Epilogue

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

I got out of bed at 0600, but I hadn’t been asleep. I had slept fitfully at best all night, and I just gave in and got up. I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower, so the water would warm up, and then started brushing my teeth.

“Can’t sleep?” asked Kelly, from our bed.

“I need to get to the station early,” I told her.

Any further discussion was ended when we heard a cry from the hallway. Kelly groaned and got out of bed. I smiled and shook my head and stripped off my briefs and climbed into the shower. I was toweling off when Kelly returned to our bedroom, grumbling. Kelly looked at me and moved to pass me Seamus John. “Here! Feed your son!”

“Hold on a sec, babe.” I went over to my dresser and picked up the little storage container that held my hearing aids. Two tours of combat had come back to bite me in the ass. It had started in my left ear, but now I had a definite hearing loss in both ears. Fortunately, the hearing aids were effective and didn’t affect my duty. Unfortunately, I had to go through the VA system to get them, which wasn’t any better than when I had complained about the VA back when I got the Medal.

I put the aids in place and turned back to Kelly. “Can you hear me now?” she asked, a touch peevishly, I thought.

I smirked at her. “Right up until you start saying something I don’t want to hear.” A standard joke, for both me and Grandpa, was that when talking to our beloved spouses, we would mime turning off our hearing aids; we would then just nod, smile, and say, ‘Yes, dear!’

“Trust me, Grim, you don’t want to go there!” I just laughed. She repeated her earlier request. “Here, take your son and feed him.”

“My son? How come when he’s being good, he’s your son and when he’s being bad, he’s my son? What’d he do now?” I took him from her, along with his bottle, and began feeding him.

“I was changing him, and he did the fountain trick again! I need to wash up!” she protested.

Seamus was our second child and looked like my side of the family, though with one important difference from me - he was ridiculously pudgy and round! “Well, if the Michelin Man ever gets fired, we’ve got the replacement here. Are you sure we didn’t mix him up at the hospital?”

“It’s just baby fat. I’ve seen the family photos, Grim. He’s too much like you guys.”

“Hey, none of us looked as round as this little guy.” Seamus looked up at me and gave me a big smile - and then filled his diaper again! I snorted in laughter at him.

“Maybe not you three, but your grandmother showed me baby pictures of your father and uncle. Trust me, he’s a Reaper!”

I grinned at her. “Then we better put him on a diet now, before he really starts to look like them.” Both my father and Uncle Dave were getting round. “Oh, and he just filled his new diaper.”

Kelly gave a small shriek. “Seamus!” She looked over at me and ordered, “Well, go get a diaper!”

I went across the hall into my son’s room and grabbed a clean diaper from the dresser. On the way back, I looked in Riley Bridget’s room. She looked so sweet and innocent, which was completely at odds with the reality! Riley had her mother’s red hair, but the genes for bright blue eyes had snuck in somewhere. She was four and promised to be nothing but trouble when she grew up. She was in a big-girl bed with her two favorite items, a pink plastic football with the Oakland Raiders logo on it that Jack had given to her for her third birthday, and Boxie, her gigantic Black Lab. Boxie ignored me most of the time, at least when I wasn’t feeding him, and he looked at me and then went back to sleep. We had gotten him when Riley was just starting to crawl around, and they were simply inseparable. He was absolutely devoted to her and followed her everywhere. It was funny to watch since he was easily three times her size. Now, if only I could teach him to chase the boys away when she became a teenager...

I went back into our bedroom and handed Kelly the fresh diaper. “Give me a second,” she said. Kelly grabbed my bathrobe and pulled it on. “He’s not pulling that little trick again!” I laughed at that.

I dressed in my black tactical clothing, but not in my heavy gear. That I kept in a duffle bag to change into at the station. Kelly asked, “Early day?”

“I need to go in early this morning.”

“Is this that big project you’ve been working on?”

“Hmmm?” I replied, noncommittally.

Kelly snorted. “Will you at least promise to let me know how it goes?” I simply smiled at her, and she gave me a quiet groan. “What is going on, Grim?”

“It’s just routine stuff. I might be late, too. Just watch the news tonight. It should be over by then.”

Kelly sighed. “Will you at least promise to be careful?”

