But that wasn’t one hundred percent true; Screech had gotten himself involved. He’d gotten himself involved when he’d agreed to take the job at Triple D in order for the DA to go easy on his brother.
He’d gotten himself involved when he’d snapped those pictures of Drake and Beckett.
This was his fight as much as it was Drake’s.
Screech plopped himself down in the chair and pulled up to the computer. Then he minimized the video and opened his browser.
“What you doing?” Leroy asked. “Are you going to help Drake?”
Screech thought about this for a moment. Drake was probably racing across the city now and, knowing him, there was nothing he could say or do to stop the man.
But he could try and put an end to this.
“Yeah, I’m going to help him,” Screech replied, pounding away at his keyboard. “I’m going to help him cut the head off the snake.”
“What? How?”
“Ohmefentanyl, that’s how.”
When he’d told Yasiv that there hadn’t been a match between a chem lab and an ANGUIS property, the sergeant had suggested looking at records of people and places that had ordered the raw ingredients.
It seemed simple enough, but even with detailed instructions on how to synthesize the opioid right in front of him, Screech was far from enlightened. All the chemical names looked to him like a can of Alphaghetti thrown against a chalkboard.
“Fuck,” he grumbled after reading the same line half a dozen times.
“What is this? What are you trying to do?”
“I’m trying to figure out where the ohmefentanyl is coming from… who’s making this shit. But I don’t understand any of it,” Screech said, shoving the keyboard.
“Move aside,” Leroy said.
“Oh, now you’re some sort of drug guru?”
Leroy shook his head.
“No, but I know a little something about chemistry. Now move aside and let me work.”
Chapter 36
Mike Pontiac banged his fist on the door.
“Dalton!” he shouted. “Dalton, you fat fuck, get out here!”
He pounded continuously for close to a minute before the door finally opened and a sleepy looking Pete Dalton peered out.
“Mike? What are you doing here? What time is it?”
“Don’t matter, let’s go,” Mike said, grabbing the man’s t-shirt and yanking him forward.
“What the fuck?”
“I said, we gotta go.”
They were almost at Mike’s car when Dalton finally dug his heels in.
“Mike, what’s going on, man? I can’t… I gotta get my daughter to school.”
Mike looked down at his cell phone and reread the text message he’d gotten less than ten minutes ago.
“I got a tip from 62nd precinct. Someone called in to report a junkie overdose at 178th and Washington.”
Dalton made a face.
“What? So what? Junkies are always—wait, 178th and Washington?”
Mike nodded.
“That’s where the kid was killed, isn’t it?”
Mike walked over to the driver seat and got in. Then he started the engine and leaned out the open window.
“Yeah, and that’s where Chris and BT deal their heroin from — our heroin. We better get the fuck over there before anyone else, unless you want to explain why our prints are all over the fucking trap house.”
Chapter 37
“Dammit,” Drake said, slamming his hands down on the steering wheel. The wheel in Hanna’s VW was much harder than his crown Vic’s and it sent a painful shock up his wrists.
He’d gotten there a minute or two too late.
Just as he turned onto 178th, he saw a midnight black Ford Taurus came to a stop outside the address that Leroy had given him. At first, Drake didn’t pay this much heed and continued driving. But when two men hopped out, he hesitated. They were dressed in plainclothes, but it was clear by their posture, demeanor, and attitude that they were cops.
And when they went straight to the front doors without even bothering to cast a glance around despite the neighborhood they were in, his suspicions were confirmed.
Drake didn’t understand why Yasiv would sent plainclothes instead of uniformed officers to a suspected overdose, but he remained in the car nonetheless. It didn’t really matter what they were wearing; they were still gonna find and bag the heroin to send it to the lab for prints. Once it reached the station, there was no way he was going to be able to get it out.
He had to intercept it before it got there; that was the only way.
Drake glanced over at the shotgun on the passenger seat, then he popped the glovebox and rooted around inside.
Thank you, Hanna, he thought, pulling out a pair of nylon stockings, still in the package. They were sheer, which wasn’t ideal, but they were better than nothing.
He stopped just short of putting one of them over his head.
What the hell are you thinking, Drake? Are you seriously gonna hold these cops at gunpoint and get them to hand over the evidence?
This wasn’t like what had happened with Officer Kramer. Office Kramer had been brained by Mandy, and he was just protecting her ass by tossing his unconscious body into the shipping container.
There had been no malice intended. But this… this was different.
