Shock Wave

thirteen

“Let me guess, your life depends on this, too?” asked the sixty-year-old man from behind his thick, dark glasses. Computer screens glowed behind him, giving him an electronic halo, like an angel. To Tasker, Jerry Ristin had been an angel when he’d helped him piece together the identity of a man who’d been part of the bank-robbery scheme. If Ristin hadn’t contributed his incredible skills as a crime analyst, Tasker might be in jail right now.

“No, Jerry, it’s not life and death, just normal urgent.”

The older man chuckled. “Whatcha need?”

“Sort through the phone books we took from Wells and see if there are any interesting links or contacts. Crooks, foreign spies, Al-Qaeda terrorists, that sort of thing.” He winked.

“Billy, for you, anything.” He took the three small personal phone books, flipped through the pages and added, “How about something by end of next week?”

Tasker controlled his anxiety about waiting, but knew the analyst would do it right. “Jerry, you’re the best.” Before he could say anything else, Tasker heard his supervisor bellow from the other side of the squad bay: “I thought you was off today?”

Tasker shook his head. “No, sir, tomorrow. I’m headed up to West Palm right now to meet my kids as they get home from school. I even have my P-car outside.” Tasker still used the old federal term for personal car as opposed to an official government vehicle, or G-car.

“I want you to step back from this case,” said his boss, as he walked closer, “but I’m not sure baby-sitting so your wife can get laid is the right choice.”

Tasker nodded thoughtfully. “I didn’t look at it like that, but it’s too late. I already committed.”

“You do more shit like that and you will be committed.”

Tasker smiled and headed out the door.

Derrick Sutter sat in the rear of the group of fifteen Miami police officers. He was helping out Vice on one of their giant combined operations-first they’d hit a bunch of search warrants, then execute arrest warrants for local people who had been videotaped selling crack to undercover cops over the past three months. Sutter liked hanging out with some of the troops, but he didn’t like the “big net” theory of scooping everyone up at once. He knew it had to be done, but sometimes it looked like it was put on more for show than for trying to clean up a neighborhood.

The whole assignment was a big change from his work with Bill Tasker over at FDLE. This was lots of action for little return. No one really cared what happened once you cleared these guys off the street. The cases he’d worked with Tasker had some impact. That was obvious from the way everyone got so bent out of shape when things didn’t work out right.

Sutter looked around the group as the sun set into twilight. This was a good time, because they usually caught the dealers at their houses and sometimes picked up extra buyers who were on their way home from work. Each cop wore a simple black Miami Police T-shirt under his black ballistic vest and jeans or black fatigues, depending on which unit they worked on a regular basis. The narcotics guys liked to look tough, so they wore fatigues. Sutter, officially assigned to crimes/person, or what was commonly called robbery, just wore plain jeans. Tonight he actually had on running shoes. He liked a little rubber between his feet and some of the nasty floors of the buildings in the area. His Bruno Magli knockoffs had awfully thin soles.

The big sergeant with the kind of rough complexion you got from acne as a kid finished his briefing, saying, “We got six cops on each site. If people run, it’s up to you. If you think you can grab them easy, do it. We don’t have enough manpower to have a whole squad chase one rabbit.” He looked over the group to make sure everyone was paying attention. “We got a couple of guys sitting at each location. We’re hitting three of the eight apartments over on Sixth Court. Two downstairs and one up. That’s where the shit will happen.” He went over more details and assignments, then sent them off to meet a block away from their assigned locations.

Sutter was one of the cops going to the notorious apartment on Sixth Court. Everyone knew the building. Seemed like half the drug sales and a third of the shootings in the whole city occurred at that run-down concrete-block apartment house.

After a quick gear check at the rally point, Sutter found himself in the lead car with three Vice cops he knew from the substation. They were going to enter the downstairs apartment at the far end of the building. They slowed as they approached the address and let one car stop first so that the cops assigned to the apartment upstairs had a little time to climb the crumbling cement stairs.

