Grass Read online

  A former college fullback, he covered the sixty yards from the house to the truck in just over eight seconds, shedding shards of glass as he ran. He had a proximity card in his wallet which unlocked his truck when he approached within eight feet. Without missing a step he hopped into the driver’s seat, mashed the accelerator, and was gone.

  At the front of the house, Luis and Hector heard the glass shatter at the back. Along with the Colonel and Ramon, they waited five seconds, then cautiously approached the rear of the house with their weapons up and ready.

  Without hesitation they entered the house through the shattered patio doors. In front, Barros was backing the van up to the garage. Luis entered the garage through the house and hit the door opener button to let the rest of the team in. The Colonel and Ramon photographed the booby-traps inside the front and rear doors to the house. The SWAT van’s rear doors opened and the rest of the men jumped into the garage, bringing the bolt cutters and bags to take the pot crop with them.

  As they opened the door to the basement, Hector heard a clicking sound on the bare wooden steps. He saw a dark brown blur flying up the steps toward him. Hector took a step back and timing it just right, slammed the door shut just as the ninety-pound pit bull leaped for him. There was a tremendous impact, and he heard the dog fall back down the stairs. In half a second he had drawn his knife, yanked the door open again, and jumped down the stairs in one leap. The dog lay at the bottom, its back broken.

  Hector put a hand up to tell the other men not to come down. He pulled his knife and slit the dog’s throat. Then he switched on the light for the basement stairs. Starting at the bottom, he examined each step. On the middle step of the 11, he discovered a pressure-sensitive switch. Evidently it couldn’t be activated by the weight of the dog. He dug his knife into the drywall beside the step and called up to the rest of the team. “Avoid the step by my knife. It’s rigged. Otherwise we’re clear.”

  The men moved with their customary efficiency and loaded the plants in the van. Hector, still amped up with adrenaline, knocked over one of the lamps in the cloning section of the grow operation, and it smashed to the floor. Luis put a hand on his shoulder to calm him. “It’s okay, Hector. I know you hated to kill the dog. But I am glad he didn’t tear out your throat. Or worse, mine!”

  Hector nodded and they got back to the job. In the van, Barros noticed a neighbor approaching the front of the driveway from the sidewalk. He radioed the Colonel.

  “Sir, there’s a resident.”

  The Colonel left his men to finish loading and went to the front. He was certain the neighbor wouldn’t be able to identify him, since he wore a partial balaclava over part of his face and the rest of his body was swathed in the full tactical gear of a SWAT commander.

  He approached the neighbor, who was wearing a housecoat, Tattersall-print pajamas, and furry slippers open at the back. The morning newspaper was tucked under his arm, and he was carrying a half-filled mug emblazoned with “Dad Of The Year.”

  The Colonel smiled under the balaclava. “Excuse me sir, I’m going to have to ask you to return to your house. We need to secure the perimeter until we can be sure it’s safe.”

  The man, wide-eyed, took in the assault rifle and the array of armaments on the Colonel’s uniform. “You betcha Officer, no problem. Is this some kinda raid?”

  “That’s correct, sir,” the Colonel replied. “This house was being used to grow marijuana. I think you and your family will sleep a lot easier knowing this kind of criminal activity won’t be tolerated in your neighborhood.”

  “Oh absolutely. Okay, I’ll get back to my place!” He started back to his home, pausing to turn around and shout, “Nice work, Officer!” and give the Colonel a thumbs up.

  The Colonel watched as the man shuffled quickly back to his home, two doors down. The van was almost full. One minute later, the crop was loaded and they pulled the garage door shut behind them. The van pulled quickly out of the driveway. But over the engine revs the Colonel heard the sound of sirens.

  “Here they come,” he said.

  They drove four blocks north, then turned down a residential alley. After one hundred yards they pulled into an RV-sized carport. It was vacant, the owners having made their annual pilgrimage south. Barros quickly stripped off his SWAT helmet and uniform, replacing them with light blue coveralls and ball cap. The other men pulled decals off the side of the van and stuffed them in the back. The entire operation took thirty-five seconds.

