Botzow read the two printouts, speaking as he did so. “That’s interesting. They stop them there for any reason?”
“No. They passed right through.”
The SAC lowered the paperwork and studied him, his next question floating unasked between them.
Joe pointed at the printouts. “Keep going. Eighty percent of their involvements are drug-related. I’m betting you have at least one of them in your databases.”
But Botzow replaced the sheets flat on his desk, smiling. “Bullshit—you already
know
that much. You’re hoping we have an open case that’ll actually mention one of them.”
Joe returned the smile and shrugged. “That would heighten your interest, wouldn’t it?”
“And maybe make it official?” He shrugged. “Could be. Hang on.”
He rose from his chair, circled the desk, and left the office. Sam turned to her boss and half whispered, “What d’you think?”
“He hasn’t thrown us out yet.”
When their host returned a quarter of an hour later, he merely leaned against his own doorjamb, his hands empty, and asked, “What d’you want from us, assuming we want to play?”
Joe and Sam exchanged glances.
“To be part of the team that knocks on the door of this Dot Ave address.” Joe patted the printout resting on Botzow’s desk. “I am still deputized with you folks,” he mentioned for good measure.
The SAC pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I think we can improve on that, especially since we don’t know where this might lead—how about forming a task force?”
Joe raised his eyebrows. “What exactly did you find out?”
“Luis Grega is suspected of killing at least one dealer in Canada, and he’s mentioned in a couple of our ongoing smuggling cases. Best of all, he’s now in this country illegally. Let’s just say for the moment that we’re very interested in meeting him—and the Canadians are flat-out eager. But we haven’t had an angle on his whereabouts until now.”
“Cool,” Sam murmured.
Botzow laughed. “Yeah. I agree.”
He bowed slightly at the door, gesturing them to precede
him out. “Let’s meet our guys who kick in doors for a living.”
Later that night, Joe and Sammie, clad in borrowed ballistic vests and stuffed into the rear of an overcrowded, anonymous delivery van, sat and waited for instructions, reduced for the most part to glorified onlookers.
It had been an educational few hours. From the SAC, they were introduced to the DSAC, his deputy, and then taken to meet the group supervisor, or “group supe,” overseeing the Drugs-and-Gangs squad, who in turn brought them before the special agent running the actual case in which Luis Grega was a source of interest.
This last person was named Lenny Chapman. A tan, athletic man in his mid-thirties, Chapman had worked for eight years with a midwestern municipal police department, which made him kindly disposed to the likes of Joe and Sam. During the briefing that followed and the subsequent strategy session with the ICE entry team—who would do the actual forced entry so popular on TV—Chapman made a point of deferring to the two Vermonters, asking for their opinion and input, and making sure they felt as much a part of the team as everyone else.
It was quite a team. Each participant seemed relaxed while at the same time exhibiting a real keenness to get going. Sitting among them, Joe was reminded of a pack of bloodhounds, penned up for too long in the kennel.
Now that they were finally on stakeout, though, the mood was different still. From bloodhounds, most of them had become something less definable—predatory,
but not as suggestive of raw impulsive energy. There was a watchful, almost patient tension in the van that Joe could see most clearly in Lenny Chapman, who’d positioned himself closest to the rear door and sat there, half crouched, a radio to his ear, waiting for the entry team’s surveillance crew to give them the go-ahead. Joe watched the young man’s profile, barely visible in the half light leaking in through the tinted windows, and studied the way his jaw slowly and methodically worked the piece of gum he’d slipped into his mouth just before heading out.
This, Joe imagined, was a man who made a point of keeping his emotions under control.
He glanced at Sam and saw a similar eagerness in her body language—the proverbial spring under restraint. She and the Lenny Chapmans of the profession thirsted for events like the one they were now facing. And Joe had to concede that he’d once shared their enthusiasm—a long time ago.
He shifted his gaze out the window beside him. This section of Dorchester Avenue was a tired, depleted, run-down place, populated with a mixture of peeling, clapboarded duplexes and larger, stained brick apartment buildings whose very blandness suggested illicitness.