“Now,” said the driver, as he listened for a signal on the radio. In one motion, all four of the cops opened the doors just as the car stopped and popped out into the small lot in front of the apartments. Two more cops, who had been sitting in a car across the street, joined them as they approached the door to the apartment, each man drawing his sidearm. Sutter held the barrel of his Glock toward the ground until they were at the door. He could hear the team upstairs start to bang on the door and yell, “Police! Search warrant!” The first man on his team repeated the same phrase as he pounded on the door and immediately tried the door handle. It turned, but the door was caught by a chain when he tried to open it. Inside, the sounds of people moving started to grow. The first man raised his long leg and kicked the door wide open, then stepped to the side as the other cops poured into the first room.

Sutter was the second cop in the door and saw that two women were already being held at gunpoint by the cop who had come in first. Sutter and the others immediately flowed into the next small room, the whole time shouting, “Police! Down! Police! Get down!” Their shouts were mingled with the cry of a woman and the shouted obscenities of several men inside. The combination of the noise and the musty smell of crack and cigarette smoke made Sutter’s head spin slightly as he tried to focus on any threats in his field of vision.

Sutter, his Glock still in front of him, headed down the hallway just as he saw a dark figure dart toward the rear window and dive straight out the screenless opening. Sutter took two quick steps and peered out to see the man running with a small gray package in his hand.

“Shit, I got a runner. I’m going,” he yelled over his shoulder. As he climbed through the window, he heard the cop behind him say, “Not more than two blocks.”

Sutter grunted in acknowledgment as he hit the ground and went to one knee, then was up and closing the distance on the fleeing man in a matter of seconds. He wasn’t going to yell and let this asshole know he was chasing him. When the time was right, he’d say something. Sutter noticed the guy’s hands were already empty. That package was somewhere close.

The man ran west through a couple of yards and a parking lot until he was out on Seventh Avenue, the main north-south artery in this section of town. He looked like he was slowing down, until he turned his head and saw Sutter still loping toward him. Then the afterburners kicked in and he flew across the four busy lanes of traffic without looking. Sutter was right behind him. Just as he was about to make the curb, a low-rider Dodge screeched its brakes and knocked the running man onto the sidewalk. He landed with a grunt, his hand spreading a blood jelly across the rough concrete.

Sutter was about to ridicule the man for getting what he deserved when the same Dodge, still moving, swerved slightly and hit Sutter, throwing him onto the trunk of a stopped Chevy.

“Motherfucker,” said Sutter, sliding back onto his feet from the trunk. Before he could yell at the Dodge’s driver, he realized his man was up and running, although this time with a slight limp, north on the sidewalk. Sutter started after him.

After a block, the man darted into the Church’s Fried Chicken.

Sutter drew his pistol as he approached the restaurant and rushed in the door. Everyone stared at him, and one small girl just pointed toward the swinging door to the kitchen. Sutter pushed through it.

The man, yammering loudly in Spanish, held a five-inch paring knife to the throat of a young female Church’s manager. She was silent as tears ran down her face.

But as soon as Sutter raised his pistol and took aim at the man’s face, he dropped the knife and backed away with his hands up. The manager rushed from the kitchen.

Sutter advanced on the man, saying, “Get on the ground, now.” He repeated it, but the man started circling the large food preparations table with a giant pan of fried chicken legs on it. Sutter stopped and so did the man, his hands still in the air. Sutter took a step and so did he.

Then the man edged back toward the swinging door, reached down and grabbed several chicken legs and started flinging them at Sutter, who dodged two and flinched at another, until he remembered they were only chicken legs. He took two fast steps, surprising the man with his speed, and swung his pistol in a short arc, clipping the man in the head.

The man fell to one knee, dazed, as Sutter holstered his pistol, drew some handcuffs, grabbed the man by the arm and spun him down in one motion, then cuffed him cleanly with his hands behind his back.

Sutter leaned in close to the man’s face and yelled, “You’re under arrest.” He kneed him in the side and added, “Asshole.”

The man said, “Why’d you do that?” With no accent.

“You speak English, too,” yelled Sutter.

“Yeah. I was born in Kendall.”

Sutter kneed him again.

After taking a few minutes to gather his breath and call into the command post that he was fine and had one in custody, Sutter yanked the man to his feet and shoved him though the swinging door. The place had emptied out, with only one teenage worker still there.

“Where’s the manager?”

“Tracey? She left.”

“When will she be back?”

“Won’t. That was the third time she was threatened here. She quit. Said she wouldn’t ever come back.”

