Don't Expect Anything

By Ralph Holiman

It's 1994 and somebody is killing and robbing drug dealers in The Big Easy. When DEA agent Richard "Doc" Holliday is called out to a marsh outside of New Orleans to the scene of a shootout where two local cocaine dealers have been murdered, he has no idea of what he is about to step into. For these are no ordinary murders and no ordinary suspects. Holliday soon finds himself juggling two important investigations, supervisor problems, and a failing personal relationship, all at the same time.

The murders soon tie into another investigation, one that will have much more serious consequences for Holliday and for Gina Tiburzi, an FBI agent who he teams up with, in a chase that goes from New Orleans to Baltimore. With neither one of them trusting the other in the beginning, in the end, they find that the only people they can really trust are each other.

Set in the relatively low tech world of 1994, see what the drug trade was really like to work for the men and women of the DEA and why the agents who worked these cases quickly learned: Don't Expect Anything.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ralph Holiman
• Release date: Oct 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301834747

Ralph Holiman

Ralph Holiman, Jr. recently retired from a long career in federal law enforcement. After graduating from law school in 1984, Holiman worked as an assistant district attorney and assistant attorney general before applying and being appointed as a Special Agent with the FBI in 1988. In the FBI, Holiman was assigned to Dallas, Texas where he was in a squad tasked with investigating the large Mexican drug smuggling cartel known as the Gulf Cartel, headed by Juan Garcia-Abrego. In 1991, Holiman was appointed as a Special Agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). In the DEA, Holiman investigated large and small drug trafficking organizations, working undercover in New Orleans, Baltimore, and Miami (and several other third world cities!). Some of the organizations he worked on or supervised while with DEA were the Sinaloa Cartel (Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman), the Gulf Cartel, and the Los Zetas. While in Miami, Holiman was one of the agents assigned to guard Max Mermelstein, during the trial of Fabio Ochoa, one of the original members of the first cartel, the Medellin Cartel. In 1996, Holiman was assigned to anti-terrorist duty on an ID Team attached and loaned out to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) where he spent seven weeks preparing for and at the 1996 Olympics. While there, he worked the scene of the Eric Rudolf Centennial Park bombing investigation. In 2004, Agent Holiman was promoted and became the Resident Agent in Charge (RAC) of the DEA office in Gulfport, MS. While serving there the office was destroyed in August 2005 by Hurricane Katrina and had to be rebuilt. In the months that followed, the office was conducting wiretaps on a large international Mexican drug trafficking organization out of a house trailer set up in a local Wal-Mart parking lot (known at the time as the Wal-Mart Resident Office in the DEA). In August 2010, Holiman retired, and spent two years sailing the Bahamas on his 42 foot sloop, before returning to work as a state investigator. Agent Holiman has worked in twenty different states and in nine different foreign countries. When not working as an investigator, or sailing, he writes novels and short stories for fun and profit.

Book preview

Chapter One – Death in the Swamp

Saturday, January 15, 1994

The young black man paced back and forth, annoyed and starting to get angrier than he already was. And, although he would never admit it, he was a little scared. For, although he lived with the prospect of sudden, and violent, death every day, it had started to ride on his mind a lot.

Recently, one of his brothers, William, had been shot to death. No one even knew why. Another brother, Antonio, had been shot to death four years before that. There was no doubt. They had the family gene for violent and early death. A middle class, white suburbanite might fret and feel sorry for himself, knowing he has genetically pre-disposed to have a fatal heart attack in his forties. The young man, named Leroy Polly, just accepted it for what it was.

More on his mind was the fact that his customer was late. At least Polly thought his customer was late. He really wasn’t sure because he wasn't wearing a watch, having never done anything that required exact timing or promptness. Not that Polly didn’t have a watch.  He owned several watches, including a gold Rolex studded with diamonds that he had taken off of a customer who had failed to pay for cocaine supplied on credit. After Polly and one of his crew severely beat the man, Polly had taken the watch as collateral. Later, after the man had recovered and made good on his debt, Polly kept the watch anyway, mostly because he couldn't remember where he had put it.

