Dallas Shadows 3

By L.R. Claude

Dallas Griffin has had some of the longest days of her life, fighting and living in the shadows and racking up a body count. Dallas has gambled her life several times in the last few days and now she finds herself waking up in an unknown world again, no cash, no ID, and no recollection of how she got to where she is. Dallas' shadows have come to collect, and she must atone for everything she's done in her life. From a prison in Mexico, to Florida, to the Bahamas and back, Dallas has tested her will, her body, and the character instilled in her from the military vets that raised her since she was a born. Dallas just wants answers to a lifetime of questions and come hell or high water, she's going to get them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: L.R. Claude
• Release date: Jun 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781943299928

L.R. Claude

As a single stay at home dad I am an avid novelist and active person. I take notice of many of the struggles in the world around me and try to help give voice to those that need it. I am an avid outdoors man in Michigan and I take many of the inspiring stories of others to better influence myself and my characters. I published 3 books in my first year of taking myself seriously and have seen wonderful results from my effort.

Book preview

DALLAS SHADOWS

BOOK 3

BY L.R. CLAUDE

Copyright© 2015 L.R. Claude

Smashwords Edition

My support and love through my writing has been incredible,

I wish that many others had the same encouragement in life.

For those who don't, you have my admiration for toughing it out anyways.

Cover Model; R.M. Foor

Cover Design Heidi Hobde Dailey

Chapter 1

You've heard everything I've been through over the past few days; the fights, the running, the deaths and also the heroics. Last night I collapsed in the grass somewhere in North Miami Beach, I was in a bikini covered in sand and completely delirious with exhaustion after swimming several miles through the open ocean. That was all I remember until I woke up this morning in a hotel room here in Philadelphia with my makeup done and a pants suit hanging on my bathroom door. Carol woke me up and prepped me for this morning’s meeting; she’s the smaller framed lady sitting behind me on my right. Carol was the unknown voice that called me in prison and a few times randomly, and strangely, while I was trying to track her down. I was determined to find out how Carol knew me and how she found me in that Mexican prison. I’ve been peppering Carol with questions all morning, through the pretty nice hotel, into the obvious and rather cliché dark SUV and up the gorgeous marble steps to this large and inconspicuous building. I am here to find out what the hell is going on and what any of this has to do with me.

I count ten people in this room, the six of you behind your large desk, Carol, myself, and two goons in poorly tailored suits near the door. I’m guessing I was checked over for weapons twice while I was passed out and judging by the piss poor needle-stick mark in my arm, someone tossed a few IV bags into me while I was out also, thank you for that. Back to my point, I see a median age of sixty-four sitting on your side of the table, Carol isn’t a spring chick and I’m the youngest person here by at least ten years which tells me that the goons are here to keep me in line rather than to keep looking pretty *SSMuah* (Dallas blows a kiss to the men standing at the back of the room behind her before crossing her arms smugly). I rode long and hard through Arizona after waking up in a gutter only to fall into not one, but two sex trafficking rings, I’ve had my ass kicked more in one week than all of high-school and martial arts and all I want are some answers about my dad and why he’s still in prison, what the hell Carol has to do with any of this, and why I’m here.

I am not your puppet, overweight men with guns and poor suits aren’t enough to force me into your mold and if I don’t get some answers soon, I will slap a century out of y’all behind the table for a warm up and then put your guard dogs out in the yard like good boys. I began putting the numbers together when I was called in my hotel room in Florida, I was expected at the Hogfish bar so the phone call to the payphone was expected but early the next morning, the call in my room wasn't. I am still bitter about getting my massage interrupted and then being chased by Sergeant Salt’n’Pepper and his little admirer out a third floor window was a dick move and one I won’t forget soon. I am hungry; I want a frittata and a yogurt. I’m trying to keep my head on straight but this whole hush hush played out government bull is about as old as… You (pointing to the elder lady at the far right).

