Allies

by Wolf Riedel

  Whitlock grabbed one more donut from the box and exited the car. Sage watched him for a minute as he got into his car and started the engine. She turned to Platt.

  “Time to discretely start canvassing the neighbors,” she said.

  Platt contemplated that for a minute.

  “Maybe we should hold off with that until we’ve been in the house,” he offered. “We could end up talking to someone who’ll try to tip the family off before we get a chance to search it.”

  Sage shook her head.

  “We need to move fast. There may be information that those people have about where we can find this guy. We can’t wait to do that until Ben has the warrant. That could be well over an hour.”

  “I didn’t say we should wait,” said Platt.

  Tuffy put his thumb in the breach of his rifle and looked down the bore finally satisfied with the clean light reflecting up from his thumbnail. When he had first sat down at the small kitchen table and removed the bolt, he had been shocked by the bore’s condition. He was sure that most of the crap that he’d found in there had been there before he had fired the first round. He had chastised himself for not having looked at it before first using it. In retrospect the damn thing could have blown up in his face. Yet another lesson learned.

  He closed up and put aside the bottle of Hoppe’s No. 9 bore cleaner that had come with the eight dollar cleaning kit he’d bought at Walmart on the way home. He’d also given the rifle’s bolt a good soaking in it and brushed the bolt’s face and extractor with the edge of a brass bore brush until the accumulated burnt cordite was gone. Even with the bottle closed, the dozen plus used, solvent-soaked, cleaning patches stunk up the whole house with their pungent petroleum and burnt powder odor.

  He fed a clean patch through the jag on the end of the cleaning rod, soaked it with a generous stream of lubricating oil from its squeeze bottle and then fed the rod into the rifle’s breach. The restricted opening of the chamber immediately squeezed most of the oil out of the patch where it ran into the rifle’s internal magazine and dripped on the table.

  “Shit!” he said aloud. He’d already cleaned out the magazine by opening its floor plate, now he’d have to do it again to get the oil out from around the magazine follower and its leaf spring.

  The curse was immediately followed by the sound by a key turning in the front door lock. Tuffy looked at the clock on the stove. Four-thirty. She’s a bit early today.

  “Hi!” she called from the door. “I’m home.” Tuffy heard her backpack hit the floor in the entryway with a thump.

  “You’re home early,” he called back.

  “Yeah. One of our instructors has the flu and our last class was canceled. Why is it when a woman gets sick she has a cold but when a man is sick he has the flu?”

  He knew she didn’t expect an answer and so he didn’t. She’d kicked off her shoes but he could still hear her bare feet as they padded across the living room to the kitchen.

  “What is that stench?” She took in the mess on the kitchen table with a glance and a crinkled nose. “Oh, yeah . . . How’d your day go?”

  “Not bad at all. This thing shoots pretty well and I think it will do the job without me having to get too close.” He again pushed the rod through the bore this time with a clean and lightly oiled patch. “I think by the time Meraz’s boys screw up again I’m not going to have any chance at all to get close to this guy.”

  “Any idea yet where you’re going to do this?”

  “Nah. I’ll take a cruise around tomorrow. I’ll have to do this somewhere along the road between his house and the airfield, I guess.” He shrugged his shoulders. “The other option is to do it from a boat offshore from his house.” He pulled the patch out of the jag, pulled the rod clear of the bore and put both the rod and rifle on the table. He tilted back the chair he was sitting on until its two front feet were well clear of the floor and he was leaning against the kitchen wall. Casually he interlocked his two hands behind his head before remembering that they were covered in solvent and oil. Shit! He thought but didn’t remove his hands.

  “Regardless of what I do I’m going to need a second set of eyes. If I’m going to do it on the road then I need a spotter that can follow him and let me know when he’s coming into the kill zone. If I’m going by boat I need a handler.” He shrugged again. “I think the boat thing’s a no starter. Anything around his house is too obvious and boats are too slow to get away in. I mean I could see if we could get a speedboat but that just gets too complex.”

  “Keep it simple,” she said.