Polly looked around, and guessed it was somewhere between ten and eleven p.m. and that was punctual enough for a drug deal. It was also a fact of life for Polly that cocaine distribution and trafficking, like most illicit activities, were accomplished with less anxiety at nighttime. The darkness provided security and natural cover for activity that could result in long prison times if detected by the proper authorities. This resulted in Polly sleeping most of the time during the day. A modern vampire.

For one of the things that Polly and most other drug dealers had learned, was that narcotics police, especially the feared Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, simply did not like to work late at night. The federal agents and cops were too normal. No matter how much they tried to set their schedules like drug dealers, they had real families and real lives and few of them were dedicated enough, or lifeless enough, to devote themselves to their profession as totally as Polly had dedicated his self to his.

But there were other reasons Polly knew he had to work just a little harder than the average doper. For one, Polly had a physical feature that was a curse in his chosen profession, as it was easy to recognize and hard to hide. Polly, a very dark African-American, had crystal blue eyes. No other description, Polly knew, would be necessary to separate him from almost every other black male in the world.  Even his blue-eyed great grandmother, the oldest living relative he had, couldn’t tell anyone where the blue eyes in the Polly family had come from.

Polly didn’t fear getting locked up as much as normal people might think.  You bonded out, and you set out to make sure any witnesses against you had changed their story by the time the trial date rolled around.

And, often, good things happened in jail. During one of Polly's frequent, and always short, incarcerations in jail, he had learned from some Cajun smugglers that weekends, especially the three day weekends created by federal Monday holidays, drove most serious drug importation timetables. Polly always considered going to jail a continuing education opportunity and always used incarceration to make new connections and to learn new drug dealing techniques.

Which was why on this Saturday night, Leroy Polly was waiting for Gene Fourtune, who was becoming his biggest customer tonight, with ten kilograms of cocaine. Not on him or with him, of course. That was too risky. It is a peculiar fact of drug dealing that drug dealers do not like being around drugs. Instead, flunkies, or throwaway people, are used to hold the drugs as much as possible. It was also why Polly was standing next to a fifteen year old rusty sedan instead of a sleek sports car. Driving an expensive, or worse, an interesting car only served to draw unnecessary and unwanted attention. Polly would laugh every time he would seem one of his competitors being jacked up by the po-po on the side of the road in their chromed-out Escalade with the spinner wheels. Idiots.

After twenty minutes or so, Polly saw a set of headlights coming down the white shell road on which he was parked. Polly reached around and touched the grip of his cheap Bersa .380 caliber pistol, just to remind himself exactly where it was placed in his waistband in case it was needed. Rule number one in Polly's drug dealing bible was to always have a gun. It might not be necessary to shoot somebody, but if it did become necessary, Polly’s theory was that it was easier to already have a gun.

As the headlights came closer, Polly relaxed somewhat as he recognized it as one of Fourtune's cars, a beat-up Chevrolet station wagon.  The car drew abreast and stopped. Polly walked over as Fourtune got out.

At only twenty-three, a year older than Polly, Fourtune was of a similar mold. Like most people in Chalmette, Louisiana, they had grown up knowing each other since they were kids. Each one knew the other's family and friends. Talk, as usual, was brief, and pretty much to the point.

‘It’s getting cold as a motherfucker,’ Fourtune said, rubbing his arms as he got out of the car. ‘Must be freezing.’  It was actually about sixty degrees.

‘Everything cool, Brick,’ Polly asked. Fourtune had been called Brick by his friends, enemies and acquaintances ever since he had been hit in the head with a brick at twelve years of age in a fight.  Almost all street names or aliases were the result of similarly innocuous events or observations.

‘Yeah, man, I'm okay.’

‘Let’s see it, then.’

Fourtune walked to the back of the car and opened the hatchback. He removed a black gym bag and set it down on the ground in front of Polly. Both of them knelt down and Fourtune unzipped the bag. Polly looked at the cash in the bag, bound up in thousand-dollar bundles. He had seen enough cash in his life that he could glance at a pile of money and make a rather good guess as to the count.  He picked up two of the bundles at random and fanned the bills, checking for a short roll, two twenties sandwiching one dollar bills. The money in the bag looked about right.

‘Two hundred and fifty ‘G,’ Blue,’ Fourtune said.  ‘You know I wouldn't fuck you.’

