by Ron Fisher
“Thank you again, Doctor,” I said, wondering how much of his determination to help was driven by guilt that he, like so many other well-meaning doctors like him, was a birther of this opioid crisis by prescribing them to their patients in the first place.
Doctor Stefans and I finished our lunch with small talk and parted ways.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
On the way back to the Clarion, I kept feeling a vague sense of familiarity with Doctor Stefans. I was sure we’d never met before my visit to his office, but he reminded me of someone. Then it came to me. It wasn’t his looks that were familiar. It was the way he spoke. He reminded me of an old fraternity brother from college. They both spoke with the same meticulous speech pattern, pronouncing their words with a kind of overdone precision. And neither used contractions. Both said, “do not” rather than “don’t,” and “cannot” instead of “can’t.”
At first, I’d thought that my old frat brother, who came from a very wealthy family, was a stuffed-shirt, and I didn’t like him much. After I got to know him, he told me why he spoke that way. As a child, he stuttered, and his parents sent him to a speech therapist who gave him speech fluency exercises. It cured his stutter, but he never got over the fear that it would return. So he continued to speak in that manner, and it became the norm for him. He and I eventually became friends and still were, keeping in touch with Christmas and birthday cards. His stutter never returned.
Was Doctor Stefans a stutterer as a kid, or was he just pretentious? I’d put my money on the latter. He was a rather humorless man who took himself very seriously—which could include the way he spoke.
Later that afternoon, I picked Alvin up at his place, and we got what we needed to stake out the Dollar’s junkyard at a convenience store in Central. We drove back past the junkyard about a half-mile and found a semi-hidden place to park off the two-lane blacktop. With the binoculars from the Jeep’s glove box, a six-pack of bottled waters, several candy bars, insect spray, and a half-dozen pre-packaged pimento cheese sandwiches, we headed toward the wooded area on the rise behind the junkyard.
First, we had to make our way through an open field, out of sight from the Dollar compound. The field was someone’s old farmland, now fallow and overgrown with weeds, broom straw, and small bastard pine trees. We would be easy to spot until we made the tree line. If anyone was looking, I didn’t see them.
Once we made the top of the ridge, I found the tree, a tall, broad oak with a hunting blind sitting about twenty-five feet up, nestled like a treehouse between three thick limbs that spread into a fork.
What looked like green-painted sheets of aluminum roofing covered the blind, sides and top, with small windows cut in the walls to look down on any prey. From underneath, I could see that the floor was built of two by fours and plywood, and from where I stood looked reasonably sturdy. I hoped I was right.
The wooden ladder that led up to it, nailed to the side of the enormous old oak, wasn’t in the same shape. The steps were weathered and rotting, and I wondered if the ladder would support the weight of two big guys like Alvin and me.
We had to try. I couldn’t see any other spot that would allow such a bird’s eye view right down into the confines of the junkyard. Alvin lost the coin flip and went first. He made it up with only one rung of the old ladder crumbling away underfoot. I broke another one, and the ladder seemed to be about to come away from the tree, but I made it too. I guessed we’d worry about getting down when the time came.
The blind was barely large enough for both of us. The structure creaked and groaned, and leaned a bit. There were two rusted, folding chairs there, and we sat in them, shoulder to shoulder, facing the junkyard below. I hadn’t fallen out of a tree since I was a boy, and I wasn’t keen on doing it again. Alvin seemed to be enjoying himself probably because there weren’t too many trees for a kid to climb on the Southside of Chicago. Or deer blinds.
We set about watching the rambling junkyard, passing the binoculars back and forth. I could make out strings of lights strung on poles weaving through the yard, and if the Dollars turned them on at night, perhaps we’d still be able to see what was going on down there after the sun went down. We’d just have to wait to see.
I took a closer look at the dwellings. We still didn’t know for sure if the Dollars were manufacturing drugs here. If they were, it had to be someplace not easily seen. The two-story farmhouse in the middle of the lot was weather-beaten, but looked livable. It had junk on the wide front porch—an old refrigerator with a round top sat and a stack of worn tires. Pots of blooming flowers hanging around the eaves revealed a woman’s touch, most likely Wade Dollar’s wife. Since fentanyl was such a dangerous drug, I didn’t think they would have it inside a house where a family lived.
