Red rain 2.0 (2 page)

"Three B," the LT says as we ease out into a hallway and pad down beige carpet toward the target. There's thick, condo-grade patterned paper on the walls, bright white sconces between each anonymous beige apartment door. Outside 3B, the LT gives a hand signal, we draw our weapons, and suddenly everybody's looking at me like I've unzipped my pants and pulled my pecker out.

They're all holding cheap Ruger 9mm semis. In my right hand gleams a .50AE Desert Eagle, Israeli-made, wearing an Aimpoint. When the Aimpoint's red dot shows on whatever you want to hit, the Eagle hits exactly
there.
Awesome handgun. It'll punch through a car door, rip up the torsos of two men inside, and blast out the other door. Which makes any nine a limp dick by comparison.

The LT puts his lips so close to my ear it's almost a kiss. "Get that monstrosity on safe
now,
mister. You will not— repeat, not—fire that weapon no matter what goes down."

I nod assent. No way I'm following that order, though. "Clusterfuck," Gunny would've called this whole operation.
I'm about to go through Alice's mirror with four men I have no reason to trust. I don't know how good their intelligence is, I've no idea if they're clear about what's on the other side. Only thing I'm confident of is that if 3B's the crib of stone gangsta drug dealers with Tec-9s, maybe Glocks or even full-auto mini-Uzis, I'm taking out at least two and more likely three with the Eagle before they can do anything but swiss-cheese the ceiling. I'm positive the guys inside and out don't know squat about fire discipline. Amateurs. Spray-and-pray. I've no intention of going down myself on some asshole's pure-chance shot.

Ice Box is through the door like it's wet cardboard, me right behind him spinning left into combat crouch, red dot already fixed on the chest of one of the dealers. Then I start laughing, really laughing, and Ice Box does too. The LT and Taggert You Fuck and the other guy come in like all their training's from watching old
Miami Vice
reruns. The LT glares at me and Ice Box. We're laughing so hard we're almost out of control, but he's covering the dealers while Taggert You Fuck and the other dude move to pat down and cuff
our gangstas. I decock the Eagle and holster it. "Freeze," screams Dugal. His timing's a little off tonight. They've been frozen on a brown corduroy sofa, newest Pearl Jam cranked up on the stereo, since the door smashed down. Three pure white-bread suburban punks, no more than eighteen to twenty, in total shock. On the glass-topped coffee table before them there's a plastic salad-spinner bowl full of pills, and the kids' hands are suspended in the act of placing two pills each into tiny Ziplocs. There's maybe two dozen of them already filled and stacked at one end of the table. I pick one up. Ecstasy.

Taggert You Fuck and the other dude hustle the kids upright. One of them starts to piss himself. I can see the stain spreading fast down the billowy leg of cargo pants so huge they’re gonna slide off his hips, the kind he's seen the black kids and rappers wearing on MTV but, my guess, never in
his life face to face. Another starts to cry when he feels the steel snap closed on his wrists.

I catch Ice Box's eye, and we both erupt again.

"Shut up!" Dugal snarls, more to me and Ice Box than the weepy Md. We go off to toss the place. No more drugs, no weapons at all, unless you count some dull kitchen knives. The LT, after scooping the salad bowl, the pills and the pile of Ziplocs into an evidence baggy, turns on me.

"Hand over the piece, Ewing," he says. Taggert You Fuck and the other joker have taken the kids downstairs to the van. I unholster the Eagle and drop it into his outstretched hand from about an inch above the palm. He isn't ready for the weight and fumbles it, almost lets it fall to the floor. Recovering, he slides open the action and neatly catches the ejected cartridge. He tosses it up and down, slips a 9mm out of his spare clip and tosses the two of them together. "Ice Box, take a look at this," he says, dumping the cartridges into IB's massive hand while he looks over the Eagle. "Can't see shit through this laser thing," Dugal says. I don't mention it isn't turned on.

"Holy Christ," Ice Box says. "The round's almost a double 9. Bigger than a .44 Magnum. Say .50 caliber. They make pistols in .50? Ohhh, that's evil. Oughta be a law against it."

"I think maybe Ewing's confused about where he is," Dugal says. "You here, Ewing? Or you imagining you're still army? You believe you're some kind of
warrior!
We got no place for military
warriors.
We're in the law enforcement business."

