Mountain Justice

by Phillip W Price

  He seemed to relax. “It’s a law. If you’re a cop, and I ask you three times, you have to tell me.”

  I was genuinely surprised to hear that. “No shit?”

  He nodded. “No shit. It’s a law. Man, I’m glad you ain’t no cop. I didn’t want to have to waste you.”

  I was surprised. “You’d do that?”

  Before I could react, he pulled a stainless steel Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum revolver out of his pants and pointed it at me across the table. When a gun is pointed at you, you notice those details.

  My gun was on my ankle. And it was a Walther .380. We were seriously mismatched. I didn’t have many options. So, I raised my hands and started talking.

  “Dude, what the hell are you doing?”

  “I don’t really know you that well. You could be a cop, or you could be here to rip me off.” His eyes were very wide now.

  I hated dealing with cocaine dealers even more than meth dealers. Cocaine dealers were more erratic, their ups and downs more pronounced. I knew this guy worked as a baggage handler at the Atlanta airport, and we suspected he was getting his dope directly from South America. I was surprised this wiry little worm could heft a bag onto a conveyer belt.

  “You know I’m not a cop. If I was, I would’a had to tell you that.”

  He shook his head. “Yeah, but you could be here to rip me off. Or you could be a crooked cop.”

  He was pointing the gun at the center of my chest. I could actually see the hollow point slugs in the cylinder of the revolver. And every part of his body was shaking, except his hands.

  He pulled a large, sealed plastic bag from under the table and dropped it between us. It held eight ounces of some really primo Peruvian Flake. This was my third buy, each time bouncing the weight up a little bit more. I glanced down at the product but wasn’t going to take my eyes off his trigger finger if I could help it.

  “Look, we’ve done business all these other times and there hasn’t been any trouble. Why do you want to mess things up now? Your stuff is better than any I’ve ever seen.”

  He interrupted me. “Damn straight. This is some of the best flake you’ll find. Not that shit that detours through Mexico and gets stepped on a hundred times.” The gun barrel was starting to make small orbits, and I was mesmerized.

  I moved my right hand down under the table, and he didn’t seem to take any notice. I leaned down on my right side, but I couldn’t get my hand down far enough to reach my gun.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but the clock was ticking. When the body transmitter goes down, there is a hard deadline of ten minutes before the cover team would move into the house. I still believed the cover team could hear every word, so I hadn’t used the word “gun.” I knew that would bring the cavalry, and I really wanted the deal to go. But Frank—that was the dealer’s first name—wasn’t focused on the deal at the moment.

  Normally, I would just push the cash under his nose and get him looking at all the money. Then, I would give the takedown signal; in this case, the signal was the phrase “I think Buddy is going to love this stuff.” I was beginning to think I might as well give the takedown sign and just charge him with a third trafficking charge. We’d let the sales charge slide.

  Frank was still in a galaxy far, far away. But the gun barrel was beginning to droop. After all, the Magnum was a heavy gun.

  “Listen, I think Buddy is going to love this stuff, but you need to put away that gun. I just want to make some money off of all this. And this looks like good stuff. I think Buddy is going to love this stuff.”

  I gave it a couple of seconds, expecting to hear car doors slamming. After a few seconds, I continued. “I think Buddy is going to love this stuff.”

  Now, Frank was staring at me. He was shot out on the cocaine, but he was still together enough to notice I was repeating myself. I tried to keep my expression bland, “I really think Buddy is going to love this stuff.”

  Frank shook his head. “Who are you talking to?”

  I shrugged. “Sorry, but when I’m stressed out, I get Tourette’s.”

  He gave me a puzzled look. “What the hell?”

  I nodded. “I repeat myself. And sometimes I repeat myself again. I repeat myself.”

  Frank squinted at me. “I heard about that on TV, but I didn’t know it was real. Can you take something to keep that from happening?”

  I shrugged. “I do cocaine. It seems to help.”

