Gatekeeper

Chapter 13

Susan and Lester Spinney were still up waiting for their son when he quietly slipped into the house through the kitchen door. They heard him lock the door behind him and open the fridge before walking into the darkened living room, where they sat side by side on the couch, having killed the TV when they'd heard him drive up.

As Dave was halfway to the staircase, Lester turned on the table light by his side.

Dave jumped and staggered backward, his eyes wide with surprise, almost dropping the soda in his hand. "Jesus. You scared me."

"Where have you been?" Lester asked.

Dave's eyebrows furrowed. "What? Out with friends."

"The Shermans?"

"Yeah-some."

"What were you doing with them?"

"Listening to music. Talking. What's going on?"

"We're worried about you," Susan said. "We don't want you making a mistake that could ruin your life."

Abandoning the soda on the side table, Dave approached them, his face blank. "What are you talking about? That thing at the Zoo? I told Dad nothing happened, and I haven't seen Craig or the others since, like I promised."

"I know you've been at the Sherman place, Dave," Lester said. "And I know the Shermans use weed like other people eat Twinkies."

Dave straightened as if he'd been slapped. "So that means I'm using it, too? You hang around criminals all the time. What's that make you?"

Lester stood up, taller and broader than his son by far. "We're not picking a fight with you, David. We both work goddamn hard to give you and your sister a fighting chance in a tough world. We just don't want you to screw that up."

"We're not accusing you of anything, honey," Susan added. "We just want to know what you're doing."

Dave turned away and retreated to the foot of the staircase. "Right. My whole life I live up to your expectations, doing everything right. First time I get caught-not even doing anything wrong-you guys think I'm like some junkie or something. Thanks a lot."

With that, he ran up the stairs. They heard him slam his bedroom door moments later.

Lester looked down at his wife. "That went pretty well, don't you think?"

Susan got up and kissed his cheek. "I'll go talk to him."

She went upstairs slowly, hearing her husband turning on the TV, and proceeded to David's door. She knocked briefly and walked in. He was lying on his bed, pretending to be reading a magazine.

"What?" he asked, not looking up.

She sat next to him and gently removed the magazine from his hands. He didn't fight her.

"I don't believe you guys," he said.

"Can you believe we love you very much?" she asked, resting her hand on his knee.

"I know that, but it's like I'm guilty with no questions asked. Child rapists get more respect than that. I mean, what happened to innocent till proven guilty?"

Susan smiled and shook her head. "Dave, nobody's comparing you to a child rapist. Don't blow this out of proportion. Your father and I see what drugs do to people every day. Can you blame us for not wanting any of that to touch the two people we love most in the world?"

"I'm not doing drugs," Dave said in a frustrated outburst. "Why is that so hard to believe?"

"It's not that we don't believe you, and we're not accusing you of anything. ."

"That's not how Dad sounded."

"Sweetheart," she said, squeezing his leg, "think of what he does for a living."

"I know that."

"Do you? Really? If you did, I think you'd cut him some slack. He lives in a world of horrible people-people who act on the first impulse that enters their heads. It's not that he thinks you're like that, but he's worried what might happen if you get too close to them."

"The Shermans aren't horrible people."

She sighed. "I'm not saying they are. ."

"He is."

"How would you deal with a son you were worried might be getting interested in drugs?"

He rolled his eyes. "I'm not, Mom."

"How would you deal with it?"

"I'd ask him, and then I'd believe him when he told me."

"Isn't that what your father did in the car when he picked you up at the police station?"

David hesitated. "Yeah."

"It shook him up when he saw you at the Sherman place, Dave," she explained. "Just like it shook him up when we heard you'd been picked up with those other boys. It's a scary world. He was concerned, and so am I. We'd be lousy parents if we weren't. Maybe we didn't do it just right tonight. If we hurt your feelings, we apologize. But can you see what made us do it?"

David made a face, as if tempted to argue the matter further, but then conceded, "I guess."

His mother leaned over and kissed him, as she had his father earlier. "I love you. We both do. Very much."

He kissed her back and gave her a grudging smile. "I love you, too. But tell Dad to lighten up, okay? I know right from wrong."

* * *

Sammie Martens opened her eyes and looked around, trying to orient herself, only slowly remembering that she was still in Holyoke, in Johnny Rivera's urban fortress, behind the locked door of a bedroom she'd borrowed to catch a few hours sleep.

She threw off the dirty blanket covering her and sat on the edge of the bed-a sagging mattress resting on a tired, metal spring frame. Whatever success Rivera might already be enjoying was clearly not being spent on decor. Not that it ever would be. TV and the movies showed drug kingpins routinely enjoying hideaways worthy of Louis XIV, and from what Sam had heard, a few such places really did exist. But not in northern New England. It was true the money wasn't what could be generated in Miami or Colombia, or even Boston, for that matter, but still, the extravagance rarely went beyond owning some real estate and a few flashy cars. In a surreal parallel to the region's Puritan past, even the crooks seemed to tone down the excess.

