The Last Witness

by W. E. B. Griffin

  “I understood a very slow morning,” Washington said. “And that proves the point that it’s cause and effect.”

  “Meaning?” Payne said.

  Washington gestured at Byrth. “While our friends along the Mexican border may not be stopping all the trafficking, they are shutting down a lot. The pressure is forcing the cartels to develop old and new routes. There has been a sharp rise in cocaine moving from Colombia and Venezuela through the Caribbean to the States. That’s why direct flights coming here from the islands and South Florida are getting much heavier scrutiny.”

  “Too bad they didn’t let him make the delivery,” Payne said, “follow the package farther up the chain.”

  “From what I was told, they were not certain that he had the drugs. And he certainly did not have the characteristics of a courier. Following him could have turned into a wild-goose chase. The best they could do was ask for permission to search. And he instantly owned up that he had the drugs.”

  Washington suddenly produced his cell phone from his jacket pocket.

  He looked at it, then said: “We can discuss further at Liberties. I have been summoned downstairs.”

  —

  When Washington had gone out the door of the ECC, Payne turned to Byrth.

  “Okay, we grab dinner and some liquid encouragement with Mickey at Liberties before heading over to the flophouse. That should put us there right about the time the crackheads come home to roost.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Do you have a room?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You could use my apartment if it wasn’t a mess of half-packed moving boxes. Hang on.” He searched his address book, found the number he wanted. After a moment, he said into the phone, “Hello, this is Matt Payne. I have a guest I’d like to get a room for—” He listened for a moment, then said, “You are? Very well. Please call me if that changes. Thank you.”

  He raised his eyebrows as he looked at Byrth.

  “What?” Byrth said.

  “Plan B, as in Byrth,” Payne then said, holding up his left index finger as his right thumb hit a speed-dial key on his phone.

  He recognized the slight Polish accent when his call was answered on the first ring.

  “David, it’s Matt Payne. How are you fixed for an overflow room tonight?” He paused to listen. “Great. Save it for me for the next week, starting tonight. I’ll get the key around nine.”

  He hung up and looked at Byrth.

  “What was that about?” Jim said.

  “I called the Union League, where you stayed last time?”

  Byrth nodded.

  “They’re sold out. Then, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it first, I called the Hops Haus. They maintain a couple of one-bedroom condos that they rent out like hotel rooms. If you don’t have room for a guest in your condo, you can put them up downstairs in a place that’s as nice as any five-star but at a quarter the price.”

  “Thanks. But a week? My blood is too thin for this cold weather, and I’m accustomed to closing cases faster than that.”

  “However long you like. Now, I need to find us a car.”

  “I’ve got a rental,” Byrth said, pulling out a key. “You want to drive? It’s your town.”

  “You do remember what happened to the last two cars I had.”

  Byrth met his eyes, then stuffed the key back in his pocket.

  “On second thought, you can navigate.”

  VIII

  [ONE]

  Kensington, Philadelphia

  Monday, November 17, 3:21 P.M.

  Driving back into Philadelphia, Ricky Ramírez knew he was on extremely shaky ground with Dmitri Gurnov.

  Gurnov was the angriest he had ever been with him after he allowed Krystal Gonzalez to get her hands on the ledgers and then screwed up the chance to get them back. He shook his head, remembering what Dmitri had said.

  “There’s gonna be hell to pay for this. Mr. Antonov does not like surprises.”

  And now, driving back from Atlantic City when Gurnov thought Ramírez was headed to Miami would probably put him over the top.

  But not if I get this woman, get the books.

  Everything, it will be good again.

  Especially since he called and said he hadn’t found her at none of those places.

  Héctor, he will know what to do.

  Ricky was on his third NRG! drink in as many hours, sucking down the small cans of caffeine and sugar water to battle his hangover and exhaustion. It was starting to make him even more anxious.

  It had been a miserable trip to the Jersey Shore. The drive had begun early that morning, after he had loaded into the Mazda minivan four girls who had spent the last week working out of the Players Corner Lounge. It was snowing, and the road conditions were poor, making rush hour traffic worse than usual on the way out.