There were three small houses and the single-wide trailer scattered throughout the yard, at various distances from each other and the big house. Two of the smaller homes and the trailer looked lived-in, one house looked vacant. Maybe this was the lab.
There was a motorcycle and a pickup truck parked in front of the single-wide, which made me think that it might be Sonny’s pad. The big house had another pickup and the two livable small homes had vehicles parked by them, too—one a black SUV with dark tinted windows. Had I seen the plate number, either while we were being chased or at the drive-by at Still Hollow, we would have had these guys nailed.
“Somebody down there is doing well,” I said to Alvin and handed him the binoculars. “All the vehicles are late models. That black truck by the mobile home is a Ford F-150 Raptor and goes for over fifty grand.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” Alvin said. “Who would pay fifty-K for a pickup truck?”
“Somebody with the money. And the SUV is a new Ford Explorer. I looked at those when I’d briefly considered trading in my trusty Jeep. I quickly learned I couldn’t afford it.”
Alvin studied the vehicles. “The Explorer looks like the one that chased us. And that Harley can run you thirty to forty. You think you can make that kind of scratch running this junkyard?”
“I’d say it’d be doubtful.”
“So, somebody's got some supplemental income coming in.”
“Could be from the Tiger’s Tail, I suppose. If the Dollars are the off-the-books owners.”
“Or if they’re running a shitload of drugs,” Alvin said, completing my thoughts.
A pickup truck pulling into the office out front caught my attention. I took the glasses back from Alvin and watched. A guy in coveralls got out, and a man I assumed to be Wade Dollar came out of the office, followed by his son Benny. The three of them walked over to the bay where Benny had the engine on the hoist. We watched as they rolled the hoist out of the bay and placed it so the engine hovered over the bed of the pickup truck. Wade and the man stood talking and gesturing, haggling over the price of the motor. They must have reached an agreement, because the man pulled out a wallet on a chain from his back pocket, counted out some bills and handed them to Wade. Benny ratcheted the engine down into the bed of the truck, unhooked the chains from the hoist, and the man drove away.
A little later, another customer came and went, leaving with what looked to be a four-barreled carburetor.
As the sun got a little closer to the horizon, Sonny Dollar came out of the single-wide, saddled up, and rode away on his chopper. He was probably on his way to the Tiger’s Tail. A cold beer from there would be pretty good right now, I thought. I was drinking lukewarm bottled water. Alvin had grown quiet, every bit as bored as I was, I suspected. This whole idea had all the earmarks of a wasted effort.
A woman carrying several full plastic garbage bags came out of the old farmhouse. I took her for Wade Dollar’s wife, but it was just a guess. A kid about five or six walked with her, holding a big yellow cat in his arms, a grandchild perhaps. From what Bagwell and Underwood said, the whole extended Dollar family lived within the compound, each owning their particular plot of land. The woman placed the bags in a big rusty oil drum an
d set the contents on fire.
I watched as the kid with the cat wandered over to stand by a chain-length pen, which held two full-grown Doberman Pinschers.
I nudged Alvin. He’d seen them too.
“The real junkyard dogs,” he said.
The dogs began barking wildly at the cat—we could hear them from where we sat. The cat jumped out of the boy’s arms, arched its back, hair on end, took a couple of defensive stiff-legged side steps like cats do, and bared its teeth at the dogs. I couldn’t hear the cat over the dogs. It was obviously yowling and spitting at them, holding its ground.
I heard Alvin chuckle.
“Junkyard cat too,” he said.
The cat finally ran off, the boy chasing after it.
A man came out of the small house where the SUV was parked, walked over and stood looking at the dogs, who were still barking. He said or did something that quieted them down. It was Laverne Dollar. He wore a cowboy hat and boots, and even from this distance he radiated a palpable menace.
