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  “That is disgusting,” Mya groaned through the haze of the scotch-induced hangover.

  “Yeah, you can hear the crunching,” Mitchell said.

  “Oh my God, you’re right,” Mya said.

  Mitchell hit the alarm’s off button but it was too late. Mya barely made it to the toilet before throwing up in spectacular fashion. Mitchell walked in behind her and held her hair back as she knelt in front of the toilet. Twice more her body rebelled against the alcohol.

  “Ohhh. I curse the Scots and the fields and bogs that gave birth to that toxic spirit Dunn loves so much,” Mya moaned.

  Mitchell rubbed her back. “You know you’re beautiful even when you’re dry heaving?”

  Mya started to cry.

  “Hey now,” Mitchell said softly. “It’s just an isolated incident.”

  “But you never get sick. I have no idea how you and Eddie can polish off so much booze when we have him and Claire over, then get up and golf early the next morning.”

  “Simple. We have fewer brain cells to kill than you do.”

  He peeled off some toilet paper and wiped her tears and the sides of her mouth.

  “Hey, this isn’t Shalimar toilet paper,” Mitchell said.

  Mya smiled weakly. “No, it’s not. I refuse to buy anything from a man who is that pompous.”

  “Well I guess you showed him. Who says you ad people never take a stand? I bet the guy sits there on his solid gold shitter reading the financial statements and lamenting the fact that you’re withholding your entire annual toilet paper budget of what, a hundred bucks?”

  She laughed. “Don’t make fun of me when I’m out of it like this.”

  He stroked her hair back into place as she sat on the bathroom floor. “How about I make you a very mild breakfast, put three painkillers on the place mat, and then you phone in sick. I wish I could stay, but Sandovan and I have to run down this Vargas kid. His mom is a saint, and I feel like we owe it to her to keep him out of trouble.”

  “You’re a good man,” Mya said.

  “Nah, it’s Eddie. You know what a sentimental wimp he is.”

  Mya paused to knot her hair in a ponytail. “There’s one other thing that’s been bothering me. I wasn’t going to tell you this…”

  Mitchell arched an eyebrow melodramatically, “Yes?”

  “Garrett Lawrence has been even more of a pig than usual lately.”

  “Which guy is he again?”

  “He’s an account manager. A bit of a kiss-ass. But he has some talent. Dunn likes how he’s developed the Four Horseman Beer account, so he’s not someone the agency can lose without a bit of pain.”

  “So how is he a pig?”

  “Remember I told you how he had a habit of going after the junior female staff? It’s usually just innuendo and flirting. But occasionally he goes over the line and gropes someone.”

  “Unfortunately that doesn’t make him unique in the business world. There’s not a lot you can do.”

  “The other day he put his hand on my ass,” Mya said.

  Mitchell hesitated for a moment. “Have you seen my shotgun? I know I left it around here somewhere.”

  Mya laughed. “See, that’s what I love about you. We can joke about this stuff, and I don’t have to worry about you going off and beating him senseless in a macho fit of pique.”

  “A macho fit of what?”

  “Umm…a testosterone-fueled rage against a perceived injustice.”

  “Ah, I like that better. So I trust you put this guy in his place?”

  Mya told him about soaking Lawrence’s smartphone.

  “Ha, nothing like a swift kick in the gigabytes. Let me know if he tries to retaliate though. He’s obviously a dickhead. One of those guys who thinks no means go,” Mitchell said.

  Mya nodded. “I’ve heard other women in the office complain. I’ll ask around and see if he’s ever taken it too far with someone.”

  “Let me know. I won’t do anything violent, but there are other ways to convince ol’ Jarrett to keep his hands to himself.”

  “Garrett.”

  “Whatever.”

  Mya put her hand on the toilet tank and tried to get up. Mitchell propped her up. “I’m gonna grab a quick shower, then I’ll set out that breakfast for you. Now go back to bed,” he said.

  “No arm-twisting necessary,” Mya mumbled as she headed back to the bed.

