The Blue Garou (Detective 'Cadillac' Holland Series Book 1)

by H Hiller

  “I can use this to catch Cisco organizing a dog fight. That is a major felony and catching him in the act will give me a lot to bargain with when I ask him to explain his role in Biggie’s murder.”

  “You’re sure he had a part in that.” Jerry had apparently agreed to this arrangement because he hoped I would come up empty and decide that I was on a wild goose chase.

  ”At the very least he had to be the one who switched the dogs and wrapped the cage. Let’s just assume he was also the guy who didn’t latch the cage so the dog could get free.”

  “I don’t think he even knew Biggie before his cousin bought the dog.”

  “Tyshika certainly did,” I had to remind him. “But I don’t think she was the one who put Cisco up to this.”

  “Then who did?”

  “I’ll get to ask him after the dog fight.” I transferred the paper scraps into an evidence bag and labeled it with a Sharpie. “I know this is going to be hard for you, but you cannot let him know we are aware of this dog fight or that I was even here tonight.”

  “I think I just got sick anyway. I may stay home for a few days.”

  I was sure that catching Cisco in the act of sponsoring the dog fight would make the dog trainer a lot more agreeable about discussing a plea deal on any other charges I might throw at him in exchange for a better explanation of the details of Biggies murder. Cisco didn’t strike me as the sort who would take anyone’s rap but his own.

  I also believed that being ahead of the curve on the dog fight would allow for a much more successful raid, and the possibility of making solid arrests of suspects besides the slowest running spectators.

  TWENTY TWO

  “Whataya got?”

  It was approaching midnight but Avery somehow knew I was calling to make a report about what I had learned at the kennel.

  “How would you like to bust a dog fight? I think I have a solid lead that the kennel’s dog trainer is behind organized fights and has one scheduled for next weekend.”

  “That’s not really part of your case, is it? Don’t tell me you’ve now set out to save every dog in Louisiana.”

  “I’ll bet I can get a lot more out of Cisco if he’s facing felony dog fighting charges rather than just my suspicion of his involvement in Biggie's murder.”

  “Alright, what do you need from me?”

  “Who should I call with the tip?”

  “That would be Candice Martin with the LA/SPCA.”

  The relief in his voice was almost comical. He’s tired of reminding the NOPD detectives that I am a useful part of the department when he provides me with resources or personnel. At least this time the person I needed was not NOPD. He gave me a telephone number in Baton Rouge and hung up.

  Candice Martin was ecstatic with my call the next morning and insisted on driving to meet me for lunch in New Orleans. She was reluctant to discuss any details over the phone but agreed to a burger at Port of Call on Esplanade when I offered to pay. The place is famous for its huge burgers and equally large baked potatoes. I arrived early to be sure our name was high on the lunch time waiting list. I was still admiring the place’s vaguely Tiki-bar interior when Candice came through the door.

  She was in her late twenties, about five foot six and was obviously on some sort of exercise regimen. She had dark hair pulled into a ponytail. She also wore a simple gold wedding band with no diamond that might get knocked loose in her line of work. She must have spoken with Avery as she seemed to know exactly who to look for when she arrived.

  “How long on the table?” She shook my hand and ordered a beer from the bartender. I was about to answer when the hostess stepped up and led us to a corner table in the far dining room, next to a large bay window looking out on the Marigny neighborhood.

  “Your chief said you might be a bit of a wild card but that you could be trusted. Are you sure about the dog fight?”

  “I have an actual invitation. I know the exact date, time, and place. I believe it’s being organized by the same crew as the one you raided a couple of days ago. I figure this fight must be to make up for that one.”

  She did not concur. She seemed to doubt what I was saying was even true. “Are you sure of the source? We get lots of false leads meant to distract us.”

  “Positive,” I said as the waitress came and took our orders, hers for a regular cheeseburger and mine for a bacon cheeseburger. We both ordered fresh beers as well.

  “Tell me what you have,” she said as soon as the waitress was out of earshot. The nearest table was too engrossed in their own conversation to listen to anything we were discussing.

  “There is a dog fight scheduled for the day after tomorrow just west of Houma.”

  I showed her a photocopy of the reconstructed invitation and this seemed to convince her that my information was worth pursuing. I also handed her an aerial photograph I had pulled off of Google Earth of the coordinates on the invitation. She folded both pieces of paper and placed them into her shirt pocket.

  “Avery says to just ask if there anything you need from NOPD on this.”

  “There’s not. I try to hold information like this to a core group. I have a tactical team and a special squad I can call up from the State Patrol. We work together all the time.”

  “You’ve had leaks.”

  Blood sports like cock fighting and dog fighting have remained popular in the Deep South despite becoming under fire from new legislation and laws with stiff penalties. Recent legislation against cock fighting in Louisiana placed a ban only on bringing fighting birds across the state line to compete, making it harder to stage fights for high stakes. Dog fighting has become a Federal offense in my own lifetime, but public sentiment has only recently favored strong prosecution of participants as well as organizers. The conviction of an NFL quarterback on dog-fighting charges increased public awareness and increased its unpopularity.