As he walked away, the boy’s cat came out from somewhere and joined him. The dogs started up again. The cat followed Dollar, winding back and forth between his legs as he walked. Dollar stopped and picked it up, holding it in his arms and scratching its ears. As he went by the blazing garbage drum, the flames now roaring three feet into the air, he tossed the cat at the fire with all the casualness of someone chucking in a piece of litter. The cat did a mid-air somersault, kicked off the rim of the drum and raced off. Without missing a step Dollar continued on his way.
“Mother-fucker ,” Alvin said, looking at me in amazement. Did he just try to throw that cat in the fire?”
I looked at Alvin, not believing what I’d just seen either. I had the binoculars, and there was no mistaking it.
“I’m afraid so,” I said.
“That’s cold, man,” Alvin said. “Cold.”
“And then some,” I added, lifting the glasses and watching Laverne Dollar.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Laverne Dollar walked into the interior of the junkyard along a footpath that lay between the plethora of auto carcasses, a rusting and weed-punched history of Detroit. There were the beetle-back shapes of the forties, the fins and two-tones of the fifties and sixties, and the misshapen, damaged remains from all eras, symbolizing injury, death and wreckage on America’s highways. Somehow the presence of Laverne Dollar walking through them struck me as appropriate. He was like some sinister acolyte of death and destruction, visiting his handiwork.
Dollar disappeared from sight. He’d walked behind a six-car stack of wrecks and simply vanished. I watched for a few minutes, and he never came out on the other side.
“What’s he doing behind there?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but he’s got company,” Alvin said. “Look to your right.”
A young woman was coming down the same path. She was walking briskly like she knew where she was going. She had short bleach-blonde hair and was dressed in tight jeans and a low-cut blouse. She looked pretty from the distance.
“Who the hell is that?” Alvin said, as much to himself.
“The sister, maybe. Bagwell said she was divorced and living there. I didn’t see where she came from.”
I handed Alvin the glasses. “Did you see her in the Tiger’s Tail?”
“No,” Alvin said. “I would have remembered. She’s hot.”
I didn’t comment, but she was hot, in a trailer-trash way. We watched her go behind the stack of junk cars where we’d lost Laverne Dollar. She didn’t come out either.
“They got something going on back there,” Alvin said, handing me back the glasses.
“I don’t think they’re removing car parts to sell,” I said, and turned the binoculars to my right, examining the trees along the ridge.
“What are you looking at?”
“Another tree to climb. We need a vantage point to give us a look behind that stack of wrecks where they disappeared.”
Alvin stared in the direction I was looking.
“Do you see that large tree in the middle of a stand of young pines?” I asked. “About forty yards down? It has spreading branches low enough to reach, and looks sturdy enough to hold the weight of a man.”
“Got it,” Alvin said.
“I think I can climb that. You stay here and keep an eye out for them if they reappear before I can get up in that tree.”
Alvin just nodded.
I made it out of the blind and onto the ground without breaking another rung on the ladder. Using the trees as cover from anyone in the junkyard, I was at the base of the big tree in a couple of minutes. I stood and looked up into its canopy. It was a perfect tree to climb and for some dumb reason, my mind went back to my eleventh grade English class and a Longfellow poem we had to memorize. “Under a spreading chestnut-tree, the village smithy stands,” it went. Only, I wasn’t a blacksmith, and I was pretty sure this was an oak.
I climbed four levels of branches before I could see what I wanted to see; a clear view of the path behind the wall of junked cars. I’d hoped to see Laverne Dollar and his sister there, but they weren’t. There were no forks in the trail, no sheds or buildings they could have gone into. So, where the hell were they? I scanned the lot and didn’t see them anywhere else. Even if they had come out while I was making my way to the tree, they should still be walking somewhere. I didn’t think they could have come out and made it back to their houses in that short amount of time.
I searched the path again through my binoculars. It ran straight past the solid wall of old automobiles without any gap between them. There was obviously something here that we were missing. I headed back to the blind.
