without taking my eyes from Navarra’s, I nodded my head toward the camera suspended from the ceiling.
“We’re alone and the cameras are off, so we can talk freely. That first offer was from a cop. This one’s not. Barrio Sureño and a man I represent have some common business interests. At the moment my employer is sitting on an excess of certain products, and we’d like to utilize Barrio Sureño’s network to move them. We don’t want to work with Carla or Miguel, though. We don’t think we can trust them.”
His eyes darted from my eyes to my side, where I would normally keep a weapon, and then back to my face. All the while, he ran a tongue across the inside of his teeth, creating a bulge beneath the skin. The comment had taken him out of his element, robbed him of some of the confident swagger he thought he possessed.
“I’ve heard some things about you,” he said, almost haltingly. “I didn’t know you did business.”
I bored my eyes into his. “If you’ve heard things about me, then you know who I work for.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “You’re a cop.”
I shook my head. People called me Mr. 187 because they thought I had become some kind of vigilante in the employ of a gangster.
“You heard who I really work for?”
Navarra’s tremble passed through his arms and into his face, causing a blood vessel to twitch beneath his left eye.
“Carla said you work for some Russian guy. Supposed to be like Keyser Söze. That’s why she didn’t kill you herself. She didn’t want to provoke a war.”
Keyser Söze is a shadowy, all-powerful gangster in the movie The Usual Suspects. From what I knew of Konstantin Bukoholov, the movie’s writer could have used the old Russian for a model. Good to know Carla still feared something.
“Close enough. Tino’s going to die, and there’s no way around that,” I said. “In the aftermath, your organization is going to need some help. They need a leader to step up. My boss wanted Tomas Quesada, but he’s dead now. We’re not going to work with your uncle or Carla. That leaves us with two options: we either kill everybody, or we throw our weight behind you. It’s your choice.”
Navarra tapped both of his index fingers on the table in front of him. He fidgeted like my daughter when she had to go to the bathroom.
“Are you offering to give me Barrio Sureño?”
I shook my head. “We’re not giving you Barrio Sureño. We’re giving you an opportunity to take Barrio Sureño. You just have to have the balls and the will. We can get you guns when you need them, and we might even be able to get you a hitter or two. A pro. In exchange, we want a partner. You sell my boss’s product, and you cut off anybody else you’re buying from. We can get you anything you want in whatever quantities you need.”
He considered and then furrowed his brow while leaning forward. “And your boss sent you here?”
“I wouldn’t be here otherwise.” Sensing that I had started to lose him, I stood. “Look, I don’t want to work with you or Barrio Sureño, but I don’t get to make that call. If it were up to me, I’d find out where you and your friends live, slit your throats in your sleep, and take over your territory. As a sign of respect, my boss is giving you an opportunity. You don’t want it, we’ve got other options.”
As I started for the door, Navarra called out. “You don’t need to go. We’ve still got business to discuss. What do you need me to do?”
“First things first,” I said, turning so I could face him. “We need things to settle down. I don’t care about the civilians, but two cops died last night, and you’d better believe IMPD is looking to take revenge. Who killed them?”
“Why do you need to know?”
I rolled my eyes and crossed my arms. “Tell me you’re kidding. Tell me you’re not really stupid enough to ask me that question.”
“Take it easy, man,” he said, holding up his hands. “I ain’t going to turn on my man without good reason. That’s all.”
I walked back to the table and rested my hands on the edge opposite Navarra and leaned forward, getting right in his face.
“You’ve got good reason. Someone’s going down for killing two cops yesterday. You don’t give me a fall guy, I’ll put it on your Uncle Miguel and say you coughed up his name.”
Navarra pulled his face back from mine, his skin growing a little pale. “Hey, hey, hey, man. You do that, I’m dead.”
I gave him the iciest stare I could, one that would have scared even me had I seen it on someone else. “Then give me a name.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and then looked at the door. “Who died?”
“Two cops. That’s all you need to know.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head and looking at me. “Other than the cops. Who died?”
“A family. A woman who testified in Santino Ramirez’s murder trial.”
“Your girl Carla did that,” he said, leaning back. “She’s got this bug up her ass to kill everybody who testified against Tino. I bet Jacob’s with her.”
That confirmed what I had thought, but I needed more than the word of an inmate. I needed physical evidence, corroboration.