“Shit,” mumbled Sutter. Now he’d have to track her down later for a statement. He looked at his prisoner. “You happy now? The girl quit, I’m pissed and we gotta walk back to the processing scene.”

The prisoner asked, “Why we gotta walk?” as they left the Church’s Fried Chicken.

“We need the gray package you had when you ran.”

“What gray package?”

“The one that if we don’t find I’m gonna shoot you for trying to escape. That one.”

The man didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, the package I threw in the bushes over off Sixth.”

Bill Tasker always used the commute time from Miami to his old house in West Palm Beach to hash out problems while he listened to sports talk shows on AM 560. At first, using the shorter ride from the West Palm Beach office, it was the whole shooting incident and the cloud from that. Then it was Donna throwing him out of the house. After that it was the impending divorce. More recently it was his troubles with the FBI. Now he tried to look at his Daniel Wells problem from the outside. Although he had wanted to find evidence at the Wells house to build his case, his first concern was simply locating the man. The problem was that he had no idea where the man was staying. He obviously wasn’t at the house, and it didn’t look like he was coming back. Tasker remembered him saying something about relatives in Tennessee. For all Tasker knew, he could still be in Naranja. If Wells was in Florida, Tasker had the resources to track him. Outside the state, it got trickier. Who could he call for help? The FBI was his obvious choice, but they weren’t too friendly lately. Jimmy Lail showed it in his attitude. What about the counterterrorism guy, Sal Bolini? He’d call him on Monday.

Tasker’s other worry, more of a vague anxiety, was: Had Wells known about the search warrant ahead of time? Or was he just lucky? Was he part of some terrorist group? What drove him? These questions haunted him almost every hour of the day.

Tasker pulled into the driveway of his old house. The two-door garage was closed and Donna’s tan Nissan van sat on the spot closest to the house. Tasker’s stomach completed a three-sixty as he hopped out of his Jeep and headed for the front door.

She had the door open before he could ring the bell. “Thank you so much, Billy,” she said, giving him a quick hug. “The girls are over at Morgan’s. As soon as they see your Jeep, they’ll race back.”

He just nodded, noticing how she looked like a Dolphins cheerleader in the light sundress, her blond hair in a ponytail.

“Nicky is picking me up in about ten minutes.” She looked at him and froze. “You’re all right with this, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. “Would it make a difference?”

“It would as far as who baby-sat for me.”

In his head, he said, Bitch! Out loud, he said, “No, it’s fine.”

“You’re the best,” she said, and she leaned over and kissed him as he got comfortable on the couch.

He watched her scoot around and finish little chores for a few minutes until the doorbell chimed. He stood and opened it to see a short guy, about thirty-five with perfectly arranged, short-cropped brown hair, wearing shorts and a loud Hawaiian shirt.

The man said, “Hey, Bill, remember me?” He stuck out his hand, “Nicky Goldman.”

“Yeah, Nick, I remember you.” He let him in the house. The guy had the class not to kiss Donna in front of Tasker. To his credit, he went to her and asked what he could do to help. They seemed to have a pretty good connection, moving around the house like coworkers as they loaded the suitcases in his Expedition.

Tasker had almost made it-until Donna took a few extra minutes in the bathroom, which left him alone with her new boyfriend. They avoided eye contact and made small talk for a few minutes, until Goldman said, “That was a pretty wild case you got involved in with the bank.”

“You mean the one I was accused of robbing?”

“Yeah, I saw the news reports and Donna has filled in the blanks. Who was your attorney?”

“I retained Clayton Troub, but never needed him. The situation cleared itself up.”

“So I heard. Pretty incredible, huh? I never heard of a frame-up in real life before, only in the movies.” Nicky smiled like they were talking about a football game.

Tasker nodded, thinking, What does this guy want me to say?

“I have to deal with the cops piling on the charges all the time. I know how you must have felt.”

“What?” Tasker stood, hoping he hadn’t heard this moron correctly.

Goldman stood, too. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Bullshit. This had nothing to do with legal charges. I was intentionally set up by an FBI agent. I guarantee none of the lowlifes you represent were ever set up like this. And cops don’t pile on charges unless the criminal committed multiple crimes.”

Nicky Goldman held up his hands in surrender and started to back away.