#
We stayed in the blind until well after the sun went down. The few lights mounted on poles came on with most of them situated around the houses. The area where Laverne Dollar and his assumed sister had disappeared remained in darkness, and as far as we could see, they never reappeared.
We’d watched Wade Dollar and his son close-up shop and release the two Dobermans. They now had a free run of the yard. I was surprised that they were trusted not to get out through the dilapidated fence that surrounded the place. Either they were well-trained, or the fence was more secure than it appeared. Was it wired all the way around with an electrical charge at the bottom?
The dogs found what appeared to be their nighttime home near the fence on our side, lying down in a couple of hollowed-out depressions in the ground beneath the bed of an old rusty truck. They remained alert, I could see, periodically raising their heads in unison and turning their gazes at whatever noise or distraction got their attention. Occasionally they would go investigate, but would always return to their spot beneath the truck.
Alvin and I had eaten all our cheese sandwiches and drunk all our water, and I was having a difficult time staying awake. I was wondering whether to call it a day or not, when the dogs went on alert and raced off in the direction where Laverne Dollar and his sister had vanished.
In the dim lights, two people come out from behind the wall of junk cars and head up the path. The dogs were by their side, following along with them.
“What the fuck?” Alvin said.
We watched as they slowly walked side by side toward the smaller houses. They went under the lights as they got nearer, and we could clearly see that it was Laverne Dollar and the woman. She went inside one house, and Laverne in the other. That had to make her the sister, I thought. The dogs hung around for a moment, then returned to their nighttime watch-point.
“They been gone for at least six hours,” Alvin said. “So, where they been?”
I couldn’t prove it, but I was pretty sure I knew. “Probably mixing up and pressing out a fresh batch of pills,” I said, and grinned at Alvin.
“Underground,” he said. “The lab is fucking underground.”
“And the entrance is behind that stack of wrecks somewhere.”
He was grinning now too. “Can’t nobody outsmart a
couple of sharp mother-fuckers like us.”
I said, “We’ve got to get in there. Find the entrance and prove it.”
“We’ll need to do something about them dogs first,” Alvin said.
“A tranquilizer and a half-pound of hamburger should do the trick.”
“How you gonna’ get that?”
“I usually get my hamburger from the supermarket. You know a better place?”
“The tranquilizers, wiseass.”
“I know a guy. I’ll go see him tomorrow.”
“So, we go in tomorrow night?
“Yeah. We’ll watch them for a few hours first, so we know exactly what we’re getting into.”
We closed up our stake-out shop and went back to my Jeep. I took Alvin home to his rental, and I headed to Still Hollow. I didn’t hear Alvin complaining about ticks or chiggers, so he probably went to bed a happy camper.
A day spent up a tree in a cramped deer blind could be very tiring. An hour later I was fast asleep.
CHAPTER FORTY
It was Saturday morning, and I sat by Kelly’s bed, trying my damnedest to maintain a positive outlook. Doctor Mathis had dropped by and said he was still pleased with her improving condition and planned to bring her out of the coma either Monday or Tuesday. That was a bright point, along with my belief that I had a handle on who did this to her. I hoped that after Alvin and I went inside the Dollar junkyard tonight, I’d have evidence to tie the Dollars to it. I wouldn’t give up until I did.
I’d agreed to pick up Alvin late-afternoon to resume our stakeout position in the deer blind before we went in after dark. Alvin and I had decided that the old farmhouse, the single-wide, or the small houses wouldn’t be where they would have their opioid lab.
According to Vickie's research, manufacturing these kinds of drugs was extremely dangerous. They could kill a person just by handling some of the ingredients. People lived in this trailer and these houses. Surely, the Dollars weren’t that crazy. Also, it would be too easy for the cops to detect drugs if they could ever get a search warrant. Especially if they brought in drug dogs, which the DEA would. But could you seal off an underground lab tightly enough to remain undetected by the dogs? I didn’t know. And if we couldn’t find it, maybe the dogs couldn’t either—another reason to find the entrance. My gut screamed at me that it was behind that wall of old cars somewhere.
