Style/Body: SUV Calculated Owners: 1
Registered To: Brenton Jordan Richards
Mailing Address: 12 Townsley Drive—Atlanta, GA 30314
He memorized the information, then tore the paper up and threw the pieces into a drain at the edge of sidewalk. Part of him was of a mind to run right now. Just boost another car and take off. They’d probably never catch him. But if they pressed Basil—it would be easy with all they would find in his apartment, and the Yeti had proven he was easily pressed—then it wouldn’t be hard to get the full story out of him.
But the vory v zakone wouldn’t let him be. They were with him now, like an irritant, a speck of dirt in his eye.
They think they’re untouchable, eh? For some reason, he just couldn’t let it go, the same way he couldn’t let Miles Hoover, Jr. go. Not that day. Not in the library of Brownfields Elementary School. Not at that particular time. That’s how they all found out who Spencer Pelletier really was. That’s how his parents found out. That’s how his older brothers found out. That’s how the school found out.
If he were present, Dr. McCulloch from Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary would remind Spencer that psychopaths typically lacked realistic, long-term goals. They make decisions based on impulse, and though they lack standard emotions, they feel very passionate about carrying through with their spontaneous decisions.
But Dr. McCulloch’s advice did no good. Like the Yeti in 448, Spencer had an itch, too, and it needed scratching. He was only human.
Resolute, he started looking for yet another car to boost. As luck would have it, there was a black four-door Nissan sedan parked on the sidewalk almost as soon as he stepped out of that short patch of woods. He went over to test the car door, figuring he’d need to bust the window. But both Fate and Destiny had taken him for a pet tonight, because the door opened right up for him.
Spencer sat in the driver’s seat and, just for a moment he thought this car looked familiar. He glanced into the passenger’s side seat, saw a comic book called The Dark Knight Returns, as well as a folded copy of The Atlanta-Journal Constitution. He immediately disregarded this feeling of acquaintance with the car and tore off the ignition cover with the same screwdriver he’d kept in his back pocket for his three-hundred-mile run across the Bible Belt.
The cell that Basil had given him was a smartphone with full bars for Internet access. He found the appropriate maps online and within seconds he was bound for Townsley Drive.
Leon moved slowly, his gun still down at ready-low. Hillside Apartments was a cauldron of various gangs, drug dealers and random hoodlums, and he didn’t want to provoke them unnecessarily. He was approaching the door of apartment 448 when he stopped in his tracks. The SWAT van was pulling up. The SWAT officers hopped out the back and filed out quickly. They moved in a direct line and did not stop running until they were in position around the building. The team jogged up to Leon before the lead guy, a man that Leon knew named Hennessey, shouted, “You sure he’s in there?”
“God damn, they called you guys in?”
“Feds at the station couldn’t get here fast enough,” Hennessey said, holding up a fist for the rest of his eight-man team. “He in there?”
Feds? Leon wanted to say, but instead addressed the most pertinent dilemma. “Well, yeah, I’m pretty sure our boy’s in there.”
“Pelletier?”
“That’s what my source told me.”
That was all Hennessey needed to hear. He waved to his guys and they all filed in behind him wordlessly. Leon now stood to one side, a bit let down that he was going to have to take a back seat for this arrest.
Lieutenant William Hennessey was the man beside the doorknob. Across from him was Sergeant Gil Warwick. Hennessey’s men were lined up as they approached the door. The lead man, Rorion Vaulstid, had his MP-5 up and aimed at the door. The man behind Vaulstid was Joey Heinrich, who had his Glock in his right hand, and had his left hand placed firmly on Vaulstid’s shoulder. Behind Heinrich was Lawrence Klein, who had his hands and weapon similar to Heinrich. Down the line, all the men had their handguns drawn in their right hand, while their left hand squeezed the shoulder of the man in front of them. This way, everyone knew the man behind was ready.
Hennessey nodded to Vaulstid, who nodded back, and then three things happened at once. The Benelli combat shotgun disintegrated the doorframe at doorknob level, Lieutenant Hennessey kicked the door in, and Warwick tossed in two flash-bang grenades that he’d already pulled the rings off of, letting the fuses burn just long enough so that when they hit the floor inside they went off almost immediately.
