Bough Cutter

by Jeff Nania

  “Coffee would be great.”

  He punched up a number on his phone, and coffee was on the way.

  I handed him the picture of Devin Martin.

  “Yeah, that’s Devin Martin. I haven’t seen him around here for a while. I was hoping that he did not appreciate his welcoming committee and moved on. Although dead is absolutely fine by me,” said Joe.

  “Did he hang around the casino?” I asked.

  “Yes and no. He would be here for a week straight and then be gone, and we wouldn’t see him for two or three weeks. One of my undercover guys made him for what he was—a drug dealer. When he’d show up here, several other people would show up too. They would book one of our better rooms for a few days, pay the bill, and be gone until the next time. As soon as we caught on, we initiated a full-fledged campaign to let them know they were not welcome here.”

  “When was that?”

  “We don’t really keep detailed track of these things. I mean, you know how it is. Sometimes you just got to do what you got to do. The details are not as important as the results. My dad was a cop in the Twin Cities in the fifties and sixties and retired in the seventies. He was never the least bit confused about who the bad guys were and how they needed to be treated.”

  “Your dad still alive?”

  “No, he’s been gone a long time.”

  “You didn’t follow in his footsteps of conventional law enforcement?”

  “Oh, I did for a while … twelve years or so. Then the hours and the time away from home started to put a strain on my marriage. I found this job with twice the pay and regular hours.”

  “Must have made your wife happy.”

  “I don’t know. She served me with papers my last day on the department. I guess she had got herself hooked up with some bolt-selling bastard at a hardware store. I haven’t seen her since.”

  A waiter brought our coffee and set it down on the table.

  “Well, Sheriff, we should get to it. I am sure you have your hands full.”

  “That I do, Joe. I’m just wondering if you can tell me anything else about Devin Martin.”

  “How about I tell you everything I can think of, and you decide what you think might be helpful. Okay with you?”

  “Works for me. Anything would be a lot more than what I have right now.”

  “The first time we noticed Martin was in the early spring. It wasn’t anything in particular, but he fit the profile of a problem child. We ran him, and he came back with a serious sheet. Still, he wasn’t doing anything wrong that we could see. We identify lots of different people we want to keep track of. Usually doesn’t amount to anything, but it is a big part of what we need to do to keep this place as trouble free as we can.”

  “It looks like a big operation. Mostly drug problems?” I asked.

  “We have it all: grifters, cheats, hookers, pimps, drug users, drug dealers. You name it, and we have it. Anyway, Martin would show up every couple of weeks and book a room. Sometimes he would have a woman with him, sometimes not. He’d go down to the floor and play blackjack. If his girlfriend was with him, she played the slots,” he said.

  “Any idea who the girl was?” I asked.

  “No, we didn’t really bother with her. We were most interested in Martin. We had a couple of other things going on, and actually, as far as Martin went, we were just about to hit the ignore button.

  “Then one night, Martin checks in and is down on the casino floor. Two really bad-looking joint rats show up, stop for a second to say something to Martin, and keep walking. One of my people watching Martin picks up on the meeting. Martin meets the guys in the hall, and they go to his room. Ten minutes later, they leave carrying a medium-size duffle bag. We checked the video at check-in, and it looks a lot like the duffle bag Martin had with him when he checked in.”

  “Sounds like a drug drop,” I said.

  “Yup, so we put Martin back on the top of the list. After that, he checks in with a duffle bag every two weeks, meets the same guys, gives them the bag, and they’re gone. I reached out to law enforcement and let them know.”

  “Who do you work with in law enforcement?” I asked.

  “Tribal police, your department, and a contact in DNE.”

  “Did anything come of that?” I asked.

  “Yeah, our DNE contact showed up out of the blue one day. He walks in like he owns the place, sits down at the bar, orders a cheeseburger, onion rings, and a beer and tells them to put it on my tab. The waitress calls me to see if it’s okay. I come down to see who my new dependent is, and there larger than life sits Agent Anthony Ricardo. Have you ever met the guy?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “It is sure to be an experience when you do.”