  Slowly, Barros pulled them back out into the alley, and he drove two hundred yards to the far end. As he approached the street he saw a police cruiser speed by en route to the grow house. He pulled out and drove calmly in the opposite direction.

  Mitchell, Sandovan and the rest of the squad room looked up as Hernandez burst in. “There’s been another hit on a grow op. This time they were posing as cops. Right down to the full tactical gear and the SWAT van.”

  “When?” Mitchell asked.

  “An hour ago. A neighbor said that he was having breakfast when a guy jumped out the back window of a house across the alley. Dude hopped the fence and took off. So the neighbor called it in. When the uniforms arrived they talked to another neighbor. That guy said he talked to a SWAT commander and the guy said they were raiding a drug house.”

  “Wow, that’s not a bad way to pull it off. Even if the dealers are putting sentries in the houses, first sign of the cops and they’d bail,” Sandovan said.

  “Are we positive that it wasn’t a real SWAT response?” Ryerson said.

  “Yeah,” Hernandez replied. “For one thing, dispatch didn’t send out any SWAT units. And a real tactical team wouldn’t load the weed and disappear before the uniforms arrive.”

  Mitchell laughed, “That’s true. There’s no way the SWAT boys would carry out the pot. They’d be afraid of getting their fancy jumpsuits all dirty.”

  “Any luck tracking the fake SWAT van?” Sandovan said.

  “Looking at traffic cams now,” Hernandez said. “We can pull up the footage here. I asked Division to send over the link.”

  The men gathered around Ryerson’s computer because it had the biggest screen. They pulled up the early morning footage of the closest traffic camera to the grow house address. After scanning through it for fifteen minutes they saw the SWAT van.

  “Shit, too bad we can’t get a clear image of the driver.” Ryerson said.

  They checked other cameras along the logical route, but there was no sign of the van.

  “Let’s assume they took evasive action and didn’t just drive away in a straight line,” Mitchell said. “Gimme a look at the northern cams.”

  They looked at two cameras without success. On the third, they’d seen about eight minutes of footage when Sandovan interjected. “Hey Sean, run it back to 06:12 or so.”

  Ryerson scanned back to the time code Sandovan had specified.

  “Geez, that’s slick,” Sandovan said.

  “What?” Mitchell said.

  “Check this out. Look at the far left lane. You can just barely see a van go by,” Sandovan said.

  The men looked at the left side of the screen. The camera was ill positioned for the perspective they needed, but when a van appeared, Ryerson froze the frame.

  “Big deal,” Nelson said. “You busted a mineral water truck making deliveries.”

  “Nah,” Mitchell said, picking up on what Sandovan had seen. “Check out the name of the company. Blisswater, all caps.”

  “So?” Hernandez said.

  Ryerson caught it. “Shit, that’s awesome. Eagle-eye, Eddie.”

  He looked at Nelson and Hernandez, who still weren’t comprehending. Ryerson held sticky notes over the left and right sides of the water company’s name, revealing the word SWAT.

  “Damn,” Nelson said. “Eddie, you should go on Jeopardy.”

  They got back in touch with the Traffic Division and had them try to follow the truck’s route. In the meantime Ryerson and Hernandez went to the house to
interview the neighbors again and to see what other evidence could be found, either from the assault or the grow op.

  The war was starting to escalate. The detectives knew that could only mean one thing: more casualties.

  27

  Jesse Murdoch was not looking forward to meeting with J.A. and Curtis. He knew he’d done the right thing by getting the hell out of Dodge when the SWAT van pulled up. But he also knew it cost the organization millions.

  Like any good company, Otis’s organization had profit sharing. Jesse’s yearly bonus had historically come in around $75,000. And he didn’t give the IRS a cut.

  He met them in the sub-penthouse, getting off the same elevator that Jak Mosely had taken when he presented the brand identity for the new designer weed.

  “Hey, Jesse. Come in. Sit down.” J.A. said.

  “Get you a cold one?” Curtis asked.

  “Sure, thanks.” Murdoch replied.