“Not good enough,” I said, shaking my head and pulling my chair close to Navarra’s. I sat down beside him and put my
hand on the back of his neck, squeezing hard. “Carla’s too high profile. I go after her, nothing’s going to stick. Tell me about Jacob.”
Navarra started to respond, but then he shrugged. “I never knew him. He didn’t grow up in the neighborhood.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Somebody told me he’s from Cleveland. That’s all I know.”
That jibed with what Emilia had heard. Good. We very likely had the right guy. “What about Carla? Where’s she staying?”
“My house.”
“If you’re going to lie to me, at least make it believable,” I said, standing once again. I smacked him on the back of the head. “Carla burned your house to the ground.”
“Nah, man,” he said, waving me off. “That wasn’t my house she burned. I stayed there some, but my house is nice. It’s out in the ’burbs. Tino gave it to me.”
My heart rate ticked up just a hair.
Keep talking.
“Why would Santino Ramirez give you a house?”
Navarra hesitated and then tilted his head to the side, like he didn’t know how to answer.
“It…it ain’t technically mine. Technically, it’s got some stuff growing in it, but I live there. Technically.”
I had seen that arrangement before. Ramirez gave him a marijuana grow house, probably in exchange for tending the plants. We didn’t find it in Indianapolis often, but in communities further south with larger migrant populations, drug dealers would buy distressed properties, upgrade the electrical systems for the future power drain, and then install grow lights in the basement and attic. They’d then find a poor family and promise them the house free and clear if they watched over the plants inside and kept their mouths shut. The system worked out well for the drug dealer, but not so much for the family. When the police raided the place, the dealer would be long gone, leaving them alone to take the fall.
“Where’s your house? I’ve got to find her.”
He looked at me and squinted again. “You’re sure Tino’s gonna die? Because he ain’t gonna be too happy if I give up his wife.”
“You want some advice? Man to man?” I asked, leaning forward. I didn’t wait for him to acknowledge the question. “Grow some balls and stop worrying about Tino. He’s in prison, and he’s not getting out. You want to be his bitch the rest of your life, go ahead and be his bitch. But if you want to make something of yourself, you’ve got take what you want when you want it.”
“All right, all right,” he said. He gave me the address of a home in Beech Grove, a suburb to our southeast but still within Marion County.
“I’m going to check your house out. If I find her, I’ll do everything I can to get you out of here.”
Of course, Navarra had admitted to involvement in at least half a dozen felonies in our conversation so far, so I probably wouldn’t be able to do much for him.
“Keep on trucking,” said Navarra, holding out his fist.
“Do what you got to do in here,” I said, hitting his knuckles with my own as if we were old friends. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
I left him in that room, and once the guard shut the door behind me, I took out my cell phone to call Paul Murphy. He answered on the first ring.
“I’ve got a lead on Carla Ramirez. She’s about to have a real bad day.”
Chapter 29
With the entirety of my department working on the events around town, I wouldn’t get a lot of help no matter what happened. Captain Bowers had co-opted Paul to work a tip line, but I still had Emilia. I met her beside my car in the parking lot nearest the City-County Building. She wore a tactical vest beneath an IMPD jacket and had pulled her hair away from her face with a hair tie. She wore her weapon on her hip and kept her jacket pushed back so anyone around could see the gun. She looked like she meant business. I grabbed my own bullet-resistant vest from my trunk just in case.
“How quickly can you get us to Beech Grove?” I asked, taking off my suit coat and then putting on my vest.
“That depends on what you had for lunch, sir.”
“All right, then,” I said. “You drive. Where’s your car?”
We took a marked patrol vehicle, and before I could even put on my seat belt, we sped off, heading east on Washington Street toward I-65 south. Once we hit the interstate, she flashed the lights, turned on the sirens, and floored it. The car roared, the front end lifted with the acceleration, and I felt the back of my head start to embed itself into the vinyl seat. Evidently, I had picked the right driver. With the mayor’s office having locked the city down earlier, we met little traffic on the road and those few cars we did see got out of our way quickly. Normally when I had somebody else drive me on a case like this, I found myself urging the driver to go faster. Here, I actually found myself praying that we’d make it alive.
By the time we pulled off the interstate onto Emerson Avenue, I had difficulty forcing my clenched fists to open.
“That was some spirited driving, Officer Rios,” I said, hoping my voice wouldn’t crack.
