City of Crime

by Warren Court

  I knew Gloria’s family ran in totally different social circles than mine and that they turned their noses up at how I made a living and what I earned. I was on the force seven years now and had spent two in the drug squad. That meant I was at the top of my salary range and making a lot more with overtime.

  The squad worked you hard, but they paid well. They shunned vacations and sick time. I’d had to book this vacation to get married a half year in advance, and even when I was clocking off to go to the airport there were raised eyebrows and eye rolls.

  “What the hell do you want to get married for?” my boss, Sergeant Emanuel Estrada—Double E—had said. “You’re only going to get taken to the cleaner’s when she divorces your ass.” He’d said it in front of the entire squad. I knew that at least half of them were on their second wives. Double E was on his third.

  I didn’t bother replying that I loved Gloria, which I did with all my heart. They would have eaten me alive. I just smiled and took my lumps, then clocked off and flew to four-star paradise and a new life with her.

  Now we were back in Canada and ready to face reality. We were hardly in the door when our phone rang. It was Estrada.

  “Great you’re back. We need you, bud.”

  “I’m not due on for a couple of days,” I said. I had booked off as long as I could, knowing I would need time to sleep off the vacation. Despite their pretentiousness Gloria’s parents were hard-core drinkers and partiers. We’d spent seven nights up until two or three a.m., and each morning I had watched in hung-over horror as her mom had devoured a couple of mimosas with breakfast and Bloody Marys for lunch to start it all over again. I could not keep up with the old broad for more than the first two days down there.

  “We need you now.”

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “Not over the phone. We brief in an hour. Thirteen thirty-five Upper James. Come in the back way.”

  “Okay,” I said. I sighed and hung up.

  “You’re kidding,” Gloria said. She had been standing behind me during the call. She hadn’t even needed to hear what Estrada was saying to know that I was going in.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Looks like the honeymoon is over,” she said and laughed, but she was not happy.

  “Don’t say that. Listen, I’ll get those two days back. We can go down to Niagara-on-the-Lake. Same place where I proposed.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “I guess I could go in and do a shift too.”

  Gloria was making her way up the corporate ladder at the hospital. She was a full administrator now and from what I could tell of her competition, she was soon to make chief admin, maybe before she turned forty. She wouldn’t admit it, but I knew that was her goal.

  I just had time for a refreshing cold shower, and then put on jeans and a sweatshirt. It was a crisp fall day, so I grabbed an extra jacket to throw in the back of my work car.

  Each member of the drug squad was assigned a work car. Nothing special, just a plain Jane automobile that could not be run back to the HPD and identify me as being a cop. It wasn’t particularly fast, and it had no police radio. We did everything with mobile radios, and more and more of us were getting cell phones. I was still doing my research, wanted to get the best one.

  I grabbed the radio off the charger on the way out and was gone. Gloria had gone into the shower after me and I hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye.

  Number 1335 Upper James was a pet hospital. Estrada would have gone to the owner to ask permission to use it as a briefing area. We moved around a lot and there were only so many abandoned buildings we could meet in. The owner had probably been happy to oblige the police department. Most people were; it was exciting.

  It was a Sunday and the pet hospital was closed; the parking lot at the front was empty. Around back I recognized four work cars lined up. I pulled up behind them and, with the radio tucked in the pouch of my kangaroo sweater, made my way to the back of the building.

  Rico, my partner and friend, opened the back door just as I approached.

  “Where you been, man?” he said.

  “Cuba,” I said.

  “Nice. I can smell the booze from here.”

  I gave myself a sniff, all serious, and then realized he was joking. He let me in. Our squad was set up in the examination room. There were yelps from an adjoining room.

  “Patients,” Estrada said, and nodded at me. I was allowed thirty seconds to do a quick recap on my trip.

  “She screw any of my countrymen down there?” Rico said.

  “Just the black ones,” I shot back, and after a good laugh we got down to business.

  “This is for your benefit, Jack,” Estrada said. “Biker gang is set up on Wentworth. Running grass and coke out of it. We’ve tracked down the runners back to this place.” He tapped a map with a red dot marking the location. “It’s strictly logistics. Customers don’t go there. The gang gets the drugs from a Toronto source. We’ve tailed him back to a warehouse in Toronto, but we don’t know who owns it yet. There are shadow companies but we can’t find the real owner.”

  “This gang—they patched over?”

  “To one of the big gangs? Not yet, but I’m sure that’s their goal.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “We’ve got several buys recorded from their dealers, who get the stuff from this house. We got warrants on that house and the occupant’s other domiciles. We’re ready to hit the distribution house and then we’ll dispatch the uniforms to the other houses. We’re going to impound everything. They got some sweet-looking Harleys there. Probably a hundred thousand in just bikes. Bubba is over there now with eyes on them.” Estrada pointed at a small TV. It showed a grainy black and white outdoor shot of a small bungalow with a carport.

