North Harbor

by Kennedy Hudner

  Howard Honeycutt studied Finley carefully, as he always did when they met. He had run countless undercover agents over the years…and had lost his share of them. But while some of his agents were discovered by the drug cartels and killed, most were lost simply because of the pressure. The day-to-day, unyielding, relentless, pernicious risk of discovery that sucked the souls from their bodies and left them joyless, cringing shells.

  So now, sitting in a comfortable restaurant with a beautiful view, he studied Frank Finley for the subtle signs that the pressure of being undercover was grinding him down. If he saw it, then Honeycutt would have to make the hardest decision any Case Officer had to make: Do you jeopardize an operation by leaving a weak agent in place, knowing he might unravel at any moment, or do you jeopardize an operation by pulling the agent out, abandoning years of work? Honeycutt had made these decisions at different times, with varied outcomes. Still, he met with his agents whenever he could and studied them carefully.

  A young waitress came over and the men both ordered beers, then spent a minute with their menus. She thought the older man looked like someone’s nice old grandfather. Finally, orders taken, the men nodded to one another.

  “Is it working?” Finley asked with a touch of urgency.

  Honeycutt smiled. “Yes, I’d say it is.”

  “Finally!” Finley exclaimed.

  “We’ve been hammering I-95 going north, from Washington D.C. all the way to Lowell and Lawrence in Massachusetts.” Honeycutt smiled thinly. “Over the last eight weeks we’ve intercepted fifteen of their shipments, one of them two hundred pounds of Grade A heroin. We also arrested five handlers on one of their mule runs and seized three apartments they’ve been using as safe houses. Got maybe one hundred and fifty mules, forty trucks and some other vehicles. A very busy, productive two months.”

  These were major victories. The plan had been to disrupt the I-95 smuggling corridor from Florida all the way up to Massachusetts. This was the “Silk Road” the Sinaloa Cartel used to bring heroin, cocaine and fentanyl into northern New England. The drugs were brought by the Dominican gangs up to Massachusetts, then broken down to street level quantities, cut with something to stretch out the supply – fentanyl was preferred because it gave the user a quick, powerful high – and sold in the classic small glassine bags. The final leg of the distribution was usually done by motorcycle gangs or other local hoods. Several metric tons a year were smuggled into New England, most of it for consumption in New York and Massachusetts, but Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine were considered profit centers. Although there were fewer users, the Dominicans had a monopoly and charged as much as the market could bear. The volumes sold were relatively small, but the profit margin was huge. The big bosses in Sinaloa were happy, the Dominicans were happy, and the local biker gangs were happy. But the people in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire were dying from overdoses in unprecedented numbers. The problem was the heroin was so pure that it was easy to overdose on that alone. Fentanyl made it worse. Much worse. Fentanyl is fifty times more powerful than heroin, so just a little too much in the mix is enough to kill a user within seconds. There were incidents of police searching the cars of dope dealers and accidentally touching some spilled fentanyl. Just a touch to the skin was enough to render them unconscious. If their partner happened to be carrying a naloxone injector, they lived. If not…

  “So, any evidence that they’ve shifted their route?” Finley asked.

  “Hmmm, I think so, yes,” Honeycutt said. “Actually, you might already know about it. You’ve got a lobsterman missing up your way, correct?”

  Finley sat up straighter. “Yes, a guy named Mitchell. The Coast Guard found his boat burned to hell three days ago, with two bullet holes in the cockpit area.”

  “Well,” Honeycutt said gravely, “I can tell you that if you ever find his body, you’ll discover he was shot with a rifle. We don’t know the details, but our Confidential Informant tells us Mitchell somehow blundered into the middle of a big pickup offshore and may have actually tried to steal the drugs that were intended for someone else. We don’t have any details, but a fair guess is that whoever was supposed to pick up the drugs shot Mitchell and recovered the drugs, then set fire to his boat.”

  “Jesus,” Finley said. “It’s really happening. Two goddamn years of waiting and it’s finally happening.”

