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  “Sounds good. Then I’m gonna sneak out and get some good coffee. You want one?”

  “Yeah,” Ryerson said. “Anything’s gotta beat this sludge.”

  An hour later, Mitchell went to the parking garage and met Sandovan on his way in. “I’m going for real java, Sandman. Come with me.”

  “Done deal. How’d your early morning practice session go?”

  Mitchell raised an eyebrow. “How’d you know? You a detective or something?”

  Sandovan reached up and picked a blade of grass from Mitchell’s hair. “Exhibit A, my good fellow.”

  Mitchell ran his hand through his hair and shook loose a couple more shreds of turf. “Nice work, Sherlock.”

  Sandovan held up the blade of the grass, theatrically, “From this remnant of ryegrass I deduce that it was clipped from the ground by a pitching wedge, swung by a player of average ability who recently lost a wager to a far superior golfer.”

  “Average huh?” said Mitchell. “We’ll see, fatso. Just get in the fucking car.”

  As they drove Mitchell brought Sandovan up to speed on his theory for the cover for the grow ops. They also discussed what they could do for Mrs. Vargas.

  “I went by Emilio’s to get a couple of butter tarts after work yesterday,” Sandovan said. “He was sold out. So much for the complaints about us interfering with his business.”

  “Yeah, no kidding,” Mitchell said.

  They got caught up on the case and were just about to turn into the coffee shop parking lot when Sandovan noticed a fender bender up the street. Normally they’d wait for a uniformed patrol car to respond, but there seemed to be a large crowd forming around one of the vehicles.

  “Let’s have a look,” Mitchell said.

  They parked and walked over toward the accident scene. “Okay folks, we’re police officers. What’s going on? Anyone hurt?” Sandovan said.

  A woman who had been looking into the rear car turned her head and was violently ill. The crowd recoiled in a perfect circle, away from the mess.

  Mitchell heard another onlooker say “…never seen anything like that!”

  They talked with the driver of the first car, a businessman who was okay except for possible whiplash. Then they walked to the second car, wading through the crowd. “Come on people, let us through, we’re police,” Sandovan said.

  Mitchell and Sandovan looked into the rear car and could not believe what they were seeing. The airbag of the vehicle had deployed, but was now deflated on the lap of the driver. The talcum powder used as a lubricant for the airbag deployment could be seen on the dashboard, and there were still traces of potassium chloride and nitrogen gas in the air inside the car. The driver, a well-dressed larger woman in her mid-fifties, was wide-eyed with panic. Protruding from her mouth was the body of an extremely small dog. The head of the dog was stuck in the woman’s mouth. The dog’s tail was moving. It was still alive.

  Mitchell spoke first. “Hey, everyone move back okay?”

  Sandovan called it in. “This is DB 1101, we need EMS…”

  Mitchell interrupted, “And a vet.”

  Sandovan continued, “And a vet to the corner of Sheridan and McFarland. Two-car accident. One driver’s fine, the other seems stable, but it’s kind of a strange situation. Her vehicle rear-ended another car. She must’ve had her Chihuahua on her lap, and the force of the airbag pushed the dog’s head right into her mouth. Yeah, that’s right, I said the dog’s head is stuck in her mouth.”

  Mitchell continued to move the people back. One of them was taking pictures with a cell phone. “Geez buddy, a little empathy, hey?” Mitchell said. “How’d you like it if that happened to your wife?”

  “Ex-wife,” the guy said. “I can only hope it does. She got the Saint Bernard.”

  “Whatever. Give the lady a break, huh.”

  Mitchell and Sandovan saw the paramedics arrive and push through the crowd. They extricated the woman from the vehicle and attempted to gently pull the dog free, to no avail. “Looks like we’re going to emerg,” said the in-charge, a woman who acted like she saw this sort of thing all the time.

  A marked police unit arrived just as the ambulance left. Mitchell and Sandovan told the officers what had happened. The uniforms—a rookie and his coach officer—looked at them like they were nuts.

  “It’s true. You guys want a coffee? We’re just headed in. Our treat,” Sandovan said.

  The cops thanked them and went about dispersing the crowd and getting a statement from the other driver. By the time Mitchell got back with their coffees, the incident report was almost finished and the scene was back to normal.