  “What did Agent Ricardo tell you about Martin?”

  “Ricardo looked at our surveillance photos and got excited. He was able to ID Martin and his buddies in about a second.”

  Then Joe started doing something on his laptop. A minute later, the printer spits out three sheets of paper, one for each of our people of interest. He handed me the sheets with their names—Devin Martin, Jesse Gunther, and Tony Carter—and corresponding photos and rap sheets.

  “They are a nice-looking bunch, aren’t they,” Joe commented.

  “Dandy. What happened with these guys?” I asked.

  “Well, Ricardo goes to work with the tribal police, and they try to put something together. He just asks us to keep an eye on things. Then a couple of days later, Martin shows up, same routine with the guys in the casino. They get the bag from Martin and head out to the parking lot. All of a sudden, a panel van, no plates, pulls into the lot, and four guys jump out wearing masks. They are all over Martin’s buddies, and I mean hard. The guys jump back in the van with the duffle bag, and they take off, and they are gone. We put out an alert, but these guys are nowhere to be found. Carter and Gunther have had some serious trauma administered to them, but they don’t want an EMS unit. They had nothing to say. They told us the only thing in the bag was dirty laundry. That was it. We never saw Martin or his people again,” Joe paused and thought for a minute. “Sheriff, when did you say he was killed?”

  “He was alive on August 25, but probably not much longer after that day.”

  “I think our last contact was in mid-August. Let me look here. Yup, the surveillance photo dates are August 20 and 21. The 21st would be the day the other gang, I mean, I’m guessing that’s who it was, ripped him off.”

  “Joe, I can’t thank you enough for giving me a call. Here’s my card with my cell number on it. If I can help you with anything, give me a call.”

  “Thanks, Sheriff.”

  I drove out of the casino lot and put a call in to my old partner, Lieutenant JJ Malone, who was now the head of the Organized Crime Task Force.

  His nickname was “Bear” and true to form, he answered the phone with a growl. “Malone.”

  “Bear, how are you doing?”

  “Well, well, the sheriff of the jack pine forest. How goes it with you, Sheriff?”

  “Good, Bear. I need a little help with something.”

  “Just like always. What do you need, John?”

  I told him everything I could think of involving Devin Martin.

  “Before he was killed, Martin was apparently running drugs out of a casino. The head of casino security called a DNE agent they work with. He identified Martin and two of his associates from surveillance pictures. The agent said these guys were high up in a drug gang. So far, it looks like Martin was killed sometime after August 25.”

  “A drug dealer that gets himself shot is not much of a big news item,” said Bear.

  “I know it. My problem is it happened in my county, and it looks like these guys have an operation going on up here. If that’s true, I need to be on top of it. I just need you to do some checking for me.”

  “Alright. Send me what you got. I’ll see what we can do.”

  “One more thing, Bear.”

  �
�Isn’t there always one more thing?”

  “The DNE agent that’s working this area is a guy named Anthony Ricardo. Do you know him?”

  “I know him. What do you want to know?”

  “Just any little thing you might think of.”

  “Ricardo is a tough sonofabitch. He rubs almost everyone he meets the wrong way. But he is a good agent and has made some major cases, along with some major enemies. Actually, Cabrelli, he reminds me a lot of you. You guys should get along just fine. He is also one of the supervisory agent’s guys who works directly with our team. Since he’s in your area right now, it would be a good idea to get in touch with him. Bring him up to speed on what you got going on. My advice would be to keep him in the loop on this. I’ll send you his cell number. Call him.” Bear clicked off.

  I received Ricardo’s number and called. It went straight to voicemail. I left him a short message with a couple of different call-back numbers.

  I drove back to the office and began to go through my messages. I looked up when Chief Bork entered my office.