Polly fixed his piercing blue eyes on Fourtune.

‘No, I don't know that.  Sometimes people get stupid. One time, anyway.’

Polly stood up and signaled to his waiting car.

‘You need ten more, right?’

‘Yeah.’

In response to Polly's signal, an old Buick four-door sedan cut on its headlights and came down the road, bathing Polly and Fourtune in light.

‘Hey, motherfucker, cut those fucking lights off,’ Polly yelled, losing his temper a little bit. This was the third or fourth time out for George, the twenty-four-year-old driver of the Buick. Polly would have to beat him up a little later to make the point about the lights.

With his night vision fairly ruined, Polly carried the money to the back of the Buick and unlocked the trunk.

‘Open the trap,’ he said.

George paused as he searched his memory for the correct combination to the trap. Then he pushed on the brake pedal and rolled down the right rear window at the same time pushing on the horn button.

Instead of the horn, which had been disconnected, he heard the whine of the electric screw arms pushing open the false floor of the trunk.

Polly watched as the floor of the trunk, with the spare tire still attached, rose up four inches. Polly reached under and slid out the ten kilogram sized bricks of cocaine and put them in two plastic grocery bags.

Designing, and installing, these secret compartments in vehicles, apartments, and houses, was a cottage industry in the parts of New Orleans that most legitimate businesses had fled years ago.  Polly usually obtained two or three of these vehicles every year. As word and rumors would get out on the street about a secret compartment, Polly would have to discard them, often to other dealers and usually even making a profit.

Polly put the bag in the trunk. He would have to take the money out and put it in the trap as the bag was too big to fit in the small enclosure. He waived Fourtune over as he walked around to the side of the car with the two plastic grocery sacks. He held them out to Fourtune.

As Fourtune tried to pull the sack away, Polly refused to let go for a moment.

‘Payment by the end of the month,’ he stated flatly.

‘Yeah. You know I will.’

Polly let go of the sack.

Out in the marsh grass, a tall slender man with close cropped blond hair, also with blue eyes, crouched in the soggy marsh. Even in the cooler weather, an occasional mosquito landed and took a drink of blood. The man, who now called himself Jim Smith, ignored them out of practice. Although not important this time, there might be a time in the future when such concentration and the dismissal of annoyances such as biting insects would be required.

Smith, dressed in a black jumpsuit, was watching through a pair of Steiner 7x50 binoculars. The Steiner binoculars gathered so much light that the man preferred them to night vision on all but the darkest of nights.

Next to him, another man, named Keith Weiss, held a small pistol grip that had a black parabolic dish and microphone attached. A wire from the receiver ran to a pair of headphones that Weiss was wearing. If it was aimed properly, the dish could pick up conversations a hundred yards away, which the unit then amplified and routed to the earphones.

Both men had 9mm Glock 17 pistols in low slung nylon thigh holsters. On a sling, hanging down in front of Smith was a Heckler and Koch MP5SD, a silencer equipped 9mm submachine gun.

Weiss held up a finger to get Smith's attention.

‘They're doing the exchange. I think that's the money right there that he's holding.’

Smith nodded then spoke softly into the radio headset, the microphone pickups attached to this throat with an elastic band.

‘Units three and five, move into position,’ Smith said.

In unison, a small young wiry man named Brian Beckwith and a heavily muscled and tattooed biker with long hair and a beard named Anthony Wilmer, stood up to see over the waist high marsh grass. Beckwith was carrying a CAR-15, a shortened version of the military M-16 with a collapsible stock, capable of fully automatic fire and equipped with a thirty round magazine. Nervous and hesitant, he moved uncertainly, looking to the other man for any indication of how to proceed. Beckwith was drawing on the confidence of Wilmer and the others to supplement his own lack of certainty about the correctness of his tactics.

He glanced at Wilmer. The large man moved with the supreme confidence of someone who never expected to come out second in any physical contest. He held the sawed-off pump action Remington shotgun like it was a part of him as he advanced on the drug dealers.

‘Number two,’ Smith transmitted. ‘Hit the lights. We’re going in.’

A pair of headlights from a vehicle coming rapidly up the road lit up the three dealers.