  Frank looked pleased. “Good stuff.”

  I nodded. “Better living through chemistry.”

  He let the gun barrel drop toward the table. The moment the barrel was not pointed at my core, I grabbed it with my left hand. I twisted the gun away from the center of Frank’s body. This had the desired effect of pointing the gun away from me and breaking Frank’s trigger finger. At the same time, I jammed the palm of my hand deep into Frank’s chin. I hit him with all my energy.

  The momentum sent him straight onto the ground, his legs pointed straight up. I pushed the table over and jumped on top of Frank. I landed with my knees on his gut and was rewarded with a whoosh of air from deep in his lungs.

  As I was kicking the pistol away from his hand, a girl came from the back of the house. She was rail thin and had long blonde hair. My first thought was she was a stripper. She was dressed in a T-shirt and panties. Oh, and she had thought to bring a twelve-gauge shotgun with her. I guess it went with that pair of panties. Her eyes were as wide as saucers, searching the room like a wild animal. And then, her saucers came to rest on me. She was holding the shotgun, an eighteen-inch Remington 870, just like the one in the trunk of my car, at port arms. I doubted if she knew what port arms was, but she had managed it.

  I was scrambling around to get to my handgun when I heard the loudest boom ever. Blondie—as I decided to dub her—dropped to the floor like she had been shot. My cover team came running in, and, in their haste, had taken a battering ram to the lock on the front door. When they hit the door, the impact was so hard the lock exploded and hit Blondie in the back of the head. She hit the ground while blood spurted from her head.

  I got off the floor and brushed the pieces of the door off my shirt. “What took you clowns so long?”

  The door breacher, one of my best friends on the Major Violators Squad, was detached from the DEA. Walt Stone was a gentle giant at six feet, six inches tall. He dropped the ram on the floor and looked around. “Looks like we were right in the nick of time, Danny.”

  “If I said, ‘I think Buddy is going to love this’ one more time, they were going to run out of the house right into your arms.”

  Big Walt looked at me. “I guess we’ll have to hear about it on the replay. Your bug went out just before you got in the house.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  Wally gave me a somber look. “I shit you not.”

  I looked around the room. Frank was lying on his back and moaning. One of the cover team, Mario Ortega, was cuffing him. Blondie had fallen face first onto the floor and now was perched with her t-back-covered butt sticking straight up into the air. Jill Leonard, the newest Agent on our squad, kicked the shotgun away and started cuffing Blondie.

  Wally gave me another look. “This is a fucked up way to make a living.”

  I nodded, my heart racing and breath ragged from the adrenaline still pumping in my system. “No doubt.” Just another Saturday afternoon. And, I thought, just one more reason I was ready to get out of drug enforcement.

  Be careful what you ask for.

  CHAPTER 2

  DIRECTIONS FROM THE TOP

  I had been a GBI Special Agent for about seven years and had spent a considerable amount of that time working undercover. At the time, I was twenty-nine years old. I had been hired by the GBI at the ripe old age of twenty-three years and two months.

  I thought of myself as a seasoned veteran of the State of Georgia’s premiere law enforcement agency. I had been commended by several district attorneys and one United States attorney for my w
ork on some complicated cases. I stupidly thought I was ready for whatever came my way.

  I was exhausted with the job I had in the Major Violators Squad of the drug enforcement section, though. The undercover work had started out as fun—pretending to be someone else, with a different name and a different background for each assignment—but the lifestyle left a lot to be desired. Working in the undercover role wore on your psyche. There were days when I needed to be reminded what my real name was after a couple of weeks using an undercover identity. I still carried several valid driver’s licenses in my undercover names. And the few times you weren’t working alone, your only support came from cover teams you couldn’t actually see. I was ready to move on and settle into a regular investigative assignment. I even had the occasional thought about starting a family.

  The call I got that Monday morning was completely out of the blue. My boss’s secretary told me to report to SAC Will Carver one week from that day at the GBI regional office in Gainesville.