  Honeycutt knew three things governed – and limited – his law enforcement universe. First, the highway network in the United States was the largest, most complex of anywhere in the world. Second, the drug cartels had more money and resources than he did with which to conduct operations. Third, he could not inspect every car, truck and van coming into New England.

  What he needed, above all else, were spies. Informants. Snitches. He did not care much about their motives; anyone who called in with operational information was welcome. That led to arrests, and arrests could lead to turning someone within the Cartel itself.

  It had taken him years, but he had secured informants inside the roving motorcycle gangs that distributed the dope throughout northern New England. More importantly, he had one lone informant within the Dominican gang in Lowell, the Sons of Cristo Rey.

  Three years earlier, Honeycutt had conceived of the plan to pinch the Cartel’s land route for smuggling the drugs and force them to either bring in the dope by sea or by air. If they were brought in by air, Honeycutt had them covered. But if they brought them in by sea…well, that was more difficult. Rumors of corruption in small police departments on the Maine coast were rampant. Worse, it was very difficult to sneak a DEA agent into a local police department without anyone figuring it out.

  Then he had come across Frank Finley working on a vice team in Philadelphia. Married to a native of North Harbor, Finley was perfect. Honeycutt checked him out very thoroughly to make sure Finley was not himself on the take, subjecting him to a series of polygraph tests. But he came out clean. Spotless. Strings were pulled and Finley was hired as North Harbor’s newest police officer, over the strenuous objections of Chief Corcoran.

  “Do you think Corcoran is dirty?” Honeycutt asked. “And is he on to you?”

  Finley sipped his beer and thought about it. “He certainly doesn’t like me. But is he dirty?” He shrugged. “Yeah, I think he is, but it could be he’s just stealing money from the traffic tickets or blackmailing somebody he caught with a few ounces of weed. I dunno. I don’t have anything that would connect him to any big-time drug smuggling by the Cartel, but I’m pretty sure that Corcoran’s got something going on.” He told Honeycutt about taking Ralph Harkins by himself to the Portland PD, and Harkins’ warning that someone was gunning for him.

  Honeycutt pursed his lips. “You think Corcoran wanted Harkins to beat you up?”

  “Oh, yeah, that much for sure.”

  Honeycutt looked at him. “How did you handle Harkins? Did you have to rough him up?”

  Finley chuckled. “I fed him three McDonald’s Big Macs, fries and two milkshakes. Slept like a lamb.”

  Honeycutt laughed out loud, and mentally patted himself on the back once more for recruiting Finley. Then he sobered up. “Frank, take care of yourself. Keep your eyes open. And for God’s sake, be discreet. We’re close now. I don’t want to scare them off by showing our hand too early.”

  “I’m okay so far, but if anything happens to me, look at Corcoran first. Like if I have a car accident or accidentally shoot myself while cleaning my service piece. Stuff like that. Corcoran is a mean bastard. If he’s dirty and he finds out I really work for you, he’ll come after me.”

  “Keep your eyes open,” Honeycutt admonished him again. “Dead agents look bad on my annual performance review.”

  “Wouldn’t want that,” Finley said dryly. He sipped his beer. “What next?”

  “The few times we know they used boats, the Cartel used the ports of Tampico and Altamira, both on the Gulf of Mexico. They’re controlled by the Gulf Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel has an arrangement with them to h
ave the dope smuggled on board ships going to Canada.” He gestured, palms up. “Problem is our confidential informant is not well placed to learn about shipments by boat.” Honeycutt grimaced. “And we have to be careful working with the local Mexican authorities – too many leaks.”

  “When do you think they’ll get a ship up here?”

  Honeycutt shrugged. “I’m thinking it will take them a month to get a boat together and send it up to Saint John or somewhere like that. We’d like to get the transfer on film, if we can. I’ve got a LUNA drone at my disposal. It’s pretty sweet: daytime and nighttime surveillance and can stay up for eight hours.”

  Finley frowned. “How we going to do this?”