‘POLICE. FEDERAL DRUG AGENTS. EVERYONE IS UNDER ARREST,’ Smith yelled loudly as he pressed a switch on the stock of his submachine gun. The switch activated a powerful flashlight that was attached to the gun under the barrel. His light and a similar light from the shotgun Wilmer was carrying pinned the three dealers in a harsh glare.

Polly, Fourtune and George froze like frightened deer. In a panic, George broke down and started running down the road away from the approaching car. In an instant Polly and Fourtune made two fateful decisions. Polly, quickly sizing up the situation as momentarily hopeless, decided that he wouldn't resist and would try to deal his way out of the bust, accepting the loss of the money and the cocaine as a business expense.  He had been arrested before, albeit never with this much cocaine. But he recognized this as the type of thing that happened on occasion. He had a good lawyer. He would keep his mouth shut and see if the whole thing couldn't be pinned on George and Fourtune. 

Brick, however, saw his whole life ending, with prison and a debt to Polly that he could never pay. He felt trapped and could only think of one insane thing to do.

Fourtune reached for his pistol that was stuck in his pants. Fourtune had just started to bring up his nickel plated .38 revolver when six 9mm slugs from Smith's submachine gun ripped through his body. A body is mostly water. Unfortunately for people who are shot, water does not compress to any appreciable degree. As the slugs hit Brick's body, his body fluids and tissue filled the hollow point cavity created by the bullets. Unable to contain the hydraulic forces that the bullet's velocity forced into it, the hollow point peeled out, tearing open blood vessels and vital organs as it increased its diameter by half.

The bullets barreled on through Fourtune’s body, pushing out the other side, bringing along with it a good portion of muscle tissue and guts that splattered against the remains of the blown-out car door window. As his body convulsed and twisted, Fourtune fell to the white shell roadway. As he did, dying, Fourtune reflexively squeezed the trigger on his gun and fired off one round skyward. The errant round entered the bottom of Polly's jaw and exited from the top of his head. Polly fell as if hit in the head with an uppercut delivered by Mike Tyson off his medication.

A spray of liquefied brain matter arced over to one side.

Smith, Weiss, and Beckwith ran up to the dying dealers.  Wilmer ran after the fleeing George.

Smith fired two more bursts into each dealer’s head and heart from his Heckler and Koch. There was almost no sound except for the bolt slapping back and forth each time he pulled the trigger.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Weiss said, ripping the earphones from his head as he tried to knock off some body tissue that had splashed back on his pants leg as Smith had administered the coup de grace to each dealer.

Smith knelt beside the two drug dealers and examined them. Pieces of their bodies seemed to be on everything.  Beckwith looked a little green as he turned away.

‘They're both dead,’ Smith announced, stating the obvious.

‘Get the money, get the coke,’ he ordered. Weiss gingerly stepped around the bodies and gore and retrieved the gym bag from the car, still picking at bone and tissue stuck to him. Smith, impatient with Weiss and his preoccupation with getting the residue of the dealers off him, picked up the two sacks, one of them splattered with blood, from where they lay near the bodies.

Beckwith was pacing back and forth and saying, ‘Oh, man, shit.’  The two bodies were already starting to smell bad from the shit and guts that had escaped from various holes.

‘You going to go get the one who ran away?’  Smith asked Wilmer,

‘Aw, man. You know he just ran into the fucking swamp.’ He looked at Smith a moment, and then said, ‘All right.’

Wilmer trudged along in the direction he had seen the third drug dealer run. He figured the man was kneeling somewhere in the marsh grass. He hoped he would not have to wade out into the water and get wet.

After he had gone down the road a hundred yards or so, Wilmer stopped and looked around. He knew the man had to be hiding nearby.

‘Come on out, buddy. Don't make us call for a dog.  Where are you going to go?’

Lying down in the grass, George thought out his options. He had only heard the one shot. That might not be anything and he really didn't want to get bit by some psychotic police dog.  Slowly George stood up with his hands in the air. He was about fifteen yards from Wilmer and just across a narrow canal.

George watched as the bearded giant grinned, pointed the shotgun at him and pulled the trigger. The click of the firing pin on the empty chamber sounded almost as loud as a shot in the quite marsh.  George turned to run as he heard cursing and the heart-stopping sound of a shell being racked into the chamber. The blast and the subsequent stings in his back came as no surprise and only made him run faster. What doesn't kill you makes you run faster, he thought.