  It had taken more than two hours to reach Atlantic City. At Tiki Bob’s Surf Shack—which was eight blocks inland from the Lucky Stars Casino on the boardwalk and set up similar to Players Corner Lounge, with strippers downstairs and two floors of beds above—the exchange of the four in the minivan for the three girls who had worked the week at Tiki Bob’s had taken far longer than Ricky would have preferred.

  Then, on the way back on the Atlantic City Expressway, just past the exit for Egg Harbor, New Jersey, a bus had been in the middle of at least a ten-car pileup.

  Worse, he had been stuck listening to the girls whine.

  “I still don’t get why we aren’t hitting Florida next, Ricky,” Janice, a twenty-year-old pasty-skinned brunette, had said from the backseat.

  His chunky, pockmarked face filled the rearview mirror as he met her eyes.

  “I told you it is now next week!” he snapped. “I had something come up!”

  “But it’s, like, warm there,” Janice went on. “And I’m so, like, sick of this snow.”

  “And it will still be warm there next week,” he said impatiently.

  “I’m tired of being cold, too, Ricky,” Shanika, a nineteen-year-old who had pale, freckled skin and her hair dyed ruby red, chimed in.

  Jasmine, the bleached blonde in her mid-twenties sitting beside him, joined in, “Why are we missin’—”

  “Will you all just fuckin’ shut up?” Ramírez said.

  Jasmine turned toward him. “But—”

  He raised his right hand to backslap her, then realized they were in heavy stop-and-go traffic and quickly lowered it.

  “Shut up!” he said. “Now!”

  The girls finally got the message and, after leaning their heads against the windows, slept the rest of the trip to Fishtown.

  It had taken more than three hours to cover the sixty miles. He did not want to think how long driving south would have taken.

  And now I got to change the ads on that escort website. Take the ones off the Miami pages, put them up on the Philly ones.

  Then change it all back next week?

  Maybe just change the dates on the Miami ones, and leave them up?

  Damn! Keepin’ these putas moving around is too much work!

  —

  At Players Corner Lounge, it had taken the better part of an hour to get the girls, sleepy and dragging their feet, out of the minivan and settled in the rooms above the dive bar. Then Ramírez hopped back in the minivan and headed up Frankford Avenue.

  Near the circular building that was Horatio B. Hackett Elementary School, he turned onto Trenton Avenue and followed it three blocks, looking in his mirror for anyone following him, as Dmitri had taught him. He made a right turn. At the second intersection he made a left onto Tulip Street, and again checked the mirror as he drove. After three blocks he made a right onto Sergeant, found the first open spot along the curb, and parked.

  Ramírez got out and pulled his coat closed aga
inst the cold. The icy breeze carried with it a sharp industrial smell. The metallic burning odor—which he guessed came from the auto salvage yard just across Lehigh Avenue, or maybe from the old distillery down the street—irritated his nostrils.

  A couple hits of that blackberry brandy they make would be good to cut this damn cold, he thought, then rubbed his nose. And this smell.

  He turned back a block—crossing the street with the flophouse that he realized he had not visited in a couple of months—then quickly went over two more blocks. As he walked, he hit some slippery spots on the sidewalk, recovered before actually falling, and wished he could have parked closer. But Dmitri had said to always park at least three blocks away from the grow house and approach it on foot so that he would not draw any extra attention to it. The worst thing he could do was park right out front. Cars coming and going wasn’t good, Dmitri said.

  Almost to the next intersection, he saw across the street three men in their thirties sitting on the stoop of a boarded-up row house. They were all brown-skinned and gaunt and looked like they hadn’t had a bath in a long time. The tallest one, with a scraggly beard and hair matted in dreadlocks under a dirty, multicolored knitted cap, had to his lips what at first glance appeared to be a cigarette. But then Ramírez recognized it, and caught in the air the unmistakable pungent smell of marijuana.

