by J. R. Rain
“You sure you’re okay?” I ask.
“Fine.” Mary Lou lets out a long breath. “Oh, the police are here. I gotta go.”
“All right. Call me if anything else happens, okay?”
“Sure, Sam. Hey, I’m the one who should be worried about you getting hurt.”
“I’ll be extra careful. This file I’m working on has a bad attitude. I think it’s planning to cut me.” I chuckle to myself, but my sister’s right. Sometimes I do wind up in dangerous situations. People abusing the HUD program can get violent when we show up, which is the reason we pack heat.
“Bye.” Mary Lou hangs up.
“So, what was that all about?” asks Chad.
“My sister thought she saw someone trying to break into her house, but she’s always been overly cautious.”
Chad, looking at me, adds too much of that green stuff to his next piece of sushi and makes a wild face when he eats it. His cough blasts the smell of horseradish into the air. “Oof. Little too much wasabi there.”
“Even our food is trying to kill us.” I raise one eyebrow at him.
Laughing makes him choke more. He dabs his mouth with a napkin and wipes a tear from his eye. “She’s right to be vigilant. Woman home alone with kids? It’s either nothing or an opportunistic burglar who panicked and ran off when he noticed someone there.”
“Yeah,” I say, not meaning it. Tammy describing some shadowy thing has me on edge, and inexplicable, crippling fear hand-in-hand with my kid seeing a shadow figure isn’t the sort of topic one can openly discuss around federal agents without risking an appointment with a psychiatrist.
Chad holds up his chopsticks, a piece of ginger pinched between them. “Don’t worry. If some guy meant to hurt her, he’d have broken in long before the cops got there.”
I stare across the table at him, my expression flat. “Thanks. That’s reassuring.”
“That’s why I’m here.” He winks and eats the ginger.
Maybe I shouldn’t worry just yet. Mary Lou and her family have lived in that place for years without anything happening. It’s weird that two days after that thing shows up on the beach, it’s at my sister’s house, too. Wait. What? That thing? I’m really thinking about this like some actual ghost or whatever is stalking… Tammy? She’s the only common link. I fidget in the chair, barely able to keep from leaping to my feet and rushing off to make sure she’s all right. But, Tammy didn’t seem the least bit afraid of it.
Stop. I rub my forehead, trying to force sanity through my skull. There’s nothing phantasmal stalking my daughter, or me, or my sister. I must’ve reached some critical point of boredom at work that my brain has kicked into overdrive and I’m making shit up.
“You okay?” asks Chad, sounding sincere. “The police are there, and I’m sure it’s nothing. We can swing by if you want. Say we were doing a property inspection.”
“And then we’d have to falsify a report about a property we didn’t really inspect.” I sigh. “Nah, it’s fine.”
He grins. “Not if we really stopped by a place. These inspections don’t have time parameters.”
“No, really. It’s okay.” I manage a smile.
A playful argument about paying starts when the check arrives. Our usual routine is to alternate, but he’s ‘forgotten’ who’s turn it is, and points out his $22 lunch was more expensive than my $13 soup. I relent this time, but make it clear tomorrow’s on me.
We’re not back in the office two minutes when Nico Fortunato, our boss, leans out of his door at the end of the row and gives us the ‘get in here now’ wave.
Uh oh.
Chapter Four
Idle Hands
“Well…” I glance across the aisle at Chad, who hadn’t even made it all the way into his cube. “At least he doesn’t look pissed.”
With a ‘yeah, good point’ shrug, he falls in step behind me. Before we can get to his office, Nico hurries out and off to the left, waving for us to follow. He ducks into one of the medium-sized conference rooms where another six agents seated around a table all look up at us simultaneously. Though none fire off accusing stares, I feel like we’ve delayed the party taking a late lunch. Without a word, Chad and I settle into open seats near the door.