Miss Griffin, if you’ll be so kind as to sit down, we are all here for many answers a man in his early fifties with a white mustache began to speak up. We are holding this hearing to bring to light the details of not just the last six days and what miss Dallas Griffin has done and how to delicately handle it, but also events that took place twenty-five years ago and how they all lead up to today. Deciding members of the panel remember than we are to hear all of the statements first and then we shall decide when it is all over with. The man sat back down after addressing the five other people that sat beside him. Ms. Griffin please have a seat, Agent, please begin.

Ms. Griffin spoke up; I won’t be so kind, I have a black eye, a purple ass and a headache, I think I have made my stance clear and my demands remain the same as she paced two steps in each direction while keeping her eyes locked on the panel members all facing her. The older agent near her kept his hands out from under his armpits in order to grab Dallas quickly if she sprang at agent Matthews. Dallas continued to flex and rub her arm where an IV bag full of solutions and some light steroids were given in order to bring her back from both: dehydration as well as light sun stroke and overall exhaustion while being transported from the beach she passed out on in Florida.

I am agent Karen Lin Mathews and I stand here before you three Judiciary agent representatives and you three Congressional judges on behalf of Dallas Griffin and Waylon county Colorado. The shorter woman in her forties with dark hair and a pressed black pant suit began to speak. "I am familiar with Miss Griffin, who sits behind me on my right; this room is comprised because of events I set forth twenty five years ago when I had just graduated from college and was beginning to make a name for myself in the bureau. I was fresh faced and ambitious as the Persian Gulf War was coming to the end. With the middle-east under a magnifying glass and all of the different countries funneling guns and money to their respective parties all fighting for power in the unstable foreign governments it left a large hole here in the United States, the need for many different illegal narcotics was at an all-time high. As the decades changes so did the music, the culture, and the sorts of drugs used among the different groups and youths.

With Iraq out of the running for producing some of the more popular drugs of the late eighties and early nineties, Mexico tapped the shoulders of some of the countries of South America and helped to funnel it into the United States from the Mexican border. The agency learned most of this through standard sources; the differential to the equation was that it wasn’t being trafficked at the drippy faucet rate but rather a busted Hoover Damn. Most of the drugs funneled in through many of the brutal biker gangs that had taken to the smooth roads of the southwest once they realized the amount of money that could be made. The amount of heroin coming from Peru rivaled the coke coming from Columbia but that isn’t just a different chapter of the same book, but that is perhaps a different book of the same series. The amount of money funneling to Peru was minimal compared to what Mexico was making, they backed the same side of the war we were because they also stood to gain and also had a hefty corner of the drug trade that they helped to funnel but the issue was that many of the biker gangs in the U.S. were also funding race wars and outsourcing terrorist style attacks on police departments in Mexico trying to close them down.

My cover was supposed to be as a medical assistant in O’Malley Memorial hospital in Texas, an area near the outer edge of the growing drug trade problems in Texas. I had the complete identity of Claire Rozky and had attended nursing classes while in the area to keep up the identity. I began a few small classes that were a convincing cover and they also gave me unfettered access to kids in their late teens that knew enough about drugs and where to score them that I wouldn’t seem like a narc. My cover was put together tightly, all the way down to a distress call of hitting six-threes after dialing a number from a payphone to call up another undercover agent somewhere in the hospital that knew me but I didn’t know them. My goal was to find out why there were so many drug instances in O’Malley Memorial, it had higher rates of overdoses than any other hospital in Texas; it couldn’t have been coincidental."

Dallas looked around on the floor or a moment and then stared up at the panel of distinguished members that had been convened. With a lightning jolt Dallas sprung from her chair, she counted backwards the twenty-three years in question as she picked at her nails and did her best to pass the time. Claire it clicked like a kick to the head, Claire was a name that Chips and Pickles mentioned that Digger had dated after he and Lu had divorced. Dallas was suddenly filled with a rage that Karen was Claire and that if Claire hadn’t been around that maybe he and Lu would have gotten back together and maybe he wouldn’t still be in prison or something. Dallas leaped from her chair; the commotion in the otherwise silent room caused two of the panel members to flinch defensively. The two men standing guard at the back of the room rushed forward to catch Dallas in midair as the made a desperate attempt to maul Agent Mathews. The two men returned Dallas to her seat and Agent Mathews continued:

