Chapter 10

Well, at least one drug gang knew that we were after them. We met with Mr. Higgins to decide on our next move. We concluded that we were making an impression on the gang, so our best bet was to keep doing what we were doing. The gang probably did not know who was after them, so they really knew as little as we did. The longer we kept them in the dark, the better off we were.

We hit those same street corners that we had hit twice before. This time, though, we were very careful to check each dealer out before approaching him. We did not want to walk into an ambush. Nevertheless, we did follow our basic pattern that had worked so well the two previous times.

Judy walked up to the pusher while Marlene and I hid in the shadows. This time, she asked for crack cocain in order not to tip off the pusher in case he had been warned about people asking for Vicodin. Naturally, the pusher had this on him, and we approached him while he was in the process of getting the material from his pocket. We were there so quickly that he had no chance to react, and we were in the process of questioning him almost before he had a chance to fall to the sidewalk.

Among other questions he answered, he gave us an address for the place where he had picked up his drugs. I warned him that he had better have given us a correct address, or he was a dead man. That scared the shit out of him (literally), and he assured us that the address was real. Just to prove that we were serious, we broke both knees and both elbows before we left him to his fate.

We hit five more pushers that night, following the same routine as with the first pusher. The address we received was always the same, so we bought into it. We left the last pusher and headed for the address that we had been given. This time, we tried to be a little smarter and waited for Judy to remove her oh so obvious white tee-shirt in exchange for her uniform shirt. Her jeans were dark enough that we thought that they would get by.

This time the house was another ranch style, so we varied our approach by trying to get in through a window into a darkened room. We figured that there was a good chance that the back way was now booby-trapped, and there was no point in tempting fate. I had a glass cutter that I used to cut a hole in the window glass large enough to get my hand through to reach the window latch. I had a very small LED flashlight with only one element that I used to look at the room before we climbed in. My eyes were now adjusted to see very well in dim light, so this was enough to tell me that the room was not occupied by a human.

I opened the latch and raised the window. Now I could get into the room, and I used my larger flashlight to examine the floor around the window before I crawled in. I was looking for something untoward that I might step on. I didn't see anything that looked troublesome, so I slithered through the window and pulled my two companions through after me. We used our flashlights to examine the room more carefully, and found several boxes that contained small plastic bags containing a powdered substance.

The stories about tasting a suspected drug to identify it was a lot of bunk, so we did not try that. It worked in the movies and on TV, but never in real life. Nevertheless, we were satisfied that we had found what we were looking for, so all we needed to do now was to find some human from whom we could extract some information.

The door to the rest of the house was locked, but we had all taken a course in lock picking. As it happened, Marlene was the best at picking locks, so she was given this job. She looked at the lock and snorted. She pulled a skeleton key from her pocket and unlocked the door. Okay, I did blush.

We turned off our flashlights, eased the door open, and looked around carefully. The house was dark, and that was when it dawned on me that we needed some sort of night-vision glasses. Unfortunately, we had none at the moment, so we were going to have to get by with what we had: Mark 1 eyeballs.

We closed the door and stood in the dark for 10 minutes for our eyes to adjust to very low light. I pulled out my small LED flashlight and turned it on. The light was very dim, but hopefully it would be enough to keep us from having a stupid accident. We opened the door again and I looked out with the aid of that tiny flashlight. I was looking into a hallway that seemed to run the length of the house. There were several doors opening off the hall on both sides, and we were about halfway down the hall. There were two more doors on this side of the hall and four doors on the other side of the hall.

We needed to check each room before we looked in the cellar. To speed things up, we split up to try three more doors. Judy found the bathroom, Marlene found a bedroom, and I found another bedroom. All of these rooms were empty of anything but disreputable furniture. There were three rooms across the hall, and one was a living room, one was a dining room, and the third had a locked door. This time, the lock was more sophisticated than that first locked door, so Marlene attacked it with an expert's eye. She had little trouble opening the door to an office.

There was the usual desk and chair in the room as one would expect, but there were no filing cabinets, etc. We searched the desk and found nothing of interest. Okay, it was now time to look in the cellar.

The only room left to check was the kitchen where the top of the cellar stairs must be. Based on our previous experience with kitchens, we looked the place over thoroughly for any sort of trap. We did not find one, and we began to wonder why. Oh, well, we were thankful for all favors. We found out why when I opened the door to the cellar stairs.

Not being a complete fool, I stood to one side when I opened the door. Dammit, there was the shotgun that we had been looking for. Unfortunately for me, several of the buckshot from the shotgun blast caught me in the side and spun me around. I was not hurt by the buckshot, but I got a sound knock on the head when I fell to the floor.

Judy ran to cover us from anybody coming up the stairs while Marlene looked after me. Fortunately, the only harm to me was a headache and a torn uniform shirt. The four buckshot were embedded in my Kevlar vest, but we could worry about them later.

There was no sign of anyone trying to come up the stairs, so I just sat on the floor for a few minutes while my head cleared. It only took about five minutes for me to rejoin the land of the conscious and aware people, so I stood up and surveyed our options. Surely, there was something in the cellar which warranted being defended by a shotgun, so it behooved us to check it out.

Just in case the shotgun might fire again, we were careful to stay out of line of the barrel as we went down the steps. The light switch worked this time, and we could see without our flashlights. Judy led the way with her drawn gun, and we got all the way down without any obvious problems. Marlene and I were holding our batons at the ready in case there was an appropriate target for us.

Judy got to the bottom of the stairs and turned to her right toward the main part of the cellar when a man jumped out of the shadows and hit her in the head with a steel bar. The guy really didn't know the best technique for that kind of attack, and the bar glanced off her steel skull cap. However, the force of the blow was enough to knock her to the floor and to stun her. I had no doubt that she had collected a concussion from that blow.

Well, nobody treats my sister that way, and I jumped at the attacker before he had fully recovered from his swing. I hoped to save him for questioning, so I went after his elbow instead of his head. I broke his right elbow with one swing of my baton, and the man dropped the steel bar. He screamed in pain, but he screamed even louder when I broke his left elbow. He was now essentially helpless, but I broke his left knee to keep him from wandering off before we could talk to him.