Street Justice (9 page)

              “So you might want to find a few street guys and work up through them. Adrian, once you develop some direction and have a few avenues identified, you’ll need to run down the money. Make no mistake, we’re not here for street level punks. That’s the DEA’s side of this assignment. If you get something on some street level, feel free to turn that over to the DEA, or don’t, I don’t care. We’re looking for the big fish, the guy or guys that organize and run the organization.”

              Just then Sam’s door banged back open without a knock, Agent Baskin stomped into Sam’s office, threw a thick file on Sam’s desk and marched back out, slamming the door behind her. She had not said a word. The three men sat in the sudden quiet as the slam of the door faded. Sam broke the silence, “I hope I got the blame placed squarely on Steve.” Sam smiled as he said it. It was not that Sam did not understand why the agents were upset, or that he did not agree with them, but he had also been in the bureau and his present role long enough to know this would blow over and needed to be done.

              “I think there will be plenty of blame to go around for the next few days and weeks,” Steve offered back, “But I think the best thing we can do right now is make some headway and do it quick.”

              “Then get going,” Sam said, waving at the file on his desk, “If you have any questions feel free to ask.” With that, the meeting was over. Steve stood and left, followed closely by Adrian who paused momentarily to grab the file. On the way back to Adrian’s desk, he glanced through the file.

              When back at Adrian’s desk, Steve asked, “So how close are they.”

              “There isn’t much in here except some surveillance. No analysis to form the pieces and definitely none of the pieces put together,” Adrian concluded. “They were not about to break this one open, unless there is something missing from the file.”

              “So Sam was right to pull them and put us on this,” Steve responded.

              “I think so. Hey, by the way, thank you for what you did in Sam’s office,” Adrian started, trying to form the words he wanted to say without being over dramatic. He wanted to give a cool guy thank you but since he was not a cool guy, that was tough.

              Adrian saved him, “Thank you for what? I just spoke my mind.” Steve gave Adrian a wink, “Now, let’s figure out our plan of attack.”

              “It is nice to be home,” Russ commented.

              “It’s not a hundred degrees and I don’t have sand everywhere,” Mario chimed in, “Good to be back. Thank you for letting me crash here while I figure out what I’m doing.”

              “Hey, mi casa es su casa,” Russ responded. The two men sat in Russ’ house. Russ’ house was a rundown rambler in Shoreline. The front door opened directly into a living room which led back to the kitchen. Off the kitchen a doorway to the left led to a carport converted to a bedroom and a laundry room. A doorway on the right in the living room led to a small hallway off which was Russ’ bedroom and the bathroom. The furniture was all second hand with the living room containing a couch of an odd brown and tan pattern, a worn green recliner next to the couch, a wood coffee table that was covered in scratches and scrapes of many years of hard use and an LCD TV against the wall that was most likely worth more than all of the rest of the furnishings put together. There was a lone computer print out, from some low end inkjet printer, of a large breasted woman lathering up a sports car, taped to the wall as the only wall decoration.

              “Thanks, I guess I should figure out what I am going to do now that I’m out.” Mario sipped his beer and took a seat in the recliner looking up at the blank TV screen.

              There was a knock at the door and Russ said as he moved to answer it, “You do need to figure out what you are doing, but not tonight.” Russ threw open the door and a large man, not quite as tall as Russ but just as muscular, stood squinting into the bare bulb that lit Russ’ concrete stoop.

              “How they hanging?” the man asked.

              “They aren’t stuck to the side of my leg from the heat,” Russ replied.

              “I hear that,” Bryon said. He reached out with a closed fist and Russ reciprocated with a slight bump. Then Bryon slid past Russ without being invited in. Russ took a step back and closed the door behind him.

              “Bryon, this is Mario, Mario, this is Bryon,” Russ said. Mario did not rise but did swivel the recliner to face Bryon. The two men looked at each other and gave each other a slight upward nod of the chin.

              “Got a beer?” Bryon asked Russ.

              “Sure do,” Russ headed into the kitchen and grabbed a beer.             

“So how do you know Russ,” Bryon asked Mario.

              “He was my squad leader in Afghanistan,” Mario replied.

              “Man, I hear that place was intense.”

              “Yeah, it was.” Both men sat in silence for a few moments, not making eye contact, then Mario asked, “How do you know Russ?”

              Just then Russ reentered the room and boomed, “Bryon? We go way back, we went to middle and high school together. We were inseparable.”

              “Until you joined the Army, you crazy jag off,” Bryon laughed, his face brightening.

              “Hey, I wanted to travel to distant lands, meet foreign people, then kill them,” Russ chimed in, referencing an old bumper sticker.

              “I hear you did that,” Bryon said.

              “They were in my way,” Russ joked.

              “Yeah,” Mario said much quieter, possible too quiet for either of the other men to hear. He wasn’t smiling and his eyes focused at a point much farther out than any place in the room.

              “Well if they were in your way, what could you do?” Bryon continued the joke.

              “What I had to do,” Russ said, though not in a reflective way, but matter-of-factly. He handed Bryon the beer.

Bryon took a long swing, then lowered the beer. “So, do we want to party tonight guys?” As he asked, Bryon reached into his pocket and pulled out a quart sized zip lock back. In the bag were a collection of much smaller baggies. Each one of these smaller baggies held a small white cube, a little smaller than a dice.

“Hell yeah,” Russ chimed in.

“Yeah, while you were out sweating your balls off, I was here building my business,” Bryon said. Russ disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a dinner plate. Bryon set the bag on the coffee table and reached back into his pocket to produce a small plastic cylinder. Taking a seat on the couch, he deftly snagged one of the smaller baggies, extracted the cube and dropped it into the top. He then spun a handle on top and fine white powder drifted out of the bottom.

