by A. E. Howe
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Eddie looked more nervous than usual, which was saying something. “I want you to know that things have worked out just the way I said. My cousin has been inviting me to his place, and they’re treating me like a regular since we took out the competition.”
The first tip he’d given me was on one of his cousin’s competitors in the drug business. He’d sold it to me as a way for him to make points with his family, which would provide him with the opportunity to learn more and feed me more information.
“That’s great. I’m really thrilled that I’ve been able to help you get back into your family’s good graces,” I said sarcastically. “Which reminds me. I saw your dad the other day.”
His eyes narrowed and a scowl came across his face. “Screw that. I got something for you.”
“Waiting.”
“Okay, I was at a party with my cousins and I heard them talking. They were saying they needed some security for Saturday night.”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“When was this party?”
“Thursday, no, Wednesday night.”
“And you’re just now telling me about this?”
“I’m using again.” He looked down at the grave in front of him. “I scored and got pretty messed up. But you’re missing the point.”
“What is the point? They need security. For what? A wedding? A concert? One of their drug dens?”
“No, see, they were talking about a shipment coming in from Tampa. So the security is for the hand-off.”
“Okay. Do you know where this hand-off is happening?”
“Yeah, I do, but you still don’t see.”
Okay, maybe I was being a little dense, but he was right. I didn’t see what he was driving at.
“When they say security, they mean a cop. One of the guys they got on payroll.”
I stood up straight, very interested now. Eddie had used the specter of bad cops and, more precisely, a bad deputy to pull me into this CI/investigator relationship. But until now he’d been cagy about putting me onto the bad cops. His family was one of the largest and oldest in the county, and they had relatives in Calhoun’s police department and one in ours, but he swore they were not the cops on the payroll. I knew that some parts of the family had nothing to do with other parts, so I was willing to keep an open mind.
“So you’re saying that at this hand-off they will have a dirty cop making sure things don’t go south.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said.” He gave me a look like I was stupid.
“Watch yourself. Now where is this going to take place?”
“No, look, this is an opportunity for you to see who the dirty cop is, but you can’t bust anybody. If you do that, they might be able to trace it back to me.”
“I’m good with that,” I said rather cruelly.
“Hey, that hurt. Remember I—”
“Yes, you saved my life when you texted my dad the location where the bad guy was holding me, blah, blah, blah. Which I really appreciate, by the way. And I also get that if we put them on alert, everyone will get paranoid and we could lose the opportunity to ferret out the other rotten apples.”
“Okay, you ain’t completely stupid.” I motioned like I was going to slug him and he dodged me. “Sorry, sorry, just kidding, cool it. Do we have an understanding?”
“Yes.”
“Say it, man.”
“I’ll just observe and not move in and make arrests.” I had to admit that he was probably right that the best thing to do was observe and take names. Finding the bad cops was my top priority. Well, actually, my top priority was finding the rotten deputy. For any number of reasons, I didn’t want a crook in our department. Not the least of which was to protect Dad. Any scandal in the sheriff’s office would reflect on him. With an election coming up next year, he didn’t need any bad news making its way to the papers.
“The deal is going down behind Jimmy’s 4x4 in the industrial park.”
I knew the area pretty well. The industrial park was on the west side of town near the interstate, just up the road from the AmMex Trucking Company.
“What time?”
“Ahhh, I’m a little fuzzy on that. I can’t remember exactly. I think it was like one or midnight.”
“You don’t know what time? Oh, I guess I can understand that, one sounds so much like midnight! Damn it, Eddie.”
“It was a party, there was a lot of noise, and they weren’t talking to me. ’Sides, I couldn’t ask them to repeat it, now could I?” he said.
From reading history, I knew that intelligence was seldom very intelligent. You had to take what you got and make the most sense out of it that you could. “Okay, Eddie, think. Are you sure that it was between midnight and one o’clock. Not later?”
He got a thoughtful expression on his face. “Yeah, pretty sure. And these guys aren’t going to be doing anything any later than two in the morning.”
Assuming that they weren’t complete idiots, he was probably right about that too. Eleven to one is the best time to be out on the streets since there are not a lot of people, but not so few that anyone driving around would draw attention. In a rural county like ours, after one o’clock in the morning, any car driving around stands out. There isn’t anything open, so if law enforcement sees a car they get interested. Around five, a few early birds get up and start heading to work and by then all the bad guys are burned out from the night before. Between one and five in the morning are the golden hours for catching drunks, burglars and other miscreants who are up to no good.
“Okay. I’ll check it out.”
“Hey, man, could you lend me a little?”
I gave him my what the hell expression.
“Seriously, I got to buy gas and stuff.”
I took out my wallet and gave him two twenties. “Don’t snort it, stick it in your arm or do anything else stupid with it.”
He looked properly chagrined. “No, I got to get straight again. Thanks,” he said, looking at the money like it was the best gift anyone had ever given him.
Damn it all, I always walked away feeling sorry for him.