  Mitchell and Sandovan drove back to the precinct with a portable 16-cup container of coffee. “I had no idea a dog’s head would even fit in a human mouth,” Mitchell said.

  “Depends on the breed I guess,” Sandovan said. “You seen those little mutts the Hollywood types carry around in their purses? I could probably swallow one of those whole.”

  “True,” Mitchell said. “The spiked collar might be painful at the other end though.”

  Sandovan laughed and they headed back to the squad room.

  All the detectives were in. They swarmed the fresh coffee container. Nelson asked Hernandez about a date he’d had the previous night.

  “Nice girl,” Hernandez said, taking a sip of his coffee.

  “Ah, so I guess you won’t be seeing her again,” Nelson said.

  “You know, Davy boy, you seem to have this misguided impression that nice girls don’t like sex. And I’m telling you one has nothing to do with the other,” Hernandez said.

  “So you scored on the first date with a girl you met at the library?” Nelson said in disbelief.

  “Yes, we met at the library. But in the ‘Erotic Arts’ section,” Hernandez said.

  “Couldn’t hurt,” Sandovan agreed.

  Nelson shook his head.

  Mitchell interrupted the conversation. “Hey Eric, you ever tell Nelson why you won’t commit to one woman?”

  Hernandez shrugged. “I figured it was common knowledge.”

  Nelson’s curiosity was piqued. “What’s the story?”

  Mitchell started to enlighten him. “Let me know if I get any of the crucial details wrong,” he said to Hernandez.

  Hernandez waved him on.

  “We were working a double homicide. Real messy piece of work three years ago. Gangland related. A Croatian mob boss strung up his two main rivals, then tossed them out of an apartment building downtown. They basically hung there and died while the whole business community watched them twitch from the sidewalks below. Anyway, we pulled weeks of sixteen-hour days, because the mayor was adamant that this sort of thing ‘didn’t happen on his watch.’ Near the end of the investigation we pulled an all-nighter, and Hernandez went home in the morning to change. There was a duct cleaning van parked in his driveway.”

  “Carpet cleaning,” Hernandez corrected him.

  “My mistake, carpet cleaning,” Mitchell continued. “Anyway, they’d already had the service done a month earlier. So Hernandez figured if the guy wasn’t there for business, he was there for pleasure. He snuck in to the house, and sure enough, there are two guys in the bedroom doing Mrs. Hernandez. Eric sneaks to the fridge, and takes out a bottle of champagne. Brings it back to the bedroom with four glasses. He pops the cork, and his wife and the duct guys are shocked to see him standing there. But Hernandez doesn’t do anything dramatic. What’d you say exactly?”

  Hernandez paused for a moment. “I said, ‘You guys look like you’re working up a thirst.’ And then I poured the glasses of champagne. I put their glasses on the nightstand, and raised mine to them, and downed it. Then I said to the guys, ‘I remember you said you’d come back for the shag, but I thought you meant the carpet in the den. When I come home after work, I’d just as soon none of you were here.’”

  Nelson grimaced. “Good God, Hernandez. So that’s why you won’t sleep with a woman more than once?”
/>   Hernandez drained his coffee. “You got it. When I got home that night, the house was cleaned out. Ain’t seen her since. They had a sense of humor though. Left me the shag carpet.”

  The conversation came to an abrupt end when Captain Ramsey barged into the room. “Okay you lug nuts. Who’s bringing me up to date on the drug war? The motherfucking chief is so far up my ass his hairpiece is tickling my tonsils. We’ve got gangsters dying in Siberian safaris and inquiring minds want to know why the fuck I pay you guys the big bucks.”

  Mitchell started to ask what he meant by ‘the big bucks’ but decided against it.

  Ryerson began. “No more eyewitness accounts or video of houses being knocked off. Hernandez has heard on the street that the number of grows ripped off is up around twenty. No way to confirm that though. We hear that the gang is still using the disguised van for their hits. It’s the only thing that can hold all the plants once they’ve bagged them.”

  “No prints off the crane used in the zoo incident,” Nelson continued. “We found where they cut through the fence, and we’re still waiting for the report on whether there were any footprints, fingerprints, or other trace evidence.”