I smiled and wrapped my arms around her. “That I can promise you. I have way too much to live for these days not to be careful! I just might be a little late over the next few days with paperwork.”

Kelly asked, “Nothing that is going to affect next week, though?”

“It shouldn’t.”

“Good! I’d hate to have bought those new swimsuits for nothing.”

“Hmmm ... new swimsuits?”

“Well, Grim, the girls have grown a bit,” she replied, glancing downward. “I had to get something bigger.” Two children had not affected her figure at all, at least not in a bad fashion. She had put on maybe five pounds between the two kids, but it seemed evenly distributed, top and bottom, and it was a pleasure to watch her change. There are some women who just get better and better looking as they get older, and Kelly was one of them. She was simply spectacular!

“I was hoping for something smaller,” I answered.

Kelly ignored that, and said, “And I got a new suit for you, too. I can’t wait to see you in a Speedo!”

“Forget it!”

She reached over and groped me. “Grim, you want to see me in something small. Fair’s fair.”

“Forget it!” I repeated. She just laughed and finished with Seamus.

Starting Saturday, Kelly and I were taking a second honeymoon, at the Sandals resort in Saint Lucia. We were supposed to have a very private room and balcony, something that would allow Kelly to wear her tiniest swimsuits - or none at all! Kelly’s parents (Nana and Pop-Pop) were going to stay at the house and watch the kids for the week, assisted, no doubt, by my parents (Grandma and Grandpa) and grandparents (Grammy and Grampy). Mom’s parents had both passed away a couple of years ago. Her mother had died from the Alzheimer’s, but her father had spent so much time and effort caring for her that he had failed to take care of himself. Colon cancer got him six months later.

It was going to be our first vacation since the honeymoon. For the first couple of years after we got married it had been nothing but work and study for the both of us, as I worked my way up in the TRT, and Kelly became established with both Matucket State and DARPA. After the nonsense with the Medal, we continued busting our asses.

I had kept studying, busting my hump trying to balance being Daddy with getting a degree in history from Matucket State and getting my Advanced certification from the Academy. Getting my degree at Matucket State had been a bit strange at times. Kelly had warned me ahead of time that the School of Humanities, which ran the History Department, was a bastion of liberalism, progressivism, socialism, and every other form of wacky ism out there. As both a soldier and as a police officer, I was bound to make immediate enemies among the faculty. I had checked this out through the vet’s grapevine and got some names of professors to avoid. I also made sure not to come to class in my uniform, and I kept my off-duty weapon in the gym bag I used for my books. (Kelly was in the Computer Science Department, part of the School of Natural Sciences, a department which was routinely exposed to facts, so she wasn’t overly affected by my sins.) Only the fact that Kelly made decent money had allowed me to do this. Most of my fellow officers tried to pick up odd security jobs in their time off. The money was good, but it simply took up time. I had passed the Sergeant’s exam and made Sergeant three months ago.

In addition to two children, Kelly had worked her way up the tenure track, and had just been named a full Professor for the coming school year, and now had a research contract with the NSA as well as DARPA. Of course, that was probably helped by her becoming a co-winner of something called the Gödel Prize for her work in algorithms. (She had tried to explain that to me once, and when I had looked confused, she gave me a very condescending response. That ended with me chasing her around the kitchen island and paddling her bottom while Riley laughed. I gave her a different sort of punishment later, which we think eventually resulted in Seamus.) She also was part of a startup in town, formed by a couple of her ex-grad students looking to commercialize some of the work she had done; her name was on the board but otherwise she mostly just let them do their thing and provided some guidance. She said they were hoping to build something that they could sell to Facebook or Google, in which case it would be worth some serious money.

It was time to do some Mommy and Daddy celebrating, without the kids!

I returned the fruit of my loins to Kelly and finished dressing. After leaving the bedroom I looked in on our daughter again. I whispered to Kelly, “Tell her I’ll play football with her when I get home.” Playing football was Riley’s favorite sport, but it wasn’t like any organized sport I had ever played. Mostly it involved her squealing and running around the yard while I chased her, waving my arms and growling, and then ‘tackling’ her, which involved picking her up and tickling her. If family or friends were around, we would combine that with various ‘passes’, ‘laterals’, ‘interceptions’, and ‘fumbles’ which simply served to hand her off to somebody else. We did the same thing with Jack and Teresa’s kids when they were visiting. Eventually the kids would wear out the adults and go scampering off into the ‘end zone’, a bare spot between two pine trees.