Drake sighed and rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept. It was probably back in the infirmary, but even that had been interrupted. Getting a good night’s sleep when someone who claimed to be you was bleeding to death in the bed one over was a difficult task at the best of times. Harder still when your face ached and your liver had shriveled up like a dessicated prune.
No matter how hard you try, everybody and everything around you just goes to shit, Drake.
“Godamnit,” he whispered.
Maybe Beckett was right. Maybe it would be best if I just curled up and died, if I go back to prison and allow Rodney and his gang to kick and punch me until there’s nothing left.
He’d come close before. When Ray Reynolds had all of the members of the Church of Liberation under his spell, Drake had willingly drunk the Kool-Aid, literally and figuratively.
He shook his head.
That was then, this is now.
Now, others would die if he didn’t get to the bottom of this. If he didn’t put a stop to Ken Smith.
Others would die, while others still — Leroy and Screech and Hanna included — would end up behind bars.
Because of him. Because of Damien Donald Drake.
The front doors to the apartment opened, pulling Drake back into the present.
One of the officers stepped out, a thickly built man wearing aviator sunglasses. He cautiously looked left and right before gesturing back inside the building.
And then, inexplicably, his partner, who was much bigger than the first with a thick midsection and pudgy legs and arms, dragged the blond-haired junkie outside.
“What the fuck?”
In the first officer’s hand, Drake spotted a bag that he hadn’t entered the building with. Whatever was inside was heavy enough to stretch the plastic.
They’ve got the heroin.
As Drake watched on, a confused look on his face, the fat officer dragged the junkie’s corpse all the way down an adjacent alley before unceremoniously dropping her.
As both men staged the scene, the officer with the aviator sunglasses lifted them up to wipe sweat from his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt.
And then Drake’s blood ran cold.
He was wrong. These weren’t good cops, normal cops, cops who were just out doing their job, trying to keep people safe.
No, these were the same cops — the exact same cops — that had stood on Jasmine’s porch not twelve hours ago.
The cops who had made a curious exchange with his girlfriend and mother of his child.
Fuck it, Drake thought as he picked up the shotgun and started from Hanna’s vehic
le. I’m not letting Leroy go down for these pricks.
Staying low, Drake did his best to cross the street without being noticed. And then he slid into the backseat of the Ford Taurus and waited for the two officers to return.
Chapter 38
“All right,” Leroy began, staring at the chemical formulas on the screen. “If I’ve got this right, the second to last step involves using 2-bromoacetophenone to react with the secondary amine before further reducing it to end up with ohmefentanyl.”
Screech blinked several times.
“You speaking English?”
Leroy ignored the comment and continued.
“I’m guessing that 2-bromoacetophenone is the substance that would be hard to get. I mean, none of the reagents involved are that difficult to acquire, but this one is probably the most rare.”
“How can that be? How can anyone just go online and buy the chemicals and reagents to make this poison?”
Leroy shrugged.
“I’m guessing because individually they’re about as dangerous as acetic acid; vinegar. The hard part is the expertise and patience required for all the sequential reactions to turn 1-Benzyl-3-methyl-4-piperidinone into ohmefentanyl.”
Screech chewed the inside of his lip. While he was grateful for Leroy’s surprising chemistry knowledge, he wasn’t sure how to act upon what the kid was telling him.
“So you can buy this stuff anywhere?”
Leroy moved his head side to side in a half nod, half shake.
“Well, not really. You can’t just walk into a pharmacy and get it off the shelf. You need to go through one of the major distributors of chemical reagents and you have to get the highest purity available. In chemistry class, we only got our reagents from one of two companies: Sigma-Aldrich or Fisher Biosciences. I mean, the shit we used was whatever was left over from a white school, but the labels were from one of those two places. The real problem is, several of the reagents are fairly common. But if you’re wanting to make the purest shit? You’re gonna want fresh 2-bromoacetophenone, which means repeated orders. So what I’m thinking is, if you get a search warrant and went through Sigma-Aldrich’s or Fisher Biosciences’s records, you might be able to—”
Screech rolled his chair in front of the computer, boxing Leroy out of the way.
“Search warrant,” Screech said, rapsberrying his lips. After a flurry of keystrokes, he flexed his fingers and leaned back in his chair. “All right, I’m in. How much of that stuff do you think they ordered?”
“Just like that you hacked into Sigma-Aldrich’s ordering system?”
“Yeah,” Screech said quickly. “Now come on, tell me how much of this 2-bromoethyl-whatever we’re looking for before Drake does something really stupid.”
