Kinsmen of the Dragons
Copyright© 2013 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 7: Surveillance
The full-size panel van was nondescript, it’s white paint faded and oxidized, and it was parked away from the buildings at a small strip mall, anchored by a chain supermarket. The van was well removed from the grocery store’s door, lost in a sea of other non-descript vehicles in the parking lot. The windows were tinted, but in Arizona that’s more a survival trait than an oddity. There was a porthole on each side, tinted like the other windows and the windows of the rear doors were also tinted.
Inside the van, Detective Sam Holland looked at his partner, Detective Sergeant James Fredericks, who was shaking his head yet one more time as another vehicle pulled away from the kiosk they were observing through the rear windows of the stakeout vehicle.
“Yeah,” Sam said, agreeing with his partner’s unspoken comment. “Sunday I was pissed because I thought the lieutenant had given us a shit job.” He waved at the unobtrusive kiosk a hundred yards away. “These clowns had about two hundred customers yesterday, and now it’s almost six o’clock, and they’ve had two hundred and thirty today. About ninety-five percent of them are buying the phone cards.”
James smiled thinly, knowing how to best to needle his partner. “You just don’t like the phone company.”
Sam laughed. “I don’t like the phone company — that’s the gospel truth! And these people are selling bogus phone cards; I was tempted to cheer when the lieutenant briefed us.”
“Half bogus ... the cards work, except the card carrier isn’t getting any of the money,” James explained.
“And according to the lieutenant, they aren’t going to tell us how that works. The perps pretty much have to have cracked their security.”
“Pretty much,” James agreed, his eyes going to yet another car as it pulled up at the kiosk drive-up window. He lifted the digital camera and snapped a half dozen pictures for posterity.
Sam Holland could have fooled, had actually fooled, many on the street when it came to what you would think a veteran police detective looked like. He was short and stocky, but not fat. He’d been a line backer, a good one, in college. He was ruggedly handsome, in a faded, craggy way; his curly blonde hair was now faded like the rest of him. In short, he looked like an over-the-hill used car salesman but who still worked out often in the hopes of attracting the opposite sex.
He looked old, but when called upon, he could fake spry youth really well when he had to. Only Sam knew what he was doing, but the fact was that he had arthritis in his back and his knees. One aspirin in morning, another at noon and a final pill the evening, kept him from hurting so that he didn’t groan every time he moved. He kept promising himself that as soon as it began to affect his mobility he’d call it a day. So far, it hadn’t, but it sure as hell hurt.
James, though — he was even harder to make as a detective. Where Sam was craggy and rough-hewn, James was thin, elegant, and dapper. He wore fine threads, cut to fit him and him alone. Personal tragedy had changed James on the inside, not so on the outside. When you cling at straws, you grab at the closest, easiest thing.
Sam sighed. “I did the numbers a bit ago. Assume two hundred cards a day. Assume they are all buying the cheapest, the ten dollar cards. That’s sales of two grand a day. More likely four grand, because I bet most of those people are buying the twenty dollar cards and a lot of them aren’t buying just one card. We’ve seen ten or twenty rolls of film delivered for processing. Processing costs something, but even so, I imagine they are making maybe two, three bucks a pop there. That has to be chump change, compared to the rest. Maybe two, three thousand bucks a day turnover, just on the phone cards.”
“Less whatever the wholesaler is getting for them,” James reminded him.
Sam nodded. “Yeah, and it’s hard to say what that it is — maybe as much as quarter, more like a tenth. Has anyone thought to look around for more of these places?”
James shrugged, before turning intent.
A teenage girl walked up to the other side of the kiosk and James cursed under his breath.
“What?” Sam asked.
James waved at the kiosk. “Mustache is doing some business with a tiny tot,” James explained. Sam put his binoculars up and watched the transaction.
“Now that’s something new,” Sam murmured, as he watched the girl take a wad of cards in exchange for an equally thick wad of bills. “Another dealer.”
“Look at the way she’s dressed,” James hissed, furiously angry.
Sam had avoided looking at how the girl was dressed; instead his glance had been professional and cursory. A mini-skirt that was barely long enough to cover her butt, a tank top that barely made it below her shoulder blades. She had pierced ears, a pierced nose and a pierced belly button. There was no telling what else was pierced.
“Damn, damn, damn, damn!” James cursed more loudly. “Why don’t parents put their feet down?”
Sam closed his eyes. Putting your foot down hadn’t helped you or your wife did it, James? What happened when you laid down the law was that your daughter got wilder and wilder, until finally she ran away and lived on the street. If you want to call that living.
Life for a fourteen-year-old on the street is best characterized as nasty, brutish — and above all, short. Amanda Fredericks had died a few days short of her fifteenth birthday, suffering from jaundice and a meth overdose. She had hepatitis C, she had herpes, gonorrhea, and tested positive for HIV. She was malnourished and had lice and fleas. She could have easily passed for a woman in her thirties.
The only thing that he could do now for James was to keep his mouth firmly shut, because saying anything at all, anything, was going to set him off.
“I want to take these guys down,” James said, his jaw clenched. “Hard! Damn hard!”