  The result has been that dog fighters have become an increasingly insular group. The participants go to elaborate means to conceal their activities and involvement, and these devoted fans include police officers at local and state levels and even judges who might preside over cases involving other participants.

  “Your information will give us the chance to put our people in place before they even set up. We usually have to raid the site from the outside but they already have escape routes set up and we only round up stragglers. They also tend to rotate between the same sites.”

  “Are you familiar with this site then?”

  “There are a number of sites in that area. I will cross reference what you gave me with the ones we know about. I doubt it will be a new one.”

  “Somehow that is not real comforting.”

  The waitress returned with our lunch and we ate the massive grilled burgers and steaming potatoes in reverent silence. Our conversation shifted from work to the traditional Louisiana table conversation about other meals. Louisianans sit at lunch and discuss where we had breakfast and where and what we will have for supper. I invited Candice to the bistro for dinner the next time she and her husband were in town, and she was delighted to accept.

  “Why are you still working as a cop if you own such a great restaurant?”

  “My name is on it just for the liquor license and because I live upstairs. It does make for handy room service.”

  We were through with lunch and I reached for the ticket, but Candice snagged it first. “It’s the least I can do for what you have brought us.”

  “We’d have eaten at Galatoire’s had I known you were going to be so grateful.”

  TWENTY THREE

  Candice agreed to allow me to join her raiding party because of my interest in being sure that Cisco was arrested on the spot. I offered to handle over-watch, which would mean hiding in a tree and relaying information about the fight to the raiding party. It might also involve doubling as a sniper if Candice’s officers met armed resistance. It had been years since I had handled these duties, but I still had the tools of the trade and
actually looked forward to getting to relive what I still think of as my glory days.

  I keep a number of hunting and assault-type weapons in a gun cabinet in my apartment, but the most lethal parts of my personal arsenal is stored at The Security Center. The Center is actually the former Federal Reserve building located in the Central Business District and offers security and anonymity similar to a Swiss bank. Tony and I are more interested in the heavy security for what we have stored than we are in being able to do so anonymously. The massive safe which once stored the government’s gold is now lined with numbered safety deposit boxes but our personal safes are actually in a locked room on an upper floor as our needs have long exceeded the confines of a simple safety deposit box.

  I store a dozen long rifles, primarily licensed Class 3 automatic and suppressed weapons, and a number of handguns in my personal locker. I have lost my appetite for the barely restrained violence my former choice of professions required, but I do still love the feel of a firearm in my hand and work to maintain my marksmanship.

  The rifle I selected that morning was a .45 caliber clip-fed automatic rifle in a bull pup design manufactured by Kriss. There was a suppresser for it but I wanted the confusion firing it from high above the dog fight could cause. Candice agreed with my plan to destroy the engine blocks of any vehicles present in order to make flight difficult for the dog owners and their guests. I packed the rifle into a hard case and loaded ammo and anything else I thought might be useful into a rucksack and headed back to the bistro for a bit of brunch before leaving to meet Candice’s team at the McDonald’s in Raceland.

  Candice’s hand-picked raid team had already assembled by the time I arrived. Our idea was to use the knowledge of the precise location of the dog fight to our advantage to situate the raid team well ahead of the arrival of any spotters and the evening’s participants. Candice brought a dozen LA/SPCA officers and six State Troopers to the assembly point. I had worked with two of these State Troopers when NOPD was still using any borrowed law enforcement it could find to supplement its ranks.

  The weather forecast was for a hot afternoon with clear skies for the rest of the day and night. The bugs and mosquitoes were fairly light, and Deep Woods OFF would hopefully keep them at bay. We were all aware of the larger predators we might encounter in the swamps in this area, ranging from alligators and snakes to bears and boars.

  The site we were staking out had been an illegal garbage dump at one time, with a single dirt track leading off of State Highway 182 south and west of Houma flanking Bayou Black. This particular location was just over the ridge of a set of railroad tracks set seven feet above the surrounding ground level that doubled as a surge levee in stormy weather.

  Candice’s plan was to place blocking vehicles fifty yards in either direction atop the levee, pulled down among the trees on the marsh side. Four of the SPCA agents and I would mount video cameras in the trees. They were set for remote operation and one of my jobs was to start recording as soon as the first dog fight began. We split up and staggered our arrival at the site over the next two hours, to avoid raising suspicions about a convoy of official looking vehicles in the area.

  The drivers used branches to sweep over their tire tracks once they had driven down the rail bed and found a place to pull down into the foliage. They further camouflaged their four wheel drive vehicles with loose brush before joining the agents and troopers who would be the blocking force at the highway for a last briefing. The officers and state troopers were divided into four teams, two on either side of the road as it came over the levee barely fifty yards from the clearing where we assumed the dogfight would be set up. The teams would move closer once the sun had set, with the object being to position themselves between any lookouts and the dogfight. The squad members were each equipped with a high powered spotlight and a semi-automatic AR-15 style carbine equipped with laser sights. You have to be especially stupid to pull a weapon on a trained police officer holding a laser dot on your chest with a gun holding enough ammunition to cut you in two, but some people are.