  Mitchell showered, set out a hangover-friendly breakfast for Mya, then took the elevator down to the parkade and went to his ride, parked in one of the guest spaces. He drove a pickup truck, which meant the rest of the guys on his shift were constantly calling him to borrow it. Between the young bucks who had blown their budgets on hot two-seaters and the married-with-kids crowd who were mired with minivans, someone was always calling to see if they could borrow his truck to pick up a skid of lumber or take a bunch of stuff to the city dump. The result was that he seldom had his truck for both days of the weekend, and his fridge was always packed with beer, the informal currency of grateful borrowers.

  The truck exited the underground garage with an inch to spare, and Mitchell urged the big V8 to life. As he headed into the precinct, he reveled in the silence of the big truck’s cab. He didn’t crank the stereo or radio. Instead he tried to make some sense of the grow-op rips and the bombing.

  They’d gotten the report back from the lab on the composition of the explosives, and it wasn’t much help. The bomb was garden-variety C4 plastic explosive, with the usual plasticizer and binder compositions. There was no taggant to help in identification. A taggant would have given the lab a signature of microscopic polymer particles, allowing them to identify where the explosive was made, but the only country where it was mandated by law was Switzerland.

  At the back of Mitchell’s mind, the Garrett Lawrence thing was also nagging at him. While he trusted that Mya had dealt with it, he couldn’t help but be pissed that the guy was probably making life miserable for some of the other, more vulnerable women in the office. The more he thought about it, the more it grated on him, because guys like that were rarely held accountable.

  Although Mitchell had met Peter Dunn and liked him, he knew that Dunn would only act if Lawrence seriously stepped over the line. And even then it would probably mean quiet dismissal with some sort of severance package instead of the public shaming and swift kick in the ass that was deserved.

  As he turned into the department parking lot, Mitchell had an idea. It would take some planning, but yeah, it definitely had potential.

  18

  The Colonel and his men awoke at five a.m. and began last minute preparations for their tenth assault on Big O’s network of grow houses. Their weapons checks were all force of habit—none of them had ever taken a weapon into the field with the slightest trace of powder, lead, or copper residues. To them the aroma of solvent and gun conditioner was like the smell of the sea to a fisherman. Comforting. Omnipresent. Something they could not imagine being without.

  Barros was making the vehicle ready. He had topped up the fuel and applied the decals to both sides of the truck. To be consistent with the garage door mode of entry, they were going in as a company called Gus’s Garage Door Repair. The plan was to back into the driveway, use the tool to open the garage door, then close it behind them. Once inside the garage, they would put on balaclavas, breach the door to the house, and then immobilize or kill the man that Ramon had seen occupy the house. From there they would cautiously clear the route to the plants, bag the crop, and use the inside of the garage as a staging area. Once the crop was cut and bagged, they would open the garage door and quickly load the van.

  The only operational threats of exposure were that a neighbor would become suspicious at the early morning house call of a repairman, or that someone would happen to be watching at the instant they raised the door to load the pot. The latter stage was only taking them an average of thirty-five seconds however, so the team was confident.

  They loaded the vehicle and Barr
os pressed the remote control to open the bay door of their body shop base. As they drove away, Andre pressed another remote to arm the building’s security system.

  The men rode in silence. Diego prayed. Hector and Luis had earbuds in, listening to music. Five minutes before they reached the target they would swap those for custom bone mics. At that point they would each feel the familiar surge of anticipation that was a part of every new mission. It heightened their senses, making their reflexes faster, their threat perception sharper, and their peripheral vision more acute. The bone mics with push-to-talk controls meant that their comms would work even under extremely noisy conditions such as firefights.

  This team was far beyond the skill level of even the most experienced urban SWAT team, because they had worked together so often. They had been tested under live-firing conditions dozens of times. They didn’t make mistakes as a result of being jacked with adrenaline. None of them would ever hesitate to do what was necessary for the success of the mission.

  It would take overwhelming numbers and superior firepower and tactics to defeat them.