Kelly followed me out to the living room, still carrying Seamus. “Grim, what is going on? What are you into?”

“Nothing you need to worry about. I’ll be fine. If I’m not home by six tonight, just watch the news. You should like the top story,” I teased. That was true, too. Unless something radically bad happened, in which case it would also make the top story, but not in a good way. Of course, if that were to happen, Kelly would be over at Matucket General, crying over her late husband’s carcass. Best not to mention that possibility.

“Grim!” Then she gave me a sultry smile and said, “I bet I know how to make you talk.”

“I bet you do, but then we’d both be late to work, and Riley would be late to nursery school,” I said, smirking.

“Not even a hint?”

“Sorry, it’s secret. I’ll let you know later. It should be finished today.”

Saturday, April 18, 2015

Jerry Wolinski tracked me down in the locker room at the end of the shift. Jerry had moved to day shift in 2013, right after having another pair of fraternal twins, and had transferred over to Investigations and the Drug Task Force. “You doing anything tomorrow?” he asked.

I looked at him curiously. It was Friday, so ‘tomorrow’ was Saturday. I had been looking forward to getting the boat in the water, but now I wondered if that was going to get screwed up. “I’m launching the boat. Why?”

“Good. I’ll be coming by in the afternoon. We need to talk.”

“Okay. About what?”

“Routine scheduling,” he said lightly.

I cocked an eyebrow at that. The DTF would have nothing to do with the scheduling of TRT, and vice versa. For some reason, Jerry didn’t want to talk to me at the station. I nodded slowly and said, “Fine. You can bring the beer.”

Jerry acknowledged that and left. I finished packing my duffle bag and took off. I didn’t say anything to Kelly, other than Jerry might be by in the afternoon, and that was a mistake. The first thing she did was call Sarah and plan a barbecue. I half expected Jerry to call back saying it was just him and me.

I never got that call. Instead, I drove over to the feed mill and met Grandpa and Uncle Dave. The last few years I had managed to ‘steal’ a few of the pension checks and had upgraded the harbor facilities at our lakeside estate. Another way of putting it was that we replaced the creaky old floating platform that Kelly and I had built back in high school. In its place was a floating pontoon dock made from aluminum and composite decking that was a whole lot more substantial. During the summer, we could extend it out far enough that Dad’s bass boat could dock at it, and then in the late fall we could bring it ashore for the winter.

Now it was time for the crowning glory of the Reaper fleet to be launched. For the last few months, I had been building a pontoon boat from a kit bought from the same company that provided the dock. Reaper’s Folly was a double-decker party barge, powered by a 75 HP outboard. I was borrowing Dad’s boat trailer for the day, and we had rigged it so that we could load the barge on it. I just needed to get it into the water. After that, it might never leave the lake again. It wasn’t like Lake Matucket was going to freeze over in the winter. I just wanted something to putter around on the lake with, taking the kids out swimming and fishing.

The weather was a bit crappy, overcast and threatening to rain, but we got the boat into the water and unhooked. Grandpa and Uncle Dave both looked at the sky and decided to wait on a boat ride until the weather got better. I didn’t have an option, so I fired up the outboard and headed north. Even with the engine cranked up it moved like a pig, so it took me the rest of the morning to make it home. The rain held off, though I was constantly watching the wind. It wasn’t too breezy, but the thing tended to move with the wind, and the breeze kept shifting in direction. By the time I pulled up to the dock, a light drizzle had started.

I found Jerry Wolinski and Ralph Hurston waiting for me on the dock, both holding a bottle of beer. That made me curious. Ralph was the head of the Drug Task Force, Jerry’s boss, and while Jerry was a friend, I didn’t know Ralph very well. Jerry grabbed a cooler that was sitting on the dock and yelled, “Ahoy the boat. Prepare to be boarded!”

I maneuvered to the dock but didn’t bother shutting down the engine. “Welcome aboard.”

Jerry and Ralph jumped aboard, and Jerry said, “Sarah cancelled. Half the kids have the plague. We’ll have to do that again another weekend.”