As fast as he could rack the gun and fire, Wilmer pumped three more rounds of number one buckshot at the fleeing man. George was hit by a few more pellets as he continued to run for his life. Suddenly, he stepped out into air and then splashed into another narrow canal.

Normally, George would have been scared of snakes, alligators and who knew what else in the dark water. Now he swam underwater until he was out of breath. He tried to surface quietly but came up sputtering. He stuck his face into a mud bank, trying to muffle his coughs as he swallowed the brackish water and black goo. A few feet away, something slithered into the water. George lay with just his head out of the water, his body sunk into the warm ooze.

The places where he had been hit were burning as if on fire. He listened as the man who had shot him loaded more shells into the gun and kept shining a light around. Twice the light swept by him as George buried himself deeper into the reeds and mud.

Figuring that he had probably killed the runner, Wilmer started walking back to the others who were quickly searching the drug dealer’s vehicles.  He waved to the driver of a Chevrolet Suburban; a man named Jerry Campbell. Campbell pulled the Suburban alongside the other vehicles and put it in park. He rolled down his window and looked over at the dead bodies but said nothing.

‘I think I got the runner.  He fell into a canal,’ Wilmer announced.

‘That's okay,’ said Smith. ‘If he's not dead, I doubt he's going to tell much of what he knows to the police.’

‘What did we get?’ Wilmer asked.

Smith nodded toward the two sacks in his hands. ‘Ten kilos, I think.’

‘How much cash?’ Wilmer asked Beckwith who was kneeling and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Beckwith looked into the bag. I don't know, could be a couple hundred thousand.’

‘You okay?’  Wilmer asked. ‘You don't look so good.’

Beckwith nodded and Wilmer looked over the two dead dealers.

‘This ain't nothing. You ought to see what it looks like when a couple of Harleys get tangled up at 80 miles per hour on a sharp turn.’

‘Here, take one of the kilos and plant it,’ Smith said. Wilmer took it and tossed it onto the front seat of the car the two bodies were lying next to.

‘Make it easy for the locals to figure out what happened here,’ he said, smiling. Next Wilmer lay down under the rear of the vehicle that Polly had driven to the deal. By feel and memory, he explored the undercarriage of the car for only fifteen or twenty seconds before sliding out with a small black box with a thin wire antennae protruding from it.

‘Don’t want to lose this,’ he said, smiling as he rolled over and stood up. Undetected, and unheard by Wilmer, his hearing still shot from the shotgun rounds he had fired, a spare magazine for his pistol fell from a magazine pouch onto the shell roadbed.

‘Let's get going,’ Smith said. The men went to the Suburban and got in. Campbell, the driver, carefully turned the vehicle around as the four other men removed their gloves and gear. The submachine guns, spare magazines, shotgun, radios, and other gear that the group was carrying were thrown into a plastic container in the back along with the parabolic microphone and headset that Weiss had been using. Wilmer kept his Colt 10mm and the other three retained their Glocks, which they concealed under their shirts. The men then peeled off their black jumpsuits and Hi-Tech combat boots, revealing the normal street clothing they wore underneath. Each man replaced the boots with tennis shoes.

‘Everybody okay back there?’ Campbell asked, turning toward the men in the back seat.

‘Of course we are,’ Weiss said. ‘Those assholes needed to be checked out.’

Campbell, who was older than the others and had experience gained from having served in the infantry in Vietnam, just smiled and shook his head.

‘Just checking.’

Beckwith just looked out the window, still tasting bile in his throat. The men drove out slowly, careful not to break any traffic laws. Reaching Highway 90, Campbell steered west toward New Orleans.

An hour later, with the Suburban safely ensconced in a small warehouse on Airline Highway, near the loading docks on the banks of the Mississippi River, the five men sat in Smith’s hotel room, examining the loot from the night's take. Smith opened a cold beer and looked around at the other four men in the room. Beckwith was on his third or fourth beer and was getting looped and talking loudly. Wilmer was watching the others handle the money like it was a high stakes poker game.