  I nodded that I understood the plan. I had my vest on underneath my sweater, and my nine-millimetre in a hip holster now; I covered it partially with the sweater. I had an old-school blackjack and my collapsible baton and pepper spray on me, as well as a KA-BAR knife in an ankle sheath.

  “Tactical is lined up six blocks from the house,” Estrada went on. “We’re going to let them hit the front door, then we’ll go in after them. Rico and Jack, I want you in the back, ready to take down anyone who comes running out. You’ll have two uniforms with you. It’s their first job like this, so show them the ropes.”

  Rico and I picked up two regular constables who were excited to be on a drug raid. They were wearing polo sweatshirts and smelled of cologne.

  “They’re going to smell you coming. Just keep behind me,” I said to the pair of them as we moved through the backyard of the house immediately behind our target bungalow. It was a midday raid on a late autumn Sunday, and things were quiet on the street.

  We crouched down and made it to the wooden fence that bordered the backyards. It was only four feet high and easily climbable. I grabbed the fence and shook it back and forth a bit; it seemed solid. The backyard of the target house was a mess of weeds and uncut grass. There was a fire pit and some wooden Muskoka chairs.

  On the concrete driveway next to the house was an overhang, and sitting in it was a shiny Harley Davidson, gleaming in the fall sun.

  “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. When the go command is given, Rico and I are going to hop over this fence and wait. You two jokers are going to wait right here on this side. We nab anybody coming out the back. You come over to help with the arrest. Understood?”

  Both jokers nodded. I looked at Rico and he grinned. He’d been on the squad only a year but he was good. He lived for this.

  We hunkered down there behind the fence. My radio was the only one turned on and the volume was turned down.

  I heard the go signal, “Arclight,” come over the radio. I looked at Rico and nodded, and we gripped the fence boards and vaulted over.

  Chapter 30

  I heard the battering ram hit the front door. It sounded like a cannon. I knew from watching SWAT raids that they wheeled up almost silently and
the guys jumped out of the vans. The battering ram guy would the way and the others trailed behind him, their MP5 submachine guns pointed at the windows.

  There was another crash from the front of the house and shouts of “Hands!” over and over again. Both Rico and I were behind some low bushes. Our guns were out and pointed down at the ground. I heard crashing sounds and other shouts. No shots, which was good. A “shoot” at a drug raid was always a huge ball-ache in paperwork.

  There was a crashing sound that was closer to us in the house and the back door flew open. A biker type came barreling out and tripped over the Muskoka chairs. He started scrambling to his feet and Rico and I were up and trained on him.

  The guy covered the distance quick, ready to lay me out, and I almost fired. I had a shoot or fight situation. Then I saw Rico come up off my right side and lay into the guy. He knocked the biker off his charge and I jumped on his back.

  “Help!” I shouted, and my voice cracked. The biker was struggling, and it was like riding a bull. I started bashing the back of his head with the butt of my pistol and then the other three cops were with me on top of him. Still the guy struggled. I put the barrel of my gun to his ear.

  “Keep it up and I’m going to pop you,” I shouted, and he finally relaxed and we were able to cuff him. It took two sets of cuffs linked together to tie him up, then we rolled him over. He tried to spit at me and I slapped him hard.

  We went through his pockets and came up with an ID. Then we picked him up and dragged him to one of the Muskoka chairs and threw him into it. The wooden chair cracked under the weight and he almost went ass over tea kettle.

  Things had calmed down in the house now, and Estrada came to the back door and holstered his weapon. We put ours away, too, and I went up to talk to him. Our two rookie uniforms covered the biker in the chair.

  “How’d it go?” I said.

  “Jackpot,” he said. There were shouts of joy from inside and I knew our guys were finding lots of dope.

  I followed him into the house. The smell of cigarettes and pot was almost overpowering. We pushed past two beefy tactical guys, all dressed up in their gear and wearing MP5s across their chests. I just nodded at them. Killbots.

  The team was tearing the place apart. On a coffee table were two bricks of pot and a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun. The other bikers were on the couch, their hands cuffed behind their backs.

  On the wall was a Nazi naval flag; weird one to have. They must have been big fans of the Kriegsmarine. I bet if I looked I could find a VHS copy of Das Boot.

  Two of our guys started hustling the bikers out one by one to waiting patrol cars. We were going to split them up here at the scene, rather than let them all ride together in a paddy van.

  “Don’t tell them anything, Antoine,” one of them said.

  “Antoine?” Estrada said. “Funny name for a biker.”

  “Shut your piehole, pig.”