  “We’ll put suspected ships under surveillance on this end, as they approach Massachusetts, Honeycutt said. “And when they try to off-load the drugs, we’ll hunt them down and string them up by their balls.”

  Across the dining room, the waitress had been keeping an eye on the table in case either of them wanted something. As she watched, the older, grandfatherly man smiled at his dinner companion. It was a dreadful smile, cold and predatory. She shivered. Perhaps the grandfatherly man wasn’t so nice after all.

  Chapter 7

  Contemplating a Problem

  Wallace Moore sat at his desk in Mexico, surrounded by computer screens. The assault on his land route into northern New England continued and inventories in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire were running low. Not a crisis yet, but soon.

  Wallace had planned for this eventuality. He had an emergency stash hidden in the basement of a home outside of Portland, Maine. The home belonged to a retired couple who lived a quiet life, paid their taxes and kept a low profile. He had selected them from among his most trusted workers and bought them the house. Their job was to look normal, fit in, keep their mouths shut and protect the dope. In the basement was a fireproof vault with three hundred and twenty-five pounds of heroin, enough supply for a month for all of Maine and New Hampshire if it was cut properly.

  Time enough to figure out how to get more product shipped in.

  It was time for Plan B. There were four freighters leaving Altamira within the next two days, all headed for Canadian waters. The first ship out would be his “proof of concept” test. If it worked, all well and good. If not, then he would try Plan C.

  Wallace was a man who liked having a backup plan.

  Using a highly encrypted email, he carefully spelled out what he wanted the Dominicans to do and dispatched a messenger with the cash to cover their expenses.

  Then he called his facilitator and told him he needed access to an oceanographer.

  ______________

  Meanwhile, in Maine, Jean-Philippe LeBlanc was contemplating his problem: Jacob Finley, son of a North Harbor police officer.

  LeBlanc needed to either get rid of Jacob, or win him over. He could get rid of him by simply firing him, but if he did, he would lose access to whatever the kid might know – or could find out – about what his father was up to. Some key members of the North Harbor police were not getting paid off. They couldn’t be trusted and would eventually have to be either shielded from the drug smuggling activities or…removed. Frank Finley was just a patrolman, but he had been with the Philadelphia police and that meant he had more training than the other North Harbor cops, probably a lot more. And now he was investigating the disappearance of Henry Mitchell. Corcoran had a made a mistake there. Having Finley poke around could be a problem.

  “Jesus, just fire the kid,” Bruno Banderas said impatiently. “Or if you can’t fire him, kill him.” The Dominican gang member was on his third beer and LeBlanc’s moodiness offended him. There were simple solutions to simple problems. This was a simple problem.

  “We can’t just kill a cop’s son, for Christ’s sake,” LeBlanc said irritably.

  Banderas shrugged. “Sure we can. He’s a young man. Young men die from stupid things every day. He gets drunk, then tries to drive home and hits a tree. Or a drug overdose. Or he falls off your boat and drowns. Plenty of options.” He smiled like a cherub, happy at his work.

  LeBlanc shook his head. “Bruno,” he said patiently, “this isn’t Mexico. Anyway, I can use this kid; I’ve just got to figure out how to win him over without him knowing he’s being taken.”

  Banderas snorted. “For fuck’s sake, he’s a kid, right? What does every boy his age want? A little money, some drugs or booze to make him feel good, and a blowjob from a girl who is so hot he thought he’d never have a chance with her.”

  The two men looked at each other, then burst out laughing.

  “I can arrange that,” LeBlanc finally said.

  It was simple, when you thought about it.

  ______________

  The girl was Katie Montgomery, and she looked exotic. She had an English father and a mother whose ancestry traced to French Guyana. Katie got the best of both their genes. She was tall, slender and leggy, with silky dark hair that tumbled past her shoulders and begged to be touched. She had light brown skin that turned soft gold under the summer sun and her eyes were a bottomless brown. Her parents met while her mother was in school in Canada. Katie was born ten months later. For a while they were poor but happy, but then her mother died when Katie was seven, and her father took her home to Stonington, Maine.

