by Marc Rainer
She got out and walked back to her spot. She waved as he pulled away. He made the light at the intersection, and noticed in the mirror that another car had pulled to the curb behind him. Bootsy was getting in the car. He shook his head while dialing the phone.
"Dix? We need to pay the ME a visit."
Laredo, Texas
November 13, 2010, 11:56 p.m.
The broker saw the truck's lights coming down the road to his ranch house. It was followed, as usual, by a red Bronco.
The Rat trusts no one. He has to be hands-on about everything. The broker stepped out onto the porch of the house, and watched as the driver of the truck and another man jumped down from the cab and began unloading the bags of feed into the barn, to his left along the side of the house. A hog pen was just behind the barn down the road that separated it from the house, and the three big sows in the pen started snorting, already smelling the feed. The Bronco, as usual, pulled up in front of the house.
"Hello, my friend!" Ramón Dominguez appeared from the front of the Bronco. He walked to the porch, grinned and held his arms in a wide embrace as if approaching a long-lost brother.
"Ramón." The broker extended his hand, forcing a smile of his own. "How many this trip?"
"Ten pounds for your friend in your capital, and ten more for his friends in New York. The same as the last trip, as you requested. They are hidden in the usual location." Dominguez looked toward the barn, and saw that his men had finished unloading the bags of feed, the mask cargo for the trip across the border. He grinned again. "Between our special friend in your border patrol, and our special mix of feed, there was no problem in making the crossing at the checkpoints. Our friend waved us on through. Even if another guard had tried to detect something with his dog, all the dog could have smelled was the feed. There's enough smelly stuff in those bags to gag a skunk. I hope your hogs like their dinner."
"I hate those damned pigs, Ramón. They smell like shit, and just make more shit to make more stench. Can't we find another way to do this?"
Dominguez laughed, but shook his head. He slapped the broker on the arm. "It is the approved solution for now, my friend. We will consider something else if you can find another method as cheap and effective."
Cheap and effective for you. A stinking pain in the ass for me. The broker nodded. "I'll think about that. My man will leave tomorrow." He reached inside the doorway and pulled out a small duffle bag. "Here's the money from the last run. I deducted the expenses plus two-thousand a pound, as we agreed. I'll see you in about ten days."
Dominguez grabbed the bag and grinned again. "Make sure you do." He waved toward the men by the barn. They trotted over and got into the back seat of the Bronco. Dominguez started to get into the driver's seat, then stepped out again. He tossed the broker a set of keys. "You might need these," he said, laughing, "for the truck."
The broker nodded, and gave a half-hearted wave as the Bronco headed up the road toward the gate. What an asshole.
He took the cell phone out of the clip on his belt and pressed a contact icon.
"The truck ready?" the little man asked.
"Yeah. They just left. You'll need to stop at the warehouse and pick up a cover load on the way out—some more of those cheap leather coats or something. Just put some boxes on the truck and tie 'em down."
"On my way."
Waldorf, Maryland
November 15, 2010
Trask beat her home, so it was his job to feed the dogs. He opened a can of the expensive, healthy stuff Lynn always bought, mixed it with some just as expensive dry food that was supposed to be just as healthy, and measured the portions into two bowls.
Even if Nikki was half the size of Boo, she was always fed first since she was older and the alpha female of the pair. Trask put the smaller bowl into the stand in front of the smaller dog, gave her a pat on the head, then did the same with the large bowl and Boo. Once the dogs were eating, he crossed the den to the couch and turned on the television, flicking the remote buttons until he recognized the channel indicator for C-Span.