  As Gus’s Garage Door Repair prepared to make their unscheduled service call, Rammi Vargas was laying sprawled across the king-size mattress in the house. His girlfriend Trishi was curled up beside him. The last time Rammi had awakened before eight in the morning was twenty years earlier, because he needed his diaper changed. He was a night owl, not a morning person.

  He was also at a disadvantage because Trishi had taken down one of the surveillance cameras and used it to capture their sexual escapades the night before. At first Rammi was against the idea, but Trishi was very persuasive. He had rigged the camera to record to the hard drive of her laptop computer. Unfortunately the camera was still sitting on a makeshift stand in their bedroom when the Gus’s Garage Door van backed into the driveway.

  Rammi stirred slightly, but drifted back to sleep. The Colonel raised the back door of the van, and Barros stepped onto the driveway. As the driver, he wore his body armor and his weapon under a standard workman’s coverall, so if the neighbors saw him, they wouldn’t think twice. It was the same coverall he used when working on their vehicles, so it even had the requisite grease stains.

  He pushed the top panel of the garage door inward and fished the thin hooked piece of steel toward the emergency release. Feeling the slight resistance as it caught on the cord, he pulled steadily toward the van and heard the click as it released. Barros motioned to the Colonel that they were ready to go, and Luis raised the garage door. The team was inside in seconds, closing the garage door behind them.

  In his relatively short life, Rammi had been awakened from a deep sleep in a variety of ways. Most often by his mother, exhorting him to get up and go to school. Often by friends, playing practical jokes. Occasionally by Trishi or another girlfriend, rousing him by arousing him.

  The sound of the door from the garage into the house being blasted open with a breaching round followed by a stampede of combat boots on the floor made for one wake-up call he would not soon forget.

  Trishi started to scream at the sight of five masked men in combat gear around the bed, but the appearance of Luis’s jet-black special forces knife three inches from her face had the effect of hitting a mute button. Rammi looked for his gun on the bedside table, but it was already in Ramon’s belt.

  The Colonel dispatched the team to carry out the mission, and instructed Andre to stay with him. The Colonel fixed Rammi and Trishi with a malevolent gaze.

  “I need some information, and I need it quickly.”

  “Fuck you, cop!” Rammi spat.

  Andre and the Colonel looked at each other. Of course, the man thought it was a raid.

  “Unfortunately for you, we are not the police,” the Colonel said quickly. “We are… farmers, here to harvest your crop. But I do still want some information.”

  “Fuck you, farmer!” Rammi said.

  Without hesitation, the Colonel grabbed Trishi by the arm and pulled her from the bed. She screamed, “Rammi, do something!”

  Rammi started to move and was met by the end of a suppressed automatic pistol in the center of his forehead.

  The Colonel glanced briefly at Trishi’s naked body, then picked up a tee shirt off the floor and told her to put it on. She did, and he pulled her from the bedroom into the kitchen.

  “Please,” she protested, “I’m an actress, I’m not connected with the dope!”

  The Colonel pulled her through a pair of saloon doors into the kitchen, then looked back over the doors to Rammi. “I will give you five seconds to agree to answer my questions.”

  Rammi was still holding out, “I’ll fucking kill you! You leave her alone!”

  The Colonel disappeared into the kitchen with his girlfriend.

  Barros, still in the driver’s seat of the vehicle, watched a very fit woman in lycra jogging apparel run past the front of the house. Her blond ponytail danced in the early morning sunlight. She smiled at him as she ran past. He waved, and his head turned as if on a swivel.

  Inside the house, the rest of the team had seen the fragmentation grenade booby-traps at the front and rear doors of the house. Diego stopped and took photos of the crude devices with a digital camera. Seven steps down into the basement there was a stair embedded with three-inch nails. They had been smeared with dog feces. It had been difficult to see in the dim light of the stairway, especially against the carpeting. The men took a hammer and pounded the nails back into the stair to make their task easier. Luis went through the pot crop with a pair of bolt cutters, cutting the plants at the base as the other men bundled them into large garbage bags.

  In the kitchen, the Colonel pulled Trishi close. “You are an actress?”