"Eagle's a good gun, sir, in my experience," I blurt, knowing before I've finished that I've gotten too dumb to live.

"Do I care? Do I really give a shit about your experience? Is it meaningful to me in any conceivable way at all that you once ran around in the desert? I don't ever want to see this pistol again. Understood?"

"Yessir."

"Ice Box is now your partner...."

"You puttin' me with this Five-O crazy?" the big man interrupts.

"Your senior partner, Ewing. Your superior," Dugal goes on. ignoring IB. "You do what he says to do, when he says to do it. You do anything else, your ass is out of my squad, ao matter how high up the brass who stuck me with you."

"Aw shit," Ice Box says. "Wait a minute, Lieutenant. I'm seeing
Lethal Weapon
movies here on my eyelids, and Ewing's the crazy Mel Gibson guy. I got some serious reservations about this."

"Live with 'em, Ice Box," the LT says and storms out of the condo.

Ice Box does. Ice Box susses I'm no pyscho, but not before he's told half the Department about Ewing's cannon, not before every half-ass is calling me Five-O and laughing as they say it.

"At least they're talking to you, acknowledging you exist, am I right?" Ice Box smiles a few days later. He's invited me for coffee at Teddy's. I take one sip of the grayish sludge in my cup and ask for a Coke instead. "They figure they've made you now, we know they haven't, but it'll relax the fucks. So you're not pissed, right?"

"What do you think?"

"I think you were thinking what I was thinking the other night. Too many cop movies. Lights, camera, action. They're going to go down looking real surprised one day, we hit anything bad."

"Yup."

"A fucking generation living TV and Hollywood referential," Ice Box says. He's starting to surprise me. "They got no idea what's real and what's not. They think the streets are some kind of set. Gotta watch your own back whenever you're out and about with any of these stumblefucks."

"You planning on watching real hard with me?"

"Do I need to?" Ice Box says. And for the first time I hear that high-pitched giggle.

He's saying the right things, but there's still payback due.

He asks for it without knowing it. "Hey Luther, let me fire that Eagle thing on the range one day, huh?" he says as we're leaving Teddy's. He sees what he thinks is suspicion in my eyes. "C'mon, man. No setup. You gotta let me try it out."

Early next Sunday morning we drive to the outdoor police range and Ice Box has the time of his life. He fires ten clips, grinning like a lunatic. "I
love
this piece, Five-O. I want one, with this red dot thing and all. Want one bad, bad, bad!"

I'm grinning Monday when he comes to work with an Ace bandage around his right wrist. "You shoulda told me about the fuckin' recoil, man," he whispers to me, mild reproach on his face, waving his wrist. "I think it's broke."

"Dude your size? Never crossed my mind it'd bother you," I say with a smile.

The fog's thick as wads of cotton wound-packing and Ice Box slows the Crown Vic to a crawl. "This guy we're going to see, he and I go back," IB says. "Almost no police record at all, just some juvenile stuff we both got popped for. We go back that far."

"And this slob is going to give up The Big Source?" I laugh.

"Never said that. But he called me. That's rare. Maybe he's got a name for us, we go see the name, maybe we get a couple more. Climbing the ladder. One rung at a time."

I sigh, take out my pistol, check the safety, drop the clip full of hollow points and rap it against my palm, then slip it home with a nice sharp click. I do this three or four times a day. Routine, but IB can't get used to it.

"Man, you handle that thing like it's your dick. In public. Don't you have any shame?"

"Riding with a human cube in a crappy Ford through middle-of-nowhere rain and fog is public? Have I done this in front of your wife? Ever see me do this in a mall, or your favorite pizza joint?" I wait 'til the wipers screech again. "So you never answered. Gonna be Tasmania and Chlorophyll or what?"

"I got two words for you...."

"And this snitch you never mentioned before, tucked away up here in the boonies. Sure it isn't snatch?"

"Two words," Ice Box says. "And don't you go freaking out my friend, Chief, playing with your thing when we get there, anything like that"

"So you just want me checking out his trailer home, counting his pit bulls, see if his fourteen-year-old first cousin b flashing her little titties at us through the window?"