“All right, everyone.” Nico approaches a dry erase board at the front end of the room. “We will be assisting in an operation involving FBI and ICE in about an hour. They are moving in on Juan Manuel Villero.” He clicks a remote and an overhead projector on the ceiling puts the image of a thirtyish man with deep brown skin on the blank white wall. “He’s a prominent figure in the local narcotics scene. According to the FBI, he has links to numerous gangs in our area as well as in Mexico. They’ve been tracking shipments of cocaine, heroin, and meth originating from Tijuana and Mexicali, which we believe Villero is acting as a distribution hub for, then sending the cash back up the line.”
Murmurs and nods go around the room.
Chad taps me on the arm with the back of his hand and mutters, “Here’s that boredom buster you were asking for.”
Nico points to the projected face of a man who looks like any other guy next door, hardly a murderous criminal… but then again, all the most successful ones are adept at blending in. “The FBI intercepted a runner with close to three hundred grand heading back to the supplier in Mexico. We expect this has, or soon will, cause pressure for Mr. Villero. We need to close the net before he disappears.”
I stare at the man on the wall, my mind racing back to my training running the tactical course. This will be only the third time I’ve gone into a ‘live fire’ situation. We help other agencies out here and there, so it’s not too unusual. That they’re pulling in so many extra people gets me a little worried. Drug gangs like this―especially with that much money floating around―usually have hardware like M-16s or AK47s. Hopefully, whoever’s running this bust is hoping an overwhelming federal presence will intimidate the thugs into surrendering without violence, and he’s not just adding every agent he can find to the raid because he’s expecting a firefight from hell.
Nico clicks the remote again and the image changes to a smallish house surrounded by scrub brush and dirt. A single beat-up Nissan sits beside the house, its ‘driveway’ little more than a strip of dirt. “This is the property Juan Manuel Villero is using as his operations center. In case any of you are wondering why we are involved, it’s a HUD home.”
A few agents sigh with a ‘that figures’ resignation. Chad shakes his head. Every time one of these scumballs takes a house away from a needy, honest family, we both get pissed. I lean forward, studying the yellowish-brown building.
“The property is registered to a woman by the name of Rosa María Melendez. What her relationship is with Mr. Villero is undetermined.” Nico hands out a stack of papers to everyone. “Miss Melendez secured the property three years ago, before Villero was on the FBI’s radar. We don’t know whether she obtained the house for him or if he found her after the fact. That’ll be our issue to sort out once the dust settles and the DEA’s vacuuming up all the coke.”
Agent Ernie Montoya laughs.
“Bet she’s not reporting that income,” says Chad with a wink.
Chuckles go around the room.
Nods and murmurs of agreement rise from the agents. I flip open the document packet and study more photos of the home, the HUD application, a copy of Rosa’s driver’s license, and a few aerial photographs showing a fenced-in backyard with a short stretch of dirt and trees between it and another road. Those photos show a white van parked by the Nissan.
“Any questions?” asks Nico.
“What’s our role going to be here?” asks Bryce Anders. He’s been with HUD six years, and is our resident by-the-book type.
Nico nods at him. “Your initial role during the raid will be containment. The FBI/DEA/ICE team will be knocking”―that’s ‘Nico-speak’ for kicking the door down―“our team will be providing additional perimeter coverage.”
Bryc
e fidgets. He’s been wanting to transfer to the FBI or DEA, so this has got to be exciting for him. Hearing that we’ll pretty much be in the back watching for runners disappoints him.
“Anything else?” Nico rocks back on his heels, silver eyebrows up.
Michelle Rivera holds up her packet. “What kind of hardware are these guys throwing around?”
“The eyes we have on the property haven’t reported a significant display of weapons, but with the amount of money involved here, we are operating under the assumption they are well armed.” Nico looks around at us. “You’ll all have M4s and tactical vests.”
Crap. I’ve barely used the M4. Only on the range for the mandatory evaluations.
“Anyone have a psych work up on this guy?” asks Montoya. Ernie’s the most senior of our group, and the agent I spent my first month shadowing. “Is this guy going to freak out and try to take as many of us with him as possible, or likely to surrender?”
