by Kelly, Diane
She had been sitting for only ten minutes when—bingo!—a grizzled white guy with greasy hair and a colorful neck tattoo emerged from a third-floor apartment wearing a pair of dirty, wrinkled jeans and a dingy T-shirt. Seemingly oblivious to the cold, he stepped to the railing, pulled a lighter and a pack of Marlboros from his pocket, and shook one loose.
Before he could light his cigarette, she unrolled her window just far enough to extend her hand and wave to him. When she had his attention, she motioned for him to come to her car.
Before coming down the steps, the man glanced first left, then right, as if looking for potential witnesses. Seeing none, he trotted down the staircase, making hardly a noise in his bare feet.
He came over to the car, crooked his fingers over the open window, and put his face to the open gap, instantly filling her nose with the odors of accumulated BO and sour beer breath. For the first time ever, she found herself wishing for the smell of her sisters’ drugstore perfume.
The man smiled a stained-tooth smile and winked at her with a yellowed, bloodshot eye. “Hi, gorgeous.”
She fought down her revulsion. Maybe this was a bad idea.
He raised a scraggly brow. “You looking to buy something?”
Then again, maybe not.
“Actually, I’m looking to sell.” She pulled the bottle of pills from her purse, holding them out of reach in case he pulled a fast one and tried to reach in and grab them from her.
“Whatcha got there?”
“Vicodin.”
“What strength?”
Her eyes scanned the bottle for the information. “Five milligrams.”
He chuffed. “That’s the low dose. How many you got?”
“A hundred and nine.” She had carefully counted them on her bed last night, dividing them into small piles of ten pills each. After counting the pills, she’d done some research on the Internet. Though the online sources quoting prices for street drugs were of dubious origin and provided a wide range of prices depending on location, she estimated that here in Fort Worth the street value of the pills would be between $1 to $3 each, which meant the bottle was worth somewhere between $109 to $327. Of course she’d have to discount the price to give the dealer a profit margin when he resold them.
The guy’s gaze went from her face to the bottle and back again. “How much you askin’?”
“Two hundred,” she said, essentially splitting the difference. “And you have to pay in cash.”
He laughed. “You’re new at this, ain’t ya?”
An embarrassed blush heated her cheeks. She supposed her reference to cash had been naïve and unnecessary. It’s not like drug dealers used credit cards or personal checks in their transactions.
“I’ll give you a hundred,” he countered.
She split the difference again. “One fifty.”
“Screw you, bitch,” the man spat, stepping back from the car. “You’re out of your element, girl. Get your ass back to the suburbs.” He turned to walk away.
“Wait!” she cried. “I’ll take the hundred.” Frankly, as brave as she liked to consider herself, this interaction had her spooked. She’d rather sell the pills now than risk going up against an even meaner, smellier dealer at another complex.
Looking left and right again, he pulled a wad of bills from the front pocket of his jeans. The bills were held together with a silver money clip engraved with a skull and crossbones. He peeled off five twenties and offered them through the window, clenching them tightly in his fingers until she had released the bottle of pills into his other hand.
“Got anything else you’d like to sell?” He looked down at her breasts, leering, before raising his eyes back to her face. He arched a lecherous brow.
The mere thought of this man’s hands on her made her stomach squirm. “No!”
He chuckled and stood, backing away from the window. “Nice doing business with ya, sweet cheeks.”
Their transaction complete, she started her car, nearly running the man over in her haste to leave the complex. She pulled out of the lot, passing a blue muscle car with flames painted down the sides as it turned in.
Ew, Lord. Three blocks later and she could still smell the man’s stench. Despite the cold, she unrolled all of the windows to clear the car, then yanked the lemon air freshener from her rearview mirror, held it to her nose, and inhaled deeply.
Aaah. Much better.
NINETEEN
FAST TALK
Megan
As Seth pulled into the parking lot of my apartment complex, I noted one of my neighbors, a scuzzy parolee named Dwayne Donaldson, backing away from a small yellow boxy car. Dwayne had two prior convictions for selling meth and, from the looks of things, he was back in business.