January nineteen ninety-one I stepped off a plane in Texas from Washington. I had a knapsack of clothes and a dollar in change for a payphone if I ran into a tight jam; this was a bare foundation for which I would build my career on. I had an appointment the next day for a low level medical position at O’Malley Memorial, the job was a shoe in so I took the time to acclimate to the airport and each street around it as I could. I spent the first few days training at my new job and setting up an off campus apartment with two other girls that were looking for a roommate. I had my job, my accommodations and my end goal, the rest was for me to fill in the blanks and string together an impressive list of names and information to submit up the chain to clamp down on the influx of unregulated drugs pouring into the country.

I signed up for many of the student lead services like campus karate and also took up jogging with other girls from some of my classes to cast my net to gather as much information as possible. The student body at the college was rife with ties to much of the underground goings on that most of society wanted to turn their heads on. When I got solid enough information that the local cops could use I would write out a letter and sign it: Agent Mathews and just drop it into the local mailbox, it always contained enough intel to convict when there were dead ends for the locals to run down. My shifts at the hospital were sporadic, mixed between day and afternoon shifts but mixed enough that I saw many different sorts of patients. One of the issues I remembered being warned about before my assignment began was the escalating gang violence in L.A. and the larger cities, even in Texas. The gangs were financed with drug sales and the violence in some of the larger cities was at risk of boiling over to surrounding cities so I was supposed to steer clear.

With plenty of money to be made a vacuum begins to grow, the lower level drug pushers push harder and faster. The top group of drug runners recruited all sorts to sell their drugs, the more sellers the more money could be made while all the street vendors needed users and it was a big snow ball of black tar heroin. Texas was no exception, the middle of the drug ladder was expansive and I saw my share of overdoses, followed by the gang violence associated with shootouts in the streets. Most of the biker groups that simply ran the drugs were often protected by large markets, clubs joined under patches to share symbols to have protection in numbers and to make more and more money. Many of the highest level drug smugglers were selling to white and black groups; much like the U.S. allegedly sells weapons to both sides of most wars to maximize profit until the side with the best vested interests needs one big oomf of weapons to win.

I rotated wards in the hospital to gather enough knowledge and practice to become a nurse, or at least that was the rouse and the reasoning why I floated among positions within O’Malley Memorial. I forced myself to be as open and exposed to as many facets of society as I could; in the hospital near people that overdosed, school parties where drugs might be used, even just jogged in some of the less ideal areas where some illicit trading might be going on just to watch for things that would stand out. I read as many newspapers as I could get my hands on, with soldiers coming back from the war there were many seeking medical treatment in my area so there were newspapers from many different states with reports of different biker groups fighting here or drugs being discovered there, I tried to keep a quiet notebook among my class notes trying to put all of the trading lines together to make a giant case for myself.

While changing dressings in a burn ward I met a man only a few years older than myself, a man with thin dark red hair named Richard. Richard Spade introduced himself and allowed me to change out the dressings on his left arm that he had burned while deployed in Desert Storm. With minimal flinching Richard sat still and listened to me talk about some of my nursing classes and how I enjoyed the vast space of Texas and so on. Richard told me that his nickname growing up was Rusty because of the color of his hair but once in the military, which he had just gotten out of, it morphed into Lil Digger because his last name was Spade; like the shovel. I can feel the heat coming from under Dallas’s collar from six feet away, relax honey (Agent Mathews turned to reassure Dallas with neutralizing hand motions). Lil Digger burned most of the skin off of his left forearm pulling a man from a burning jeep or something not long before we met, he was out on patrol in the military when they found an ambushed convoy and proceeded to help.