  Sandovan summed up their legwork. “The cell phone we got from the dumpster in the alley was no help. It was brand new—the only call it made was the nine one one. Bought down in Chinatown. Purchaser paid cash and used the name ‘Bill Gates.’ Typical pay-as-you-go dealer throwaway phone.”

  “We got a good index finger print from the keypad, but it’s not in the system,” Mitchell added. “We’re starting to run down the types of businesses that could legitimately move large amounts of fertilizer and other stuff used in grow houses. They could be fronts for the skunkworks.”

  The captain looked in Ryerson’s direction. “Sean, you wanna just give me a bullet-point synopsis of this entire jerk-off. I’ll see if the chief will mistake it for progress.”

  “You got it, Cap,” Ryerson said.

  The captain departed with the same momentum he had arrived with. The men hunkered down to their desks. In addition to being part of the pot-wars investigation, Randall Tewks was finalizing the security for the Ptushko parade route and coordinating the various levels of government who all wanted face time and photo ops.

  The visit was classified as requiring medium security. Manhole covers would be welded shut, bomb-sniffing dogs would make a morning inspection of the route, and a police helicopter would accompany the motorcade, watching for rooftop snipers or protestors looking to make a statement of some kind. Three years before, a group of protestors had disrupted the Harringer’s Department Store Santa Claus Parade by throwing large balloons filled with red dye off buildings on the route. The mayor, the governor, and the President herself were adamant that no fringe group would use this parade as a platform for their own agenda.

  “Hey Tewksy,” Mitchell piped up. “Hate to rain on your parade, but you wanna help us narrow the field of retailers and wholesalers of all this garden supply shit?”

  Tewks looked up over his computer monitor. “Yeah, whatever. Shoot me a list and Burke and I will dig in. But not too many. This parade thing has arms and legs all over the place. Everyone wants their picture taken with this Ptushko guy. In the three days he’s here, he’s probably going to get more blow jobs than Hernandez.”

  “Doubt it,” Hernandez said without looking up.

  26

  Mya and three members of the team had spent the first half of their day putting the final touches on the logistics of the next phase of the game. When they were finished, Sisha Wong waited until the others had left and asked Mya if she was free for lunch.

  “Of course,” Mya said. “Where do you want to go?”

  “How about that Indian place on Burwash Street?” Sisha said.

  “Ohhh, their samosas are the best! I’ll meet you in the lobby in ten.” Mya responded.

  They took the elevator down and walked to the restaurant. They spent the first forty minutes of lunch oohing and aahing over the samosas, bhajia, and saag paneer. They commiserated over the amount of cayenne in the latter, and then Sisha’s face got serious.

  “Leah told me that you’re the least political and most ethical woman in the company,” she began.

  “That’s nice of her,” Mya blushed. “I don’t know if I’m every bit as Snow White as she says, but what’s on your mind?”

  Sisha took a sip of water and hesitated for a second. “Garrett Lawrence raped me.”

  “What!” Mya exclaimed.

  “The smug bastard raped me. He put a roofie in my drink at last year’s Christmas party.”

  “The official agency party at the Latham Hotel?” Mya asked, still incredulous.

  “That’s right. I was heading home, and he got on the elevator with me after the party. He hit a button, and we went up instead of down. At first he said it was by mistake. I laughed, but then I got really woozy.”

  “What happened?”

  “He seemed genuinely concerned when I said I wasn’t feeling well. He said he’d booked a suite upstairs because he knew it would be tough to get a cab in the middle of the holiday party season. He took me to the suite so I could lie down. I don’t remember much after that,” Sisha said, downcast.

  “And the next morning you knew…” Mya said quietly.

  Sisha started to fight back tears. “I knew. For one thing, Garrett was gone when I woke up. And my underwear was missing. I called a cab and went home, but later on that day I went to my gyno. I also have a cousin who works in a hospital lab. She told me that the active ingredient in roofies, flunitrazi-something, can be detected in a hair sample for weeks after. So she ran a test. Sure enough, it came back positive.”

  Mya was trying her best to be calm, but she couldn’t disguise her shock. “I knew Garrett was a perv. Shit, last week he put his hand on my ass, but I told him straight up that I wasn’t going to tolerate anything.”