It all happened within the span of two seconds, done exactly as they had rehearsed hundreds of times before.
SWAT moved in. The first two men in the line shouted as they moved in, “Atlanta PD! Search warrant! Search warrant!”
They moved through the doorway in what was termed a button-hook pattern: one man turned a hard left, the next a hard right, the next a not-so-hard left, the next a not-so-hard right, and so on. They spilled into the room, each operator covering his own sector of the room. They could be fairly confident that the tremendous bang and exploded magnesium powder would have deafened and blinded any immediate resistance.
But they hadn’t counted on the trash. Rarely had the SWAT team encountered such a packrat. They moved as best they could around stacks of Tupperware filled with books and random knickknacks, as well as a mound that would prove to be a sofa under closer inspection later.
“Atlanta PD! Search warrant!” Warwick called out. He was the last man to enter the apartment.
Vaulstid had been the first through the door. “Clear!” he claimed of the living room, and moved to the side of a hallway entrance. So far, no sign of the tenant.
“I’ve got deep!” Heinrich called out. He took a position on one side of the hallway, and then proceeded to “slice the pie” as he crept out from the hallway corner and held his Glock out, slightly canted, waiting to see a sign of a bad guy waiting at the other end. “Clear!” he shouted once satisfied.
Lieutenant Hennessey called, “Anyone down there, you better drop to the floor and don’t make a move! We’re coming in!”
The others moved up. They waited for the lieutenant’s signal. He held up all five fingers on his left hand, then squeezed them into a fist.
They filed down the hallway in a bounding overwatch, advancing quickly and clearing a bathroom that had a floor littered with the empty cylinders of toilet paper rolls and grime growing up out of the shower and onto the curtain.
“I’ve got movement!” shouted Klein. “Runner! Runner! Out the window!”
The Yeti was halfway out the bedroom window, stumbling blind and mostly deaf for the moment. Klein and Vaulstid got hold of him by his robe, yanked him back, and flung him to his cluttered floor. The big, skinny creature twisted and screamed like a banshee caught, not knowing what had hold of him and clawing at their helmeted faces. Klein grabbed an arm and twisted it so that Basil flipped over, and Vaulstid placed a knee on the Yeti’s lower back.
“This place fucking stinks,” someone called out. “I can smell it through my helmet. How is that possible?”
“Clear!” someone else called. Then others followed.
“Clear!”
“Clear!”
“You have the right to remain silent,” Klein was saying as he was putting on the cuffs. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of a law. You have the right to an attorney—”
“Hey-hey, look at us!” Heinrich laughed when he came into the room. “We caught ourselves a Yeti!” Everyone laughed.
Kaley was very tired, but couldn’t fall asleep. She was glad to see that Shannon and the other girl could, though. Or, at least, they’re pretending to be. Kaley actually hoped that was the case, because it meant they were trying to lull their attackers into complacency.
This was actually Kaley’s new plan. She wouldn’t show any sign of aggression, no kind of trickery. S
he would appear docile. Playin’ possum, as Nan would’ve said, though Kaley still wasn’t entirely sure what that saying meant. Living in the Bluff her whole life, she didn’t think she’d ever seen a possum. But she had gotten the gist of what it meant. The guy on the Discovery Channel that one time said that if you ever get attacked by a bear, you should play dead. Same principle as playing possum. Trick the predators. Lull them into a false sense of security. Then, when there was an opening, and the time was right…
But, as much as she was hoping Shannon was pretending, too, she couldn’t be sure. Kaley wasn’t close enough to truly sense what was going on inside Little Sister’s mind or heart. And the other girl, the familiar-looking one holding her locket, she was too petrified to think or feel anything more than dread.
The vehicle slowed down. Kaley looked out the window. They were in another unfamiliar part of town, pulling into a row of buildings she didn’t know at all.
Oni, still in the front, said something to the driver in that weird language. The driver laughed and looked in his rearview mirror at Kaley. Kaley looked away. She’d been trying to recall all the landmarks she could in case she needed to run—streetlights, a Waffle House, a liquor store that seemed to be simply called Liquor Here—but most of it was starting to run together. She had remembered the number of turns, and the order they had been in, though: left, right, right, left, right, left, and now right.