Good. I need to watch Heidelberg at work. Don't know why, just know that I do. Credence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" started playing in his head. Not-so-fortunate daughter, in this case, Fogerty.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was having another hearing on how much funding was appropriate for the war in Afghanistan. Trask mentally checked off the names of the majority members as he recognized the faces. Heidelberg of Texas, Chairman, Craig Funderburk of Colorado, Digger Graves of Georgia, Heidelberg's gofer and lapdog. I wonder when Digger last had an original thought of his own? John Clark Arthur of Oklahoma, Robert Tatum of Maryland, William Pope of Pennsylvania, Tom McWhorter of Alabama. Their opposition, Robert Anderson, the ranking minority member from Illinois, Scott Holland from Tennessee, Susan Sims Brockman from Maine, Chancellor Kirkland from Nebraska, Michael Baker Weilepp from North Carolina.
Trask watched as the hearings continued, with a couple of witnesses from the Pentagon fidgeting nervously as they waited for the senators to ask their "questions." Questions, hell. All I've heard is the usual round of sound-bite speeches tailored for the party bases back home. They don't really care about any answer, just their own face times before the cameras. Transparency may be a good idea in theory, but I bet they'd get more work done if they thought nobody was watching.
He heard the door close, and Lynn walked in, carrying some take-out fried chicken.
"Will this work for dinner? I just don't feel like cooking tonight." She turned toward the TV "C-SPAN? What's the plot?"
"I'm not sure. Thought I might see something, anything that might poke me in the head about Heidelberg's daughter."
"In a Senate hearing?"
"I know, another real long shot."
"And what have you discovered, watching the wheels of government grind something else into mush?"
"Absolutely nothing. They all hate their counterparts on the other side, or pretend to, and all love to hear themselves talk."
She paused and watched for a moment as Heidelberg and Anderson discussed some opaque point of senate procedure. "Those two are at least civil today."
"Yep. They seem to be the adults in the room for now. Should be, they've both been in the Senate since the earth cooled."
"Come eat this chicken before it gets cold. You can return to this thrilling serial after dinner."
"I've seen enough already. Nothing, to be exact."
Trask pushed the off button on the remote. Fade to black. Just like a junkie on her last trip.
Washington, D.C.
November 16, 2010, 9:38 a.m.
Assistant Medical Examiner Kathy Davis pointed to the arms on the corpse.
"Tracks. The toxicology report won't be back for another couple of days, but I know what my cause of death will be before I see it. I already wrote the report, and I know I won't have to change it. Opiate toxicity. Very probably a heroin overdose." She looked up at the others surrounding the table. "She's the fifth this month. I'm sorry I didn't think to call you, but I didn't see any connection between these hooker ODs and the senator's daughter."
"That's okay, Kathy," Trask said. "There may not be a connection. We're kind of grasping at straws here, and hoping."
"There's some really strong new junk on the street," Detective Gordon Hamilton looked at the body, shaking his head. "The junkies aren't used to anything this pure, and they're dropping all over the metro. This girl was new to town. I hadn't met her yet."
"Any personal effects sent over from the hospital, Kathy?" Tim Wisniewski examined the scars on the girl's arm as he asked the question.
"Just some cash—about forty bucks—probably her cut from the last two tricks of the evening." Davis retrieved a plastic bag from a nearby counter and handed it to Wisniewski. "Oh, and a cell phone. It's in here with the money."
Trask circled the body on the autopsy table. Just another dead junkie-hooker, except to her parents, or a sibling, or—God
forbid—a child. We'll be lucky to ever get a real ID on her. The body's just a shell now. Just evidence. Nobody's home anymore. Stay detached. Time to analyze now. We can ask a jury to sympathize later.
Trask gathered himself. "If we can identify the source of this poison—one pusher or a conspiracy group—we'll take it on the federal side. A conviction for distribution with death resulting from use of the stuff is a mandatory twenty years. If anyone in the chain of distribution down to the victims has a prior conviction on a drug felony, he gets mandatory life." He looked up at Dixon Carter. "Any of the other victims have cell phones on them, Dix?"
"One. Found in her hotel room. I stopped by the computer lab and picked up the file. The other three dropped while they were out on the streets soliciting. A free cell phone doesn't stay with a dead owner very long on the track."
Trask nodded. It's almost always 'the track.' 11th Street, K Street and New York Avenue. If you're out for a 'datef there's never a wait on the track.