  Estrada cocked his head and looked at me and smiled, and then put his shoe in the man’s face, knocking him back. He had a bloody nose and said nothing more.

  I went through the rest of the house and found other members of team going through the bedrooms. The master bedroom had a king-size bed and I helped one of our guys lift the heavy mattress.

  “Would you look at that beauty?” he said. I spotted the Browning Hi-Power on the box spring.

  “Take it,” he said.

  “You found it,” I said.

  “Man, I have so many guns. Take it. It’s yours.”

  I picked the gun up and fell in love with it instantly. “Hello, gorgeous,” I said. Guns to me were just tools of the trade. Automatics held no emotional sexiness, but this heavy killing machine was a thing of beauty. I made the weapon safe, then put it down the front of my pants and covered it with the sweater to get it out of the house. Later on, I stashed it in the glovebox of my work car. Eventually it wound up in my nightstand.

  After that shift the boys in the squad hit a bar on Upper James and got loaded drunk. Celebrating the raid, we’d nabbed three of that biker gang’s full patch members and two hang-arounds. Confiscated thousands of dollars worth of vehicles and booked them on multiple handgun and long gun violations. Not to mention the drugs.

  In addition to the two bricks of grass, we’d confiscated four kilos of something that looked like methamphetamine; the lab results would verify that. There were also two dozen bags of pills. We picked up videocassettes of parties. Home movies. Not the kind you would normally find—kids’ birthday parties, trips to the beach. These showed massive beer-drinking parties.

  We could clearly identify all the members of the group and several members of the international gang they were courting. There were girls, some of whom appeared to be underaged, all drunk, showing their tits. We were going to throw everything we could at these guys. These videos were not only evidence of the corruption of minors—we would track the girls down—but also of criminal conspiracy with known felons.

  I stumbled into my house at three am and woke up at noon. The squad had agreed to meet up in the afternoon and follow up on processing the gang. My head pounded as I sat up. Gloria came in with a cup and put it down in front of me. Fresh coffee, god bless her. She was dressed for work.

  “You going in? We just got home from our honeymoon,” I said.

  “Apparently they can’t survive without me. Like your boys’ club.”

  “We pulled a big one off yesterday. Biker gang; drug raid. It was on TV.”

  “That’s nice,” she said without smiling, and walked out the door. No goodbye or anything.

  “Goodbye,” I said, louder than I should have. A stab of pain jolted through my head. Our phone rang and I walked, zombie-like, to it.

  “Yeah,” I said, expecting to hear Estrada.

  “Yo, bud. It’s me.”

  “Don,” I said.

  “Yeah. Look, can you come see me?”

  “Gotta go into work, pal.”

  “It’s important,” Don said.

  “All right. I’ll be by in thirty.”

  “I’ll have a pot of coffee ready.”

  “You can tell?”

  “Yeah. You sound like death warmed over. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out you’re going to look like it, too.”

  I laughed and hung up.

  A shower and change of clothes and Gloria’s coffee and I was feeling marginally better.

  There was a bright red Corvette in the driveway of Don’s shop. It looked gorgeous. Next to it was a brand-new silver BMW. I heard a howl and a yelp come from within the shop. A German shepherd puppy galloped awkwardly over to me and greeted me. I turned away, put my hand down my side and let the pup get a good sniff. Satisfied, he ran off back into the darkness of the garage.

  “New car?” I asked and thumbed at the ’vette.

  Don nodded. He wiped his greasy hands on a rag but didn’t offer to shake. Since his arrest and subsequent mistrial, I’d met up with Don a couple of times. When he’d approached me in that bar a year after the trial, Don and I had shaken hands, but I don’t think we’d done so since.

  I followed him into his office, where I met the owner of the Beamer.

  “Jack, this is Emerich Soos.”

  The man was well dressed, and he had a muscular black man standing behind him in a tight-fitting sport coat. Soos didn’t bother to get up.

  “I’ll leave you two to it,” Don said.

  “Thanks, pal,” I said under my breath, and Don nodded at that. I had my gun on me so I wasn’t afraid, and I could tell this wasn’t a hit or anything.

  “That little raid yesterday—it was successful?” Soos said. His voice betrayed a hint of a European background.

  I said nothing.

  “Those bikers—distasteful, but they have plenty of money.”

  “What’s it to you?” I said. The black man behind Soos tensed.

  “Easy, Louis,” Soos said.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “I want those
drugs back. Or the money that was owed to me. Not both of those things; I’m not greedy.”

  “I could arrest you. Right now. For admitting your involvement.”

  “You could.” Again, the black man tensed, then smiled. I noticed there was no admonishment this time from Soos. “But you’re not going to do that,” Soos said.

  “Why not?”

  “I want you to get a message to your boss, Estrada. I’d like to talk to him.”