Dead on Arrival

23

‘So you wanna know about Jubal Pugh,’ Patsy Hall said.

Hall was a mid-level supervisor at the DEA, and according to Barry King she was the DEA’s expert on Pugh. She was in her early forties and had smile lines bracketing intelligent brown eyes, a trim build, and short-cut, no-fuss dark hair. She was wearing a charcoal-gray pantsuit, a white blouse, and a big gun in a holster on her hip. She was short enough — and the gun was big enough — that the handgrip on the gun was halfway up her rib cage.

Two minutes with Hall, and you knew you were dealing with someone who was bright, tough, stubborn, and confident. DeMarco bet that none of the men who worked for her had any doubt that she was the boss, and most of them, the ones with any brains, knew she deserved to be the boss.

‘Jubal Pugh,’ Patsy said, ‘likes to-’

‘Jubal,’ DeMarco said. ‘That name just cracks me up.’

‘His full name in Jubal Early Pugh, Jubal Early having been a Confederate Army general who — Aw, never mind. At any rate, Jubal likes to wear an old slouch hat and he shaves about once a week. In the summer, he wears bib overalls, no shirt, no shoes, and he talks so slow you wonder if he’s ever gonna finish a sentence. Your first impression would be that he’s the brother of the guy who played the banjo in Deliverance. And you’d be totally wrong.

‘Pugh sells meth; he’s one of the top five dealers in Virginia. His territory also includes parts of West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. I know he’s killed people and burned their houses and intimidated witnesses to stay king of his little hill. I know all this, and I haven’t even been able to arrest the bastard, much less convict him. And I’ve been after him for more than five years.’

Hall gave a little tug on her holster to readjust the pistol grip digging into her ribs.

‘Jubal didn’t go to school beyond the tenth grade, and he started out with a 1956 Airstream trailer and ten acres he inherited from his daddy. Today he owns four hundred acres. He’s got apple orchards and gas stations and a muffler shop, and he makes cider for sale. He uses these businesses to launder his drug money. He’s not that smart, but he’s smart enough to know what he doesn’t know. He’s got a good accountant, who makes sure he stays out of trouble with the IRS, and another guy who manages his legitimate businesses. And even though he’s no Rhodes scholar, he hires people that are competent and then he micromanages the shit out of them so they don’t screw up.’

‘Isn’t he some kind of white supremacist too?’ DeMarco said.

Hall laughed. ‘Yeah, Jubal’s the head of a group called America First. And you know why he heads up this group? For money, pure and simple. His militia or club or whatever the hell it is never meets, but it has about three hundred dues-paying members. Jubal hired a kid from Shenandoah University to build him a Web site, and every month the kid writes a bunch of garbage about how blacks and Hispanics and whoever are taking over America, and every month a bunch of idiots send money, just small donations, but it adds up. The Web site cost Jubal only two hundred bucks to design and he makes a few thousand dollars a year off the loonies who support groups like his.’

‘So why can’t you nail him?’ DeMarco asked.

‘Do you know anything about meth?’ Patsy Hall said.

‘No.’

‘Well, let me to tell you,’ she said.

* * *

Methamphetamine is highly addictive, and the effects of the drug on the human body are devastating. Longtime users will appear twenty years older than their actual age, will have lost their teeth, and have open sores on their faces. And the drug doesn’t simply affect the users. In communities where meth addiction is widespread, crime — theft and murder — tends to skyrocket.

Depending on purity and availability, a pound of meth can cost as little as six thousand dollars or as much as twenty thousand dollars, and the thing that makes meth particularly troublesome to law enforcement is that anyone can make it. Poppy flowers and coca plants and complex equipment are not required. To make meth — or cook it, as they say — most of the ingredients and equipment needed, things like rubbing alcohol and drain cleaner and lye and lithium batteries, can be found at your neighborhood hardware store.

The key ingredient in methamphetamine is either ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, chemicals found in over-the-counter cold medicines like Sudafed and Actifed and a dozen other brands used to unstop your stuffy nose. Meth cookers used to be able to walk into drugstores, buy all the Sudafed on the shelf, and then go home and cook up a few batches of speed for themselves and their friends.

But times had changed. Laws were now in place in an increasing number of states limiting the amount of ephedrine-based drugs that an individual can buy at one time. And consumers of these cold remedies are required to show the pharmacist a driver’s license, and the pharmacist is required to record the name and address of the buyer. Then the pharmacies provide the narcotics cops with these names and addresses, and the narcos start watching those folk who seem to have a chronic case of the sniffles and live in shacks out in the woods.

So in the last few years, because of the difficulty of purchasing ephedrine in the States, Mexican cartels had become the primary manufacturer and distributor of meth because they were able to purchase ephedrine in large quantities — large being tons — directly from the nine foreign chemical companies who make the stuff. According to Patsy Hall, what Pugh had managed to do was get a Mexican connection to provide his ephedrine — a connection small-time local dealers didn’t have — and then Pugh either sold the ephedrine directly to cookers or cooked the meth himself for distribution.

‘What’s all this have to do with your not being able to nail Pugh?’ DeMarco asked.