  “Hey, Len, what’s up?” I asked.

  “Just wondering where you are at on the Martin homicide.”

  I shared what I had learned. “I am guessing this Tony Carter and Jesse Gunther are still around here. If not all the time, then now and again. It would be good to know where they stay. Let’s get a BOLO and the pictures out to our people, give them a heads-up on who they might run into.”

  “Sounds like those guys are just what we don’t need. Drug use is growing like a plague. At the chiefs’ meeting this year, a guy from Health and Social Services gave a talk. Statewide, the number of ODs is out of control. Over seventy thousand people died from drug overdoses in the country last year. I guess we have been pretty lucky so far.” •

  13

  A week later, on Saturday night, our luck ran out. I had filled in on the three to eleven shift. At the end of my tour, I advised dispatch I was going to find my way home. A couple of minutes later, dispatch called me.

  “Sheriff, we got a 911 request for an ambulance at 22 Old Lake Road about two minutes ago. Then we just now received a call back to cancel. There was a bunch of noise in the background. I am familiar with that address. My in-laws rented it for my niece’s wedding last summer. It’s a private lodge that someone from Chicago owns. What do you advise?”

  “Keep the EMS coming. I’ll swing in and see what’s going on,” I replied.

  Deputy Delzell was also in the area and advised she would respond as well.

  The massive lodge was on the edge of town, with a long driveway far enough off the road that you would have to look to see if anything was going on there. I tried to pull in, but the drive was blocked by cars, some backing up, some moving forward. It appeared as if people were trying to leave in a hurry. Delzell pulled in behind me. A girl came running up to us. She grabbed me by the arm and started to drag me toward the direction of the lodge.

  “Please, my sister needs help. Hurry, please hurry,” she pleaded.

  At the same time, a car trying to leave lost control and crashed into the side of Delzell’s squad car.

  Before we could react, the reality of what we were seeing overtook us. There were kids, high school age and older, running in every direction. Delzell called for all available units as backup.

  The girl tried to drag us to her sister, but we had to fight through the mob to get to the lodge. Seeing uniformed officers only exacerbated the situation as some kids started yelling, “Cops!” When we got to the lodge, we realized how bad the situation was. Kids were yelling and screaming. When we finally found the sister of the girl who had dragged us in, she was on the floor in a pile of vomit, barely conscious, while others ran over the top of her. A boy stumbled to Delzell. He had severe cuts, was bleeding profusely, and fell into her arms.

  Another girl from somewhere in the crowd was screaming, “Help me. Please help me!”

  Delzell wisely requested all available EMS units. We tried to do what we could, but the pandemonium was overwhelming. I picked up the girl I was trying to help and laid her on a long dining room table. I positioned her head as best I could and told her sister to hold her that way.

  Our first aid gear was in the squads, but the need was so immediate that we just had to do what we could with what we had. The always resourceful Delzell came up with some linen napkins from a buffet, and I helped her use them to slow the bleeding from the injured boy.

  We began a two-deputy triage protocol, trying to identify those in the greatest need, ordering the others out of the way.

  Sirens screamed in the distance. EMS units from two counties and every form of law enforcement officer responded to the scene and waded into the melee. We didn’t even realize that help had arrived when it did.

  I found a breathing but unconscious boy of no more than thirteen or fourteen lying on the floor. I picked him up and started to carry him toward one of the long dining tables. A hand grabbed my arm, and I gratefully handed the boy to an EMT who quickly loaded him into a waiting ambulance.

  I looked around the room and saw Len Bork, his arms restraining a young girl screaming at the top of her lungs, wrapped in a blanket. Len’s face was bleeding where it looked like she had deeply scratched him. I only had a second to glance at him before I jumped in to help two of our local EMTs who were wrestling with a big high school-age boy who had ripped his shirt off and was fighting like he was possessed. It took all we could muster to zip tie him to a backboard.