He didn’t doubt that his sheer exhaustion was exerting an influence on his mood—he’d only had two naps in two days, one on the drive down and the second, shorter still, just before this, but nevertheless, his notion of joy was no longer being poised for action in a blighted urban landscape.
He wondered if his priorities hadn’t evolved—that
he’d segued from the pure pleasure of chasing people down and locking them up, to something harder to define—perhaps a growing interest in pondering their motivations. Right now, for example, watching the street under the sterile glow of the overhead lighting, he remained focused on bringing in—or down—a cop killer. But he was equally mindful of what might have prompted Luis Grega to turn a traffic stop and, at worst, another dance with the judicial system into a cold-blooded homicide.
Joe was conscious of an evolving bafflement on his part, not unlike that of a trained but wearying combatant, who was fighting an urge to stand up in midbattle simply to ask what the hell was going on.
These were not ruminations he shared. Ever.
Lenny Chapman turned toward the small, tightly packed group and raised his radio slightly, as if it had become a pennant to follow.
“We’re set. Surveillance has confirmed both targets. The entry team is positioning. It’s rock-and-roll time, ladies and gentlemen.”
There was no more meditating on Joe Gunther’s part when Lenny Chapman gave them the signal to move out. Old soldier that he was, he hit the rear exit of the van like a paratrooper hurtling through the side dive door of a plane, as adrenalized as his younger companions.
They ran across Dorchester Avenue, shadows on a gloomy street, startling a couple of passersby, barely catching the attention of another, and took the entry-way stairs of a dilapidated apartment building, two at a time.
Chapman led them all the way, speaking rapidly into his radio, coordinating with the black-clad, armored entry team already ahead, who, by now, had broken down the door of James Marano’s apartment and charged inside.
However, Joe, Sammie, and the rest of Chapman’s team, assigned to take over from the entry guys and effect the arrests, never made it to the third, top floor. Midway there, Chapman held up his hand and stopped them dead in their tracks, listening incredulously to his radio.
“Shit,” he said, turning toward them, “they’ve flown.
They had a hole in the wall to the next apartment, covered by a dresser.”
That was all Joe needed to hear. He turned on his heel and started pounding back downstairs, Sam instinctively in hot pursuit.
“What’s up?” she asked, breathing hard.
“Simple,” he answered, hoping not to break his neck on the dimly lighted stairs. “They planned this out. They live on the top floor. That means a roof escape. The ICE guys’re already behind them. We should try to cut them off.”
Either satisfied with this, or still working out what he meant, Sam didn’t respond. But Joe could still hear her boots banging on the steps close behind him, joined, he noticed, by others. It seemed he wasn’t alone in his thinking.
Bursting out onto the street, Joe immediately led the way across before swinging around and studying the building they’d just left.
Panting by now, he pointed to both sides, just as Chapman and a couple of others also appeared on the stoop. “Two alleyways,” Joe told her. “You take the right; I’ll take the left. Check for anything like a fire escape or maybe a jury-rigged bridge or a zip line, running to the next-door building.”
As he spoke, he was already moving left, shouting over his shoulder. Across the street, Chapman saw what they were doing and got on his radio to get an update from upstairs.
Joe ran back across Dorchester, aiming for his alleyway, and was intercepted at its mouth by one of Chapman’s men.
“You have a flashlight?” he asked him.
The man dutifully pulled a small halogen torch from a holder on his belt.
Joe pointed upward. “See if there’s anything connecting the two buildings.”
The special agent looked at him. “We got the fire escape covered. It’s in the back anyhow.”
Joe simply took the light from his hand. “They would’ve known that. If they knew enough to knock out a wall, they didn’t stop there.”
He played the beam between the buildings. Sure enough, as bright as a shaft of sunshine, the underside of a broad, pale, yellow pine plank was reflected back at them, running from the roof of Marano’s building through a window of its taller neighbor.
“That’s it,” Joe said, returning the light and running for that neighbor’s front door. “Third floor—one of the apartments at the end.” He paused only long enough to call out for Sam.
The lobby door was half open, on a busted hinge, eliminating the need for a key or someone to buzz them in. Joe glanced around quickly, saw the staircase leading up, and headed for it, hearing multiple footsteps pounding along in his wake.