  “You got it. Keep it simple. Take a shot. Leave the rifle. Walk away. That’s the way to go.”

  “It’s a nice rifle. Too bad you’re gonna leave it,” she said as she opened the fridge and took out a Diet Mountain Dew and popped the tab. “You want one? Or a beer?”

  He shook his head. “I’m good.” He started to disassemble the cleaning rod. “It might be a nice rifle but it’s only got one more shot in it for me. I’ll never use the same weapon at two different scenes. No way. That way they can track you from hit to hit. It’s like leaving puzzle pieces for the cops; give them enough pieces and they’ll solve the puzzle.”

  “So who will you use as a spotter? Who do you trust enough for that?”

  He looked at her. “You’re right to ask who do I trust enough. There’s really only one person.”

  She took a sip from her soda while waiting for him to tell her who he trusted when the light came on for her. “You mean me? You want me to be your spotter?”

  He nodded. “You’re doing well at school. You can probably afford to take a sick-day; a flu day.”

  She turned away from him and looked down the hall to the girl’s room. “How’s Amber doing?” she asked.

  Tuffy packed the cleaning rod and oil back into the cleaning kit. “I really don’t give a fuck,” he said.

  “That’s her, I think,” said Sage. Whitlock had returned and he and Sage were set up down the street from where Isabella was plodding along the cracked concrete sidewalk. Platt and his partner had headed downtown to set up and monitor the phone taps.

  The light was failing as the sun started to dip below the low bungalows that made up Isabella Juárez’s neighborhood but there was still enough light for them to recognize the diminutive woman as she made her way home from the HART No 7 bus stop on Howard Avenue to the small green clapboard three bedroom that was her home. Her weariness hung off her shoulders like a cape.

  Three children, one boy and two girls had been home for almost two hours having arrived a bare fifteen minutes after Platt had finished going through the house. Nothing had come up. The two girls shared a bedroom as did the two boys but Platt had concluded that it had been at least a week since Tuffy had lived there.

  They watched as the woman made the turn onto the walkway to her front door. Her head never came up.

  “Yeah. That’s her all right. Call for the patrol.”

  Whitlock took up the radio’s mic and called in. They’d prearranged for an on-call patrol to help secure the scene while they officially searched the premises and interviewed the family about Tuffy’s whereabouts. The car arrived within three minutes and the four of them went up to the house. The front door was sadly in need of fresh paint but otherwise, the property looked neat and clean. Whitlock stood to the left side of the door and gave a sharp backhanded rap that made the door vibrate. Sage, from her position to the door’s right kept a sharp lookout covering Whitlock. The two uniforms stood further out watching the windows, the corners of the house and up and down the street. The hands of each one of them on their respective holstered sidearms. This part of the neighborhood was not known for overt gang activity but it never hurt to be alert.

  “Mrs Juárez!” Whitlock called out. “It’s the police! We have a search warrant. Please open the door.”

  Sage heard movement and voices inside but no one appeared to let them in.

  “Mrs Whitlock. Please open the door,”
Sage called. Maybe a woman’s voice would help the situation.

  It did. The door slowly opened a crack and the worried face of the diminutive owner of the home peaked out from behind it.

  “Yes?”

  Sage took the lead.

  “Mrs Juárez. I’m detective Baumgartner and this is Detective Whitlock. We want to speak to you and your children and have a search warrant to search the house. Would you let us in please?” Sage held the warrant out in front of her to demonstrate her authority.

  The door opened no further.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Ma’am. Please let us in. We’ll explain everything once we’re inside. You don’t want to have your neighbors start to get nosy about what’s going on, do you?”

  Hesitantly the door opened enough for Sage to move through followed by Whitlock and one of the uniforms while the other positioned himself just inside the doorway where he could keep an eye on both the living room and the street outside.

