CHICAGO
FRIDAY
When John Vaughan met Paul Davidson at a health food restaurant under the “L” tracks in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, he thought he had the wrong guy. Davidson was a barrel-chested man in his late forties who looked more like a narcotics officer or a Hell’s Angel than a cop from Public Vehicles. He had long hair pulled back in a ponytail, a goatee, and even an earring.
Vaughan, who had dropped off his daughter at school and bypassed the Starbucks in order to get to this meeting on time, hadn’t been expecting this.
“We’ve only got one type of coffee,” said the waitress after he had joined Davidson at the table. “But I’ve got tons of teas. I can bring over the box if you want to choose.”
“No thanks,” said Vaughan. “Just coffee, please.”
“Anything to eat?”
“Their turkey sausage is off the hook,” replied Davidson.
Vaughan shook his head. He hated health food.
Davidson rattled off an order that sounded like it was straight from a craft services table for some Hollywood movie. Vegan this and tofu that. It was disgusting.
“Why do you eat that stuff?” asked Vaughan.
“Because I’m too stubborn to go on Lipitor.”
“I’d rather take a bullet.”
“No you wouldn’t. Trust me. It’s not fun.”
“You’ve been shot?” asked Vaughan.
“I didn’t move to the Public Vehicles Division for the action.”
“When did it happen?”
“Four years ago. I was a patrol officer. My partner and I were doing a traffic stop. Some thug pulled a gun, and my partner and I both got capped. I took it through the shoulder and my partner got a round in the leg. I shot the offender in the head and killed him.”
“So you decided to hang it up being a patrol officer?”
“No. My wife decided. No mas patrol.”
“How did you wind up at Public Vehicles?” asked Vaughan.
“Due to my heroism and valor, blah, blah, blah, the department let me have my pick. There was a slot at Public Vehicles and the rest is home-by-six-every-night history.”
Vaughan was amazed by how the man downplayed what had happened. “Is your partner still a patrol officer?”
Davidson laughed. “He is and he’s been shot two more times since then. I’m glad I got away from him. The guy’s a bullet magnet.”
Vaughan laughed. “Listen, I’m sorry again for bothering you on vacation.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll let you pay for breakfast and we’ll call it even.”
“I was going to offer to pay anyway.”
“In that case, I’ll think of something else.”
Wiseass, thought Vaughan. “You’ve already got something for me?”
“You sound surprised.”
“I only called you the day before yesterday.”
“I can hold on to it for a day or two if it’d make you appreciate it more.”
“No. What have you got?”
Davidson pulled a blue notebook from his jacket pocket and set it on the table. “Are you familiar with how the cab system works in Chicago? I don’t want to bore you with a bunch of stuff you already know.”
“I know the basics. You’ve got the actual cab owner who purchases a license to operate from the city office of Consumer Services. It’s also called a medallion. You can’t legally operate a cab without one. Usually, the medallions are worth more than the cabs themselves.”
“Correct.”
“Each cab is required to have a meter. The meter is turned on when a fare gets in. The meter has set rates, et cetera.”
“Exactly. Drivers then lease the cab for a short period of time from the owner. The most common lease is for a week for about six hundred bucks. Owners, whether it’s a small-time guy with a handful of cabs or a big conglomerate like Yellow, also do weekend leases for about two hundred bucks if they’ve got extra vehicles sitting around not making them any money. That’s the surface material. When it starts to get interesting is when you get beneath that.
“Like gas stations and mini-marts, cabs are a popular entry job for immigrants. In Chicago, the taxi subculture is composed of three predominant cartels: the Middle Easterners, the Pakistanis, and the East Africans.”
“What about the Russians?” asked Vaughan.
“The Russians and Eastern Europeans own a lot of cabs, but I’m talking about drivers. The Eastern Europeans are more into the limo business.”
“You know all of this from being in Public Vehicles?”
“I know it because I have initiative. Public Vehicles may be a safe place to work, but it’s frickin’ boring. After a year of wanting to put a gun in my mouth, and I’m kidding by the way, I decided to get out on the street. I got my sergeant to approve a sting operation I wanted to run on gypsy cabs at the airport. I was busting these guys left, right, and center. You should have seen it. I’d pop the glove box and they’d have ten grand in cash and a stack of food stamps. It really pissed me off.
“I wanted to learn more, so I started building a network of informants. When I caught a guy I thought could be useful, I’d let him go.”
“Which meant he owed you.”
“That’s right,” said Davidson. “I started visiting the pool parking lot where they all wait and got to know as many drivers as I could. I became friendly with a lot of them and learned what restaurants they hung out at and started eating in those places and so on and so forth. What really surprised me was that nobody was doing this. Not the CPD, not the FBI, nobody. I mean before 9/11 I could understand them overlooking these guys, but not doing it afterward was nuts. Nevertheless, that’s the way it was and still is. I’m it.”
“How does this play into Alison Taylor’s case?”
“I put the word out to all of my informants. I wanted to know if they’d heard of anything that fit with our case. Was anyone suddenly out sick? Was anyone suddenly remorseful or guilty? That kind of stuff.
“I pumped my contacts at the cab restaurants, the roach coaches, the hummus stands, the hookah bars; everywhere. I even spent the last two nights cruising the neighborhoods most of these guys live in, looking for cabs with damage.”
“How’d you do?”
“I struck out,” replied Davidson. “I didn’t get anything.”
“So?”
“So I reached out to another driver I know. He’s not a regular informant, but I let him slide on something a ways back and he owed me.
“I wanted to put myself in the shoes of the guy we’re looking for, so I called him up and laid out the scenario for him. I asked if he had been involved in a hit-and-run, what would be going through his mind.”
“I would assume, getting caught by the cops,” said Vaughan.
Davidson shook his head. “Not quite. According to this driver, he’d be more afraid of his owner learning that the cab had been in an accident.”
“Seriously?”
“Yup. And to prevent the owner from finding out, the guy we’re looking for would need to get the cab repaired as quickly as possible. Enter the Triple P.”
“What’s the Triple P?”
“Piss, paint, and pray,” replied Davidson, as the waitress set his breakfast down on the table. “It’s an under-the-radar taxicab mechanic and body shop. They’re all over the city and fix damaged cabs while drivers wait. And they’re fast too. The Muslim ones have little prayer rooms in them and the joke is that as soon as you’ve taken a piss and said your prayers, the paint on your cab would be just about dry.”
Vaughan was fascinated.
“If you’re a Middle Eastern driver, you go to one of the Triple P’s owned and run by a Middle Easterner. If you’re Pakistani, you go to a Pakistani operation. If you’re East African, you go to an East African one, yada, yada, yada.”
“How come I haven’t heard about these places before?”
“Like I said, they’re under the radar. They operate around the clock, only deal in cash, and don’t advertise. They do business only within their own ethnic group.”
“And you think the driver who hit Alison Taylor used one of these body shops to repair the damage to his cab?”
“According to my source, there was a Pakistani driver who brought his vehicle into a particular shop on the night in question. He was shaken up and was dumb enough to blab about clipping some woman. He wanted to get his cab repaired as soon as possible and was willing to pay extra for it.”
“This is fantastic,” said Vaughan. “When can we pay a visit to the shop?”
“Right after we’re done with breakfast.”