With a squeal of tires, the car zipped past us at warp speed, the pretty young blonde at the wheel appearing both disgusted and panicked. I looked back just in time to catch the first letter of her license plate before she sped out of view.
T.
“What kind of car was that?” I asked Seth as he pulled into a spot. “Was it a Honda Fit? A Nissan Versa?”
He glanced in the direction the car had gone. “Some kind of Chevy, I think.”
I turned my attention back to Dwayne. By this time he’d scurried up to his apartment door and pulled it open.
I threw open the door to Seth’s Nova and stepped out. “Dwayne!” I hollered.
The thug pretended not to hear me, closing his door with an emphatic slam. Given that nearly a quarter of the residents at my low-budget apartment complex were ex-cons or on probation for one offense or another, I got the same reaction from many of my neighbors. Brigit and I weren’t exactly popular around here.
Seth and I went up to my apartment. “Wait here,” I told him as I rounded up Brigit and clipped her leash onto her collar. “I need to go talk to my neighbor.”
“That creep who ran up the stairs?”
“That’s the one. He’s had two convictions for dealing drugs. I think he may have just sold something to that girl who drove out of the lot.”
“I’m not letting you go alone.”
A small laugh escaped me. “You realize I do this kind of thing every day? It’s how I make a living.”
“I know,” Seth said. “I try not to think about it too much.”
I hurried to my bathroom, slipped into a FWPD T-shirt, and strapped on my belt. Armed and in some semblance of a uniform now, I led Brigit down the stairs of my building, stopped to let her take a quick pee on a patch of dirt, and headed up the stairs to Dwayne’s unit.
Knock-knock-knock. There was no answer.
Brigit snuffled around the door, her nose twitching as she sniffed along the bottom and up the sides.
I knocked again, this time using the side of my fist instead of my knuckles. Bam-bam-bam.
Still no answer. “Dwayne!” I hollered. “Open up. Fort Worth PD!”
Screeeee!
We turned to see Dwayne peeling out of the parking lot on his Kawasaki motorcycle, no helmet on his greasy head.
“Want to go after him?” Seth asked. “My Nova can do one-sixty.”
“And you know that how?” I raised an inquisitive brow.
He raised his palms. “I plead the fifth.”
Brigit finished her sniffing and sat, giving a passive alert on Dwayne’s door. So much for having the morning off.
I pulled my radio from my belt and asked dispatch to have officers keep a lookout for Dwayne. “Looks like he’s dealing again.”
Meanwhile, I went down to the on-site manager’s office to get a key.
Dale Grigsby answered his door wearing only a pair of too-long gray sweatpants that hugged his paunchy, pimply belly and puddled around his pasty ankles. He rubbed his bulbous nose. “What?”
“I need a key to apartment 33A.”
“Why?”
“Donaldson’s dealing again.”
“How do you know?”
“My dog alerted on his door.” My
partner might chew up my shoes and steal food off my plate when I wasn’t looking, but her nose was never wrong.
Grigsby rolled his eyes, reached over into a cabinet, and pulled out a master set of keys. He fingered through them until he found the right one, eased it off the large ring, and handed it to me. “Bring it back when you’re done.”
Seth waited outside on the walkway while Brigit and I searched the tiny efficiency apartment. Though she sniffed intently at the dresser drawers, the soiled mattress that lay directly on the floor, and the toilet tank cover, she gave no alert. I pulled open the refrigerator door to let her sniff inside. People were known to hide drugs inside things they thought might mask the scent and throw a dog off track. Coffee grounds. Pots of baked beans. Cans of tuna. Though Brigit failed to alert on anything in the fridge, she helped herself to a cold hot dog from an open package on the bottom shelf. I didn’t bother to stop her. Heck, she was putting in overtime here, too, and deserved a treat.
