by Joe McKinney
“Understood,” Paul said.
“Outstanding. Now the two of you need to get out there.”
Mike nodded.
Paul looked from his new partner to Garwin. It took him a moment to realize he was being dismissed.
Still feeling confused, he nodded, then rose to his feet.
Mike motioned to Paul to follow him and they both turned to go. They made it as far as the doorway before Garwin stopped them.
“Hey Mike...” he said.
“Yes sir?”
“Do me a favor, would you, bud?”
“What’s that, sir?”
Garwin suddenly looked uncomfortable. He had the same slumped shoulder aspect he had just a few moments earlier with Detective Anderson.
Strong-willed subordinates scare him, Paul realized then. Detective Anderson, and Mike here, they scared Garwin.
“Yes sir?” Mike said.
Garwin wouldn’t look at him. He fidgeted with a pen on his desk, glanced at his computer monitor. He seemed to be looking everywhere but at Mike, refusing to meet the officer’s smiling face.
Finally he said, “Barris told me somebody put a passed out homeless guy in the backseat of their car while they were at lunch. Apparently, the guy vomited all over the car. You know anything about that?”
Mike looked shocked, but not convincingly so. “Who, me? No, sir.”
“Uh huh. Listen, no more pranks on him, okay? I mean it. Some guys just can’t take a joke.”
Mike gave him a flyboy salute. “You got it, sir.”
But when he turned back to Paul he winked.
***
They headed out the back door, towards the parking lot behind the substation where East Patrol’s squad cars were parked.
“That’s our car over there,” Mike said. “You got your gear with you?”
“It’s in my truck.”
“Okay. We’ll get it in a bit. For now, let’s just wait.”
“For what?”
“You’ll see.” Mike stood there for a moment, hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels. Then, abruptly, he turned to Paul and said, “Hey, what were you doing with that coin before roll call?”
Paul took the Barber out of his pocket. “Coin tricks,” he said, and handed the Barber to Mike.
“It’s heavier than it looks.”
“It’s a Barber fifty piece,” Paul said.
“Why do they call it a Barber?”
“It’s named after Charles E. Barber. He was the head engraver at the U.S. Mint for a while.”
Mike held the coin up to the sodium vapor lights. “Nineteen-oh-one?” he said, reading the date at the bottom. “Damn. Is this thing valuable?”
“Not really. They made a bunch of them. That one’s not even close to mint condition. And even if it was, it’d only be worth a few bucks.”
“Yeah, well, something that old is still pretty cool.”
He handed it back to Paul. “Hey, show me a trick. We got a minute.”
Paul was used to this. People who saw the tricks he could do always asked for more. He flicked the coin into the air, caught it, then rolled it back and forth over the back of his knuckles and dropped it into his palm. He waved the other hand over it and the Barber disappeared. He waved the hand back again and the Barber reappeared.
“Bad ass,” Mike said. “Do another one.”
Paul made the coin disappear again. He held up his hands and showed Mike his palms, turned them over, showed him the backs of his hands. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and fished around.
His smile faded.
“Hmmm,” he said.
“What’s wrong? Didn’t work?”
Paul took his hand out of his pocket. No coin.
“That’s weird,” Paul said.
Mike smiled patiently. “You wanna try it again?”
“No,” Paul said, still frowning. He looked on the ground. “It’s around here somewhere.”
“I didn’t hear it drop,” Mike said. He started looking around on the ground, too.
“No. Me either. Hey, check your pocket. Maybe you got it.”
Mike gave him an amused, Yeah, right look. He reached into his pocket and felt the coin. “Holy shit!” He pulled out the coin and looked at it, dumbfounded. “How’d you do that? I didn’t even feel you put it in my pocket.”
Paul smiled and took the coin.
“Seriously, that was amazing. How’d you do that?”
Paul shrugged.
“You gotta show me how to do that,” Mike said.
“Okay.” He was about to take it out again and show Mike the basic palm hide when Mike stopped him.
“Wait a sec. I want you to meet these guys.”
They had drifted over to their car and were standing by the trunk, Mike nodding at two officers walking across the parking lot towards them.
“I hang out with these guys a lot,” Mike said. “They’re the regular 44-60.”
“And we’re 44-70, right?”
Mike nodded.
“Paul, meet Wes and Collins.”
Wes was Wesley Stokes. He had to be six-eight, and was probably pushing three hundred pounds. He wore his sandy brown hair in a tight crew cut that made his head look small and bullet-shaped.
“Hey,” he said to Paul. He shook Paul’s hand, his hand swallowing Paul’s, which was an odd feeling for somebody accustomed to being the biggest guy in the room, then turned away and started checking Facebook on his phone.
Paul turned to the other officer. His name was Chris Collins. He was squat and muscular, box-shaped, with an almost perfect helmet of black hair slicked back with what had to be a gallon of gel. He stood with his hands crossed over his chest, chewing on his lip, an expression on his face that suggested all of this was a big hassle he didn’t need.
“How’s it going?” Paul said, offering him his hand.