After leaving the cemetery I made a quick swing by the industrial park, scoping out a good spot to hide and observe the action that night. Then I went back to the office, checked my email and worked on the files for the Kemper case. By two o’clock I’d managed to fill a plastic box with all the reports and evidence logs that the prosecutor had asked for. Another check of my email brought up a message from the company that made the phone we’d found near Tyler’s body. According to them, the phone had been bought at the Fast Mart on Jefferson Street on Tuesday. With luck, maybe they’d have a CCTV image of the killer. I grabbed my coat and headed for the door. A lot of these small stores had a system where the footage would be replaced with new footage every couple of days, so time could be important.
The Fast Mart was not the gold standard of quicky-marts. It was on the edge of one of the worst neighborhoods in Calhoun. A couple of fellows who’d been loitering out front shuffled off when they saw me drive up. As I entered the store, a bell over the doorway gave a clang that was meant to alert the clerk. It wasn’t needed. The young black man behind the counter was staring at the door, looking relieved to see me.
He peered past me out the front window. “You a cop?”
“Sheriff’s deputy.”
“Those guys gone?”
I backed up and looked outside. “They’re gone.”
“Damn it, they’re going to think I called you.”
“Is that a problem?”
He looked at me wide-eyed as he realized he’d said too much. “Ah, no.” He was visibly shaking.
I took a closer look at him. He was clearly not the tough guy you’d want working behind a counter in this part of town.
“You new to this area?”
“Man, I work for the owner at one of his stores in Tallahassee. He asked me to fill in over here fo
r a few days. But this shit is bad.”
“Those two guys were dealers,” I told him.
“I asked them to leave earlier and one of them showed me a knife and said that if I didn’t like working here, they could make sure I didn’t ever have to work in Calhoun again. He was serious! Damn it. The boss looked at me and thought I’d fit in over here. He’s crazy.” The young man, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, was pacing up and down behind the counter. “I’m from Naples, man.”
“You need to call your boss and tell him you’re out of your element over here,” I told him.
“Man, I don’t know. I can’t just run out on him.”
“Listen to me. I need to look at your security footage from a few nights ago. The store has CCTV, right?”
“That’s the only thing that works around here,” he said, still paying more attention to his dilemma than to me.
“You let me see that tape and I’ll fix things with your boss. At least I’ll get you out of here today. What you decide to do beyond that is up to you.”
“Okay, sure, it’s in the back,” he said without hesitation.
“Go lock the front door and then take me in back and show me where it is.”
Sure enough, the store had a pretty sophisticated recording and monitoring system set up. “It’s the same as the one we have at the store in Tallahassee,” the clerk said. “What day do you want to see?”
“Back it up to Tuesday.”
He showed me how the search function worked and how to play, rewind and fast-forward. I sent him back out front and went through the tape. Most of it I could watch at fast-forward. The pre-pay phones were on a rack in front and to the right of the cash register, so all I had to do was watch for someone reaching for one of the phones. They sold three of them. I was disappointed to see that the last one was bought by David Tyler on Tuesday morning. He used a mix of coins and bills to pay for it. Cleary this was not someone who had stolen a lot of money or drugs.
I called the clerk back and had him show me how to make a copy of the video. He had to use a thumb drive he got from his car, so I paid him for it.
“Do you want to go home?” I asked him.
“I’m going to get shot I if stay here. But how—”
I put my hand up and stopped him, then I called a friend of mine at the fire station. Great thing about fire stations is that there are always people hanging around. “I’m at the Fast Mart on Jefferson. Any chance one of you could come out and find some fire violations and shut it down for a day?” They were delighted to help.
“I’d suggest you explain to your boss that the color of your skin doesn’t indicate the type of people you’re used to dealing with.”
He looked like he was going to cry when he thanked me. Being a clerk at some of these stores was more dangerous than being a cop. At least we were armed and trained to deal with crooks and drug dealers.
Chapter Seven
I went home to feed Ivy, grab a bite for myself and decide what I was going to do that night. Going out to the industrial park without telling anyone would be stupid. But who could I tell, and how much should I tell them? Who was easy: Pete.
“Hey,” I said when he picked up the phone.
“It’s Saturday,” he groaned.
“Where’s Sarah?”
“How’d you know that she’s not here?”
“Because you weren’t looking for a diversion. If she was there you’d be thrilled that I called.”
“Ha, got me. She’s with her sister and the girls shopping. God save me from the holidays. I was just sitting here watching the TV and drinking my third beer. And you know what? No one told me it was my third beer. I have hours until the mall in Tallahassee closes. Heaven. But do I get left in peace? No, my partner has to call. So what do you want?”
“Something simple, nothing that will upset your evening of sloth and gluttony. I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to check out a hunch at the industrial park.”
“What’s out there? And why don’t you call dispatch and let them know?”
“My CI told me there might be something going down out there tonight. It may not be anything, so I want to keep it hush-hush.” I could almost hear the gears in his head working.