  “Leah told me about it. I figured that since you’d experienced his antics yourself, it might help you believe me. Anyway, I agonized over it for a long time, but I didn’t go to the police. My cousin put me in touch with an anonymous sexual assault counseling service. And at least I didn’t get an STD or anything.”

  Mya interjected, “There’s a surprise. Garrett’s such a slime bucket.”

  Sisha agreed. “I guess I don’t know why I’m telling you. There’s not much we can do now. And my parents are super traditional—they’d be more embarrassed that their little angel was out drinking and had sex. I decided I’d spare them.”

  Mya reached over and took Sisha’s hand in hers. Sisha was barely five feet tall, and her frame and features were delicate. Even if she weren’t drugged, she couldn’t have fought off Garrett Lawrence. “There has to be something we can do. My boyfriend’s a police detective. I’ll ask him without telling him who you are. In the meantime, I’ll be on Garrett’s case at the management meetings.”

  Sisha’s eyes were now overflowing with tears. She was trying hard not to blink, so they wouldn’t track down her cheeks and attract attention, but it was a losing battle. Mya offered her a tissue. Sisha smiled demurely. “Thanks, Mya. It feels good just to tell someone who’s higher on the ladder at the agency. At least you’ll know why I get so uncomfortable in meetings when Lawrence comes in.”

  “I’ll see to it that your paths don’t have to cross. And like I said, we’ll figure something out so that Garrett doesn’t have the opportunity to work on the same projects with you.”

  Mya paid for their meal and left a generous tip. The hostess smiled and told them to come again. All the way back to the shop Mya tried to make small talk, but inside she was seething. She knew she had to control her rage. Maybe Mitchell would have some ideas.

  En route to their latest target, the Colonel and his men reviewed their plan one more time, with special emphasis on contingencies.

  “What if the man doesn’t do as we expect?” Luis said.

  “He has no choice,” the Colonel
replied. “He’ll trust his first instinct, and that instinct will be self preservation. We will leave him an escape route, and he’ll take it.”

  They tried to anticipate other wrenches that Otis’s men, the neighbors, or the police might throw in. There was no way to predict every potential scenario. But the team had been through enough together that they trusted one another’s ability to improvise and deal with situations on the fly.

  Barros called back from the driver’s seat. “Thirty seconds to objective.”

  Those four words set off a flurry of activity. The men checked their comms, weapons, ammo, and bootlaces. The van came to a screeching halt in front of the house. Four of them deployed instantly, weapons ready and in full battle dress.

  Inside the house, a large man named Jesse Murdoch sat at a small desk, watching a DVD on a laptop and paying occasional attention to the two surveillance cameras that would be his early warning systems for the front and back of the house. Murdoch was a hardcore gangster and one of Otis’s most dependable men. He was also one of the nine who had thrown up when he viewed Otis’s “motivational” video. The sight of the enormous cat worrying the legs of the kid hanging from the crane would make anyone sick, he thought.

  Murdoch was carrying one of the Schall 9mm sidearms that Phineas had supplied. He also had a combat knife strapped to his ankle and a twenty-one-inch expandable tactical baton in a sidebreak scabbard, which he used for breaking arms and cracking skulls.

  In the two hours since he’d awakened, he’d gone through three cups of strong coffee, half a dozen donuts, and a cantaloupe, which he’d sliced up precisely with his combat knife. He was bored senseless. But unlike the Vargas kid and some of the other hasty recruits, he was still on edge and primed to repel a threat.

  A sudden movement in the front surveillance screen caught his eye. Astonishingly, a SWAT van had screeched to a halt in front of the house. Four men in full tactical gear, automatic weapons at the ready, leaped out of the van and approached the front of the house in a diamond formation.

  Murdoch checked the house’s back yard surveillance camera. Nothing. He sprang into action. For a big man, he was lightning fast. He covered the five steps between his desk and the back sliding patio door in half a second. With his arms up, protecting his head, he leaped through the glass doors. The sliding doors shattered and Murdoch’s momentum carried him right through the deck rail. He was over the back fence without touching it and sprinting down the back alley to where he’d parked his vehicle on a side street.