  Her father, John Montgomery, was a dreamer. He dreamed of owning a fishing fleet, but the fact was he was a mediocre sailor and poor fisherman. While other skippers seemed to sense where the fish were and filled their nets, John always arrived too early or too late. The years came and went and he continued to barely scrape by. He borrowed money to pay his crew and the bank kept threatening to repossess his boat. John began to drink too much and one stormy night, as they returned to Stonington from a day of disappointing fishing, he put the boat up on a rock just outside the harbor entrance. He and his two-man crew scrambled into the life raft and made it to shore, but the boat was reduced to splinters. As were his dreams. After that, he turned to drink and lived on odd jobs.

  His daughter, who never recovered from the death of her mother, sought numbness. In small town Maine, numbness meant opioids, and there were plenty to choose from. Katie Montgomery paid for them while she had money, and when she was out of money, paid for them with sex. She was a pretty girl and men were attracted to her. And sex was just sex. She didn’t care, didn’t hurt her none. And she got what she needed.

  One day a hard-looking man knocked on her door and said to her, “I need you to do a little job for me. Nothing criminal, just taking care of a guy who’s lonesome. You do this, and I’ll give you enough White Lady you won’t have to worry about nuthin’ for three months. If the guy likes you and you stay with him, you’ll get supplied for free for as long as you treat him right. Sometimes this guy might look to you for a little advice, and if he does, then you tell him what I tell you to tell him, got it?”

  Katie Montgomery heard what the man said, but wasn’t sure she really understood. “What’s the matter with this guy, is he butt-ugly or something? Is he mean? Is he gonna beat on me?” She could take a little beating now and then and didn’t really care if he was ugly, but a girl had her pride, after all.

  The man laughed with real humor. “No, no, he’s not ugly and as far as I know he doesn’t get violent. He’s shy, is all. He’d never meet up with anyone as pretty as you because he’s shy around girls.”

  Katie mentally shrugged. One guy was pretty much like any other guy. They all liked to drink and fuck. “So, if I do this, can you get me some Dragon?” she asked, trying to sound casual, unaware of the voracious drug lust that was all over her face.”

  Jean-Philippe LeBlanc smiled inwardly. Everyone had a price. “Sure, we can do that,” he assured her. Dragon was just heroin mixed with fentanyl – he had access to kilos of the stuff.

  Katie Montgomery scrunched up her face. She still couldn’t believe this was all happening and that she was going to get her dope for free just for fucking some guy. Had to be a trick of s
ome sort.

  “So, what is it you want me to do, exactly?” she asked nervously.

  “Do?” LeBlanc replied. “Why, all you have to do is make this guy fall in love with you.”

  Katie felt a rush of relief. “That’s all?”

  Chapter 8

  The Poacher’s Children

  Two days later, as the men gathered by the dock for their daily assignments, LeBlanc took Jacob aside. “I’m moving you to the My Other Girl, starting today. Marc tells me you’ve been doing a good job on the inshore boats and it’s time you get some experience offshore as well. Okay?”

  My Other Girl was one of four boats in the LeBlanc clan that went out twenty to thirty miles off-shore and laid down “trawls” of twenty or more traps on a line a mile long. Each boat usually carried the captain and two sternsmen. It was punishingly hard work, but when the lobsters were migrating through the area, the catches could be huge and very profitable. The lobster boats that went that far out were usually larger, forty-two to fifty feet long.

  Jacob was stunned. He thought that only blood relatives of the LeBlancs ever got to go out on the highliners. It was a more prestigious, higher-paying job.

  “Yeah, sure,” he stammered. “Thanks, that’s great.”

  “You’ll get a percentage of the boat’s take, just like the other sternsmen,” LeBlanc told him, and gave him a figure. Jacob could hardly believe it. With that much money, he could finally buy the motorcycle he had been looking at.

  “Thanks, Mr. LeBlanc,” he gushed. “Thanks a lot.”

  “You’ve been working hard, Jacob,” Jean-Philippe told him, clapping him on the shoulder. “We take care of our own.”

  ______________