  The house was neat and orderly; a front room that served as the living room with a TV, a couch and two chairs, walls adorned with religious paintings and artifacts. Beyond the living room sat the kitchen from which the aroma of a tomato-based sauce or stew permeated the house. The three children sat at the kitchen table with school books in front of them. One of the kids must have started supper, Sage thought. The mother hasn’t been in here long enough to do that. A glance to the right showed a hallway that presumably went to the bedrooms and bathroom of the house. Sage nodded to Whitlock who went to examine the other rooms while Sage asked the uniform to bring the kids into the living room and to have one of them turn off the stove.

  By the time the children were assembled, Whitlock returned and declared the house cleared.

  “Mrs Juárez,” said Sage. “I want to ask you and the children some questions about your son Antonio but I want to question you one at a time so I’m going to have this officer here take your three children to wait in another room. Is that all right?”

  Juárez looked meek and cowed. She’d come home tired and hungry after a hard day’s work and wasn’t mentally prepared for this invasion of her home by four armed people. She shrugged her consent and watched as the uniform ushered the kids down the hallway. Sage nodded to Whitlock who commenced a cursory walk through the house poking into all the obvious hiding areas and anywhere else where information as to Tuffy’s whereabouts could be found.

  “Mrs Juárez!” Sage drew the woman’s attention back to her and away from her disappeared children and Whitlock’s intrusion into her family’s privacy. “Ma’am. Did you know that Antonio has stopped going to school?”

  There was a glimmer in the woman’s eyes. Surprise? Acknowledgment?

  “Not for sure,” she said. “I knew he had found work but I thought he was still going to school part-time. He’s a very smart boy and knows I want him to finish his education.”

  “Education is important to you,” said Sage, not as a question but a statement nodding in the direction of the book covered kitchen table.

  “Yes,” she replied with a hint of pride. “All of my children do well in school.”

  “But you’re not sure that Antonio is still going to school?” Sage faked a perplexed look on her face. She knew that the likelihood that Tuffy still lived here full-time was slight from Platt’s search but she wasn’t about to put that knowledge out there overtly. She’d lead the mother to come out with it.

  “No I’m not.”

  “Why is that?”

  “He doesn’t live here very much anymore.”

  Sage would come back to that.

  “You think that he’s working now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where does he work?”

  The only reply was a shrug.

  “You don’t know where he works?”

  A shake of the head.

  “Then how can you be sure he’s working?”

  “He’s told me he’s working and brings home money to help out with his brothers and sisters.”

  “How much?”

  “Not so much. He comes by every few weeks with a few hundred dollars. It’s not so much but it helps.”

  “Where is he living now?”

  Another shrug.

  “You must have some idea.”

  “No I do not,” she said adamantly. “I’ve been told that he has a girlfriend but that she’s not a latina. He has never told me about her and I do not ask.”

  Sage watched the woman’s eyes closely. She sensed instinctively that she was being fed a line of bullshit but expected that there wouldn’t be much given out voluntarily here.

  CHAPTER 55

  AFOSI Det 340, Tampa AFB, Florida

  Wednesday 21 Mar 07 2328 hrs EDT

  Sal watched the activity around him. This was not his show. He was merely here as a guest of the Air Force; of AFOSI to be specific. Tonight this would be their show: Air Force crook, Air Force cops. His role was to be a liaison on behalf of the concurrent army operation going on across the bay and the TPD op a few miles north of here.

  He’d gotten text messages from each of Mark and Sage that their respective teams were in position and ready to go. Platt and Sage were assisting a single AFOSI agent in seizing and freezing Silvera’s house in Tampa until such time as the rest of the AFOSI agents were free from arresting Silvera and searching the hangar at the airfield. AFOSI was too light on the ground to carry off both tasks concurrently. Mark was leading a CID op to execute a search warrant on Cabello’s house with liaison from St. Pete’s PD and one from TPD’s gangs and guns unit. Their job had become more interesting when word came down that Cabello’s wife had picked him up at the hospital half an of hour before. By then it had been too late to change the timings.

  Sal caught Hurley’s questioning eyes.

  “They set to go?” asked Hurley.

  Sal gave him a thumbs up.