  I was being transferred and would immediately start a special investigation case of some kind. That wasn’t the normal course of business in a government agency. It crossed my mind that the call had been an elaborate joke. I had seen more complicated hoaxes pulled on Agents. Nothing happened quickly when it came to administrative matters.

  Numbered from northwest to southwest, then southeast to northeast, the GBI had established eight original offices throughout the State. By the time I was hired, the number had grown to thirteen. Gainesville was Region Eight. With fourteen counties, some bordering Tennessee, some bordering North Carolina, and some bordering South Carolina, the office covered a variety of crime.

  I had met my new boss, GBI Special Agent in Charge Will Carver, a few times, but we had only shaken hands. Carver was legendary within the GBI. He had a reputation for taking care of people who got in trouble for doing their job the right way, and for being very unforgiving of those who came to his attention for not doing much of anything right.

  Needless to say, I was very nervous about my new assignment and this special case I was about to work. I was ready for a change but hadn’t expected to get the opportunity to go to one of the best offices the Bureau had.

  That Monday was my first day in headquarters after several weeks of being on the road, so I rushed around and turned in reports I had dictated. I went upstairs to the finance section and turned in all my drug-buy money. Normally, when an Agent was transferring to a new assignment, they were given a couple of weeks to get case files up to date and to make arrangements for housing in the new area. While I worked in the drug enforcement section, I was living in a rental house in Roswell, which was a couple of hours from my new office. I figured the drive would be doable until I could find a place to live.

  The following Tuesday, I made my way to the office I had just been assigned to. I wasn’t sure what my commute time would be, so I headed north early. I was generally going against the rush-hour traffic, and the drive up into the mountains was refreshing. It ended up taking me an hour and twenty minutes.

  I made my way into the lobby of the office and was greeted by Machelle Stevens, the Office Secretary. She came around her desk and gave me a hug. “You are going to love working up here,” she said.

  She had moved to the regional office a few years ago after she married. Before that, she was in the pool of secretaries I worked with in the drug enforcement section.

  “I’m happy to have someone here that I know,” I responded. I was the first Agent in the door that day and felt like a fish out of water. My suit was new, and I hadn’t worn a tie for anything other than the occasional court appearance in quite a while.

  Machelle laughed. “Nervous?”

  “Does it show?”

  She nodded. “You won’t have any problem fitting in here. We’ve got a good mix of veterans and newer Agents. Most of them are out in their counties right now, but come in next Monday and you can meet the whole cast of characters.”

  “Thanks.” I changed the subject. “I smell coffee, is that available?”

  She directed me down the hall to the break room where the coffee pot was located. But before I could avail myself of the much-needed caffeine, I had to pay two dollars a month into the coffee fund.

  I had just poured a cup of coffee and taken a seat at the small round table when SAC Carver came in. I stood up and extended a hand. He was about my height, but much thinner. He was dressed in a suit and tie as well. He walked with a slight limp which added to his mystique. His blond hair and mustache didn’t seem to have any gray in them, even though he was easily old enough for it. He motioned for me to follow him.

  “Thanks for coming up. Although, I guess you didn’t have any option, did you?” He offered a friendly smile when he said it.

  “No, sir, Mr. Carver. But it’s a pleasure to be here.”

  “Call me Will. In the regional offices, we’re all on a first-name basis.” He fixed his own cup of coffee while I waited. “Do you go by Danny, Daniel, or Dan?”

  I replied with “Danny.”

  Carver took a quick sip of the coffee to gauge how hot it was. He seemed satisfied, and took a longer drink from the cup.

  Carver nodded toward the door and I followed behind, “This assignment is easier on a family life compared to a dope office.” Carver remarked. “It sure is nice to be in your own bed most nights. Are you married?”