  Curtis put a coaster down on the table, then placed an icy bottle of imported beer in front of Murdoch. “Bit more excitement than you wanted this morning, hey Jesse?”

  “Yeah. I did everything according to the manual though. You guys said to get out at the first sniff of cop, so that’s what I did. I haven’t run that fast since we made it to the bowl game in my senior year.”

  “How’d it go down?” J.A. asked.

  Although he’d played it by the book, Murdoch was nervous. Rumor was that Otis himself liked to listen in on these informal get-togethers. The last thing Murdoch wanted was to be the star of one of Otis’s motivational videos. He took a long swallow of his beer and then told them everything, from the moments before the SWAT team arrived to the point where he’d gotten to his truck.

  “And the dog,” J.A. asked. “Any idea whether the dog got loose?”

  “Nah, I didn’t hear anything.”

  “You wouldn’t hear anything,” Curtis said. “We cut the vocal cords on all the pit bulls, so they can’t bark and disturb the neighbors.”

  “It also makes them a stealth weapon,” J.A. said. “The dog in your particular house was one of my faves. Raised him from a pup. He was quite the fighter. Made me a bit of scratch in his day.”

  “Sorry. All’s I ever did was let him out in the yard three times a day and feed him. We weren’t close.”

  Curtis scratched his ear and thought for a second. “I just have one other question for you Jess. Remember that pack of designer spliffs I gave you? It was one of the new packaging prototypes for our hybrid ganja. You still got that?”

  Murdoch shook his head. “Nope. When I decide to bolt, I’m outta there. I left the recon hardware, the laptop, an’ everything.”

  “Just checking,” Curtis said. “Go see Phineas and ask him to hack into the laptop you left behind and fry the hard drive. Then he’ll tell you where we could best redeploy you. Maybe take a day off to decompress first.”

  “Thanks Curtis,” Murdoch said.

  They watched him walk to the elevator, waiting until he descended to the lobby before they spoke. “Otis, anything else you want us to do?” Curtis asked.

  Otis’s voice came over the intercom. “No. Murdoch is a good soldier. He’s killed for us, and he’d never tell the authorities anything, even if they were giving him the deal of a lifetime. Are you still plotting the assaults and looking for any evidence of a pattern? I want to anticipate their next move and hurt them bad.”

  “We’re all over it, Big O,” J.A. said.

  “This needs a quick resolution,” Otis said. “The longer it goes on, the more vulnerable we look. The more vulnerable we look, the more vultures start to circle. We have to crush this. Let people know we’re still the baddest organization out there.”

  Curtis agreed. “They’ve been lucky, boss. We have new munitions in place at a lot of our locations. Someone’s going down, real soon.”

  Big O’s voice was grave. “You’d best be right.”

  Ryerson and Hernandez returned to the precinct after spending the lunch hour and early afternoon at the crime scene. They briefed the rest of the unit.

  “Man, these guys are tight,” Hernandez began. “They pulled up in a SWAT van and spooked the sentry inside the house. He busted out so fast he gave them a quick way in that they knew wasn’t booby-trapped. The doors were all rigged with a nasty explosive surprise. One of our bomb techs said he hadn’t seen anything like it since Iraq.”

  Ryerson nodded. “There was also a pit bull, dead at the scene. Neck broken. Throat cut. The CSI said the neck was likely broken first. The throat cutting was a mercy kill.”

  “Geez. I dunno if I wanna meet up with these guys,” Nelson said.

  “Mostly the same MO as the others,” Ryerson continued. “Back up the van, bag the herb, then take off. We know they’re likely to change the appearance of the van now. So we should get that info to all patrol cars. If we get a hot call, it might be worth just pulling over anything that looks like the van.”

  Mitchell grimaced. “Pull it over, yes. But don’t approach unless you’ve got the USMC as backup.”

  Sandovan agreed with Mitchell. “What else did you guys find at the scene?”

  Hernandez laughed. “I roached Ryerson. Man, you shoulda seen him jump.”

  Ryerson punched Hernandez hard in the shoulder. “That’s right you bastard. Any normal person would jump.”

  Nelson’s eyebrows knitted together in confusion. “What do you mean, you roached him?”