Leroy shrugged.
“Well?”
“I have no idea — I have no idea how much of this stuff is out there. I mean, it can’t be that much; given how deadly it is, if the heroin is cut with too much of it, all the junkies would just die.”
The mention of dead junkies caused Leroy’s face to sag and Screech quickly tried to distract the kid.
“Okay, yeah, but you said that it had to be ordered often so it didn’t go bad, right?”
“GLP practices state that you need to buy fresh reagents like 2-bromoacetophenone every month or so.”
Screech turned back to the computer and started typing again. Within minutes, he’d brought up a list of maybe a dozen places that had ordered 2-bromoacetophenone over the past six months. When he narrowed it down to orders that were repeated every thirty days or so, he was left with only two addresses, one of which was NYU’s chemistry department.
Working so quickly that his fingers were a blur, Screech cross-referenced this final address with the buildings owned by ANGUIS Holdings.
A small smile formed on his lips.
“Bingo,” he whispered. “I’ve got you now.”
Chapter 39
Drake lay as low as he could in the backseat of the Ford Taurus, grateful for the dark — and probably illegal — window tint. With the shotgun gripped in both hands he tried to regulate his breathing, to remain calm, to think of nothing at all.
But no matter how much effort he expended, his mind kept coming back to Jasmine. Jasmine, and how these two officers had coerced her into some sort of exchange.
They… they extorted her somehow. That’s the only thing that makes sense. But then where the hell did she get the heroin from?
Drake shook his head and closed his eyes.
Maybe Clay—
The sound of approaching footfalls and voices caused him to focus.
“You going to call in it?”
“No need; it was already called in. I just asked my contact at 62nd to give us a twenty minute head start. Uniforms should be arriving in fifteen.”
“And you got the dope?”
“I got some dope. I have no idea where Chris got it from, but it’s definitely her shit.”
“What does that mean? Someone stole it from us and sold it to Chris? I told you we were middlemen.”
“We’re not fucking middlemen. Just shut the fuck up and get in the car, Dalton.”
Drake tensed as the car doors opened. A moment later, the vehicle lowered as first the driver sat, then the passenger.
Dalton… where have I heard that name before?
He waited for the men to close their doors, then sat bolt upright, the shotgun aimed straight ahead.
At first, nothing happened; unbelievably, neither of the officers noticed him.
But the second Drake clucked his tongue, the fatter of the two police officers literally leaped forward, banging his head on the windshield in the process.
The other officer, the one with the obnoxious sunglasses, was also shocked, but not so much that he was incapacitated.
His hand immediately went for the gun on his hip, but Drake snaked his arm over the center console and grabbed his wrist. With his other hand, he pushed the barrel of the shotgun into the back of his seat.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” Drake warned in a calm, even tone.
Chapter 40
“Either of you go for your guns and I’ll put a hole in this douchebag’s spine,” Drake said. “I want you to slowly raise your hands and interlace your fingers behind your head.”
Both officers did as they were asked.
“Real fucking smart, buddy,” the driver said. “We’re police officers, you moron.”
“Oh, is that what you call yourself? Police Officers? You’re a fucking joke, that’s what you are.”
Officer Dalton’s eyes flicked to the rearview and focused on Drake’s face. The man’s brow slowly began to furrow.
“I… I know you,” he said.
“You don’t know shit,” Drake shot back. He’d put the nylon over his head before leaving Hanna’s car; there was no way that they could tell who he was.
“No… no, I know you. I recognize your voice. I was in the court the other day. You’re… fucking hell, you’re the guy who kidnapped Kramer.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be in prison? Aren’t you—”
Wanting to put an end to this discussion, Drake thrust the shotgun forward. The driver grunted and turned to his partner.
“Shut the fuck up, Dalton.”
“Yeah, shut the fuck up,” Drake repeated. “I want you to tell me where you got the heroin from. I want you to tell me that DI Palmer gave it to you and that he got it from Ken Smith.”
There was a short, awkward pause during which the two officers exchanged glances.
“What are you talking about? We confiscated the drugs from some dead junkie’s apartment. You’re off your rocker, man.”
“Pontiac, it’s him,” Dalton said suddenly. He was almost giddy, as if he were in the presence of a celebrity. “I swear, it’s him. This is what he was saying in court. All this crazy stuff about the mayor and—”
“Shut up, Dalton.”
And then something in Drake’s head clicked.
Drug Lord- Part I Page 12