Ralph added, “That was good thinking, Reaper. A cookout and boat ride is the perfect reason to meet. Nothing like hiding in plain sight.”

“That was Kelly’s idea. What exactly are we hiding?” What were these two up to that needed to be hidden?

“Let’s put out to sea and talk about that.”

I glanced over at Jerry, and he nodded and smiled, so I flipped the throttle into reverse and backed away from the dock. He handed me a cold beer. Then he looked around and said, “You need some lawn chairs or something.”

I smiled and stayed in my captain’s chair at the helm, such as it was. “That was the original plan for today. You two want to tell me what’s going on? What’s so secretive?”

Ralph answered, “Let’s just say that we don’t like people where they can listen in on conversations. Nobody would ever think of this as anything but a few buddies drinking beer and fishing.”

“Like who?”

“Like an individual heavily involved in the drug trade in West Georgia that Jerry tells me you know and who we’d like to know more about.”

My eyes popped open at that. “That I know?”

Jerry said, “Before we get into that, let me give you a little background. For the last few years, we’ve been getting word that there is a major new player in the drug business in West Georgia. We call him Mister X. He is very cagey and quiet, and we only figured his name out in the last year or so. Unfortunately, we don’t have much proof. It’s more a matter of there being an awful lot of smoke, so you know there has to be a fire somewhere.”

“And I know this guy?” I repeated.

“You do. We’ve been keeping this very quiet and close to the vest, as you will understand when I tell you who he is,” said Jerry. “I know you’ve had history with him, and I told Ralph you would be good to get a feel for him.”

“So? Who is he?” I couldn’t imagine any of my friends being a drug kingpin!

“Tell me what you know about Randall Caniday Holden,” said Ralph.

I stared at Ralph for a moment and then broke out into laughter. “Candy Pants? That’s the drug boss? Candy Pants Holden? Oh, thank you God! I have lived long enough for that son of a bitch to get what’s coming to him. Please, please, let me be the guy who puts the cuffs on him!”

Jerry smiled at his boss. “Told you he’d like this.”

Ralph grabbed another beer. “So, you are familiar with Mister X?”

“Oh, Lord! Yes! He and I have gone at it more than once over the years, going all the way back to elementary school.” Jerry knew about my history with Candy Pants, but Ralph didn’t, so I had to explain that. I also told them the latest, about Holden trying to retaliate against me and my family. Trying to prevent me from building on our property had just been the start of the latest nonsense. He had also tried to get Matucket General to fire Mom and the County to fire Dad. Neither had worked.

“Where’d the Candy Pants name come from?” asked Ralph.

“His first day at school at Matucket Plains, he stuffed a candy bar in his pants pocket, and it melted all over.”

“What a putz!”

“He’s a punk,” I replied. “He’s smart and well educated and all, but at heart he’s just a punk. How in the world did you link him to drugs? I mean, I can see him doing that, but how did you figure it out?”

“Through an analysis of the last few years of drug arrests in Matucket County. It took us a while to figure out a pattern, but it involved real estate,” answered Jerry.

“Which the Holden family is into,” I interjected.

“Which the Holden family is into, big time. Anyway, where do drugs get sold? I don’t mean the street corners, but big quantities? Where do they get stored and warehoused and cut? Who owns the places the meth labs are set up in and who owns the property the pot gets grown on? We started looking at that to see if there was a pattern, and there was. It broke down into two categories. One group was all on abandoned properties that were up for sale but not being actively marketed, and they were all listed through the same real estate companies, Merry Meadows Realty, and a few other related companies. The second group was all on rental properties. Early on it was properties being rented through the same companies, but then that changed. Those properties were being sublet from a company in the Cayman Islands.”

“The Caymans?” I asked.

“To start with. We tried tracking that down, but then that company folded, and the assets were bought by a company in Liechtenstein.”

“I might just be another dumbass cop, but don’t those places have awfully strict banking laws? Like, they don’t have to tell you jack shit if they don’t want to?”

Ralph smiled. “Maybe you’re not such a dumbass after all.”