  Trishi couldn’t even speak. She had to pee and felt like it might happen at any time. She nodded at the Colonel.

  The Colonel continued, “I am about to give you the role of your life. Make your boyfriend believe I’m hurting you. If you can’t do this convincingly, I will torture you. Do you understand?”

  Trishi was still mute with fear.

  The Colonel stepped on her bare foot with his combat boot. She cried out in pain.

  “Do you understand?” he repeated calmly.

  “Y-y-yesss,” she stammered.

  Trishi began to whimper, then cry out. The Colonel told her not to scream, so she wouldn’t wake the neighbors. After fifteen seconds of Trishi’s theatrics he looked back over the kitchen saloon doors, into the bedroom where Rammi was still helpless on the bed.

  “Do we have an accord?” he said to Rammi.

  Rammi was broken. “Yes, just leave her alone! Trishi! Talk to me!”

  The Colonel put a finger to her lips, instructing her to remain silent. Then he took two pairs of flexi-cuffs from his belt and immobilized her arms and legs on the floor. “Say nothing,” he said.

  The Colonel and Andre interrogated Rammi quickly and expertly. Andre used a small digital recorder so they could share the intel with the rest of the team. Within minutes, Luis came into the bedroom and gave the Colonel the sign they had all the bags in the garage and were ready to load.

  The Colonel went back into the kitchen, helped Trishi to her feet and threw her over his shoulder. He dumped her on the bed as Andre cuffed Rammi to the bed frame.

  Rammi looked at Trishi, searching for signs of her ordeal. “You okay, baby?” he said.

  The Colonel stopped on his way out of the room and looked back. “Of course she’s okay. I am a soldier, not a sadist.”

  Within seconds, the men were gone.

  19

  When Mitchell arrived in the squad room, Hernandez, Sandovan, and Ryerson were all listening to something on Ryerson’s computer.

  “Hey, what’s up?” he asked.

  Ryerson looked up. “Giving a listen to a bizarre nine one one call. Check this out.”

  He hit the play button on the audio file.

  “…One has a lacerated spleen and blunt force trauma to the skull. The second
has a broken leg, crushed larynx and a fractured mandible. The third has a stab wound to the left lung and both his testicles are ruptured. Please send medical personnel immediately to the alley beside the Cornice building.”

  Mitchell looked at Ryerson. “So?”

  Sandovan brought Mitchell up to speed. “When the paramedics got there they didn’t find anyone. Nobody was injured at the scene. And it doesn’t exactly sound like the sort of trauma you just walk away from, does it?”

  Ryerson added, “Plus listen to the detail in the description. Who talks like that?”

  “He also says ‘send medical personnel,’” Hernandez said. “The guy sounds more like a soldier than a citizen.”

  “I suppose. There are all kinds of practical jokers out there though,” Mitchell said.

  Sandovan squinted. “Dunno, Mitch. Usually the pranksters make up stupid shit. Remember that dude last year who called nine one one and said he was holding the Apostles hostage and wanted to talk to God?”

  Hernandez chimed in, “Or the guy who said his ex-girlfriend had an emergency case of infectious…”

  At that moment the captain appeared. “Ryerson, my office. And bring the fucking pussy posse with you.”

  The men got up from sitting around Ryerson’s computer. Out of the side of his mouth Ryerson said “And into the valley of death, rode the six hundred.”

  They walked into the captain’s office. Mitchell pulled a chair away from the front of the desk and started to sit down.

  “Mitchell, when I want you to dust my office furniture with the seat of your pants, I’ll tell you,” the captain began. “Now why are you guys cluster-fucked around Ryerson’s computer? I know you don’t share the same taste in porn. So it must be something pretty fucking important in the clue department. Let’s hear it. Convince me you fuckers aren’t clueless.”

  “Well sir,” Ryerson said, “a friend of mine who works the nine one one dispatch center sent me a recording of a call they had earlier this week. Weird one. Guy talked like an army combat medic, but the call turned out to be a false alarm. When they showed up there was nobody injured at the scene.”

  “And?” the captain said.