Dragons Wild

Twenty-nine

The next day, Griffen decided to try out some of the tactics Padre had coached him on. As far as routines went, Tuesdays were when he usually hit both Virgin and Tower to shop for new DVDs, so it would make a good test.

As he emerged from his apartment complex, he paused to look around with new, suspicious eyes.

There was a street entertainer sitting on the far side of the avenue playing a guitar. Griffen had seen him there often, but had usually ignored him as the man really wasn’t that good a musician. This time, just to change his pattern, Griffen crossed the street to speak with him.

“Keep seeing you out here,” he said, dropping a five into the open guitar case, “but never had the time to stop. You work hard for your money.”

“Hey! Thanks, man. Really appreciate it.” The guitarist smiled back.

The man had a cell phone in his guitar case, and his hair was noticeably shorter than the norm for the Quarter. Also, even though he was wearing denim pants and jacket, they seemed very stiff and new.

Griffen strolled toward the Square, but glanced back before he had gone half a block. The musician had stopped playing and was talking on his cell phone.

Uh-huh.

There was a moderate crowd of people on the street, a mixture of tourists seeing the sights along with a scattering of locals going about their daytime errands.

Griffen strolled along at a leisurely pace, pausing occasionally to look at the displays in the shop windows, then took advantage of the cover of a knot of tourists to duck into a used bookstore he had never been in before. With a quick glance around, he selected a place where the shelves hid him from the street, but he could see out. Then he selected a book at random, opened it, and waited.

In the next several minutes maybe two dozen people passed the store headed for Jackson Square. Again, they were mostly tourists, but a few stood out. A trio of gutter punks went by with a small puppy on a rope arguing about something with exaggerated gestures. One young woman, a tourist by the look of her, was pausing every four or five steps to snap a picture of something…anything apparently. Lampposts, Dumpsters, storefronts, anything. A delivery man from one of the delis or restaurants came by with a basket on the front of his bike. He was walking the bike instead of riding it, which was a little strange, but Griffen realized he recognized him and turned his attention elsewhere.

A Latino male caught his eye, walking by at a normal pace wearing the uniform black pants and tuxedo shirt of the service industry. A green jacket topped his ensemble. A waiter. From the Court of Two Sisters, by the jacket. What was unusual was that it was the wrong time of day for him to be going to work. Too late for the breakfast and lunch crowd, but too early for the dinner crowd. Still, maybe he had gotten a call to fill in for someone.

Finding nothing he could definitely label unusual, Griffen was about to give up and move along when he spotted the Latino again. The man was returning on the far side of the street, but moving slowly and looking through the windows of la Madeleine, a restaurant Griffen sometimes stopped at for a late lunch. He reached the end of the windows, then turned and stared back toward Jackson Square. Finally, he produced a cell phone, keyed a number, then spoke into it briefly.

Within minutes, another man appeared. This one was wearing a suit complete with a convention badge displayed prominently on the lapel. The only thing that made him vaguely distinguishable was that he wore a wide green tie and was carrying a bright orange shopping bag. Normally, Griffen wouldn’t look at him twice on the street. The man went into a brief huddle with the Latino, then they both walked hurriedly toward the Square and the video stores, splitting so that they were moving some fifteen feet apart.

Bingo!

Griffen smiled and reached for his own cell phone.

By the time he reached Yo Mama’s, Griffen was in a foul mood. After waiting on pins and needles for over six hours for some kind of word as to what, if anything, had happened, this summons to meet with Harrison seemed almost anticlimactic.

The detective was there ahead of him, holding down a booth, and waved him over as soon as he walked through the door. The fact he seemed to be in a good mood did nothing to ease Griffen’s disposition.

“Sit down, Griffen,” the detective said. “You got a steak dinner coming to you courtesy of the NOPD.”

“I didn’t know they served steaks here,” Griffen said.

“They do,” Harrison said. “They’re just not as popular as their hamburgers. Mostly, the hoi polloi prefer to eat cheap.”

“Actually, I’ve already eaten,” Griffen said.

“Well, it’s paid for in advance,” the detective said. “Just tell Padre the next time you’re in the mood for a steak.”

“I’ll remember that,” Griffen said.

Harrison peered at him.

“Are you okay?” he said. “You sound kinda peeved. We don’t buy steaks for people every day, you know. As a matter a fact, that steak dinner bonus was supposed to be for me. I decided to pass it along to you instead.”

“It’s been six hours,” Griffen said. “You could have called.”

The detective leaned back in his seat and scowled.

“Did I miss something here?” he said. “Am I reporting to you now on the chain of command? Jeez, you sound like my wife.”

Even though he was young, Griffen knew enough to be aware that when someone compared you to his wife, it wasn’t a compliment. He decided it was time to lighten up a little.

“I didn’t know you were married,” he said.

“I’m not. Not anymore.” Harrison sighed. “I’d forget to call her, too. She didn’t like it either.”

All of a sudden, the detective seemed more like a man and less like a cop. It made Griffen uneasy. He preferred to think of Harrison as a cop.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “So what happened after I called you?”