They finished the count. There was only $232,000 in the gym bag. As usual, one of the dealers had tried to short the other. Smith counted out $40,000 to each man.

‘That leaves $32,000 for the fund,’ he announced. ‘Agreed?’

Campbell nodded. Weiss and Wilmer looked like they wanted to say something.

‘What is it?’ Smith asked.

Wilmer looked away and then Weiss said, ‘Why does Brian get a full share? He’s really just training.’

Smith looked at Weiss and Wilmer carefully. ‘We agreed that we needed another man. Brian doesn’t have any training or experience. But he’s willing, he listens and he’s not some half-wit scum bag who would trade us up to some cop when he gets caught doing something stupid.  I’ve been running this thing pretty well and I say everybody gets equal shares every time. If you guys don’t like that, you go ahead and take quarter shares. And I’ll shake your hand and say it was nice working with you, sorry it didn’t last. Is that what you want?’

Wilmer looked away.

‘Shit. I was just asking,’ Weiss said. ‘I’m happy. Forget it.’

‘Well, since we had to smoke those guys, we probably need to make a couple more quick scores and get out of here,’ Smith announced, after putting the money into another gym bag. ‘No sense taking any chances. What about this other one you have lined up?’ he asked Beckwith.

Brian Beckwith, the youngest of the group at twenty-four, stood up to give his briefing. Smith thought he still looked a little pale. Tonight was the first time Beckwith had watched a man die. They waited.

Beckwith started talking.

‘The deal I'm working on involves me posing as a dealer with five or so kilos of coke for sale.  I've had one meeting with this guy, a local dude.  If I can get him to show up with some decent money, I'm just going to give a sign and you guys come in like cops and stick us up.’

‘Does he look like he could come up with that much cash on his own?’  Smith asked.

Beckwith shook his head. ‘Naw, this deal's over his head and he's already admitted it.  He's got somebody who he's going to lay off some of the dope on.  He's trying to put the cash together right now, but I'm going to have to meet the other dude too, I imagine.  I doubt he's going to send his money out alone. We're supposed to meet sometime tomorrow or Monday to discuss exactly how many he can buy.  I really think we ought to go ahead and do it.’

‘How did you get hooked up with this guy?’ Wilmer asked.

‘On one of our scouting trips I got in with a bartender. I gave him a gram one night and watched him snort it. He had done it a lot from the looks of it. I put it to him that I could make some deals and I gave him an ounce on credit and let him know I had plenty more. Last week, I was in the bar and he introduced me to a dude named Mike. We talked a little, then a little more and he said he'd get back to me.’

‘Any chance the bartender or this guy Mike is snitching?’  Wilmer asked.

‘Well, there's always the chance,’ Beckwith admitted. ‘I waited that night and followed the bartender and Mike to their cars and got their tags.’  He turned to Smith, ‘If you can get them run for me.’

Smith nodded. ‘Give them to me. Let me see what I can do.’  Beckwith fished out a piece of paper from his wallet and handed it to Smith.

Smith walked over to the telephone and made a call. He stayed on the line for about ten minutes and then walked back over.

‘The bartender has a petty criminal history. Lots of personal use possession charges, an assault, and a burglary.  Nothing within the last five years. Mike is Michael Terry Morgan. He's twenty-six, and he's got one arrest for burglary of a business and one arrest for possession of marijuana with intent to distribute.  The burglary, about five years ago, was dismissed and he got three years’ probation for the marijuana about four years ago.’

‘How's that?’  Beckwith asked.

‘That's not a problem,’ Smith said. ‘Nobody turns informant over a marijuana bust, if he had, he wouldn't have got anything anyway for that and a business burglary charge is bullshit.  If he's a rat...’

‘We just do some rat killing,’ Wilmer said, grinning.

Everybody laughed, still high from adrenaline.

‘What's your plan for the next meeting?’ Weiss asked.

‘Well, I want to try to get him out as soon as I can,’ Beckwith said.

‘Do you think he's going to have any money with him at this meet you have set up?’ Smith asked.

‘Well, you know, normally I wouldn't even expect it.  But, when I talked to him this afternoon, he told me three times he and his partner wouldn't have any money with them.  It just sounded kind of funny. It makes me kind of think he might show up with the money.’