‘Right now,’ Patsy Hall said, ‘meth is a big problem on the West Coast and a growing issue in the Midwest. Because of the proximity to Mexico, places like California and Arizona are up to their necks in the shit. But here on the East Coast, the big drugs are still heroin and crack cocaine, and the DEA’s budget and manpower are primarily focused on the big cities where most of the dealers and users live. What all that means is I can’t get the priority I need to nail an SOB like Jubal Pugh who deals meth and lives out in the sticks.’

Hall tugged on her gun again; DeMarco guessed she did that a hundred times a day.

‘Someplace on Pugh’s property is a meth lab,’ Hall said. ‘And every day a bunch of cars and trucks and tankers go onto his property. They deliver fertilizer or insecticide or they drop off people who pick apples or prune his damn trees or clear the brush on his land. And because he has four hundred goddamn acres, there’s a dozen ways to get on and off his property, and meth and ephedrine are not bulky items — we’re not talking bales of marijuana here — so the shit’s easy to hide.

‘The bottom line is, I can’t get the warrants I need to search Jubal’s place and all the vehicles that are constantly going on and off his property because I don’t have the two dozen additional agents I need to follow all these vehicles. And when it comes to distribution, like most drug kingpins Jubal is personally three or four steps removed from the actual deals. People he trusts make the dope and give the dope to distributors, the distributors give it to dealers, and the dealers sell it to the junkies. So when the cops actually catch some tweaker with meth in his jeans, they can’t get that person to testify against Jubal because the tweaker’s never met him. Or they catch a dealer and he gives up his supplier, and we get the supplier but, because he wasn’t arrested for murder, the damn judge lets the guy out on bail and the next thing you know the guy has vanished into thin air or turns up dead or develops total amnesia because Jubal has most likely told him he’s gonna die if he talks.’

‘Sheesh,’ DeMarco said, but Patsy Hall wasn’t through with her rant.

‘The other way we usually get guys like him,’ Hall said, ‘is we plant someone in his organization, an undercover cop or some lowlife we’ve caught who’ll work for us to keep from going to jail. But Jubal’s too smart to let that happen. Normally he only hires people he knows personally, but if he hires an outsider he does a background check on the guy on par with what the government does to issue a Top Secret security clearance.

‘So,’ she said, ‘I know the guy is importing ephedrine, I know he has a meth lab someplace on his property, and I know he’s doing all sorts of bad things — and I can’t get him. But I’m gonna get him,’ Hall said. ‘I swear to God I will.’

DeMarco also asked her about Donny Cray. She knew Cray was dead but she didn’t know Cray’s thumbprint had been found in Reza Zarif’s house.

‘You’re kidding!’ she said to DeMarco.

‘No,’ he said, and told her the FBI’s theory that Cray had most likely sold Reza the gun he used to kill his wife and kids.

‘That’s possible,’ Hall said. ‘I mean, that’s the kind of thing Donny used to do before he started working for Jubal, but I’m still surprised. Pugh keeps his people on a short leash. He wouldn’t like Donny having some kind of sideline enterprise that could land him into trouble with ATF.’

‘Yeah, that’s the same thing Barry King told me,’ DeMarco said. ‘But now let me ask you something that’s gonna sound kinda strange. Do you think Pugh would be the type to get involved in these Muslim terrorist attacks that have been taking place lately?’

‘What in the hell are you talking about?’ Hall said.

DeMarco was somewhat reluctant to let Hall know what he was thinking. She was a law enforcement fed and would obviously be more inclined to accept the Bureau’s version of events than his, but he decided he had to tell her. And he liked her and she seemed like someone he could trust. So he told her his suspicions about Rollie and the Capitol bomber and how some things about the attacks just didn’t add up, but in particular how he couldn’t accept that Reza Zarif had killed his family.

He concluded by saying, ‘What I’m asking is this: Do you think Pugh is the type that would threaten to kill Reza Zarif’s children to make Zarif crash his plane into the White House?’

DeMarco realized how ridiculous that sounded the minute the words left his mouth.

‘Not for political reasons,’ Hall said. ‘Jubal couldn’t care less about politics. For money he might do something like that — he’d do anything for money — but what you’re saying … Well, I just can’t imagine Pugh getting involved in something so high profile. He’d know that the FBI and Homeland Security and God knows how many other federal agencies would be coming after him. I mean, I may not be able to get the priority to nab him, but those guys sure as hell could. No, for Jubal to get mixed up in this terrorist stuff, the payoff would have to be huge.’

‘Yeah, but who would pay him?’ DeMarco said.

‘Hey, it’s your theory not mine,’ Hall said.

DeMarco was silent for a moment before he said, ‘There’s one other thing. The bomb the cabdriver had — it didn’t explode. The Bureau said a wire came loose, but it’s hard to believe with as much bomb-making experience as al-Qaeda has that they’d screw up like that. But maybe someone like Pugh would make that kind of mistake.’

Hall shook her head. ‘I think you’re totally off base thinking Pugh’s involved in any terrorist stuff. I mean, he’s fire-bombed other meth dealers’ labs, I know that for a fact, but I just can’t see him making a bomb out of C-Four with a dead man’s switch. No. That’s just way too high tech for Jubal. He’s a bottle-of-gas-and-a-rag kinda guy.’