Nevertheless, she thought as she got up to stretch and rearrange her rumpled clothing, a trip to the mall for a decent mattress wouldn't hurt.

She went into the bathroom, used the toilet, washed her face, and stripped to the waist to give herself a cold water bath at the sink, using some paper towels to dry off. This operation had been put into play so fast, she hadn't had time to set up an alternate apartment to her real one in Brattleboro and therefore had nowhere she could safely go for a shower and a change of clothes.

She knew undercover work would be dangerous. She hadn't thought about the lack of hygiene. You're back in the army now, she thought, replacing her clothes.

There was a knock on the door. She crossed the room, flipped the lock, and found Manuel standing in the hallway outside.

"Hey," she said. "Get some sleep?"

"Johnny wants you upstairs."

She tapped his chest with her fingertips as she walked past him. "Hello to you, too, tough guy."

Johnny Rivera was standing before a large wall map of Vermont, put up since her last visit to this room.

"Supervising your kingdom?" she asked as she entered.

He looked back at her, his entire attitude more open and friendly than during their previous encounters. "Yeah-the land of milk and honey, right?"

"If we do it right," she conceded, standing next to him and looking at the familiar terrain. It was a colorful topographical map, showing the spine of the Green Mountains running down the state's center in shades of brown, the blue of the Connecticut River on the right and Lake Champlain to the upper left. Seeing it like this stimulated a surprising pang of emotion inside her, as if she were about to enter into combat against this man for the preservation of her home. It looked so small up there, so insignificant-undeserving of this kind of malevolent attention.

"You said you could get Rutland going for me," Rivera continued. "How?"

"Run it like a business," Sam said simply. "Up to now, either mules or dealers drive up there with some product, unload it through a phone tree or a pager alert, and hightail it back for more, like we did last night. But most of the mules and dealers are users, too, so any profits go straight up their noses-or whatever. Business is good, demand is high, but that's where it stops. It's like sex without commitment- just a bunch of fast fucks."

Johnny burst out laughing. "God, girl. You do have a mouth. Tell me more."

"It's been catch-as-catch-can-a grab bag approach with no real organization. You want to change that, you have to do a few things different." She held up one finger. "First, be the sole supplier-besides a few freelancers who you don't need to worry about. Put a business manager you can trust up there and either make deals with the local competition or force 'em out. Right now it's like you're shipping product without having a retail outlet to draw in customers. Crack houses work on that principle, which is why they're tough for the cops to bust-it's a controlled environment. I can set that up for you."

She held up another finger. "Second, the people you send up there stick out like sore thumbs-we already talked about that. They're junkie-city-flatlanders from a mile off, and they're unreliable to boot. They drop out of sight, they get busted, they die, or they rat you out to the cops. I can give you stability there. A lot of local people who aren't junkies will deal for us for old-fashioned cash. I can find them and put them on the payroll."

A third finger went up. "Last but not least, you don't know anyone up there who isn't either a customer or a buyer with customers-people in the business. By living in the community, I'll get to know more, including how the cops do what they do and who their snitches are. That was the mistake the gangs like Solidos made when they tried to move into Rutland way back when. They didn't pay attention to how the locals work, which is way different from city people."

"What about the money?" he asked. "How're you gonna handle that? I'm supposed to trust you with everything just 'cause you say so?"

She shook her head. "I told you that before, too. Pick out a banker for me. Like an accountant or a treasurer. Someone you trust. I don't care who it is. I can set up the business, he can run the books and the inventory. I don't care if I don't see the dope or the money." She smiled suddenly. "Well, I want to see the money, but at the far end, as part of the profits."

Johnny scratched his head, obviously a little overwhelmed. "Why so complicated?"

She stared at him wide-eyed. "What're you in this for?" She pointed at the barricaded windows. "You're risking your life here. Why did you piss off everybody grabbing this turf?"

His eyes narrowed, as if confronting a trick question. "The money?"

She rewarded him with a laugh. "Right." She slapped the map with her palm. "We're talking Rutland now, 'cause that's what's hot and that's where you need help, but remember those freelancers I talked about? The ones you don't have to worry about yet? Well, them and Torres and the Canadians and some upstate New Yorkers are selling in Barre and Burlington and around St. Johnsbury and a dozen other places. We want to know who they all are. We want to either work with them or take them over, or just knock them off. Look at that map, Johnny. We do this right, maybe you can get hundreds of thousands out of Rutland every year-maybe. We do the same thing to the whole damn state, and we're talking millions. You can move out of this dump and live like a real man-make the rest of these so-called Holyoke bigwigs look like losers.