“Fucking crappy.”
Paul blinked.
Collins didn’t smile. “Every day I gotta come back to this hellhole fucking sucks.”
Paul just stared at him.
Mike gave Paul a nudge. “Ignore him.” He turned to Collins. “Tone it down for the new guy, would you?”
“Why? He’s gonna find out how much this place fucking sucks soon enough.”
“This guy, he makes a career out of bitching,” Mike said. “I’m about to start calling him Monica, after my ex-wife. She was a little bitch, too.”
“Yeah, I got your little bitch right here.”
Mike laughed at him. “Wes, were they in there?”
Wes put his phone back in his shirt pocket and chuckled a little. “Yeah. They should be coming out here in a sec.”
Even Collins cracked a smile.
These three guys, Paul sensed, were old friends. They were tight. He could tell it just by listening to them.
“What’s going on?” Paul asked.
“First lesson of survival out here,” Mike said. “What I do, whenever this job drives me so fucking nuts I can’t stand myself, is pull a good prank on Barris and Seles. Keeping those two in misery boosts my morale.”
The four of them stood in a huddle. From where he stood Paul had a view of Barris and Seles walking across the parking lot to their patrol car. Barris put his gear bag down on the ground next to the trunk and fished through his key chain for the right keys. Seles glanced down at his car and scratched his head.
And then he dropped his gear bag and said something to Barris, who stopped what he was doing and looked at what his partner was pointing at.
Paul didn’t see what Mike had done until Seles rapped his knuckles on the back quarter panel. All the patrol cars were white Ford Crown Victorias with a thick blue stripe down the sides. Written in red decal letters above the top stripe was 1-800-CRIME STOPPERS. Every car had the logo, but on Barris and Seles’ car the letters now read 1-800-PIMP STOMPERS.
“Holy crap,” Paul said. He turned to Mike. “How did you do that?”
“I disavow
all knowledge,” Mike said. “But I would imagine all it would take is getting in good with the guys in the body shop. If someone were to do that, he could probably get hooked up with all the decals he wanted. Not like I would know, though.”
“No,” Paul said, “of course not. But didn’t Garwin just tell you—”
“A little secret about Garwin. Whenever he tells you to do something just smile and nod and he’ll go away happy. Then you go back to doing whatever it was you were doing in the first place.”
Barris turned towards them. “That’s real funny, Wes. Nice.”
“What?” Wes said. He looked genuinely indignant. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You guys are the only ones who think this shit is funny, you know that? You behave like children.”
“It wasn’t...” he said to Barris, then turned to the others. “He thinks it was me. Why does he always think it’s me?”
Barris and Seles got in their car and drove off in tire-smoking hurry, Barris with one hand out the window and his finger up in the air.
Mike, Wes, and Collins all laughed. Paul felt like he’d fallen into a good thing with these guys. They were cool, and they were making him feel welcome.
“We’re going to the Cave, right?” Collins asked. “My blood sugar’s gonna crash if we don’t eat soon.”
Just then, an emergency tone sounded on their radios. Instantly, the other three officers stopped talking and focused on the radio. Paul watched them. It still intrigued him, even after nearly a year on the Department, how an emergency tone could instantly silence any conversation.
“In Fifty-two Seventy’s,” a dispatcher said. “High Street and Garden Ridge, I have a shooting with a hit, clearing all but West.”
All the way across the city, Paul thought. Not our service area.
“We’ll meet you there,” Mike said, picking up the conversation as though the tone had never sounded. To Paul he said, “We better eat quick. When they start killing each other early like this, it means we’re in for a hell of a night.”
Chapter 2
Detective Bobby Cantrell turned off the Chevy’s headlights as they left the main road and pulled into the south entrance of the old Morgan Rollins Iron Works factory. He parked just inside the gate, which was little more than a remnant now, a rusted ribbon of metal hanging from a leaning post, and told his partner, “We’re gonna walk from here.”
As they got out of the car, his partner, Detective Raul Herrera, looked up at the silhouetted ruins of the old factory and whistled. The place looked like the skyline of some war-torn, bombed-out city, backlit by the hazy orange glow of the San Antonio skyline many miles to the west. He frowned. This place felt weird. Wrong somehow. Off to their right was a train yard. He could see the tops of its old trains rusting on the tracks. Beyond that he had a view of the sprawling slums of San Antonio’s East Side. There was urban desolation everywhere he turned. There was misery everywhere he looked, but at least it was a living, breathing place. Not here, though. Not this factory. This place felt dead. He shivered, despite the heat.
Which was something else altogether. It’d been dark for hours, but it was still miserably hot, and he could feel the baked-in smell of rot and corruption that emanated from the old factory.
“You didn’t want to get any closer?” Herrera asked, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. It was damp with sweat and gritty from all the dust in the air.
“This is fine,” Cantrell said. “They may be just a bunch of junkies, but if they see us coming they’ll take off for sure.”