Digger was a gentle man, he wasn’t very large or formidable in size but he carried himself well and spoke confidently. Digger left the military and was doing his best to readjust to civilian life; he used some of his GI bill to take mediocre classes at a local college just to get an idea of what he might be interested in pursuing for a career now that he had his life back in his own hands. Digger was a comforting person to talk to and it was nice, i spent most of my initial time in Texas feeling on edge until I met him. Digger was capable of changing his own bandages but because his bills were covered by the government, he was back every few days to keep an eye on his healing progress from his war wound. I admired Diggers’ tattoos; he was rather liberal with his ink running up his right arm, a giant bald eagle across his back and ink over most of his left arm, except what he lost to the burn scars.

I tried to time Diggers’ visits to the clinic so I could cross his path more than anyone else, the leather riding jacket and rough exterior seemed a good place to set my attention. Digger rode motorcycles, the exact type of person I was looking to befriend in the area. I played coy when he boasted and bragged about loving the open road the freedom that comes with it, I tried to be as naive as possible. Digger was very friendly and likable; it was easy to get him to share about himself as I slowly dressed his arm wounds and then drew out each appointment and let him tell me more about his time over in the desert. The cold sterile burn rooms of a hospital aren’t normal places you’d meet someone that you'd feel an attraction for, some of the classes I took to support my role as an eager nurse spoke about Florence Nightingale syndrome where patients fall in love with their care takers and the caution to take to prevent such things, I learned what I needed to do to get some of my patients to open up to me more than they maybe should have and I played into it.

Closer to some of the last visits with Digger I referenced how well he was healing and that even though he had burn scars, that they really weren’t that bad. Digger was prideful that he had the constant reminder in the form of a scar that he saved a brothers’ life and that was what he was most proud of. I admired the honor that Digger upheld, the sense of duty to his fellow soldier and regardless of personal safety, another soldiers’ life was sacred. I had my doubts about the role of Digger in the drug running but I wasn’t going to let a big hole open up in my career just on a hunch. I knew there were other agents investigating other biker gangs and there was even rumor in the academy that there were already one or two agents that lost their lives because they were discovered, a fear that I kept in the back of my mind in order to adhere to my new identity with all my life.

Digger mentioned that he and his ex-wife along with some military buddies had begun to form a biker club for returning vets; The Lucifer Squadron. If digger had just been a weekend rider or a bike enthusiast I might not have sniffed any deeper, but because he actually called himself a club, I wondered what sort of things they were up to in order to fund their constant biker lifestyle. Riding bikes is expensive and without a full time job, there had to be some other form of financing, including running drugs. Muling drugs is easy for bikers, they ride fast and cheap and the persona started in the sixties and seventies by many of the outlaw type bike groups had paved a way for an explosion of free riding bikers.

The roads from the Texas-Mexico border were open and vast, cars hauling bundles of drugs aren’t as hard to catch as bikes are, a pack of bikes can break up in cases of police intervention and at most one or two of the riders might get caught while a majority of a shipment might make it to its destination. Catching drug runners in cars often means everything in that car is destroyed and there is a lot of money lost to the supplier that fronted the money, but spread up among several bikes, there was a smaller percent of a shipment confiscated and it was financially a smarter move. With open arteries from the southwest to most of the rest of the country, bikers became a constant sight. With an influx of bikers and dealing entrepreneurs comes the ever present conflict over territory control. Many full time bikers live the biker lifestyle, fast bikes, fast women, octane in their blood and lug nuts for brains.

The biker clashes escalated in the eighties as Columbia shipped in tons of cocaine monthly and many different groups fought over territory control for most of the decade. The U.S. began to fight the drug lines and dwindled the population to less than one percent of what it was before the new avenues of heroin opened up a short while later. Once the heroin streams began to flood in, new booms of gangs and spring up cartels found any and every small street kid or broke pilot to move product, and that gave way to new needs for undercover agents to search and discover what methods were the most successful and shut them down. As a lady fresh out of school I was recruited to drop my age by a year or two and enroll in a small college in Texas to find out what I could. The agency was casting a wide net with many undercover agents trying to put as many holes in the drug ship as fast as possible to sink it quickly.

I would have