As we finished up and headed out the door, Dwayne came trotting up the steps, a smug expression on his face. “Didn’t find anything, did ya?”
“Only because you took the drugs with you when you left.” Given that my partner had alerted on the door, there had definitely been drugs in the apartment not long before. She must have caught a residual whiff.
Dwayne emitted a sour, beer-scented chuckle. “Prove it.”
I couldn’t, of course, and he knew it. “Who was the girl?” I asked.
“What girl?”
“You going to play dumb?”
“I don’t have to play at that,” Dwayne spat. A look of confusion crossed his face a moment later when he realized his blunder.
Seth shook his head and gave me a look that said Really? This is what you deal with every day?
“You know exactly who I’m talking about,” I said to Dwayne. “The pretty blonde in the yellow car.”
“Maybe she’s my girlfriend,” the thug said, his lip curling up in a stained-teeth grin. “Maybe we spent all morning making sweet, sweet love.”
The mere thought had my coffee and cinnamon roll battling to see which would be first to make its way back up my esophagus.
“No way,” I said. “She’s out of your league.” After all, she looked like she’d showered in the last week and had no visible herpes scab on her lip. I couldn’t fault the guy for being an ugly SOB. His DNA was to blame for that. But his personal hygiene failures? Those were all on him.
Dwayne’s smug look turned indignant and he crossed his arms over his chest.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You sold her something, didn’t you?”
A nasty grin spread across his lips. “I can honestly say no to that.”
Funny thing was, I was pretty sure he was telling me the truth just then.
“I’ll be watching you,” I told him.
He gave me another nasty grin. “I’ll be watching you right back.”
* * *
I spent my day off on Monday cleaning my apartment and training with Brigit at the K-9 facility. It was important to keep our skills sharp. Though we spent forty hours a week on duty, the vast majority of our time was spent simply cruising in the car or walking around on foot patrol. Regular training was critical to maintain our edge, to make sure that, when the time came that our special skills were needed, we’d be ready.
Monday evening, I decided that merely watching Dwayne wouldn’t satisfy me. If he was pushing meth again, I wanted to bust his sorry ass. The drug had ruined too many lives already.
I plopped down on the couch with my FWPD laptop, logged in to the DMV records, and searched for a yellow Honda Fit with a license plate starting with the letter T. There was one in the area. It was registered to a Myrna Belvedere who, according to the driver’s license records, was eighty-two years old. Definitely not the woman I’d seen driving away from my complex. I searched for Nissan Versas next. There wasn’t a single yellow Versa listed in Tarrant County.
I logged on to a Chevy Web site next, trying to figure out what model the girl might have been driving. Could it have been a Spark? Possibly. The Spark had a similar boxy design and came in a yellow color.
Brigit hopped onto the couch next to me, draping her head over my thigh and looking up at me with big brown eyes.
“Hey, girl.” I ran a hand over her neck and continued to type, hunting and pecking with the fingers of my free hand. Not an efficient process, obviously, but how could I deny my partner some attention when she worked so hard?
I found three yellow Sparks registered to women in Tarrant County.
The first belonged to a thirty-year-old woman named Erica Ryan Spencer. I looked up Erica’s driver’s license photo. Though she was blond, she looked a little too old to be the woman I’d seen driving by. Then again, the woman in the car had been without makeup. Maybe if Erica’s face were bare she’d look younger.
I squinted at the photo, trying to picture the woman without eyeliner, blush, and lipstick. Hmm … I supposed it was possible the woman had been her.
The second Chevy Spark belonged to a twenty-one-year-old named Amber Lynn Hood. Amber Lynn’s driver’s license photo showed a pretty young woman with brown hair. Hmm. The woman who’d been interacting with Dwayne had been blond. Of course it wasn’t that hard to change your hair color. All a person had to do was make a trip to Walgreens for a bottle of Clairol.
I leaned in to take a closer look at the woman in the photo. Inconclusive. I hadn’t gotten a really good look at her face when she’d driven by, only an impression.