‘It makes me think he might be a cop,’ interjected Wilmer.

‘Exactly,’ Smith agreed. ‘Let's make sure he isn't some kind of law enforcement and then I think we should do it.  I can get subscriber on that telephone number. And I want to get a look at him at the meeting. I also think we should definitely be set up with a plan and ready to take him off if he does have a decent amount of money with him.’

Weiss spoke up. ‘Doing all kinds of meetings and stuff. Isn't that kind of risky? I like doing it like we did tonight. Just wiretap some dopers until they set a deal and then take their dope and their money and light 'em up. No muss, no fuss.’

‘You wouldn't be saying that if you had tapped as many phones and listened to as much jive ass shit talk as we had to listen to before we figured out that deal tonight,’ Wilmer said. ‘I think doing it this way is a hell of a lot better. That's the way I always did it before.  Get their money, then knock 'em out.’

‘There's another thing,’ Smith said. ‘This is the first job Brian has set up on his own. He's new and even if we don't get but ten or twenty thousand, I think it's a good practice run.  Besides, five grand each for one day's work isn't too bad.’

‘Just make damned sure this guy isn't a cop,’ Campbell said, looking at the young man. ‘I'm too old to go back to jail and I'm not old enough to die yet.’

‘Yeah, but I've seen the women you get, man,’ said Wilmer. You don't really have all that much to live for, anyway’.  The others broke up laughing as the comment cleared the air.

‘Everybody out of my room,’ Smith said. ‘I’m going to bed.

Chapter Two – The Investigation Begins

Sunday, January 16

Rick Holliday slowly blinked away the sleep in his eyes. Rays from the rising sun coming in through the porthole had finally reached his head after their slow progression across the bed. He moved his arm slightly trying to gain a better position.

‘Hey, be still, trying to sleep here.’

Holliday looked over at the woman lying next to him. Jenna Wickes, although thirty years old, still had a high school girl's skin. Even first thing in the morning, she always looked radiant. He kissed her lightly on the forehead and she murmured.

‘You know I can't sleep in on Sundays.  I must read the comics.’

Holliday watched as she rolled over into the space he vacated as he sat on the edge of the bed. Jenna pulled down the sheet, exposing a breast, which she cupped with one hand. ‘You sure? You could have some of this.’

Holliday reached over and tweaked her nipple lightly. ‘Sorry, must read Dilbert.’

As he got up, Jenna turned over and pulled up the covers.

‘Try to be quiet. And try not to rock the boat,’ she added, with a smile.

Holliday stood up and pulled on an old pair of cut-off sweatpants. With his joints creaking worse than a 33 year old man's should, he made his way from the bow of the old Chris Craft and up into the main salon, ducking to make his six-foot-three inch frame clear the overhead at the stairway. He was pleased to note that the automatic timer on the coffee had worked.

With a steaming cup of coffee in his hand, Holliday walked gingerly down the gangplank to the pier, trying not to get a splinter in his bare feet. The sun coming up behind his back warmed him and left the city of New Orleans looking cleaner than he knew it to be. Sipping his coffee, Holliday walked down to the end of the dock and found his Sunday paper in the parking lot along with several others. He tucked it under his arm and walked back to his boat. He nodded and said his good mornings to several boat owners who were preparing their vessels for a Sunday cruise.

Holliday's boat, the Slipaway, was a wooden Chris Craft cabin cruiser. Fifty-seven feet in length, he had bought her for a low price when the constant maintenance of a wooden boat in warm waters had finally overcome yet another of her many owners. Thousands of hours of hard work and varnish had transformed the Slipaway to most of her former glory. Holliday often reflected that if he had taken as good of care of either of his two long term girlfriends as he did of the Slipaway, he might still be engaged, or even married. Or at least be on speaking terms with them.

As he walked back to her, a fleck of peeling paint on the hull, just below the deck, caught his eye. Holliday stopped and reached over to the spot, flicking away the paint chip and inspecting the area to determine the cause. The wood under seemed a little damp. That meant another water leak. About number four thousand he calculated.