  I shook my head as Carver led the way into his office. The room was small, and a desk and small conference table were crammed against the far wall. The walls were out-of-date wood panel and the desk was pressed wood. Government cheap would always be the standard décor for a GBI regional office. But at least his desk was a step above the gray metal, military surplus desks that most of the Agents seemed to have.

  Carver turned back around to face me. “You have a reputation for being a solid investigator. How does it feel to be back in a coat and tie?” The motto of the GBI Investigative Division, for everyone except the narcs, was “No coat and tie, no GBI.”

  “Good, sir,” I replied. Then I corrected myself, “Good, Will. I enjoy general investigation. But working dope is a lot of fun, too. I guess I’m not telling you anything.”

  “Yep, working dope can be a whole lot of fun. But we all have to grow up and put on our big-boy pants sooner or later.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ll get acclimated up here pretty quickly. This is a great area to work. Lots of violent crime.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll just try to tone down what they tell me is my ‘At-lanna’ accent. As soon as I can get settled in, I’ll start looking for a place to rent up here. Right now, I live in Roswell. Do you have an area you’d prefer I live in?”

  “I’ll want you over near Canton or Cumming. We don’t have anybody living over that way, and you’ll be working those western counties.” He motioned for me to take a seat.

  Carver sat at his desk and took a sip of his coffee. He gave me a serious look. “How much do you know about the Gilmer County area?”

  “I know it has a reputation for being closed to outsiders. I was sent up there to do an undercover buy of meth with a confidential informant about two years ago. I might as well have been a Martian with the way they looked at me.”

  “Right. Well, apples are one of the primary crops up there. A chicken plant or two, and some apple orchards. And old-school politics on a grand scale.” Carver stood and walked over to the eight-foot-tall map of Georgia on his conference-room wall.

  Carver pointed at Gilmer County on the map. “Sure, those northern counties have always been pretty cliquish. One of the older Agents who has worked up here for a while asked me if I had ever heard of the NFH defense in court. He told me that was the defense people in the hills used when they killed an outsider. NFH—not from here. They say if an outsider were to get killed there, he didn’t have any business going there, and if he had stayed away from there, he wouldn’t be dead.” Carver looked at me for effect.

  Before I
could respond, the office’s Assistant Special Agent in Charge stuck his head in the office. Scott Andrews didn’t look much older than me. He had red hair and an infectious smile. He was dressed in khaki pants and a blue, long-sleeved dress shirt with the obligatory tie. He stuck out a hand and said, “Welcome on board. Looking forward to working with you.”

  “Same here,” I said. “I’m just getting the rundown on this case I’m getting into.”

  Andrews nodded. “Sounds like we’re throwing you into the deep end of the pool. They don’t like people coming in from the outside in Gilmer, even intrepid GBI Agents.”

  I was surprised to hear this. Even in the far reaches of South Georgia, where the swamps kept people isolated, no one was brave enough to push back against the GBI. Whether out of fear or respect, no government official was willing to obstruct one of our investigations.

  Carver took up where he left off. “The people in those communities don’t feel connected to the seat of government in Atlanta.”

  I knew what he was saying was true. Even though I hadn’t been in the area that long.

  “What about the law enforcement in that county?” I asked Andrews.

  “Crooked as a dog’s hind leg,” he said. “Don’t trust anybody over there with a badge unless it’s a state one or a federal one. There is a rabbit sheriff who works over there.” He was referring to the common term for a state game warden. “He’s half-Cherokee Indian, and is a really solid cop. He knows those woods like the back of his hand. He can tell you a lot about the people in the area. His name is Willie Nelson—no relation to the country singer. I can get you his contact numbers.”

  I nodded. Then I spoke up. “You may not be aware of this but I’m pretty rusty when it comes to working general investigations. I’m willing to give it my best shot, but you might want someone who is more experienced.”

  Carver was watching me closely. “I’ll explain some of the reasons why you were chosen in just a minute, but you being from out of the area is one of the reasons why we want you on this case. And I know about some of your background working undercover. That may come in handy on a case like this.”