The third yellow Spark belonged to a Gigi Redding, who was in her early fifties. Gigi was definitely too old to be the woman I’d seen, though I supposed it was possible that she or Myrna had loaned their car to a daughter or granddaughter or neighbor or something.
What to do next?
The criminal records database might be able to tell me more. I typed Amber Lynn’s name into the system and waited while it churned through the data. Five seconds later, the screen told me that no record was found in her name. Evidently she wasn’t the person I’d seen on Sunday or the woman I’d seen didn’t have a record. If this Amber Lynn had committed any crimes, she’d gotten away with them so far. But things had a way of catching up with people. Sooner or later, if she was up to no good, somebody would catch her. Heck, maybe it would even be me.
I ran Erica’s name next.
Bingo.
Bango.
Erica Ryan had a conviction for possession of marijuana. Evidently she’d been caught with only a small amount, and the conviction was seven years prior, before she’d married. But that didn’t mean she’d changed her ways. She’d probably just learned to be more careful. Though Dwayne’s convictions were for methamphetamine distribution, that didn’t mean he hadn’t decided to dabble in other drugs. Or maybe Erica had developed a new drug of choice. Marijuana was a gateway drug, after all.
I glanced at Erica’s address. She lived in Kennedale, a small town southeast of Fort Worth and technically outside my jurisdiction. That didn’t mean I couldn’t pay her a visit, though, ask a few questions. As a courtesy, though, I’d need to run things by the Kennedale PD before dropping in on her.
As long as I was logged on to my computer, I decided to run a search and see if I might be able to identify the person who’d snagged Catherine Quimby’s purse. Given that I didn’t have a name to run through the criminal records database, I figured I’d have better luck searching the police reports for key words. I typed in bathroom, purse, drugs, and theft.
The system churned for a few seconds before informing me that 3,784 records included those key words. Looked like I’d have to narrow it down.
I added female suspect and hit enter to activate the search function again. The additional words narrowed things down considerably, but still left me with 692 reports to read.
I typed painkillers, which cut the list down to twenty-seven reports.
I spent the next couple of hours skimming the reports. In
most cases, the word bathroom came into play because stolen purses containing painkillers had been found discarded in restroom trash cans. Several of the thefts had occurred in area hospitals or medical clinics. I found only two instances in which women had reported being robbed of their purses and prescription painkillers in a restroom. In one instance, the victim had passed out in the bathroom of a bar and woken to find her purse and Percocet missing. No suspects had ever been arrested. The other report was the one I’d entered after interviewing Catherine Quimby.
Darn. Looked like I’d have to track down this purse snatcher the old-fashioned way.
* * *
Tuesday morning, I swung by the station early to pick up my cruiser. I wasn’t officially on duty for a few more hours, but I wanted to get down to Kennedale and talk to Erica before too much time passed. No one would ever call me a procrastinator.
I stopped at the Kennedale PD headquarters first, letting Brigit take a quick tinkle in their bushes before going inside.
“Hi,” I told the receptionist. “I’m Officer Megan Luz with Fort Worth PD. There’s a resident I’d like to speak to in connection with a possible drug offense in Fort Worth. Just wanted to clear it with you all first.”
“Just a moment.” She pushed a button on an intercom, waited a moment, then explained my situation to someone on the other end. “Okeydoke.” She hung up her phone. “Officer Munsen can accompany you. He’ll meet you out front.”
Brigit and I returned to our cruiser, waiting outside in the crisp air. A moment later a gray-haired officer pulled up in a white cruiser with a large letter K and two green stripes down the side.
I stepped up to his car and gave him the address, which was only a mile or so east of the station.
“After you,” he said, gesturing with an open palm.
I loaded Brigit into the back of my patrol car and climbed into the front. In less than three minutes, we were at Erica’s door. Her house, which was relatively new, sat in a nice, well-maintained subdivision. Not what I’d envisioned exactly, though I knew drugs crossed all socioeconomic lines.