"But," she added, dropping her voice, "if you want to do that, you're gonna have to think big. Maybe it sounds complicated now, but you need a good foundation to make a business work."

He looked back at the map, shaking his head as if he were seeing it for the first time, which in a way he was. "Sounds good."

Sam went in for the clincher. "It'll make you a man to respect."

They stood next to each other for half a minute or so, gazing at their separate destinies, Sam hoping she'd just given another quarter turn to this man's cell door lock, and Rivera wondering if and how he'd ever get this woman into bed.

* * *

Joe waited patiently, listening to reports about the Hollowell/Lapierre double homicide, mostly from Chick Wilson, Rutland's deputy police chief. For these meetings in which Sammie Martens's activities might be discussed, only Joe, prosecutor Mara Coven, task force leader Rick McCall, Chick, and Peter Bullis of the local drug unit were invited.

"Long story short," Chick was concluding mournfully, "we still don't have much to go on. Usually, these people spill the beans pretty quick, but either the ones we've been squeezing really are clueless or somebody's got 'em more scared than we do. Sure as hell, if Hollowell was killed as a warning, nothing we can do will compete."

He turned to Joe. "Any hints from Sam about that?"

"Just the implication that Hollowell was part of Rivera's operation, but that's still iffy. She's on the inside now, ready to move in as Rivera's Rutland lieutenant, but as of our last phone chat, she still doesn't feel she can ask those kinds of questions yet."

"How is she going to set up here?" Bullis asked, curious about this complication on his home turf.

"Be best if we could find a rental property on the west side of town," Gunther explained. "Something a dealer would find appropriate, and we could rig for sound and video. Is that a possibility?"

"Assuming we can get a search warrant," McCall cautioned.

Joe rubbed his forehead. "Right. I forgot about that." A few years earlier, Vermont law was changed, requiring the police to get a so-called wire search warrant anytime they wanted to covertly record a conversation. "That going to be a problem?"

McCall shook his head. "I doubt it. I'll go after it the way I usually do. They're used to me by now. You gonna use your own equipment or ours?"

Gunther laughed. "All ours, Rick-that was the deal. The trick'll be to get into the house and rig it before they come shopping, and then steer them to the right place."

Rick looked at Bullis. "What do you think?"

"I don't see a problem," he said. "One of my CIs should be good for the second part of that. I just wish I had a better handle on how the street dealers are sorting themselves out in this supposed switchover. Right now it's hard figuring out who's with Rivera and who's not."

"That'll be part of Sam's job," Joe said, "but it does bring up another question: You've given us a pretty good idea of the players in the Rutland drug world, and I've passed that along to her, but a lot of it may be old news to Rivera. Is there any way we can make Sam look like a hotshot-as if she had the insider knowledge she's pretending to have?"

Bullis thought for a moment. "We know a lot of stuff we can't move on," he admitted finally, "mostly because we don't have enough evidence or time or manpower. I just. ." He stopped in midsentence and smiled. "I have an idea," he resumed. "There may be someone we've never much bothered with, mostly because he's small potatoes and a little out of our area of interest. But he might be a great source. Let me work on that. I'll do it fast. Promise."

"I have a question about Sam," Mara Coven then said, having largely kept silent up to now. "How is she going to be the local lieutenant and avoid making drug sales?"

"She may not be able to at first," Joe explained. "We'll have her sell to informants first, to establish credibility. After that, she can claim executive privilege or whatever and hand it over to a flunky-probably Manuel. I've been told they'll be setting this up along business lines, with different people doing different jobs, so that should give her some wiggle room.

"But that's another reason I think a video record will help," he went on. "Not just to capture what happens, but for what doesn't as well. If somebody in court later claims Sam sold them dope direct, we can ask for a time and date and show them the transaction-at least that's the perfect-world scenario."

"Hell," Mara said, "the perfect-world scenario would be that we tell them we have it all on tape, and they don't even ask to see it, 'cause you're not going to tell me every deal is going to happen in front of a camera."

Gunther shrugged. "That's what I am hoping for. This'll be a retail store of sorts, like a traditional crack house. You want some dope, you get vetted by one of Rivera's people, who escorts you to the house, where bingo, you get on Candid Camera. The artifice of the vetting will explain why the cops can't get inside and shut the place down. These are not Ph.D. candidates we're talking about, after all."

Mara merely nodded, prompting Joe to add, "Nothing's guaranteed here. This is brand-new for us, and it's moved at amazing speed. Sam fell into this at exactly the right time, what with the Hollowell killing having upset Rivera's applecart. But the trade-off is we're driving without headlights. I think we better assume that some mistakes are going to happen."

"Little mistakes I can live with," McCall said gloomily, not bothering to spell out the one disaster they weren't mentioning.

"Okay," Wilson said with artificial brightness. "Let's find a house they can rent."