  Then I heard a call on an EMT’s radio, and my heart sank. “10-33 code blue, code blue! We have a pulseless, non-breathing teenage boy. We have initiated CPR.”

  I don’t know how long it took. It seemed forever, but eventually, everyone who needed to go by EMS to the hospital was on their way. In all my years of law enforcement, I had never seen anything like this. It was a living nightmare.

  We loaded up the remaining partygoers and hauled them down to the clinic next to the emergency room, which had opened with family practice doctors and nurses coming in to help.

  News travels fast in a small town, and shortly after we arrived, cars full of parents whose kids had not yet come home began to pull in.

  The scene was growing chaotic as terrified parents tried to find their kids among the wailing teens. I could see the situation could get out of control any second, except for Len Bork. He directed the deputies and officers to herd all the kids who didn’t need immediate medical attention into the clinic waiting room. Then he gathered the parents together in the entryway. Finally, after some cajoling, Len had everyone’s attention.

  “With the sheriff’s permission, here’s what I would like to do, folks. We are going to match the kids we have with their parents. So if your son or daughter is here, we are going to let you take them home. If there is a child you know and would be willing to reach their parents for us, please call and ask them to come down and pick them up. Before anyone leaves, you need to fill out one of these information forms and hand it to Deputy Delzell. We will be in contact with you soon. We hope you will reach an understanding with your youngster about how important it will be for all of us if they cooperate. If you are concerned that your son or daughter may have ingested a substance they shouldn’t have, go right to the clinic reception desk. They will take it from there. The kids need to understand that if they took something, they need to come forward. Do not worry about the police. Our only concern right now is to make sure everyone is safe. Do you folks have any questions?”

  No one did. About half of the kids went home in the first round, and most of the rest left as a result of parents calling parents. After a while, only one remained. She sat on the floor squeezed into a corner, with her arms wrapped securely around her knees. Her face was down and covered by a hoodie, with wisps of purple hair sticking out. She would not look up or respond to the officer’s questions.

  I recognized the girl squatted down on the floor. “Amber, do you remember me? I am Ms. Carlson’s friend. I kno
w your grandma and grandpa. Do you remember me?”

  She wouldn’t look up or speak.

  “Amber, will you give me your mother’s cell phone number?”

  No reply.

  I called Julie and told her who I was with. She gave me Amber’s mother’s cell phone number.

  “John, I am on my way to town to see what I can do,” she said with resolve. I didn’t argue.

  I called Crystal Lockridge’s number. There was no answer, so I left a message. Twenty minutes later, Julie walked in the door and right past me to where Amber was sitting. Julie plopped down on the floor beside her.

  “Hi, honey,” she said in a soothing tone. “Are you all right?”

  Amber looked up for the first time since I arrived on the scene. Julie put her arms around her and held her tight. Amber began to sob, deep breath-robbing, painful sobs.

  Julie requested a glass of water, and I responded promptly. I tried her mother again with the same result.

  I took a chance and asked Amber if I could ask her a couple of questions. Amber looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes, and Julie glared at me.

  “Amber, I need to know if you took anything you shouldn’t have at the party. I am not asking you this for any other reason than if you did, we need to get you over to the clinic to be screened.”

  She whispered in Julie’s ear. “John, she didn’t take or drink anything. She promises.”

  “Amber, do you know where your mother is tonight?”

  Again, a whisper. “She doesn’t know,” Julie relayed.

  “Julie, do you have the number for her grandparents?” She did.

  Stella Lockridge answered. I told her the situation, and she said that she and Ed would be there as soon as possible. Amber appeared to be glad to hear they were coming.

  Meanwhile, I checked in with the hospital. Things were chaotic but getting under control. Dr. Chali’s wife, Becky, had come in to help work with the families.

  Ed and Stella Lockridge rushed through the door. Stella joined Amber and Julie on the floor, sweeping both up in a powerful hug.