  The three, who Ramírez decided had to be from one of the nearby flophouses, did not pay him any attention as he passed.

  That was not the case with the pair he encountered next.

  On the opposite corner, Ramírez came up on two Hispanic teenagers—they looked maybe sixteen and were probably Puerto Rican—with a battered gray Yamaha FZ1 motorcycle on its stand between them. They wore bulky dark coats, their hands stuffed in the deep pockets, and had black stocking caps pulled down low on their heads. They talked to each other as their eyes darted between the three brown-skinned men sharing the joint and the approaching Ramírez.

  The teenagers didn’t recognize Ramírez, nor he them. But he knew what they were.

  Some of Héctor’s halcónes.

  And he knew that the “hawks” had more than their hands in their coat pockets. Lookouts always carried a disposable cell phone, of course, and often a pistol.

  Ramírez turned the corner, and midway down the street he crossed over. He went up to the door of the last of the five rough-looking row houses on the block. The first two houses, tagged with graffiti, had realtor signs nailed to their doors that read FOR SALE—BANK FORECLOSURE. There was chain-link fencing, eight feet high, vine-covered and topped with coils of razor wire, blocking off the side and rear yards.

  Just as Ramírez knocked twice on the door, wondering if there was an eyeball on the other side of the dirty peephole, he heard dead bolt locks turning.

  The door swung inward. The row house interior was dark, but just beyond the door—and behind a wall of thick, clear plastic sheeting that hung from ceiling to floor—Ramírez could make out two human forms standing midway in the room. They were aiming the Kalashnikovs he’d brought at him.

  “Get inside, Ricky!” the one on the left gently urged in Spanish, lowering the AK-47 he’d converted to fully automatic.

  Ricky, recognizing Héctor Ramírez’s voice, went through the door. It was immediately closed behind him and the dead bolts thrown. An overhead lightbulb came on, and Ricky saw the short Hispanic male who had locked the door and hit the switch. He now was pulling the sheeting from the wall. He gestured for Ricky to go through.

  There was another motorcycle, a big Kawasaki, by the door. Duct tape held more of the clear plastic sheeting over the windows, sealing them. Ricky crossed the big front room of the house. It was mostly empty except for a ratty sofa, a wooden box that served as a coffee table, and a big flat-screen TV mounted on a wall.

  “Hola, mi amigo,” Héctor said, his tone friendly.

  Just hearing that caused Ricky to start feeling a little better. They had developed a strong relationship—maybe ’cause of our Latin thing, and being from the islands—one far better than what Ricky and Dmitri had. Héctor’s calm demeanor helped ground him, balancing out Ricky’s quick temper and his tendency to be reckless.

  Héctor was a swarthy forty-year-old whose hardscrabble life had included spending his early thirties in a Cuban jail. After growing up on a tobacco farm in central Cuba, he had made his way to Havana. He worked various jobs in the restaurants and bars, then wound up running hookers to the tourists out of a Havana apartment building. And got busted. He discovered that his primary crime against the socialist motherland wasn’t pimping—which, unlike the prostitution, was illegal—it was his failure to pay off the correct policía with U.S. dollars or free putas or both.

  In jail he had heard about the smugglers who, for a fee that he could work off, would get him to Florida. When released, he had wasted no time seeking them out. Once in the States, and owing ten grand for his passage aboard the fast boat, he had his horticulture skills put to the test. The smugglers were Cuban exiles and had grow houses near Miami. Héctor found cultivating marijuana indoors much easier than hoeing rows of tobacco under the Cuban sun. He also found himself almost back behind bars—someone had tipped off the house to the DEA. His handlers sent him to Philadelphia, subtracting a little from his bill for transporting a kilogram each of black tar heroin and cocaine.

  Ricky Ramírez, after getting a call from Dmitri Gurnov, had taken delivery. When he heard Héctor’s story—and Héctor convinced him that running a grow house would be easy money—Ricky set him up in the rented row houses in Kensington. Ricky had lied to Dmitri that that money—which had included what he advanced Héctor to satisfy his debt in Little Havana—was a loan. It really was Ricky using Dmitri’s money. Héctor now worked for him.