“Oh, it was beautiful!” Harrison said, regaining his good mood. “First of all, we managed to pick up all three of them…good descriptions, by the way. I was a little worried about the Latino…afraid we’d get tagged for profiling…but they were all carrying, which made it real easy. Seems that someone told them that this town of ours is dangerous.”

“Slow down a little,” Griffen said, holding up his hand. “Profiling?”

“Sorry,” the detective said. “I keep forgetting you’re not in the business. Profiling has been all the rage ever since 9/11. Homeland Security is real big on it. Basically, it means keeping a special eye on people who fit the profile of a terrorist or a career criminal. It’s not a bad technique, and you can build up a nice case against a suspect using it, but the civil rights groups don’t like it. All too often, the profile includes a reference to a racial or national group, so we get accused of treating anyone of that group as a criminal. Now, I’m sure not going to try to say that all blacks are criminals or that all Arabs are terrorists, but the records do show that a disproportionate percentage of criminals or terrorists do come from those groups. Trying to ignore that fact when you’re looking for potential perps is just plain silly.”

Griffen actually had a fair idea of this from reading the newspapers, but after having gotten off on the wrong foot with Harrison, he figured it wouldn’t hurt things to give the detective a chance to show off a little. From the extent of the speech, the longest he had heard from the otherwise gruff cop, it worked.

“So the fact that one of them was a Latino was a problem?” he said.

“As I started to say, it never came up,” the detective said. “All the boys did was stop them and ask for some identification. We had plausible stories for doing that if they had raised a hassle, but the fact that they were all carrying firearms moved everything past that point in a hurry. That meant they had to show not only identification, but their permits to be carrying, so it became readily apparent that they were federal men from the get go. Then the only question was what they were doing in New Orleans.”

“What did they say?”

“One of them…the street entertainer…tried to bluff his way through, saying he was just here on vacation. Yeah, right. Like federal agents always spend their vacations standing on the street in the French Quarter playing guitar for loose change. The other two admitted they were on assignment, but wouldn’t say what it was. That’s when things really got fun.”

“What did you do?”

“Took ’em down to the station on Royal and let them talk to the chief. He had them get this guy Stoner on the horn so he could confirm their story. Stoner admitted that he had an operation in place down here, but refused to tell the chief any more about it claiming it involved national security.”

The detective broke off and laughed.

“I wish you could have seen it,” he said with a grin. “If there’s anything the chief hates more than Feds on his turf, it’s being told that it’s none of his business.”

“He told Stoner in no uncertain terms to get his team the hell out of town, and that if he ever ran an operation down here again without going through proper channels, the chief would personally see to it that any agents he caught would do time as well as getting their pictures plastered all over the Times-Picayune.”

“What did Stoner say?”

“He didn’t like it, no. Not one bit, but there was nothing he could do but agree. With the chief in the mood he was, if Stoner had tried to bluster his way out of it, the chief would follow through, startin’ with the three already in custody. Of course, he had to get in one good lick before he hung up.”

“What was that?”

“He said something to the effect that the chief had better hope that Homeland Security never got the chance to return the courtesy that the NOPD had shown them.”

Griffen scowled and shook his head.

“That doesn’t sound good,” he said.

“Just a little face-saving bluster,” the detective said dismissively. “There isn’t much he can do against the whole city…or the police force, for that matter. If he tries, he’s in for a surprise. The chief had him on the speaker phone and taped the whole conversation.”

Griffen sighed and shook his head again.

“What is it?” Harrison said.

“I don’t know,” Griffen said. “I mean, I’ve heard about how local cops don’t like the Feds coming into their territory, but it all seems…I don’t know, a little petty is all.”

“You’ve never had to deal with them like we have,” the detective said with a snort. “Come in throwing their weight around and treating us like dirt. They act like the whole force is incompetent, on the take, or both.”

It occurred to Griffen that he had met Harrison when the detective was growling at him about having to put up with protected gambling operations, but it didn’t seem like a good time to point that out.

“Well, enjoy your steak,” Harrison said, sliding out of the booth. “I’ve got to run. The boys are getting together for a little celebration, and I told them I’d stop by. We owe you one or two for this one, McCandles.”

Griffen sat staring for a long time after the detective had left. He was still staring when Padre came up to the booth.

“So, do you want that steak now?” the bartender said.

“I’ll take a rain check on that,” Griffen said. “Sit down for a second, Padre. What all did Harrison tell you?”

“Enough that I could tell they caught the ones shadowing you and that they were Feds,” Padre said. “He seemed really happy about it.”

“Yeah,” Griffen said, making a face. “Tell me, is it just me or does all this seem a little too easy to be true?”

“It’s not just you,” the bartender said. “Remember what I said about the possibility of an infiltrator? It could be that whoever’s running this show is pulling a little misdirection. Let you catch the obvious tails so you relax and don’t look around internally.”

“I remember, and I’m keeping an eye out,” Griffen said. “Of course, it doesn’t really matter.”

“It doesn’t?” Padre said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Griffen said. “We really aren’t doing anything that merits federal attention. The only reason I said anything to Harrison was to switch his focus from our operation to the Feds, and that seems to have worked out just fine.”