Her eyesight was good enough to see the lit-up dashboard up front, too. Kaley had watched the green-lit mileage counter go from 46,819 to 46,828. Nine miles, she thought. Just nine miles. She hoped all of this information would be useful eventually.
Kaley didn’t know it, but she was trying to prevent her premonition from coming true.
7
When the black SUV pulled into Hillside, Leon knew at once that it was a G-man’s ride.
They were just finishing putting the cuffs on the Yeti when the SUV pulled to a stop behind the Aerostar minivan, which was parked without anyone inside. So far, all he’d heard on the radio was that the SWAT guys inside had found O’Connor alone. That meant no Pelletier. Fucker got away. For a moment, for just a second, Leon wondered if Pat had called ahead to warn Pelletier. But he didn’t think Pat was that stupid. He didn’t want any more trouble than this Pelletier might’ve already brought him.
Two black men and one white man hopped out of the SUV. All of them wore street clothes. One of the black men had a beard. These men doubtless performed various undercover tasks, but tonight they were flaunting what they were. Their jackets were the only thing not normal street attire; they had the yellow FBI letters written across the backs and the left breast.
The bearded black man nodded at Leon and said, “You Hulsey?”
“That’s me.”
“Special Agent Jamal Porter,” he said, shaking hands without looking at Leon. The first thing Leon noticed was that Porter’s cologne was very strong. He had intense eyes fixed on the doorway of apartment 448. He introduced the others still without looking at the detective. “Agents Mortimer and Stone,” he said of the white man and other black man, respectively.
“Guys.” He nodded to them, and they nodded back, saying nothing.
“Pelletier inside?” Porter asked.
“Doesn’t look like it.”
Porter hissed by breathing in through his teeth. “God damn it. Anybody see him?”
“Got some officers canvassing neighbors right now,” Leon said, trying to keep his tone from sounding defensive and failing.
“Where’d this lead come from?”
Careful, Leon. Careful. “Street-level informant. One of mine.” He knew that he had, on some level, mentioned that last bit as a means to establish that he knew this territory well. It was another automatic defensive gesture.
“What’s his name?”
“Deep cover. Can’t divulge it.” Part of him counted on his large, imposing body to do as it had always done, and shut the other man up.
“You can if he’s got information about Spencer Pelletier, Detec—”
“He didn’t have information about Spencer Pelletier specifically,” Leon lied. He thought, The things we do for family. “He gave a description. I thought it sounded familiar. I went to FBI-dot-gov and showed my informant the picture from the guy who did the six guys in Baton Rouge. I thought it was a long shot, but it turns out I was lucky as hell. He IDed Pelletier—and this informant is never wrong—but said he didn’t know him by that name, and didn’t know him before last night,” he lied again. “He said the guy was looking for Basil O’Connor.”
Agent Mortimer, the white one, spoke up. “Who is this O’Connor guy?”
“Not entirely sure,” Leon said. That part was true, for the most part. He knew O’Connor was somehow connected to Pat’s operation, and knew he’d worked in forgeries a few years back but didn’t know to what extent. “My informant has worked in a certain capacity with O’Connor before, though, and reported suspicious behavior to me, but nothing serious.” That was true, too. Though “report” was a strong word. Pat had pretty much told him some street gossip that occasionally had the name Yeti or Basil attached to it.
“Detective?” someone called out. It was Hennessey, stepping out of 448 with his MP-5 slung at his side and his Glock re-holstered. He was speaking formally of Leon, not using his first name, because the G-men were present. Leon and Hennessey had unconsciously assumed the stations of a unified front against feds taking over their case. “You might wanna see this, Detective Hulsey.”
“What’s up, Lieutenant?”
“I tell you, it’s a God damn mess in there. The place is a fucking wreck. It’s…just come look at it.”
“Mind if we sneak a peek with you?” Agent Porter asked.