“You fucking grave-robbing attorneys complain when your clients are charged, hoping for some sympathy. Let me tell you something, Counselor, you don’t help the downtrodden, you hurt them. Every day. By helping those predators get back into those neighborhoods.” Tasker started to go into his remedy for attorneys when Donna emerged from the rear bedroom.

“You boys getting along okay?”

Tasker cleared his throat and Nicky turned his flushed face. Both mumbled, “Yes.”

She kissed Tasker on the cheek, again saying, “We have to move on. At some point we have to meet each other’s new friends.”

Then Tasker realized that his ex-wife’s change in attitude in the last month may have been prompted by something other than fear of commitment. Maybe she was just afraid to recommit to him. He froze, wanting to apologize to the still-silent lawyer. He didn’t need this now.

After Derrick Sutter’s little adventure, he realized just how much he missed working on the bigger cases with FDLE, and missed his partner, Bill Tasker. They had fun together, and even though Tasker wasn’t the most cheerful guy, considering what had happened to him the past few years he seemed to maintain pretty well.

The Vice unit was finishing the sweep. They hardly made anything of Sutter’s efforts to run down the dope dealer earlier. Pretty common stuff for these tough veteran cops.

Sutter had placed the guy he had chased in line with all the other suspects, sitting on a curb, waiting to be processed. He had given the gray plastic package he’d recovered to the sergeant, who had opened it to find a load of cash.

Sutter liked helping out, even though he was still assigned to robbery. This gave him a chance to roam Liberty City and help clear out some of the dickheads that made it hard for the ordinary residents of the area to live and raise families. It also felt good to run after someone once in a while. At least the brothers here didn’t throw little sticks of dynamite at him or cook up all kinds of nasty explosives in their bathtubs. He decided that he preferred to have chicken thrown at him anytime.

Now, as his shift started to wind down, he was filling out an arrest form on one of the dozens of prisoners. With the other cops in a straight line, sitting at long, portable tables with folding chairs, it looked like a recruiting drive, with people filling out employment applications.

Sutter looked across at the young black woman, her hands secured behind her back with plastic flex cuffs. He recognized her from the neighborhood over the years but had never spoken to her. She was pretty, with a full-framed gold front tooth and funky, slicked-down hair. He didn’t like it when they just swept up everyone in a big net like this, but he knew it had to be done. Crack sales were killing neighborhoods all over the country. The regular people who lived here had to put up with it every day, and that was definitely not right.

As Sutter filled out the top part of the form, the woman said, “I gettin’ out tonight?”

“Doubt it. You’ll see a judge tomorrow.”

“He just let us out then. Why bother with this tonight?” She wasn’t nasty, just exasperated.

“ ’Cause this is my job.” Now he really started to miss Tasker and the big cases. He came to the prisoner-information section on the form. Looking up at the woman, he asked, “Last name?”

“Williams.”

Sutter wrote in block letters and asked, “First?”

“Sha-theed.”

He started to write, then said, “Spell it.”

“S-H-I-T-H-E-A-D.”

Sutter wrote it in, then stared at the name until it made sense. “Funny. Now what’s your first name?”

“That is my first name. Look at my ID.” She nodded toward the small plastic evidence bag containing her personal property.

Sutter retrieved the official Florida identification card, usually issued if you couldn’t get a license for some reason, and found that the young woman’s name was, in fact, Shithead Williams. Sutter let a smile slide across his face and said, “I bet you have a nickname.” He was about to write “Shitty” before she even answered.

The woman said, “Yeah, my brothers call me Anita.”

Sutter stopped writing and looked up at her again. “Anita, where’s that come from?”

She shrugged.

“Is that what you use everywhere?”

“No, I likes to be called Sha-theed. It’s prettier.”

Sutter was about to explain the mean joke her parents had played on her when a big sergeant walked over, rotated his head on his massive shoulders and said, “Sutter, can you run down to the Gables and see if that guy is staying at the address he just gave us?” He pointed to the small, dark, Latin-looking man at the end of the row who Sutter had caught earlier. His head drooped down and shoulders hunched.

Sutter said, “No problem, Sarge.”