"Let's have the computer guys crack all the phones open that we do have and dump the call history," he said. "Then get the files to Lynn and have her start looking at them. See if we can ID some common calls, in or out, someone other than the johns. Maybe a pimp's pushing the stuff to his stable, maybe the dope is outside the pimp's control."
"Probably the latter," Hamilton said. "No pimp is going to want to see half his girls dropping dead. Bad for cash flow."
"We'll put out some feelers to the guys in Maryland and Virginia, too," Wisniewski added. "Maybe they've picked up some phones we can throw on the pile."
"The more the better," Trask agreed. "Lynn's good with the phone programs. If there's anything in common, she'll see it."
Trask left the morgue, walked out into the sunlight, and climbed into the driver's seat of the Jeep for the drive back to his office. The lyrics hit his mind almost involuntarily.
Laid Back. Danish techno group. Early '80s. "f you want to ride, don't ride the white horse." Even the hookers usually know not to mess with heroin. Most of them are crack addicts. Coke can kill, but not as frequently as the 'horse.'"f you want to ride, then ride the white pony"Yeah, right. Coke starts safer, but then they have to have more and more to get high, and finally even more just to get back to normal. They turn to heroin because it eases the crashes between the highs. Some even end up 'speedballing'both drugs in the same syringe.
He pulled the Jeep into the underground parking garage, parked and started the short walk across the street to the FBI field office. The coke and crack users are used to doing half-grams, big fat lines. High-potency heroin is properly done in 'points,' or tenths of a gram. A new user can easily overdose on what looks like a fraction of her usual coke or crack hit.
Trask walked to the entries of one of the cubicles in the squad room and kissed Lynn on the back of the neck. She turned and smiled.
"Hi, babe!" She smiled up at him from her chair. "What's up?"
"Back from a cheery visit to the local morgue." Trask looked toward the squad supervisor's office. The door was shut, a sure sign that Supervisory Special Agent Barry Doroz was out.
"When does the Bear return to his lair?"
"Monday," Lynn said. "He's down in Texas at some kind of conference. Cartel stuff, I think."
"Who's in charge 'til he gets back?"
"Officially or actually?" she asked.
Trask didn't have time to sort that out.
"I'm the operational supervisor." The deep baritone of Dixon Carter boomed across the room as he and Wisniewski entered.
Trask smiled. Bear couldn't officially leave one of the TFOs in charge. They weren't full-fledged FBI agents. That hadn't stopped Doroz from telling the squad that Dixon Carter was actually running things, even if some baby fed had to sign off on something to make the paperwork pass muster.
"In that case, Dix, I have to ask you to approve the assignment I have for your squad analyst here. Running the phone analysis on our dead addicts."
"So be it." Carter waved his hand in the air, sprinkling imaginary holy water on an imaginary edict. "I'm surprised you need my approval for that, Jeff. Didn't she promise to love and obey and all that?"
"They seemed to have left that out of our vows," Lynn said. "At least I can't recall hearing that part. What about you, babe?" She turned to Trask. "You remember everything. Was that in there?"
"I don't remember anything about that day. I think I'd been drugged. The whole thing could be annulled anytime now."
"See?" Lynn turned back to Carter. "No witnesses, no vows."
"Here's your first stack," Carter said, dumping two inches of paper on her desk. "The phone dump on one overdose victim from the geeks in the computer lab. More to follow. Look for patterns in this one, then we'll see if anything similar pops up on the other vics' phones. We're looking for their dealer, not their pimps."
"Yes, boss," she said. She looked at Trask. "I didn't mean you."
"I know," he said. "The thought never entered my mind."
Ciudad Victoria
Tamaulipas, Mexico
November 22, 2010, 11:48 p.m.
The old man held the photo of his wife as he spoke to her. She had been dead for more than a decade, but he made it a practice to kiss her before retiring every night. Tonight, however, he knew there would be no sleep for him; at least there would probably be no sleep from which he would ever awake. He looked at the clock over the mantle, and saw that it would be soon chiming midnight.