“You know if I hadn’t had a few beers, I’d insist on going out there with you?”
“I know that and if I thought I needed you, I’d have given you the heads-up earlier.”
“Wait a sec.” I heard him groan as he raised his bulk out of his recliner. “Okay now.” I knew he’d gotten a pen and paper to make notes. If something did happen, he didn’t want to rely on a fuzzy conversation that he had just before dozing off in front of the TV. Pete didn’t look like much of a cop, but once you scratched the surface you found a professional law enforcement officer who took his job a lot more seriously than some of the hotshot SWAT team heroes.
He tried one more time to talk me into getting some backup. I assured him that I’d have my radio and phone with me if I needed assistance in a hurry.
I packed a stakeout bag with PowerBars, water, binoculars and a flashlight. In my trunk there was a rifle and shotgun. I had my Glock and a couple extra magazines. I attached a rail light to my handgun. All of this seemed like overkill, but I wanted to be prepared. The possibility of facing drug dealers and bad cops called for some extra precautions. I also got my digital camera that had a pretty good lens and would take better pictures in low light than my phone could. I put on a couple layers of clothes, starting with a pair of flannel underwear. The temperature would be around freezing by midnight. I would have gone and checked out some infrared and night-vision surveillance equipment, but that would have involved filling out forms. We were a small department and that stuff was still expensive. I’d have had an easier time getting one of the department’s M4 machine guns than the expensive optics.
At ten-thirty I told Ivy I’d be back in four hours and left the house. Outside in the cold and the dark, I wondered if I was crazy to listen to Eddie. But he’d never told me anything that wasn’t true. At least, not anything that I could check. Now whether or not he’d heard his cousin correctly at a party when they were all a little high, that was a different question. I sighed. Doesn’t matter because I’m committed now, I thought as I got into my car.
I got there by eleven. There was no one in the front of the industrial park as I drove by. I turned around and came back. I didn’t dare drive back in the park and onto the circle where Jimmy’s 4x4 was. If someone was back there waiting and watching, it would be a dead giveaway. The only thing I could do was to put my car in the woods close to the entrance and see who came and went. Hopefully I would recognize any cop who was with them. I pretty much know every deputy and police officer in the county by sight. There are only about thirty-five deputies and a dozen police. The only thing that might have screwed it up was if I couldn’t recognize their car or see them through their windshield.
I backed my car in farther than I’d planned. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t seen. A dirt path allowed me to park far enough back in the woods that someone could pull partway up the path and still not see me in the dark. The downside was that I couldn’t see anything from inside my vehicle. I needed to be outside and lying on the ground closer to the entrance.
After parking, I took a green army blanket from my trunk and walked closer to the road. I found a small depression where I could lie down, cover myself with the blanket and be reasonably well concealed. As an extra measure of camouflage, I threw leaves and sticks on the blanket. They stuck well to the thick wool knap. By eleven-fifteen I was down on the ground and well hidden. That’s when the first ant bit me. Five minutes later I had shaken all the ants off me and managed to get resituated four feet to the right of my first position.
Midnight came and went. My neck was sore and I was just barely avoiding hypothermia. Just as I was trying to decide when I would give up, the first vehicle, an SUV, pulled into the industrial park. I’d gotten lucky b
ecause Industrial Drive was higher than the main road, so cars had to slow to make the approach. The county had also put in half a dozen streetlights at the entrance so I would get a pretty good look at the occupants of each car as they came in.
The SUV looked local, but I didn’t recognize anyone on the passenger side of the car. Even with the streetlights, the people on the driver’s side were hard to see. The second vehicle to arrive was an upscale crew cab truck. Its tinted windows didn’t allow me to see anyone, but I was guessing it was with the SUV. The buyers had shown up first, which made sense since it was their home ground.
I shifted a little to get the feeling back in my lower legs. Just as I resettled, I saw another car pull in. It didn’t go into the industrial park. Instead it turned around quickly and backed down the dirt path I was parked on. My heart was trying to pound its way through my chest as I watched the car get closer and closer to where I lay. I was frozen in place. I thought about running, but it was too late to get my car out. Abandoning my car didn’t strike me as a good option.
But who was this and how long was I going to be trapped here? What if the guy got out to answer the call of nature? Why would they park out here? The answer to that seemed obvious. They were the security. What better place to watch who came in and went out? If the deal started to go bad back at Jimmy’s, he could quickly pull out and block anyone from leaving. If I wasn’t such a dumbass, I would have thought of that ahead of time and been prepared for the very guy that I was looking for to park in the very spot that I’d singled out as the best place to maintain a lookout.
I had to get a grip on myself. Beating myself up over bad planning wasn’t going to help. The good news was that the deal must have been going down pretty soon since the home team had already taken the field. And the sooner this was over with, the sooner I could go someplace warm. I didn’t have to remind myself that I was there for a reason, but being trapped had altered my priorities a bit. And, unfortunately, when the car came in I was so startled trying to keep from being seen that I didn’t get a look at the driver.