As he spoke, Cantrell studied the outline of the old factory, looking for the best place to enter. The problem wasn’t the junkies. Most of them were so browned out they wouldn’t know what hit them until the handcuffs bit down on their wrists. The real problem was the structure itself. It had been falling apart for twenty years, since the company closed it down. There were catwalks up there that looked sound, but would collapse under a man’s weight without warning. He and the other detectives on the San Antonio Police Department’s Narcotics Unit had been lucky so far. No accidents. He wanted to keep it that way.
“What did you call this place again?”
“The Shooter’s Gallery,” Cantrell said, still watching the structure.
“And we can make our cases here?”
Cantrell glanced over the roof of the car at his new partner. It suddenly occurred to him that he might have a lot of ground to cover with Herrera.
“Didn’t you grow up in San Antonio?” Cantrell asked.
“Houston.”
“And you never worked the East Side when you were on Patrol?”
“Two years on South, five on Central.”
“Never heard this place come out on the radio?”
Herrera shook his head. “Not that I can remember.”
Cantrell closed his door and walked up to the front of the car. “Well, welcome to The Shooter’s Gallery. We got junkies by the dozens here. And enough brown tar heroin to make the Mexican Mafia blush.”
“Really?” Herrera said, wide-eyed.
“Oh, yeah. It’s a gold mine in there.”
Herrera glanced up at the factory, then back to Cantrell. “If it’s that good, how come we don’t sweep the place? Get them all in one shot.”
Cantrell just laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Raul, when you were working a district on Patrol, didn’t you have a favorite honey hole where you’d go to write a few quick tickets to keep the sergeant off your ass?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, well, The Shooter’s Gallery is ours. We knock out our small cases here and then go on to the bigger stuff later.”
Herrera glanced over the factory in silence, but he was obviously disappointed. Cantrell knew the look. Most patrolmen who promoted directly into Narcotics had casino eyes. They were looking for the big busts, the eighteen wheelers full of cocaine, the sophisticated methamphetamine labs, the cornfields full of pot. When they learned that the little bullshit cases were the real meat and potatoes of the job, they looked a lot like Herrera looked now.
“Alright,” Cantrell said, because he felt like he owed it to the new guys to set them straight, “you remember when Sarge told you he expects six felony cases every month?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret. There’s nobody big in there—just a bunch of burned-out bottom-feeders who live for their next high. The name of the game is quantity, not quality. What we do is come in here and pop six small time cases every month for one or two balloons a piece. That covers our six felonies with the Sarge. After that, you can focus on making your real cases, your big ones. You just got to learn the game. Give them the numbers they want, and then you can spend the rest of the month doing whatever you want.”
“And it’s just that simple?”
“Just that simple,” Cantrell said. “Come on. Let’s go make some numbers.”
***
Cantrell led the way up to the main part of the factory and pointed out the rough spots for Herrera to avoid. By the time they’d made it to the hive-like series of corridors in the superstructure, where most of the junkies shot up, they’d already spotted a few who were passed out and riding their highs in quiet little corners.
“You don’t want any of them?” Herrera asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
Cantrell looked around before he answered. When he spoke again, it was in a whisper. “The ones out here have already shot up. We want the ones closer in to the courtyard. They shoot up there and stumble out here to sleep. You’re only gonna find dope on the ones still inside the Gallery.”
Herrera nodded. Cantrell watched his trainee’s gaze shift down to the ground. Cantrell didn’t like knocking the new guys down like that, but sometimes it had to be done. Patrolmen came to Narcotics with a skewed sense of tactics. They approached everything with the beat cop’s mindset of visible authority and control.
The bodies folded up in the shadows of the superstructure were a good example. Herrera was having obvious trouble passing them by. He clearly wanted to go over and check out every one. Teaching the new guys to blend in to a bad situation, to accept the kinds of tactical risks no beat cop would ever take, was one of the hardest lessons to pass on.
They passed a man sitting in the dust, his back against a wall of corrugated tin, head slumped down between his knees, the ground dark and wet between his legs. His hands were open on the ground next to his feet. Cantrell glanced at him, then moved deeper into the ruins of the factory.
But Herrera hung back. He took his Stinger MiniLight from his back pocket and lit the guy up with a quick flash.
Cantrell spun around on him and hissed, “What are you doing? Kill that light.”
“I think he’s dead,” Herrera said.
“What?” Cantrell paused for a second, then walked closer. “No.”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Cantrell lit the man up with his own flashlight. He saw the puddle between the man’s legs, a red rope of something that looked like fish guts hanging from his lips. He knelt down in front of the man and turned his light up into the man’s face. The eyes were wide open and the corneas were already clouding over.
“Fuck.”
“What is it?” Herrera asked. “Overdose?”
“No. Look at his face.”
Herrera knelt down next to him and his eyes went wide. The left side of the dead guy’s face looked like somebody had beat on it with a hammer.
“What’s that written on his face?” Herrera asked. “You see that, there on his forehead?”
Cantrell shook his head in disgust. “This is fucking perfect. This place is a bust now. Homicide’s gonna want to shut it down for sure.”