  Ricky knew he’d luckily gotten away with all that. So far.

  “I’m glad that you are here, Jefe,” Héctor said, patting Ricky on the back. “It’s been months. I have something to show you.”

  Ricky motioned in the direction of the teenagers outside.

  “Your halcónes look about ready to shoot someone,” he said.

  Héctor laughed. “They all want to think they’re sicarios. But those two, Tito and Juan, they are only couriers. One drives and the other rides to deliver the pot.”

  “Courier, assassin,” Ricky said, “only difference is a shooting.”

  Héctor laughed again.

  “Yes, I guess that is true, Ricky. Now come with me. . . .”

  [TWO]

  Liberties Bar

  502 N. Second Street, Philadelphia

  Monday, November 17, 4:45 P.M.

  “Teenaged kids in foster care are ripe for the picking by pimps,” Mickey O’Hara said, sliding the files on the two missing West Philadelphia Sanctuary case workers that Matt Payne had given him back in the envelope. He then put that in his laptop case at his feet. “It is tragically simple.”

  Payne and Jim Byrth, having arrived at Liberties first, were seated at the far end of the enormous dark oak Victorian bar that ran along most of the wall. They had a view of the entire room, including the front window—through which could be seen the back of the bar’s five-foot-tall replica of the Statue of Liberty—and the front door. O’Hara, his back to it all, stood near them at the corner, leaning with his forearms against the bar as he nursed a Guinness Black Lager. Matt had before him a half-finished eighteen-year-old Macallan single malt whisky, slightly cut with water and two ice cubes. Jim sipped at a Jack Black on the rocks. They picked at two overflowing baskets of hand-cut onion rings and fries.

  The narrow brick-faced three-story Liberties was at the end of a hundred-year-old building that went the entire block. A half circle of canvas awning with an inviting Lady Liberty painted on it overhung its front door.

  The heavy wooden interior was rich in character, warm and intimate, what came from decades of crowds drinking,
eating, laughing, living. The crowd was light now—only one other man at the bar, close to the window and talking with the bartender, and two couples, one at a table in the middle of the room and another in one of the wooden booths lining the opposite wall—but it would quickly build as people stopped in on their way home from work.

  O’Hara went on: “Like all kids, the ones in foster care are hungry for love and attention. Arguably more so. Their fathers and mothers who should have provided that instead failed them miserably—often because their parents had failed them, too. It’s a vicious cycle.”

  He paused and took a sip of beer. Then he chewed on an onion ring as he gathered his thoughts.

  “Okay,” he went on, “so here’s the fairy-tale version. Let’s give our foster child a name. Call her, oh, say, Joyce. She’s fourteen. Her parents die in a car wreck, leaving her an orphan with no other family. The courts take custody, put her in the care of CPS. She’s matched with a foster family, who raise Joyce as their own. She graduates high school, then at eighteen exits CPS and maybe goes to community college down Spring Garden Street here, or to a beautician’s school, or just gets married. And Joyce lives happily ever after.”

  “And we all know that’s not what happens . . .” Matt said.

  Jim grunted, nodding as he sipped his bourbon.

  Mickey looked between them.

  “And we know that’s not what happens,” Mickey parroted. “The cruel reality of what happens is that Joyce is fourteen going on twenty-four. She has a father she’s never known. Her mother, who might have two or three baby daddies, is bipolar, a crackhead, a hooker, dead. Pick one, or more. The courts send Joyce to CPS. But there are no available foster homes, so Joyce winds up, if lucky, at a place like Mary’s House, run by someone like Maggie. Or at a larger facility that has, shall we say, less considerate caretakers. Now, one of two things can happen. One, Joyce remains there in the group home due to the lack of an available foster family. Or two, she gets placed in a foster home, where she learns that the foster parents may mean well but really are not a helluva lot better than the caretakers in the large group home. Many foster parents do not supervise the kids. Cannot, because they’re working to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads.”