Jerry said, “Grim, remember when you were training with me, and those Miami drug dealers decided to shoot us up and you stopped a major drug shipment?” I nodded at that. “Did you ever hear that they weren’t just going through the area, but were actually meeting somebody in Matucket?” Again, I nodded. “The address was for a warehouse owned by the Holden group. This goes back to at least that long ago.”

I nodded at that. Ralph continued, “It’s more than just that incident. For the last several years the shipments have been getting larger, but when we do intercept one, the runners aren’t just surrendering and waiting for their lawyers to get them out of jail. They are getting extreme.”

“Extreme?”

“Like trying to outrun the police or trying to shoot it out. If they do end up in custody, they end up getting shanked in jail, no matter where we stash them,” he explained.

“Huh!”

“Like I said, extreme. It’s like these guys are being told to make it through or else. The guys who surrendered or get captured? We checked on a few of them; their families were all killed, too,” added Jerry.

“Christ!” I thought for a second and looked at them. “Tim Hungerford?”

They looked at each other and then back at me and nodded. “It fits the profile”, said Ralph.

“Shit!”

I looked out over the railing, the gray overcast matching my mood. Two years ago Tim Hungerford had pulled a guy over for a faulty tail light and was shot as he approached the driver. He managed to get a couple of shots off, but then collapsed on the highway. He bled out before the paramedics arrived. They found the car he pulled over, abandoned five miles away. The car had been stripped of anything it might have been carrying, but the driver had been found next to it with two bullets in him. One had been from Tim’s service weapon, his Glock .40, but the other was from a 9mm to the back of the head. The rumor was that the coroner said that one of Tim’s shots had hit the driver, really messing him up, and rather than chance getting him to a doctor, his employers just cut their losses and killed the driver.

“Huh. One thing I know about Candy Pants is that he is going to be lawyered up and politically connected. He won’t get his hands dirty. He’ll keep everything at arm’s length.” I described some of the details about his previous escapades. “So why do you need me, other than for this amusing trip down memory lane? I can’t get you anything on the Caymans or wherever. That’s a job for the feds. Get the DEA involved.”

Both men grimaced at that. “You got a bathroom on this boat?” asked Jerry. “This beer is going right through me.”

“Yeah, it’s right there,” I answered, pointing to the side of the boat. “This ain’t a cruise ship, guys.”

They shrugged and lined up on the lake side of the boat. With my luck, the Sherriff’s Patrol would bust us all for indecency or something. It was still drizzling a touch, so maybe nobody would see us. I joined them and lightened my load as well.

Afterwards we all grabbed a fresh beer. “You were going to tell me about the DEA?” I said.

“Yeah, we’ve got a problem with that. Mister X is quite connected. You had that correct. He’s got somebody in the DEA. We don’t know who, but they have a leak. That’s why he changed from the Caymans to Liechtenstein; he got tipped off. It’s also why transporters keep getting iced.”

“Well, we know he’s got at least one guy on the County Council, and that means he’s probably got somebody in Atlanta, too,” I commented.

They both grimaced again. “I’m not too sure how much we can trust the DA’s office either,” replied Jerry. “The Holdens have been major contributors to Eli Younger’s reelection campaigns for years. He’s also been a major contributor to Lynn Westmoreland for years.”

“Congressman Westmoreland?” Jerry nodded and I groaned. If we were going to take down Candy Pants, the MPD would have to do it by themselves, without much state or Federal help. I thought for a second and smiled. “I know one guy in the District Attorney’s office who wouldn’t have been compromised.”

“Oh?” said Ralph. “Who?”

“You trusted me. I trust this guy.” I grabbed my cell phone and made a call, while the others listened in, not picking much up from my side of the conversation. After that I turned the boat back towards the shore and docked it.

The weather had cleared up some, in that it was no longer raining but was still gray and overcast. We went inside, where I told the guys to pump their bilges and off load cargo. Kelly snorted at that, especially after Riley started following them around while asking what a bilge was. I had skipped lunch while boating, so I made a few sandwiches for all of us and waited for my guest to arrive.

A new Toyota Camry pulled into the driveway and stopped, and I knew who it was. He knocked on the door and Kelly let him inside. “Gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Beauregard T. Effner, Esquire, Executive Assistant District Attorney for Matucket County.”