Nico sets his hands on his hips and sighs. “The FBI, if they have that information, didn’t share. I think they got lucky and tripped over this guy. He’s a US citizen, born in Amarillo. His record’s got a couple of minor arrests in his early twenties, but nothing violent. We know he’s got at least one relative in Mexicali, a first cousin. The FBI believes he’s the contact on the other side.”
“If Villero’s a citizen, what’s ICE doing here?” asks Michelle. “They can’t revoke citizenship if he was born in Texas.”
“No, but they believe his associates are in the country illegally,” says Nico.
Montoya shuffles his papers. “How many suspects in the residence?”
“You’ll be coordinating with FBI Special Agent Will Martin. He’ll be able to provide a more accurate idea, but from what I’ve seen, I’d expect four to six.”
On any other day, I’d be nervous―who wouldn’t be―but after the beach? I have no explanation for that, but I can’t remember ever being so paralyzed with fear before in my life. Not talking about when Tammy vanished, I mean that sense of something predatory hovering around me. At least, I haven’t been that terrified since I’d been about five. One night, my parents’ crystal skull bong caught the moonlight and glowed on the windowsill. (At the time, we all shared one giant bedroom.) I thought it was a demon or something and screamed my head off.
I once read this article about the difference between fear and terror. It described fear as the way you feel if you’re trapped in a car with a huge dog on the hood growling at you, ready to rip you to shreds if you open the door. Terror happens when that dog’s eyes start glowing red.
Well, that damn dog’s eyes lit up bright on the beach last Saturday.
After feeling that, the idea of raiding a drug den doesn’t bother me as much as it should. At least, no worse than the second or two of consideration that any time I get in a car, I could wind up dead. Nico dismisses us after no one comes up with any more questions. Once back at my cube, I pull up the records we have for the property.
Rosa Melendez, the property owner, applied for HUD assistance as single, no dependents. She’s a twenty-eight-year-old lawful permanent resident with a ‘green card.’ Looks like she applied for naturalization, but they denied her due to her not being in the country for five years yet. No criminal record, and according to the file, she works for Universal Maintenance Services, a company that does contract cleaning for corporate offices. That beat-up twelve-year-old Nissan is registered in her name. Twentyish minutes of digging up tax returns and bank statements later, I’m convinced she doesn’t have any unreported income streams… unless she’s stuffing cash in her mattress.
“Hmm. Rosa looks clean.”
Chad rolls his chair back enough to look at me past the cube wall. “What?”
“Been checking up on the Melendez woman. Nothing’s out of place.”
“She might have other bank accounts under false names.”
I shrug at him. “Either that or she doesn’t have a whole lot of choice about what’s going on in her house.”
Chad’s eyebrows tilt up. “Nervous? I thought you were bored. It’ll be nice to get out of the office again… you know they love to borrow us because ‘HUD agents have nothing else to do.’”
“Ha!” I chuckle. “Not really nervous… more hoping if this woman’s as innocent as she appears to be, she doesn’t wind up catching a bullet.”
“Yeah.” Chad looks down. “Maybe we’ll luck out and these guys will see an army of feds and shit their pants.”
I glance sideways at the clock. Time to go. “Here’s hoping. Ready?”
“Yeah. You?”
“As ready as I guess I can be.” I lock the computer and grab my gear.
Chapter Five
Field Trip
I wind up driving this time, following a pair of black Chevy Suburbans and another ‘inconspicuous’ sedan like ours.
Chad fidgets at the straps holding his tactical vest on. Yes, it feels strange, rigid and tight, but I’m not one of those agents who bitches about having to put body armor on. Hell, I’m more uncomfortable at having my hair up. Nico’s fine with me leaving it down at the office, but it’ll only get in the way on a raid. Small price to pay.
Normally, they give us lighter bulletproof vests that we can wear under our clothes, but these are blue versions of what combat infantrymen wear. Heavy duty shit that can supposedly stop an assault rifle round. Maybe it’s less bothersome to me since I’m on the slender side. It sure seems to be bugging my partner.
Danny’s like that a bit with dress shirts. He loathes tight collars, the way they squeeze and rub his neck. His grandmother had a thing about ‘how boys should dress,’ so whenever they visited, he got stuck in a button-down and slacks. Kinda weird for a lawyer to hate dressy clothes, but at least he’s not stuck with the strangulation shirts (as he called them) his mother used to make him wear.