"They will be coming soon, mi corazon. I will be joining you tonight, God willing. I hope you understand. They wanted me to give them our home, the hacienda we worked so hard to build, where we raised our children. I have not told the kids. Manuelito would surely want to stand with me, but he has a family of his own now, and I cannot let him make such a sacrifice. I will defend our land against these scum like the man you knew me to be. I will try to make you proud of me. With any luck, I can take a few of them with me. I love you."
He kissed the photograph and returned it to the mantle, positioning it so that she had a good view of the room. He turned out the last lamp, grabbed his rifle and waited.
The first bullets crashed through the windows just as the clock began to chime. A burst of automatic weapon fire interrupted the bells by smashing the old clock, making the midnight hour the last one that it would ever mark. The old man knelt behind an oak table he had positioned against the window for cover. He cradled the rifle as he had so many times before when shooting the coyotes on his ranch. He could make out some of the human varmints approaching the house in the moonlight. He took aim and fired, and smiled as the shadows began falling.
There are too many of them, my love. I am coming to be with you soon.
He felt a bullet slam into the top of his left shoulder. His left arm could no longer support the weight of the rifle. He dropped lower, resting the barrel on the window ledge. He saw another silhouette and fired again.
Washington, D.C.
November 24, 2010, 2:38 p.m.
Officer Thomas Thaggard McInnis of the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department looked around as his partner pulled the marked cruiser to the curb at the convenience store.
"Need anything, Sam?" his partner asked.
"Nah, I'm good for now," he said. "On second thought, maybe just a Diet Coke. Bottle."
He reached for his wallet, but she slapped his hand away from it.
"I gotcha."
"Okay, thanks."
While she went inside, he rotated the side view mirror and looked at his right eye. It was still black from the tussle he'd had with a perp the night before. Sam, he thought, shaking his head and smiling to himself as he looked in the mirror. Growing up, his first two initials had earned him the nickname "T-square" from friends in school. In the police academy, however, his flaming red hair, matching moustache, and Irish temper had combined to tag him "Yosemite Sam," after the cartoon character of the same name. He'd tried to fight off the moniker at first, but had eventually give
n up. The name had stuck, and he'd answered to "Sam" for over twenty years now.
"You're still beautiful. Quit preening." She was back in the car now, handing him the soda.
"Just checking the eye," he said. "I must be slowing down. That dude from the traffic stop last night really got in a good shot before you tased him."
"He was an asshole, and deserved every volt."
Officer Miranda Rhodes winked at him. Sam chuckled. His partnership with the rookie cop was running smoothly now. They knew each other's moves, the strengths that could be counted on, the weaknesses to protect. It hadn't started as smoothly. Sam's previous partner, a guy named Stewart, had quit the force to go into flipping houses. When his replacement turned up in the personage of Officer Rhodes, Sam had gone through every instant adverse reaction that could have been expected of a veteran cop used to working with other veteran cops. Other male veteran cops.
Randi, as she was known to her friends, was certainly not a male. A very pretty brunette of five-seven, she could only be thought of as a cop when in uniform. Out of uniform, she could have been a model, and Sam had caught himself lately thinking of her in some very out-of-uniform scenarios.
Gotta keep this professional, Sam told himself, shaking his head slightly. Randi had dispelled his initial misgivings in almost no time. She was a very capable cop, and her recent taser shot had not been the only time in the past year when she'd proven herself to be more than up to the job.
He valued their partnership now, really liked her, wanted to keep everything good. Hell, I'm fifteen years older than she is anyway, he thought. Old enough to be her daddy in some parts of the country. Don't know if I could survive her turning me down, anyway. We wouldn't be just partners anymore. We'd be the hot young cop and the oldfool who was stupid enough to make a play for her. I've stayed single this long. Might as well just maintain status quo. Don't mess up a good thing. He readjusted the mirror. Wonder if she's dating anybody at the moment. She never talks about it.