Yeah, you weren’t supposed to take things on the job personal. Yeah, and pigs fly and hell is chilly in wintertime. “That’s what we’re here for,” Sam said quietly, firmly. “I thought this was a shit job, but these guys are raking it in.”
There were two men inside the kiosk. The one they called Mustache was named Raul Gomez, if the snitch had given them accurate information. He was Hispanic, in his mid-thirties, dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved sport shirt.
The man who looked to be in charge they’d nicknamed the Swede, John Marshall Field. The Swede was tall, blonde and blue-eyed, his hair in a ponytail, and was about the same age as Mustache. He wore Dockers and long-sleeve sport shirts, just a tiny, modest bit of a better dresser than the other man.
They never talked about their subjects by name, not even in their reports. Rule One of undercover surveillance: the less anyone knows, until the time is right, the more likely the investigation won’t be blown. Both he and James had seen enough undercover work go south for one reason or another. They were both men with a dozen and a half years on the job; they had been friends since high school. They gone to college together, married together — although Sam got his divorce a couple of years ahead of James.
Sam had made detective sergeant ahead of James. That had been the first time — but then Sam had stepped on toes, and had subsequently refused to look the other way and he’d nearly ended up in a radio car. A year later James was a sergeant and things had once again been good for a while.
After six years of purgatory, Sam made sergeant a second time.
What happened then was the luck of the draw; it could easily have been James — and it wasn’t as though James hadn’t gone to the mat for Sam the second time, as he had the first.
But, Sam was agnostic and not a Mormon like James. When they’d busted the Mormon Bishop, a US senator, for DUI, Sam had taken the case, written the report and signed the complaint. The senator had claimed he was on medication and that was what had set off the breathalyzer. Sam visited the senator’s doctor and got a list of medications the senator had been prescribed. He’d been apologetic, but when it was clear that none of them would set off a breathalyzer, Sam had rearrested the senator when neither the senator nor his lawyer had made the court appearance.
Eventually senior officers in the detective bureau stepped in and took over the case. The senator went back to his job, zonked to the gills on pills of half a dozen sorts. But hey, he was legally sober, right? And Sam lost his stripes a second time for “lacking insight into social interactions.”
Sam hated thinking about the past; he mentally shifted gears and looked around again. Nothing was happening at the kiosk; it was getting close to time for the dynamic duo inside to call it a day.
The difference, Sam thought, between having kids and not having kids. James’ marriage died on the day Amanda left home; his wife would forever blame James’ strictness as the cause of their daughter’s departure and subsequent death.
Sam wished to God that he and his wife had had a kid. But even if they had, they’d probably have screwed that up too! But, jeez, it would have been nice! What kind of a woman looks twice at a cop? None of the decent and fine ones! Still, now and then things bubbled up in Sam’s psyche, things he didn’t understand. One of them was his desire to sit down with a kid and impart some of the wisdom he’d learned over the years. To keep even one kid from screwing up the way he saw kids screw up practically every damn day.
The van was silent for some minutes before James spoke again. “And speak of the devil, here’s Dog Boy.” James’ voice was back to its normal, professional self.
Sam checked his watch and sure enough, it was nearly six thirty. A full-sized Dodge dual pickup with several large cages in the back stopped a few feet from the kiosk. A young man of nineteen or twenty got out of the truck, walked to the back of the truck, dropped the tailgate, and slipped a leash on a big German Shepherd, before walking the dog towards the kiosk.
Sam glanced around the supermarket parking lot. This wasn’t the best part of town. The kiosk stood out because it is one of the few places around that didn’t have graffiti-covered walls.
The two men came out of the kiosk. Dog Boy held the dog, while Mustache put a water dish and some kibbles inside. The dog went in last and the door was locked. Dog Boy nodded to the men, and then got in his truck and drove away. The pair of men walked a few yards to a modest Honda Civic, got in and then they too drove off.
“The only thing visible that they take away is Swede’s lunch bag,” James stated. “I pretty much figure that’s where the money is, that or a money belt.”
“It has to be, even if it wouldn’t fool a professional for a second,” Sam agreed.
The men carried nothing else with them and the detectives had watched for two days as the Swede ate two sandwiches, an apple or orange and had a 99 cent bag of chips. Mustache walked a half block to a Subway store and bought a sandwich and a drink for his lunch. Once he had chips as well.
The lunch bag wasn’t very large; there wouldn’t be much room left for anything else but the money so it wasn’t very likely that the stock was going home at night.
They’d done a little research. The Swede was single and didn’t have a roommate, while Mustache was married. They lived within a mile of each other, in different apartment complexes. The Swede lived on the second floor and Mustache on the ground floor. Mustache had a good view of the parking lot, while the Swede overlooked the pool.
“Still, leaving the stock in the kiosk...” James shook his head. “Even with a dog, that’s a risk.”
Sam sighed and went forward and started the van and let it idle for a couple of minutes. March wasn’t the worst time of the year and the van was as well insulated as they could make it, but it still got hot after a day in the summer sun.
After a few more minutes Sam pulled out after the others were well on their way. Another team of detectives had been waiting to follow the Civic and sure enough, they reported Mustache was dropped off at his place, and then the Swede parked his car and went towards his apartment, carrying the lunch bag.
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