After hearing that, Leon wondered if he’d been too hasty in automatically assuming he would have to fight to keep his clout in this investigation. It seemed as though Agent Porter was trying to show a gesture of peace and cooperation. “Sure,” Leon said. “Why not? Let’s all go take a look.”
The Yeti’s home was an utter disaster, with random patches of organization that only made the scene more bizarre. An odor reached out beyond the open door, so pungent that the brain and the olfactory nerves never really learned to ignore it. The big man himself was sitting on his ass on the floor, his robe spread wide open and his balls completely hanging out of his stained white briefs.
Leon said nothing. He’d never seen so much junk in all his life. He glanced over to the G-men. Agent Porter and his two pals were looking about the apartment with mild interest. One of them, Stone, had gone directly over to a pile of computers, printers and stacked manila envelopes. A nest of wires clung all around the nearest wall by a mix of duct and electrical tape.
Sergeant Warwick was bent down to one knee, asking a few basic questions about the Yeti’s well-being, just making sure that he was recovering suitably from the effects of the flash-bang grenades. So far, he just gazed with tired, indolent eyes at something on his foot.
“Bunch o’ H,” someone said beside Leon. He turned, and found Heinrich offering him a tin My Little Pony lunchbox that was opened and filled with a bag of eight-balls and hypodermic needles. “Vaulstid said there’s more in the back. I’ll bet there’s a lot more hidden all over this apartment.”
“There’s a lot over here,” said Agent Mortimer, who had joined Stone by the computer array. “Not heroin, but a whole lot of forging going on.”
Leon walked over. He pulled his rubber gloves from his back pocket, slipped them on, and started rummaging through the piles of what looked like garbage, but was one man’s livelihood. Agent Mortimer had moved aside a 2009 edition of The Merck Manual of Medical Information, and was lifting a packet filled with driver’s licenses. The pictures were mostly of black men and they came from all over: Houston, Hackerville, Las Vegas, Cumming, Jonesboro, Lafayette, Tutte, Kansas City, Thomasville, Milwaukee, on and on.
“Laminate over here,” Agent Stone said, lifting up
sheets of plastic, no doubt used to seal a phony license in place. “This kind of laminate is good to use for holograms on a driver’s license. Various kinds of ink over there.” He pointed. There was an enormous toolbox on the other side of the computer desk, hitherto concealed by a mound of clothes. The toolbox was filled with inks and tools necessary to emboss or add complex designs to a driver’s license.
There was Teslin and Artisyn NanoExtreme paper, some butterfly laminate pouches, a thermal pouch laminator, and an encoder to encode the magnetic strip on each pouch. There was a pigmented based inkjet printer, an Epson printer with DuraBrite ink, pretty much the best for making fake IDs. There was also plenty of Pearl-Ex paint and Photo-EZ paper for creating convincing holograms. There were numerous books on how to manipulate images on Adobe Photoshop. There was also sandpaper. Only the best forgers went through the trouble of sanding down holograms to remove the jagged edes on the synthetic paper.
Some of the IDs Leon saw were EDLs, Enhanced Driver’s Licenses, made with the specifications of the new Federal Passport Card, which made a document not just good for proving one could drive, but for proving one’s citizenship of the U.S.
“Quite the operation for a pig,” said Agent Porter, turning away from it all. “Now let’s hear him squeal.”
“We still haven’t confirmed that it was Spencer Pelletier who was here tonight,” Leon reminded him. The G-man stopped and looked at him. “Until we confirm that, this is technically still a local matter of nothing more than a possible kidnapping. Missing Persons has authority and jurisdiction on it. I don’t mind you guys hanging around, but I’ll ask my questions, and then we’ll see what we’ll see.”
To his great surprise, Agent Porter showed no chagrin. He smiled humbly and said, “It sounded bad, didn’t it? My fault. It’s your ball, Detective.”
“No harm, no foul.”
“I need to ask you, though…” Porter paused, gave some of the cops and his fellow agents a glance that indicated a private conference would be appreciated. They all obliged and moved away. Agent Porter turned back to Leon, who prepared himself for a line of bullshit. “Detective Hulsey, you are aware of why we’re here.” It wasn’t a question.
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