  Sandovan answered. “A lot of these grow houses are humid and lacking in housekeeping, if you know what I mean. So the cockroaches like ‘em. Often they congregate around places that get greasy handprints, like light switches.”

  “That’s exactly where I got him,” Hernandez cackled. “I was in the kitchen and he was in the hall. I said, ‘Hey Ryerson, you wanna hit the light for me?’ And when he reached in for the light switch it was covered in la cucaracha. Man, I thought you were going to scrub your hands raw.”

  Ryerson smiled, but they could tell he was disgusted. “You wait, Hernandez, I’ll get even. The only thing stopping me from putting pinholes in every condom in that large economy size box you keep in your file drawer is the thought of you procreating.”

  Mitchell asked if they’d found anything else.

  Hernandez ran through the inventory. “Laptop, which has been scrubbed. Porn mags. Low quality, I prefer the more upscale Japanese erotica, myself. There were also about two dozen DVDs. The usual junk food wrappers. Oh, and this. This is new.”

  He took a package out of the evidence box and threw it to Mitchell. It was a small, elegant flip-top box which looked like it could’ve held a dozen cigarettes. Mitchell opened it and sniffed the inside. “No doubt what was in here.”

  He tossed the package back into the box. “I’ll take it down to the locker when I go home tonight,” Sandovan said.

  “Thanks buddy,” Mitchell said. “Mya’s coming by and we’re heading out to dinner. You wanna join us?”

  Sandovan shook his head. “Nah. You know me and weeknights. If it ain’t work, it’s a kid’s soccer game or just getting home to make sure Claire doesn’t lose her mind.”

  They spent the rest of the afternoon updating the whiteboard with the new elements from the latest grow op raid.

  “You know one thing that amazes me?” Sandovan said.

  “My golf swing?” Mitchell said.

  “Yeah, I wonder how something that ugly can get any kind of positive result,” Sandovan replied. “No, how come we don’t get more citizens calling in with tip-offs to these grow ops? It’s not like they’re impossible to notice. They steal from the water and power companies. The growers come and go at all hours. And there’s usually harsh chemicals and fire hazards associated with them. Who would want to live next door to that?”

  Hernandez shook his head. “I know what you mean. But my snitches tell me these Pot Incorporated guys sometimes bribe the immediate neighbors to look the other way. When you consider the millions that a dope house is wo
rth, who cares if you grease a couple residents with a few grand to keep their mouths shut. One community even got itself a new ball diamond, is what I hear.”

  “Crimestoppers can’t exactly match that kind of financing,” Ryerson said.

  They continued to compare notes until the late afternoon. Then Mitchell got a call from downstairs that Mya was coming up. A minute later, she stepped off the elevator.

  “Hi Ms. Laing,” Nelson said as he passed her on his way out.

  “Hi Dave,” said Mya.

  “Ooh, Mya’s here,” Hernandez said, getting up from his desk. He walked over to her, his eyes wandering like hamsters on LSD. “I like that dress. I’m guessing…Tory Burch?” he asked.

  “You never cease to amaze me, Eric,” Mya said, winking at him.

  “If you think that’s amazing…” Hernandez began.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa” Mitchell interrupted. “Hernandez, don’t you have some twins to plunder or something?”

  “You know that I would take quality over quantity any day,” Hernandez retorted. He arched one eyebrow at Mya, which made her laugh out loud.

  “In that case I’m going to whisk Mya away to my rooftop oasis,” Mitchell replied. Mya said hello to Sandovan, then Mitchell took her by the hand. They took the elevator up, then navigated the stairs and went outside.

  “It’s beautiful up here,” Mya said. She peered over the edge. “Don’t you and Eddie ever hit someone’s car. Or knock someone out with a chunk of turf or a ball?”

  “Not really,” Mitchell said. “It’s therapeutic. A lot cheaper than the department shrink.”

  They chatted for a few minutes, then Mya got a chill. They headed back downstairs. Mitchell made sure Hernandez was gone, then went to his desk to get his coat. Sandovan was just heading out with the evidence box.