The big man said, “That package you found had eight grand cash in it and we need to know who he is for sure. He may be a good link to something else. Figured you caught him, you’d want to do the follow-up. I know you been kicking around in south county with your FDLE buddy. I send one of my guys out of the city, he’s liable to end up in Tampa.”

Sutter laughed. “I hear ya. I’ll call when I find anything out.”

“If it looks like he lives there, see if we need to get a search warrant for the house.”

“How do you want me to do that?” Sutter asked.

The sergeant just looked at him. “You’ll know what to do.”

Sutter nodded and handed the lovely Shithead, or Sha-theed, off to another cop and found his issued Buick parked around the corner. There was a good-sized crowd on the street watching the cops complete the search and haul away the prisoners.

Half an hour later, Sutter had determined that the address provided by the suspect was a Publix shopping center. He cruised the lot and asked a few questions about the man in case he was homeless and really did live here. The Publix produce manager explained that Coral Gables didn’t have any homeless people and assured Sutter that he had never heard of the suspect.

After Sutter reported this info back to the Vice sergeant and was told to head home for the night, he found himself driving south on US 1. Since his adventures in the southern Dade area, he’d found he liked the idea of there being such a diverse and different place only a few miles from the city that he loved. He would’ve liked to have Tasker with him now, but his friend had agreed to watch his girls so his wife could get away for the weekend. That made Tasker either one of the greatest guys he’d ever met or a sucker. He’d seen the FDLE agent’s ex-wife and figured she could’ve turned him into a sucker, too, if she wanted to.

Sutter noticed a bar attached to the end of a little strip mall in what Sutter believed was South Miami, a separate little town just south of the Gables. He was about to pass it when he saw it was a nude bar. His favorite kind.

The bar had no visible name until he entered and saw it was called the Tittie Shack. Probably not a name the landlord of the shopping center wanted outside the club. He paused, looking past the sign, and the doorman demanded a ten-dollar cover. The vibe the big man threw Sutter’s way wasn’t positive, but Sutter ignored him. The small façade hid a good-sized place with two stages. He thought, What the hell, and handed the giant bouncer a ten-dollar bill. There were only five customers and at least ten girls, most sitting around in skimpy outfits, looking bored. A pretty Latin girl with too much makeup smiled and patted the empty space next to her on a bench by the rear wall. No one else seemed interested, so he strutted over, letting the girls look him over, and took a seat on the padded bench. As he sat, he realized that the table had hidden the girl’s substantial lower body, but to Sutter that was a plus. She introduced herself as “Diamond,” and Sutter said his name was “Gold.” She accepted it just as he had accepted her stage name. Half an hour and two drinks later, Sutter felt his groove coming on. He thought this girl might be good for a party. As he worked his mind around how to ask if she’d like to see his South Beach apartment, he noticed the blond dancer on the far stage. She had a body but not many moves. Still there was something familiar about her. He stared at the light-skinned dancer until his Latina flicked his ear. The rest of the night was a blur.

Daniel Wells cringed as he squished the last cone under the wheels of the big tractor-trailer. Counting the two garbage cans before he’d even entered the course, he had hit twenty-two objects. He didn’t figure that to be a passing score. He looked over to the fifty-year-old heavyset instructor.

The older man said, “Mr. Westerly, that was god-awful.”

“Don’t pass yet, huh?”

“I’m not sure you should be allowed to drive a car.”

“I just need to get a feel for the distance from the driver’s seat to the bumper.” The big Freightliner Coronado made him feel like he was driving from the second floor of a building.

“No offense, but I seen fellas drunk on moonshine calculate distances better than you. Once, for a prank photo, we put a monkey behind the wheel. I believe he did a better job than you.”

“Need more practice, that’s all.”

“Mr. Westerly, I don’t usually say this, ’cause the school needs students and the income, but you been coming for lessons a long time and you ain’t ready to drive a pickup, let alone a semi.”

Wells nodded. The only thing he’d done right at this school was use a fake name and answer to it when someone addressed him. “Just let me work on cornering and some narrow lanes and I’ll be happy.”

The big driving instructor hesitated.

“I’ll pay the full tuition again. Start from scratch.”

The instructor shrugged. “Okay. I think you’d do better finding other work, but we can try again.”

Wells slapped him on the shoulder. “Thank you. This is all part of my dream.”