“That’s fancy,” Russ chided.

“What is it?” Mario asked.

Bryon looked at Russ before replying, “It’s a grinder, grinds the coke up nice and fine. Nothing worse than trying to snort chunks, am I right?”

“You know that’s true,” Russ responded. Glancing over at Mario he added, “Contrary to what you see in the movies, coke isn’t moved in powder form, it’s a solid block. These are eights, and because they are a good quality, they come in smaller cubes, basically showing that Bryon here cut pieces off a larger block and he didn’t grind it up to mix with anything more, to stretch it.”

“Gotta maintain a reputation for a quality product,” Bryon said looking at Mario and nodding his head.

“Oh,” said Mario. Bryon finished grinding the cube and a small pile of white powder sat on the edge of the plate. Bryon whipped out a credit card and a five dollar bill. He handed the bill to Russ and smoothly cut out three lines from the pile of white powder. Russ handed him back the bill, tightly rolled into a tube. Rather than snorting a line himself, Bryon handed the bill over to Mario who took it hesitantly.

Mario had never done cocaine before and was not exactly sure what he should be doing, or if he should be doing it at all. Russ and Bryon looked at him expectantly. Mario looked down at the bill in his hand and then at the plate. He slid off the recliner and knelt before the table and the plate on it. Trying in his head to match the scenes he had seen in movie, he placed the bill at one end of the line then inhaled through his nose as he ran the bill down the length of the line.

The white line disappeared but Mario did not feel the finely ground powder as it filled his sinuses. In fact, the back of his throat instantly went numb. He sat back and blinked.

“Yeah, there you go,” Russ laughed. Russ leaned forward and repeated Mario’s actions on the next line. “Wow, this is good.”

“I told you, only the best,” Bryon said, then leaned in and his line disappeared, “Now, let me call some girls and have them bring more beer.” Thirty six hours later, Russ and Mario said goodbye to Bryon. All three looked haggard and tired having not slept. The beer was gone, the girls were gone and the blow was gone. For now, that was not all a bad thing.

Adrian and Steve sat in a car near Pioneer Square. Pioneer Square was where Seattle had been founded. It was full of history, both above ground and below. Most people do not know, but what everyone knows as the ground floor of downtown Seattle, was at one point actually the second floor. Because Seattle was built on flood plains, many years ago, the City built walls around the first floors, raised the streets, forcing the building owners to do the same, leaving the original first floors as deserted basements. But Steve and Adrian were not in Pioneer Square for a history lesson.

They sat in a tan Toyota Camry with slightly tinted windows. The car was only a few years old and had low miles. It was nicer than the normal stakeout car. The FBI had confiscated it from a drug dealer just a month ago so it hadn’t seen the hard times that most of the other department vehicles had and this one would in time. Steve sat in the passenger seat dressed in sneakers, jeans and a 24 Hours of Lemons t-shirt. Adrian was in one of his seemingly endless supply of suits, this one a solid color of dark gray.

“You know, this is far more boring than you see in the movies,” Steve said to Adrian.

“Stakeouts are like that,” Adrian replied not shifting his gaze from a street corner a block and a half down the street.

“Why don’t we simply come back later, we know they’ll be here thenand we can bust them then.”

Adrian finally turned to look at Steve, “Not everything is so cut and dried. We don’t want them. But it’s not like they can point us up the ladder even if they wanted to, which they don’t. So how this works is, the guys on the street set up shop, then a mid-manager swings by and hands them their product. You don’t trust street level hustlers to hold onto a large amount of product. The mid-manager then swing by at the end of the shift for lack of a better term and collects the remaining product and the money.

“So what we need to do is be here when mister mid-manager swings by, then follow him back hopefully to his supply center. If he doesn’t go back to the supply center, then we come back here and wait until he picks up at the end of the shift. Got it?”

“I got it. Then we go kick in the door of the supply center,” Steve said brightening.

“Well, we’ll see. Usually we wouldn’t even be scratching the surface to the levels, but the intel says this is a much flatter organization than most other operations. We have to figure out who the players are and follow them.”

“And people wonder why I never became a full FBI agent, I just hang around as a contractor,” Steve muttered.

“Because we wouldn’t take you?” Adrian said, though with a laugh. Both men knew it was true, but not because of any commentary on Steve. Steve was a former CIA agent and the two agencies did not hire each other’s former agents for paranoia reasons. They both competed for the same pool of congressional money, so there was a lot of political in-fighting. Last thing either agency wanted was to hire a former agent who wasn’t so former, who would then send all the dirty secrets back to the other agency.

Neither Steve nor Adrian liked or played the political games. But they also understood they were a part of their world and were not delusional enough to think they could change them. These games had gone on as long as the two agencies had been in existence and would continue after they had both retired: Steve for the second time since technically he had already retired from the CIA years ago.

“Oh yeah, that’s right,” Steve laughed. He took out a small flask and unscrewed the top.

“Really?” Adrian said.

“I’m bored, come on,” Steve protested. Adrian didn’t say anything, he simply held Steve’s gaze. “Fine,” Steve said after a slight hesitation, then he screwed the cap back on and put the flask away.

Just then a black Audi A6 sedan with tinted windows pulled up next to the corner Adrian was watching. As if by magic, seven boys ranging in age from younger than ten to mid-teens materialized from the surrounding buildings. The rear driver’s side window lowered and one of the older boys leaned in. A few words were exchanged then with a quick look both ways by the boy, a package was handed out the car’s window. The car’s window rolled up as the car eased away from the curb and back into traffic.

“That was smooth,” Steve said, “I didn’t even see those boys hanging around, not that I was looking but I don’t usually miss things like that.”