As he took the stairs two at a time, pulling himself along by the banister, he used his other hand to pull out his gun. From being last man in line earlier, he was now at risk of coming face-to-face with a certified cop killer.
But his exposure was short-lived. Against Sam’s and Lenny’s youth and motivation, he didn’t have a chance
of leading any foot pursuit for long. By the time he’d reached the second-story landing, all three of them were looking like a Ben-Hur chariot race, metaphorically wheel-to-wheel. Joe was bringing up the rear only about ten steps behind.
Chapman, at least, had the courtesy to say in passing—even if he wasn’t breathing hard— “Nice move, Joe. Quick thinking.”
Quick, perhaps, but not perfectly timed. Above them—appearing and vanishing so fast it seemed more like an apparition than an actual sighting—the outline of a man peered down at them, followed by the slamming of a door.
The three cops saw it at the same time, since they were all looking up the stairwell for something to happen. Chapman was the one to yell out,
“Federal agents. Do not move,”
albeit to no avail.
At the third-floor landing, they barely paused at the door to the hallway beyond. Chapman kicked it open, huddled just inside its protective angle, and then, pointing his gun where he looked, he quickly risked a glance in both directions.
A shot almost immediately reverberated down the hallway. No bullet hit nearby.
“You okay?” Sam asked.
“Yeah,” Chapman answered. “Looked like Grega, shooting from an apartment at the opposite end of the corridor from where they crossed on the plank. They must have multiple hideouts, all strung in a line. He’s probably the one we saw.”
“Any sign of your entry team?” Joe asked hopefully.
Chapman gave a very quick update on his radio, heard someone say, “We’re on the bridge now,” and then turned to Joe. “We’re running out of time,” he said.
He then did as Joe might have once—clipped the radio to his belt, took his gun in both hands, quickly checked again outside, and, getting no explosive response, slid fast and low into the hallway. He began jogging toward the apartment where he’d last seen Grega—Sam and Joe in close backup.
Joe was not a happy man. Keen as he was to take Grega, the risks of running down a hallway full of closed doors—any one of which could open behind them—seemed ill advised at best. Sadly, however, that had suddenly been rendered moot. Now, it was all about backing up Lenny Chapman, and keeping everybody alive if possible.
At the apartment door in question, Chapman jumped to its far jamb, flattened against the wall, waited a second for Joe and Sam to position themselves opposite him, and then pounded on the door from the side.
He didn’t get to say a word before two more shots splintered the door where his hand had been, the rounds thudding into the wall across the way.
Simultaneously, a door far down the hallway opened to reveal two members of the ICE entry team, at last arrived from their travels across midair. Joe was relieved to see Chapman motion to them to join their understrength trio.
As the entry team leader drew near, he cocked his head toward the bullet-punctured door. “Wild guess—you want us to kick that in?”
“You’re good, Arnie,” Chapman complimented him, fading back with the two Vermonters.
The team quickly positioned itself, destroyed the door, and charged into the apartment, shouting at the tops of their lungs, Chapman, Joe, and Sam hot on their heels.
The place was obviously specifically used for this purpose—a backup residence with minimal furnishings, a thick layer of dust, and a window leading out to the fire escape. After ensuring that the apartment was clear, everyone hit the escape ladder, half heading down, and the other half going for the roof. Joe joined the upwardly bound, betting on a runner’s primordial instinct to head for the high ground.
His choice proved correct moments later. Their quarry, in a mirror image of his brief appearance at the top of the stairs earlier, once more stuck his head over the edge of the roof and looked down at them. Only this time, he was armed.
“Gun,”
shouted one of the people at the front of the line.
But there was nothing anyone could do with such short warning and in such tight confines. The shot cracked out, accompanied by a blinding flash from the gun’s discharge, and Joe heard one of the leaders grunt and drop back onto the next person in line.
Without hesitation, several answering shots came from the group, and there was an almost mad rush to get by the wounded man, and the one tending to him, in order to reach the roof. Joe and Sam were now third and fourth in line.