The next morning at ten o’clock sharp, we walked out of the elevator and into the tenth floor lobby of the Seattle Criminal Justice Center. Mickey Cole and Javier Martinez were already there, talking to each other while they waited for Nancy. When we stepped out, Mickey saw me. He nodded. “Hey, guys,” he said.
We walked over. “Good morning.”
“How are you two this fine morning?” he asked. “All ready to go?”
I nodded. “You bet.” I looked the two of them over. Instead of the grubby jeans and T-shirts they’d been wearing when we met two days ago, today they were both dressed in tactical clothing, right down to black boots. “You know, you didn’t have to get all dressed up for us,” I said.
Mickey smiled. “No shit,” he said. “So much for casual Fridays, right?”
I gave him another look over. “Looks pretty tight to me,” I said. “Reminds me of the old days.”
“You guys wore this kind of stuff in Iraq?” Mickey asked.
I nodded. “Yeah, pretty much,” I said. “Different color, but same kind of gear. Course we’d have about forty pounds of shit strapped onto our belt and vest, but same basic idea.”
“Cool,” he said. “One of these days, I want to take you to lunch. I’ve got a bunch of questions about your time in the service-,” he paused and looked at me seriously, “-that is, if you don’t mind talking about it.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “I don’t usually bring it up, but if someone has questions, I don’t mind answering.”
“That’d be great,” he said.
“Why-you thinking about joining up?”
He laughed. “Who knows, right, Javi?” Both men laughed.
“That’s right,” Javier said. “Depends on how the contract talks between the union and the city go. Right now, they’re still a long way apart. We may need another job.”
“They’d probably be happy to have you,” I said. “How you boys feel about low pay and the desert?”
“No mold, no mildew,” Mickey said. “Sounds cool.”
I laughed. “Cool is one thing it ain’t,” I said. “Think warm, maybe hot. Think-dry.”
“Hot and dry are good,” Mickey said. “We’ll see. Meanwhile. .”
“Shifting gears-,” Javier said. The two partners were so comfortable with each other, they could finish each other’s sentences.
“Shifting gears,” Mickey continued, “we haven’t been sitting on our asses over the past couple of days. We were able to dig up some more information on Donnie Martin and NSSB.” He paused. “You know, this fucker’s a little scary.” He paused again, “Oops,” he said, turning to Toni. “Pardon my language.”
Toni smiled. “No problem. This guy here-” that would be me, “-talks like that all the time.”
“What makes you say he’s a little scary?” I asked.
At that moment, Nancy Stewart walked out of a door marked Authorized Personnel Only. She held the door open and said, “Good morning, everyone. You guys ready?”
Mickey turned back to me. “I’ll go over it when we’re all together,” he said.
We followed Nancy back to a large conference room. Tyrone Allison was already there, along with another man whom I recognized. Captain Gary Radovich headed up the Seattle SWAT unit. He was medium height and solid in build, probably in his mid-fifties. His prematurely silver-white hair was cut in a tight military-buzz style. He saw us enter and immediately stood up. We’d accompanied his team on a SWAT raid on the apartment of a suspected drug cartel member last August. I’m not sure he remembered me, but most people tend to remember Toni. He smiled. “I remember you two from last year,” he said. Wow. Better memory than I thought.
“Captain Radovich,” Toni said, “It’s good to see you. I didn’t know you’d be leading this raid today.”
“It’s Toni Blair, right?”
She nodded, smiling. “You remembered.”
“Of course,” he said. He turned to me. “And you are. .?”
“Danny Logan,” Toni said, filling in his blanks. There. I was right about his memory, after all.
“That’s right,” he said. “Good to see you two again. And to address your point, Ms. Blair, yes, I am heading up the operation today.”
“Wonderful,” Toni said.
Two other men walked into the conference room. Radovich nodded toward them. “Let me introduce these two mean-looking guys,” he said. “Dave Bryant and Lonnie Charles from the narcotics unit. Apologies for their generally unpleasant demeanor. They have to deal with crackheads, tweekers, and various other druggies all day long, and it tends to make them cranky.”
“Very funny,” Bryant said.
The men said their hellos and took their seats.
“Let’s get going, then,” Nancy said. “I’m going to provide a little background for everyone and then Gary, I think you’ve got an operation all planned out?”
He nodded. “I do,” he said.
“Good. So what we’ve got is a house on the western edge of Ravenna Park.” She used a projector to flash an aerial photo of the boys’ house up on the screen. She walked the group through the history of our investigation, including a description of Donnie Martin and DeMichael Hollins.