The blasé feeling I’d had toward this raid while in the office chips away with each passing mile. I can’t explain it, but some inner sense whispers at me that something’s not right. Chad has his game face on, as usual, while my knuckles whiten on the wheel. This is a new feeling, though I’m quite certain I’m not psychic. What am I saying? Psychics? That’s no more real than witchcraft. No… I’m letting my imagination run away with itself after that nonsense on the beach.
And at my sister’s house.
Deep breath in. Deep breath out.
Our caravan pulls off the expressway, headed for the outskirts of Palmdale. The area around Rosa’s house is pretty wide open, so the FBI has set up a rally point a few blocks away out of sight. After parking, we all gather up in the shadow of a huge, blue transport truck. Two men in black BDUs and bulletproof vests with yellow FBI markings hand us each a Colt M4 from a weapons rack in the truck, plus a nylon belt with two extra 30-round magazines.
Holy crap… what exactly are they expecting here?
I check my weapon, ensuring it’s got a round chambered and is on safe. We all had to go through range time with them, but this is the first time I’ve had one in the field for real. When we helped Denise comb the forest for that abducted girl, our standard sidearms had been plenty.
Chad takes his carbine and checks it over. In his hands, it looks small, almost like it wants to be an assault rifle when it grows up. For me, it’s about perfect. Well, as perfect as a killing machine can get. He slings it over his shoulder on the strap and walks across the street to where a striking man with short black hair and piercing blue eyes is facing a group. I do the same.
Five men and a woman in dark blue jumpsuits with vests and helmets stand at the front of the line, all in FBI markings. Another six men in DEA vests fill in behind them, along with two men in blue windbreakers and ball caps marked ICE. At the back of the crowd, a pair of men in all black have bolt-action rifles with scopes. Cripes. Snipers? Good thing I have a giant yellow FBI logo on my back and chest. (HUD isn’t issued military grade armor.) I hide my anxiety well and take a position beside Chad. It’s
hard not to think about Tammy and Anthony, and how they’re safe at Mary Lou’s house, unaware of the danger I’m about to hurl myself into.
I close my eyes and meditate on my training. Phantoms don’t exist. Eerie feelings don’t mean anything more than a manifestation of anxiety. Little kids sometimes have imaginary friends. Damn, please don’t let an ‘evil’ imaginary friend mean my daughter’s got real mental problems.
“Good afternoon everyone. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Special Agent William Martin. Our primary objective here is to serve an arrest warrant on Juan Manuel Villero, take him and any associates into custody, and have everyone walk away alive.”
Nods and murmurs of agreement come from the group.
“At this time, we believe that Mr. Villero and six other adults are in the residence.” Agent Martin gestures to his right, down the street. “Capriati and Walters, you’ll go in and set up on the north and south sides respectively. Once you’re emplaced, the rest of us will move in.”
The snipers nod.
I swallow the saliva gathering in my mouth and fold my arms in case my hands decide to start shaking. We’re all carrying weapons that can go straight through several houses in a row, especially these kinds of houses. I chant ‘check your target’ over and over in my mind. If I have to fire this M4, I need to be aware of what’s behind the suspect. This is the worst part, right before. Once we’re moving, I know my training will take over. Right here, thinking about everything that could go wrong, is when the nerves fray. In the heat of the moment, I’ll be fine.
Special Agent Martin proceeds to assign everyone to positions. Chad and I get the rear of the house, along with the rest of our HUD fellows. We’re going to head in along the road that runs behind the place and cover the backyard for runners.
The snipers jog off on foot, one cutting to the right between two houses. An FBI tech comes by and gets us all set up with earbuds and throat mics. Once we’re all on the same channel, we pile into one of the Suburbans and wait. Radio chatter from the snipers confirms they are in position about five minutes later; Capriati is up a power line tower 180 yards from the south face of the house and Walters is on the roof of a two-story building 210 yards north.