"Luther, how'm I ever gonna teach you anything when you get dumber every day? What I mean is, stay chill when you see what you see."

"I'm ice, IB. I'm so slick you could skate on me."

"It's The Big Source who's so slick. We got nothing," Ice Box says.

He's right. For about eighteen months after we took down the three kids in Cockeysville, Ecstasy only turned up once in a while. IB and I do a bunch of buy-and-busts that put away some addled crack-cocaine merchants, we nail some fairly big-time grass distributors—one asshole who's got maybe a hundred pounds neatly sealed in genuine two-pound potting soil bags stacked in his unlocked garage, claims he runs a little garden supply business for the local housewives. We even find a crazy high-school chemistry club president who's making methamphetamine in the basement of bis parents' million-dollar, six-bedroom house in Hampton. Dugal lends me out to the City narc squad on some interjurisdic-bonal traffic—heroin, on the eastern border of Baltimore and the County. It's copacetic. The City narcs I work with are serious spades, they're cool when I show up with the Eagle and pop some gangsta cribs with them. "You be forgettin' those County faggots, come hang with us, Luther," a detective lieutenant called Dog says to me. I'm tempted.

Then, suddenly, an avalanche of Ecstasy hits the County. We've busted twenty-six sellers, all of them pure white bread, just like the first three. The arrests make Dugal very happy, he sends glowing reports upstairs about how active
and effective his squad is, he especially likes to personally count and recount each Ecstasy pill and put big numbers in the reports. But not one solid thing on the supplier. Which makes Dugal very unhappy and, though he tries to disguise it, tenser and tenser as the shit keeps coming.

Damn these wipers, making me crazy. "Confession, IB. I don't give a flying fuck about Ecstasy. It's nothing," I say. "Kids wanna drop this stuff in clubs, go all warm and fuzzy and cuddly for a while, who cares? It's only mommy-and-daddy money they're spending, not a crime wave."

"Ho, you haven't figured the priorities yet, slow learner? Make it simple for you. The mommys and daddys are very scared of this. Why? Because it's a new thing they never tried when they were kids. Hash, Thai sticks, a few lines of coke—no big deal, they've been there. Some of them probably still
are
there, recreationally. Ecstasy, wow! Don't want my kid on whatever that is. So the pressure comes down on the politicians, they slide it off on the Department Chief, he slides it off on Dugal. And Dugal creams himself whenever he gets his name in the papers."

Seems even more of a waste then, all that computer time collating everything the busted kids say about their supplier, trying to build a profile. All I'm sure of to date is it isn't the black city gangbangers. These suburbans are too scared to deal with them. Anyway, the gangsta dealers can't be bothered with Ecstasy. It's too pussy, doesn't create its own inexorable demand. Old economy biz.

No trace of old-economy mafia, local or down from Philly or New York. Not a make on what seems most likely—a smart freelance import man, using kids as mules to bring the pills in from Amsterdam or wherever, then using local kids to retail them.

Lately I'm worrying a lot, I admit, because the traffic's suddenly changed. Real bad news. Last four busts in a row, the kids are making what IB calls Bonus Packs. Inside each two-pill Ecstasy Ziploc, they put little glassine envelopes of super-pure heroin, meant to be snorted or smoked, not shot
up, about two lines worth. Clever. Needles are too scary for these white kids. Dugal trys to stay cool about this. Dugal thinks his excellent leadership and police acumen keeps hard stuff out of the County. "We will never have a heroin problem here," Dugal says. He says the Bonus Packs are an aberration meaning absolutely nothing.

Nothing is what I've got on my iMac. A child's raggedy connect-the-dots drawing. All consistent, though. All the same, from twenty-six scared teenagers.

Two players. Man in his twenties, dresses Old Navy and J. Crew, hair buzzed short, bland face. And a chick who looks like nobody. Nobody to give our hormone-crazed teen dealers a hard-on, nobody who's in the mug files we make them all study forward and back. Like a coed at Towson State or Goucher, they say. You wouldn't look twice, detective. Not coyote-ugly or anything. Just not sexy. Totally average. She comes up to you in clubs, not on to you. Gets around to Ecstasy, gives free samples, asks if we want to ■take some easy money.