  Candice and a trooper parked half a mile away in an unmarked pickup truck. They had a line of sight on the turnoff the participants would have to use to get over the tracks, but were tucked back into a junk yard with a spotting scope. They would contact the local authorities just ahead of the raid, and use this backup to help block the road headed either direction from the scene. Candice told me she occasionally suspected the local authorities of some parishes of tipping off the organizers about her raids, so now she simply distrusted them all.

  I was in cell phone contact with Candice from my perch in a cypress tree at the edge of the clearing below. I sat camouflaged in a mesh Gilly suit decorated with Spanish moss and had my carbine across my lap. I had placed a flash suppressor, instead of a sound suppressor, on the barrel because I wanted the sound of the gunshots to add to the level of confusion we wanted to create among the surprised dogfighters but not at the expense of giving away my own location.

  A late model Chevy pickup truck came over the levee just after four o'clock and two middle aged men in jeans and T-shirts looked around for a few minutes and then stopped atop the levee on their way back to the highway. They looked both ways down the railroad tracks and then headed off to wherever they had come from. I texted the plate number to Candice. There was a valid fear that police scanners might be used to trip up raiding parties such as ours, so radioing the plate to her could have blown this operation before it even started.

  I had personally arranged a surveillance team of state troopers from the headquarters unit in Metarie to watch Cisco’s house and received a text message from these officers that dogs were being loaded into a pickup truck shortly after seven o'clock. They followed Cisco at a greater than usual distance as his truck made its way across the Causeway, west on I-10 to I-310 leading towards Houma, and then west on US 90. I had them break off pursuit once they reached Paradis and the truck turned to take a narrow two lane road towards Houma instead of the faster four-lane. This would add a minimum of a half hour to their driving time to our location over using the main roads, but their route would have exposed anyone tailing behind Cisco’s truck. The deputies were well out of their district by now and turned around to go back to their normal patrol duties. Candice and I had the advantage of knowing the vehicle’s assumed final destination, so letting our surveillance team head for home was not likely to be a risky decision.

  The sun set just before eight o’clock and the last vehicle arrived at the location an hour or so later. There were twenty cars and trucks, each with two or three occupants. The transports parked at one end of the clearing and the patrons parked where they could find a spot. The transports parked facing forward, and it was their head lights which would illuminate the dog fights. Some of the handlers erected a sturdy wire enclosure about five foot high for the fighting ring. I ran the video cameras for a few minutes to have evidence against those directly involved in organizing the dog fight. Cisco and one of his passengers set about erecting massive loudspeakers atop his truck and the distinct thumping of hip-hop music soon filled my ears. I aimed at the engine block of that truck for my first shot, hoping it would be enough to stop the horrible sound.

  The activity began to come to a head and I used the remote control to activate each camera for the last time. I had noticed an immediate change in the level of aggression in the fighting dogs once the music began to play. I recalled that there had been a CD with demos in Biggie Charles' Land Rover. It now occurred to me that using the CD may have set Taz in motion, since it was likely to have been a fighting dog like the other aggressive canines below me. Two of the dogs, a Rottweiler from Omega Dog and a Doberman Pincher held by a tall white guy in jeans and a Saints T-shirt were set in the arena. The music stopped in mid-song and a new piece of music started, which immediately drove the dogs upon one another. The dogs around the arena strained harder at their chains as well. I don't keep up on hip-hop music but had certainly never heard this son
g before. I could make out none of the lyrics, but there was a very compelling beat to the music itself. The Rottweiler took barely five minutes to dispatch the taller, but lighter, opponent. The losing dog owner stepped into the cage to retrieve the bloody mess that had been his dog and tossed the carcass into the water at the edge of the bayou. I could hear, but luckily not see, the sound of an alligator dragging the evidence away.

  One dog fight was all we needed for a case, and all I had the stomach for. I now had a fuller understanding of what Biggie's last moments must have been like. He would not have gotten a shot off if he had been holding a gun in his hand at the moment Taz tore out of the cage. I called Candice and waited for the four flashes of light from each group in the woods to mark their position, before pressing the compact assault rifle to my shoulder.

  The first round of metal jacketed ammunition tore through the radiator of Cisco’s Ford pickup and into its engine block, but it took a second round to its battery to stop the music. I placed rounds into the remaining transport vehicles in the next ten seconds, a pace slow enough to immobilize them while causing the desired amount of confusion. The sound from my weapon was soon drowned out by the angry and confused voices below. The spacing between shots also kept any of the group below from getting a clear picture of where I was firing from. I succeeded in creating a level of pandemonium that disrupted whatever normal routine Cisco and the other dog handlers had for escaping.

  The agents in the tree line turned on their floodlights and blinded the gathering while the squad parked down the levee roared forward to block the exit road about the time the spectators realized that what was happening was not part of the evening’s entertainment. The gathering below me faced two choices at this point: surrender or make a break for it through the swamp in the dark. Dark is when the alligators come out to feed, like the one that had chomped the evidence, and there were plenty out there waiting for a meal.