“I can add a little about Donnie Martin,” Mickey said. “Since we talked to Danny here a couple of days ago, we’ve been doing a little digging.” He turned to Javier and nodded.
“Donnie Martin, as Nancy just explained, is a twenty-two-year-old career criminal. He’s already spent six years of his life locked up in one institution or another, starting when he was eleven years old. He served two different stints at the Green Hill School in Chehalis. And, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, Green Hill is not known for being a college prep school. Martin’s no petty thief-he’s a violent young man. He’s been arrested twice for assault-once when he was sixteen. The second time was two years ago, when he was twenty. He beat another gang member nearly to death with a baseball bat, but the case got dropped when the victim refused to testify-said he tripped going down a flight of stairs. All the other witnesses suddenly developed amnesia and recanted.”
“I can add to that as well,” I said. “In the course of our investigation, we interviewed a friend of Donnie’s family, Reverend Arthur Jenkins. Reverend Art’s the pastor of the Twenty-Third Street Baptist Church over in the Central District-the area where Donnie Martin and DeMichael Hollins grew up. He knows the boys well-in fact, he presided over Donnie’s aunt’s funeral a year ago. He told me that when he tried to talk some sense into Donnie then, Donnie just laughed and wouldn’t have any of it. According to Reverend Art, the word is that Donnie Martin said no way he was going to end up in Walla Walla-he’d rather go out shooting.”
“Great,” Gary said, sarcastically. “Your basic nutcase. I’ll make sure my men are briefed. Thanks for the heads-up.”
I nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Back to our raid. What do we know about the house?”
“Not too much,” Nancy said. She turned to me. “Danny, you guys staked this house out, right?”
“Not this one,” I said. “The NSSB gang has a total of three houses that we’re aware of. We staked out one of the other ones. But we do have some familiarity with this house.” I squirmed a little as I said this. The police were unaware of my clandestine recon mission the day before yesterday.
“Inside layout?” Radovich asked. “That’s what would really be helpful.”
“A little,” I said.
Nancy looked at me curiously for a few seconds. She cocked her head slightly and gave me a look that was equal parts skeptical and suspicious.
Oh, what fun. When I’d made my little recon excursion into the house, I hadn’t thought that the information I’d gathered would become vital to the success of a police raid. Now, if I held back information in order to protect myself from a possible B amp;E charge, I might possibly be endangering the lives of Radovich’s SWAT team members. I made a quick no-brainer decision. “Look,” I said. “You’re going to have guys putting their lives on the line in a couple of hours, so I’m not going to hold out on you. I’ve been in that house. Don’t ask how.”
Gary and Nancy both looked at me. Then Radovich shook his head and said, “I don’t care how. Tell me what you know.”
Whew! I stepped over to a whiteboard and grabbed a marker. I sketched a rough outline of the floor plan as I described it. “The house has three floors-main floor, upstairs, and basement-except when I was in it, I didn’t know about the basement. The main floor has a big porch and a front door with a sidelight window. You can definitely see outside onto the porch from inside the house.” I drew clever little sight lines to illustrate my point. “Be careful. The front door opens up onto a living room and formal dining room area. There’s also a back door that opens up onto a family room. If the blinds are open, you can definitely see into the backyard from the family room.” I drew more squiggly little lines. “Again, be careful. The kitchen is also in the back near this area. And then there’s another door on the north side of the house that enters into an office area, here.”
“Any bedrooms on the main floor?”
“Yeah, what looks to be a guest bedroom.”
He nodded. “Upstairs layout?”
I drew a separate box and started sketching. “Stairway at one end, here, and then a long hallway with three bedrooms on either side. The last bedroom in the back of the house is set up as kind of a bedroom photography studio.”
He took notes. “Basement?”
“Yeah. Like I said, I didn’t even know about it when I was there. But apparently, there’s a basement with an entry in the office down here on the main floor.” I pointed to it.
Nancy looked at me for a moment, then she looked down at her notes for a few seconds. “The judge talked to our witness-a juvenile female-last night,” she said. “Our witness told her that the gang keeps marijuana in the kitchen pantry and that they keep cocaine, methamphetamine, and weapons downstairs in the basement. Also-and this is very important-she said there are two bedrooms in the basement that lock from the outside; they’re essentially jail cells. We have reason to believe that a missing juvenile-Isabel Delgado-may be held in one of these basement bedrooms. Although the judge gave us our warrant specifically for illegal drugs, the warrant allows us to search those bedrooms-for drugs-and to make sure our officers are safe. If you happen to discover a young girl being held against her will while you’re in there, well, let’s just go ahead and bring her out, too.”