“You can call me Emilia,” she said, glancing over at me. I pointed to the road in front of us, directing her gaze to oncoming traffic. “Sir.”
“You can call me whatever you want as long as you don’t kill me.”
We pulled into a working-class neighborhood called Farhill Downs seven minutes after we left the jail. Even with my lights and siren blaring, that same drive would have taken me at least ten minutes. Impressive, and a little nuts. Farhill Downs had wide streets, clear sidewalks, and homes with well-kept lawns. Judging by the architecture, it had probably gone up sometime in the late seventies to early eighties, but it looked well maintained. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a colleague or two live there. We followed the main road as it curved to the left. The address Danny Navarra had given me belonged to a single-story brick home with a privacy fence in the backyard and a front-facing garage. He—or maybe Carla Ramirez—had put a family of stone geese beside the front door. It didn’t stand out from the other homes in the neighborhood at all save for one addition: solar panels covered nearly the entire roof.
I pointed them out to Emilia as we drove past.
“They’re smarter than we thought. Power company knows to monitor houses that use too much electricity,” I said. “Solar panels make them harder to catch. Bet Carla even got a tax break on that.”
Emilia nodded and parked half a block up. “Maybe we’ll get her for tax evasion, too.”
“Maybe,” I said, reaching into my jacket for my firearm. I never carry my weapon around without a full magazine, but I checked anyway to make sure. I looked at Emilia and watched as she did something similar. “You ready?”
I looked at the house again. Barrio Sureño had done their due diligence on this house. It blended in with everyone around it. They could probably even park a van in the garage, close the door, and load up their dope without its ever seeing the light of day. A house like that, if I had to guess, had surveillance as well. She’d see us coming, but maybe we could use that.
“You have a Taser in here?”
She tilted her head to the back. “In the trunk. You comfortable using one here?”
Despite their low lethality, Tasers have become somewhat controversial in law enforcement circles. They incapacitate a subject by shooting him with a pair of electrodes, which then deliver a 50,000-volt shock that overwhelms his nervous system, forcing every muscle in his body to contract at once. A member of our SWAT team once shot me with one a couple of years ago, and I can safely call it one of the most physically painful experiences of my life.
I nodded. “Yeah. I tried running someone down earlier. Didn’t work out for me. She takes off, I’m shooting her.”
“How do you want to handle this?”
I pointed to a dense thicket of pine trees that separated Carla’s home from the one beside it. “I’m going to get out here and hide out in those trees in the neighbor’s yard. You’re going to drive up the street and g
ive me two minutes. After that, blast your lights and siren and go tearing toward her house like your hair is on fire. I want everybody on the block—including Carla—to know you’re here. Carla doesn’t want to die, so she’s not going to open fire on you. If she does, stay behind the car for cover and call in backup. More than likely, she’s going to take off out the back door as soon as she sees your car. I’ll subdue her in the backyard.”
Emilia nodded. “Sounds easy enough.”
I almost told her that nothing in this job came easily, but she’d have to learn that lesson on her own.
I opened my door. “Pop the trunk, would you?”
As I stepped out, she nodded and then reached beneath her dash for the trunk release. I walked around the car and pushed aside the jumper cables in the trunk so I could pull out a plastic box similar to the one that held my power drill. This one held an M26 Taser and five cartridges. I pulled the Taser out of the box and checked the mechanical sights and the charge. The maker did a remarkably good job of mimicking the feel of a handgun, so I felt comfortable with the weapon despite my minimal experience with it. In a real emergency, nothing beat an actual firearm, but this would bring most people down without a problem.
I slipped a cartridge into the weapon and then put the whole assembly in my pocket before shutting the trunk. As per our plan, Emilia drove off quietly, only to turn around about three blocks up. That meant I had two minutes to get into Carla’s backyard. I turned directly down the driveway of the nearest home. Had it been dark, I might have tried to conceal myself in shadows, but the sun shone down like a spotlight from Heaven itself, illuminating both sinner and saint. I hoped to look casual, like an invited guest or maybe the gas meter reader, so I didn’t hurry. Once I reached the backyard, I walked on the edge of the lawn and then turned toward Carla’s house. Her neighbor directly to her east obviously had small children, because they had a wooden playset in the backyard and a sandbox beside the home. If she started shooting, I’d try to remember that, but hopefully the family would have enough common sense to stay inside.