Shakedown

Chapter Three

I was alone in my office, lights off, door closed, cradling a cold cup of coffee. It was past midnight, everyone else long gone except for the new security guard who knocked at my door on the half hour, last time reminding me not to take any files from the building without signing them out.

“I’ve been an FBI agent almost as long as you’ve been alive,” I told him.

“I know that, Agent Davis. Regulations say I’m supposed to make sure, that’s all,” he said. “Get that light for you?”

I shook my head. “Call me Jack.”

“Yes sir, Agent Davis.”

A storm blew outside, the rain hitting the window without making a sound against the insulated glass. I leaned back in my chair outside the reach of the pale-blue glow from my computer monitor. I kept to the dark so I couldn’t see myself shake.

The tremors started in my belly, galloped up my neck, and spilled into my arms and head like they were excavating fault lines. I didn’t shake all the time. Tonight, it had been every ten or fifteen minutes, usually only for a few seconds, except for one stretch that lasted two minutes by my watch.

It had started two months ago, right after my future former wife Joy moved out. It was a few twitches at first, not enough to send me to a doctor, slowly getting worse, taking off in the last week. I could go for hours without so much as a hiccup. Other times, like now, I kept the door closed. I’d gotten a few looks, but no questions, from the agents on my squad. That’s the way it had to be until I shut Marcellus Pearson down, which I would do when our surveillance warrant expired in four days. I could wait that long to find out what was happening to me.

I was watching the feed from the surveillance camera I’d installed two and a half weeks earlier in the front room of Marcellus’s house. The camera was in the ceiling fan, giving me a 360-degree view, and with a microphone that could capture a fart.

Marcellus’s crack operation was good enough to make him Entrepreneur of the Year, except he didn’t have anything to show for it besides the usual pimped-out ride, tattoos, and bling. He could have lost his money in the stock market, given it to charity, or funded retirement plans for his enforcers, the Winston brothers. Or, he could be fronting for someone.

I ran the Violent Crime squad in the FBI’s Kansas City regional office and there was no criminal enterprise more violent than drugs. Marcellus had been operating in Kansas City, Kansas, for a long time. No one bothered him. People who did woke up dead. I intended to bother his ass right out of business before I shook myself into an early retirement. We had already mounted a camera on a utility pole down the street, but we needed eyes inside the crack house.

A month ago, I asked Marty Grisnik, head of Robbery and Homicide for the Kansas City, Kansas, police department, for his help serving a fugitive warrant. I’d met him a year ago at one of the interagency events put on to foster cooperation between federal and local law enforcement. We hadn’t worked a case together, but we drank enough that night to make up for it, and had traded a couple of favors since then. I gave him Marcellus’s address, not telling him that the warrant was phony and that I was going to use it so I could get inside the house and install a surveillance camera.

“FBI has its own fugitive warrants team, Jack. Why do you want my help?”

Grisnik had a linebacker’s build and looked uncomfortable in a suit, like he’d rather be on the field roaming for someone to hit. Near my age, he worked harder than I did to keep a muscled edge. We were in his cramped office on the fifth?oor of the police department headquarters on Seventh Street, Grisnik rocking back in his swivel chair. I stood, keeping a tight grip on the arched back of a chair in case I started to shake.

“The guy we’re after, Darrell Johnson, is hooked up with one of our undercover people. If we don’t get him, we don’t want him tipped off that the FBI is chasing him. Works better if he thinks it’s you guys.”

“But you want to go through the door, not us?”

I took a breath, glancing over his shoulder at the view to the east out his window. The Intercity Viaduct stretched over an area called the West Bottoms for its close proximity to the Missouri River. The Viaduct and the West Bottoms connected the two Kansas Cities, the highway a concrete artery, the Bottoms muscle and ligaments made of old warehouses, new businesses, and reborn bars. From Grisnik’s window I could also see a thin slice of the Missouri coming down from the north, then bending east on its way to St. Louis. The FBI building stood on a bluff on the southwest edge of downtown Kansas City, Missouri, part of a string of office towers running north to the river.

“That’s right. I need your people for backup. And I’d like to borrow one of your uniforms.”

Grisnik pecked away at his computer, sending an e-mail, double-checking my warrant to make certain he got the address right. He smiled, waiting for a response, his silence code for telling me I was full of shit and he was about to prove it.

“The Bureau appreciates your cooperation. If we get him, you get the credit. If we don’t, nobody will know or care.”

I didn’t tell Grisnik about the surveillance camera because I suspected that Marcellus had some KCK cops in his pocket. That would go a long way in explaining how he had stayed in business for so long. If I were right, Marcellus would get word of our raid and clean house so that we wouldn’t have any reason to arrest him. That was fine with me. All I wanted was to get him out of the house long enough to install the camera. I wasn’t ready to lock him up.

Grisnik’s computer binged, signaling that he’d received a reply to his e-mail. I couldn’t see his monitor to read it, though that wasn’t necessary.

“This would play a little better if you worked homeland security into it somewhere along the way,” Grisnik said.

“Do I need to?”

“Wouldn’t smell any sweeter if you did. This address belongs to Marcellus Pearson. Says here Marcellus is a suspected drug dealer. Bet you didn’t know that. And no one named Darrell Johnson shows up on the list of his known associates. You want me to run a quick check on your fugitive?”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“We got our own fugitive squad and we got our own drug squad. You ought to be talking to them, not me. Since you aren’t, makes me think you’ve got a reason I’m not going to like.”

“I do.”

“This isn’t my idea of cooperation, Jack. You coming to me for help and not telling me what I need to know, especially if it involves this department.”

“Operational constraints. It’s better for everyone.”

“Better for you, maybe,” Grisnik said. “Puts my ass in a sling if this blows up.”

“It won’t blow up.”

“You can’t keep something like this a secret.”

“I don’t intend for it to be a secret.”

Grisnik nodded, his eyes softening as he understood what I needed. He held the warrant to the halogen lamp on his desk as if he was checking a fifty-dollar bill to see if it was counterfeit. He slid it back toward me with a reluctant grunt.

“You’ll need a name tag for your uniform. You want one that says Jack Davis or you want me to pick on somebody else?”

“Any name will do as long as it isn’t mine.”