Holliday walked up onto the aft deck, selected a chair out from under the large awning that let him get some sun, and began to read the paper. Holliday noticed his feet were getting cold and he wished he had put on a pair of deck shoes. Damn, he thought, January in New Orleans was hell.

At that moment, the telephone began to ring. Annoyed, Holliday got up and walked back into the cabin and picked up the receiver.

‘Hello.’

‘Rick, it's Pohlman down in St. Bernard.  Did I wake you up?’

‘No, Allen. Just reading the paper. What's up?’

‘You're going to love this. Somebody whacked Leroy Polly and Gene Fourtune.’

‘Shit.’  It was all Holliday could think to say.

‘Yeah, splattered them all over a road headed down toward the seafood docks. And George Robinson has got a load of buckshot in his ass.’

‘George, the rat?’

‘Yeah. You want to talk to him.’

‘I'm on my way.  I'll get you on the radio when I get closer.’

Holliday put the telephone down. Why did it have to happen on a Sunday?

Jenna walked out wearing one of his t-shirts that ended just past her shapely rear. She sat down across from him and propped her legs up on another chair. Modesty was never one of her strong suites, Holliday reflected as the tee shirt failed to do its duty.

‘It's cool out this morning,’ she observed. ‘Anything in the paper?’

‘Brad Pitt is engaged, or getting a divorce, maybe both, or something, again.  And one of those zip code girls, 90120201, or whatever, wants to save cows or whales or rabbits, I haven't got that far yet.  I was saving it for last.’ 

‘You take it,’ he offered, handing it over.

‘Thanks.’

‘You want some breakfast? I'll make you something.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Omelet?’

‘No.’

‘Pancakes?’

‘No. Hey, Rick?’

‘Yeah?’

‘You ever think about you and me moving in together?’

Holliday hesitated. Think, think, think, he told himself.

‘What did you say?’

‘You heard me. How come you never asked me to move in with you?’

‘You just talking or are you serious?’

Jenna laughed. ‘Don't get squirrelly on me, Rick. I'm just asking if you ever thought about it.’

‘Yeah, I have.’

Jenna waited a few seconds unsuccessfully. ‘Well, what?’

‘Uh, it's like this.  You like me, I think, and I like you and I like having you around. But I've been through this before with two long time girlfriends and a bunch of short-term girlfriends.  They all like me until they start living with me full time. Then for some reason, they don't like me so much.’

‘And why is that, you think?’

‘I don't know.  I think that most women know that some men, like me for instance, are decent enough guys with a few bad traits.  The problem is that women believe that if they can make it a full-time job, they can cure that defective stuff in us. With a lot of men, that's probably true.  I think there are at least a dozen women around who can swear I can't be cured.  Then they quit liking me and they leave.’

‘And you think that would happen to me.’

‘Jenna. The first girl I loved, who I was engage to, left me when she found out I was getting sent to Miami by DEA. The second serious girlfriend I had, in Miami, left me when I told her I was going to Colombia.’

‘Yeah, but you’re not going anywhere.’

‘How do you know that? I haven’t even been here a year yet and I am starting to look at teletypes for another overseas job.  Are you going to go with me to South America, to Mexico, to Pakistan?

‘You would leave me to go to some place like that?’

Holliday laughed. ‘Jenna, I know I would. That’s what I do.  That’s what I like.  Seeing new places. Doing new things. There isn't much I do know, but repetition has a way of finally beating some sense even into somebody like me.  Believe me, I'm not permanent material.

She didn't reply and Holliday sensed he had said something wrong again.  He always did, eventually. He walked over and kissed her on the head. ‘I've got to go down to St. Bernard Parish and meet with Allen.’

‘Have fun, but don’t forget that you promised to take me to the Quarter later.’

As crime scenes went, it wasn't much.  Polly's and Fourtune's bodies were still lying on the ground. As the scene was pretty far out in the boondocks, away from curious members of the public, no one had bothered to cover them up. The hot Louisiana sun sure wasn’t doing them any good, Holliday thought.  He leaned over Polly and waived the flies away.

‘His eyes are still blue as ever. Well, the one that’s left anyway.’

‘Yeah. Ain't it a shame? There just can't be that many blue eyed, black drug dealers walking around, and we just lost one more.’

Holliday stepped over to Fourtune's body.