Bo looked at me curiously and smiled. “Grim, what in the world are you up to that involves me doing something on a Saturday afternoon? I was just about to open a beer when you called. If I am late for dinner, Samantha will never let me hear the end of it!”

“Trust me, Bo. You want to be here. Come on, guys, let’s refill the cooler and adjourn to the middle of the lake.”

I waited until we had embarked until I introduced everybody. This time Jerry grabbed some lawn chairs so everybody could sit comfortably. I anchored the boat offshore and grabbed a beer, and then sat down. “Okay, like I said earlier, this is Bo Effner, Assistant DA. He goes back with me as far back as elementary school, and I trust him as much as I would trust any lawyer.”

“Hey!” he protested.

I waved Bo to silence, and said to him, “And this is Ralph Hurston and Jerry Wolinski. They’re on the Drug Task Force with the MPD.”

Bo nodded. “I’ve met you both professionally, at least around the courthouse.” Bo looked at me. “So, what’s going on? Why am I spending a perfectly miserable Saturday afternoon drinking beer with a bunch of cops and not keeping my children out of my wife’s hair, thereby earning me Brownie points for later this evening?”

“One of our favorite people has come to our attention, in a professional manner, so to speak,” I answered.

“Who?”

“Candy Pants Holden,” I replied, smiling.

The effect was all I could ask for. Bo coughed up some beer and snorted more out his nose. “Please, don’t joke about that! Are you for real?”

“As real as death and taxes.”

“Okay, I’m in, whatever this is,” he answered. To Ralph and Jerry, he explained how he had been hit by Candy Pants in elementary school, and how he had gone around with him later in high school with the football team. “So, you have enough to bring the slimy bastard down?” he asked.

“It’s mostly circumstantial now. As soon as we let either the Feds know or the DA’s office know, he’ll know, and he’ll either close down or change tactics again,” said Ralph. He went on to explain his influence around the area.

Bo told me that all hope was not lost. “He’s got two guys on the County Council, not one. You already knew about Alderdyce, but he’s also got a piece of Pendergast. Alderdyce is slimy, but Pendergast is simply stupid and thinks he’s using Holden to get what he wants, even though it’s really the other way around. Holden’s strategy is to limit and tie up the police department; the more they get involved in just surviving, the more room he has to play.”

I nodded in understanding at that. “I don’t think that’s going to work, however. He can generate a 5-2 vote on anything, but that’s about it,” I said.

“Yeah, but just by being on the Council, they hear everything related to the department and can pass it along. As for the DA, let me handle him. Route everything to me. What Eli doesn’t see, won’t hurt us. How long before you have enough to nail him?”

After that it was mostly a discussion of tactics and plans. I might have some participation in things, but I wasn’t a member of the Task Force, and my presence would be suspicious. Instead, I would be simply a good friend with a boat, somebody who would be able to take fellow cops and friends out for a few beers and try to catch a few fish with. We could talk and store stuff at the house as needed. I would drive into Atlanta during the week and pick up a couple of high-security file cabinets.

“Hey, I have a question. Whatever happened with Holden’s brother?” The others all looked at me curiously. “Randy is old man Holden’s second son, by his second wife. He had a half-brother in California. I heard he died. Anybody know any details?”

The others all looked blank, but Ralph said he would make a few phone calls. The odds were that even if Candy Pants had been involved, he would have an alibi, but you could never be sure.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

When I got to the station I reported to Lieutenant Jenkins. Two years before, Chief Jefferson had retired, having cleaned up the MPD to the satisfaction of the Justice Department. There had been a brief scramble for the position by the three captains, but Captain Carson in Services hadn’t really been in the running and planned to retire anyway. It was really between Captain Crowley in Patrol and Captain Benson in Investigations. Both men were white, so race didn’t play a factor in the decision, and Captain Crowley was now Chief Crowley. Because of that, since he knew the history of the Holdens, too, he was part of the plot to bring down Mister X.

When Captain Crowley moved up in the world, Captain Benson quit and took a job in Smyrna. That opened a few slots in command, and Sergeant Jenkins of the TRT moved up to become Lieutenant Jenkins in charge of Patrol, as FitzHugh moved over to Investigations. Josh Washington was now in charge of TRT. The net effect of the Mister X project was that at the finish, TRT and the DTF had a firm grip on things.