Radovich nodded. “Agreed,” he said.
“Any idea what we’re talking about in terms of dope?” Bryant asked.
“I think there’s at least ten kilos in the kitchen pantry,” I said, pointing to the closet I’d sketched in the back of the kitchen. “I think it’s in one-kilo bricks. I don’t know anything about the blow or the crystal.”
He stared at me for a minute. I didn’t know what to make of his dark, beady eyes. Maybe he just didn’t like me. “You seem to have pretty good information,” he said.
I smiled. “I do,” I said. I didn’t elaborate.
“How about the guns?” Radovich asked. “Do we know anything about their weapons?”
Nancy turned to me. “Well?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No, sorry. I don’t know anything about their weapons.”
“How about lookouts?” Radovich asked.
“The couple times we’ve driven past, we haven’t seen any,” I said.
“So,” Radovich said, “if we’re going to the trouble of searching the house for drugs, and if we happen to find some, we’re going to want to arrest someone. Preferably the ringleader-this Donnie Martin character. How do we know he’ll even be at this house? As I understand it, he and his girlfriend-,” he referred to his notes before continuing, “Patricia Denise ‘Crystal’ Wallace-don’t even live there.”
“True,” I said, nodding. “But every day we’ve watched, Martin and Crystal Wallace leave their house about a mile away and drive over to this house at noon or a little after. We think they hold some sort of staff meeting-maybe to divvy up the previous night’s earnings. But we’ll know for sure whether he’s there or not by whether we see his car-a white BMW.”
“And we don’t need to worry about these other two houses?” He pointed to photos of the big house and the girls’ house.
I shook my head. “Lucky for us, they have their daily staff meeting at our target house. There probably won’t be anyone at all at the big house, and most likely it will be just the girls at the other house.”
“We’re going to watch both of them while we’re raiding the house on Brooklyn, anyway,” Nancy said. “Or actually, Danny’s going to have a man watching each house so that we can concentrate all our guys on the raid. Our warrant includes them, as well-just without the no-knock part. We’ll hit them after we’re all done with the target.”
Radovich nodded. “Makes sense. So here’s our basic plan, then. He spent the next twenty minutes going through a simple but very detailed assault plan that seemed to me to leave nothing to chance.
“Anything else anyone wants to add?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Mickey said. “Remember to be careful with Martin. He’s dangerous.”
Radovich nodded. “So are we.” He looked up at the clock in the back of the room. “It’s eleven o’clock now. We’ll meet at the rally point at noon. I’ll need a couple of minutes there to go over the plan with all the men. At 12:15 p.m. we’ll move to our assault positions. Then, when everyone’s ready, we’ll go. Questions?”
There were none. The meeting broke up, and we started to leave.
“Hey, Logan.”
I turned around.
Gary Radovich approached. “I just wanted to say, I appreciate you coming clean in there. My main goal is to make sure that I go home with the same number of guys I started with.”
I nodded. “Been there, Captain. I get it. Just remember: these guys are going to be either in the back of the house-the family room-or the basement. The living room’s not set up for more than four people.”
“Got it,” he said. “Thanks.”
Nancy walked up and said, “I appreciate it, too. Still, when this is all over, we need to have a little talk,” she said. “Seriously.”
I nodded. You bet. Right after we pull Isabel and Kelli out, I’m all yours.
Since I often drive the Jeep with its hard top removed, I’d had a locking steel box welded into the floor of the cargo compartment for security purposes. Both Toni and I are almost always armed. For me, it’s a carryover from my military days. Toni learned from me. On the few occasions when I needed to take my weapon off-like when I visit police headquarters, for example-I lock it up in the steel box. But today, the moment we were out of there-even as we stood there in the police garage-we “gunned” up. To not have done so would have been unthinkable. Imagine. “Excuse me, Mr. Armed Bad Guy. Would you hold up a second while I run to my car and get my sidearm?”
Although we were dressed plainclothes-style in blue jeans and shirts, we’d chosen to wear our tactical belts and holsters today-the kind that strap down around the thigh. In the unlikely event that we found ourselves in a gunfight during the raid, I wanted to be ready. Along those lines, I also went ahead and pulled out the two dark blue bulletproof vests we’d brought along. These, I tossed into the backseat of the Jeep for easy access later.
“You ready?” I asked Toni.
She nodded.
“You nervous?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Mostly because of Kelli.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll have her out of there before lunchtime’s over.”