Chapter 24
I COULD DEFINITELY SEE why Ned Mahoney wanted me here.
A heroin factory estimated to have more than a hundred and fifty kilos of poison, street value at seven million. Cops versus cops. It looked like a no-win situation for everybody involved. I heard Captain Moran say, “I’d tell you to go to hell, but I work there and I don’t want to see you every day.” That sort of summed things up.
No one inside was showing signs of surrendering ? not the drug dealers, not the guys from SWAT. They also weren’t allowing any of the lab workers trapped on the fourth floor to leave. We had the names and approximate ages for some of the lab workers, and most of them were women, between fifteen and eighty-one. They were neighborhood people who couldn’t find other jobs, usually because of language and education barriers, but who needed and wanted to work.
I wasn’t doing a whole lot better than anybody else at figuring out a possible solution or an alternative plan. Maybe that was why I decided to take a walk outside the barricades at around ten. Try to clear my head. Maybe an idea would come if I physically put myself outside the box.
By now there were hundreds of spectators, including dozens of reporters and TV camera crews. I strolled a few blocks along M Street, my hands dug deep into my pockets.
I came to a crowded street corner where people from the neighborhood were being interviewed for TV I was starting to walk by, lost in my thoughts, when I heard one of the women talking between wrenching sobs. “That my flesh and blood trapped inside. Nobody care. Nobody give a damn!”
I stopped to listen to the interview. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty, and she was pregnant. From the look of her, she was due any day. Maybe tonight.
“My gramma is seventy-five. She inside to make money so my kids can go to Catholic school. Her name Rosario. She a beautiful lady. My gramma don’t deserve to die.”
I listened to a few more emotional interviews, mostly with family members of the lab workers ? but also a couple with the wives and kids of the drug crew trapped inside. One of the runners in there was just twelve years old.
Finally, I headed back inside the barricades, the inner perimeter, and I went looking for Ned Mahoney. I found him with some administrative types, suits, and Captain Moran outside one of the command-post vans. They were discussing shutting off the building’s power.
“I’ve got an idea,” I told him.
“Well, it’s about time.”