  They had staged inside AFOSI’s offices with three vehicles outside and ready to go on the short drive to the 6th MXS’s hangar. While it was an easy walk, the cars would give them the ability to swoop down suddenly without risk of exposure and would provide them with immediate vehicular support. They already had observation on the shop by way of the various cameras and microphones planted earlier. Silvera was there; alone and hard at work.

  Hurley turned to the other four AFOSI agents. There’d be six of them in total on this arrest. They were already geared up in tan slacks, dark blue windbreakers and black armored vests; their SIG Sauer M11’s strapped to their thighs. Their Kevlar helmets and stubby MP5Ks sat on a table near the door. Sal himself was similarly dressed but carrying an M4 carbine. No one expected trouble but everyone wanted to be prepared for it.

  “Okay,” said Hurley. “You know what to do. Let’s get her done and be careful out there.”

  Mark’s plan looked like it had gone to hell in a handbasket when, just over an hour earlier, word had come down from Lucky—who, together with Sergeant Terry King, was on surveillance of the Cabello house—that Mrs Cabello had received a call from Bayfront hospital that her husband was being discharged and that she could come and pick him up. Five minutes later she was on the road.

  When he had received that call, Mark, together with Ingrim and DiAngelo, had been at Tampa PD HQ picking up their liaison from the TPD’s gangs and guns unit. Mark had weighed their options but there had been nothing for it but to go forward with the scheduled link up in a Publix parking lot at the corner of 9th and 83rd with four patrol officers from the St Pete’s PD. Here Mark had held everyone up waiting for further word that Cabello and his wife were back in the house.

  Cabello’s wife had taken just under an hour to make the sixteen-mile, city-traffic round trip to the hospital and to negotiate the maze of the hospital’s discharge department. The wait had been excruciating for Mark who had been concerned that the Cabellos would pull a bolter. But, with twelve minutes to spare, word of the Cabellos return to the house had come and Mark had immediately
moved everyone forward to the final staging area to wait out the last few minutes.

  Mark looked at his watch as he counted down the time.

  They were staged in the parking lot of the Shores Acres Elementary School just a little over a quarter mile from their target. King and Lucky were still in the surveillance house just down the street from Cabello. King would join them when the rest of the team drove up to the house while Lucky would stay in the house monitoring the surveillance equipment.

  The amber lighting of the parking lot was cut by the shadows of a stand of Live oaks between the lot and the road into the Tanglewood community. The plan would have the four CID agent’s do the entry armed with M4s. The civilian cops would cover the perimeter with their shotguns until the scene was secure.

  DiAngelo, leaning against the door of one of the team’s SUVs, looked across at Ingrim as he ground out a cigarette on the pavement.

  “You good to go tonight?” he asked.

  “Shit yeah. Let’s get this mother on.”

  “I mean with that big hole that got punched in your ass you’d think you’d be taking a month off and looking for a disability pension.”

  “ It was my hip, dipshit. Not my ass.”

  It hadn’t been a big hole either. Ingrim had spent a total of three hours at the hospital and been released to go back to work. Nonetheless, regardless of how minor the graze might have been, it was located just enough around the back side of his hip to make him the butt of every butt joke imaginable at the detachment.

  Mark shook his head and looked at his watch again: twenty-three twenty-nine.

  “Okay, guys,” he said. “One minute. Saddle up. Let’s move out.”

  Sun Bay South formed a neighborhood of fifteen thousand people nestled just north of MacDill Airfield on the western side of the South Tampa peninsula. It was predominantly white, predominantly employed with a median income that exceeded Tampa’s average and predominantly made up of older single family bungalows. Of its seven thousand households, over a third were made up of individuals living alone. Technical Sergeant Malita Silvera was one of those. But not for long. AFOSI had determined that Malita was on the move. She’d bought a new house on the other side of Old Tampa Bay in the community of Venetian Isles. The house was in escrow which was anticipated to close in two weeks. Her house here, on West Wyoming, had been sold for two-hundred and twenty thousand almost all of which would go to paying off the existing mortgage. The new house in Venetian Isles had been bought for four-fifty and so far there was no indication whether Malita would be taking out a mortgage or not. She was definitely moving up in the world.