Court Gentry stood in the darkness, a light rain falling on his head and shoulders, the back of his jacket soaked from leaning against the steps of a rusted playground slide. He shifted his feet back and forth for warmth and blew into his hands.
As he stood and shivered in the tiny park he watched a young white man in a red parka standing on the porch of a dilapidated single-story home across the street. The man lit a cigarette and looked around in all directions, his eyes searching for anyone watching him. Court was just one hundred feet away but he might as well have been invisible. The man looked through him and continued his scan, then he left the porch and headed down the street.
Court kept his eyes on the man until he disappeared around the corner a block to the south.
When he was out of view, Court turned his attention back to the house. Sandwiched between a pair of low-rent and low-rise apartment buildings, it had whitewashed wood clapboard walls and a small front porch, accented by a black metal door that looked like it could withstand a direct hit from an antitank missile. There were two security cameras visible on the property, one watching over the driveway to the right of the porch, the other pointing straight down to the front door to record anyone who approached.
A tall wooden fence rimmed with barbed wire enclosed the small backyard, and an angry dog back there barked and snarled at any sound on the street.
Court blew into his hands again while he took in the scene. The inner-city location, the beat-up house with the fortified access point, the rough-looking skinny white boys coming and going.
There was no mystery as to what he was looking at.
This was a stash house for a drug ring.
Thirty minutes after his run-in with the would-be muggers on 8th Street SE, Court had seen a man selling packets of either heroin or meth behind a gas station on Savannah Avenue. Court melted into the dark edge of the parking lot to watch, and soon he determined the man probably wasn’t dealing H, because he looked like a meth head, which meant he was both a user and a dealer, and it stood to reason he used what he dealt. The bony man made a phone call after the sale. Court wasn’t in a position to hear any of it, but from the fact the man started walking as soon as he hung up, Court thought he might be heading to a stash house to drop off money and pick up more supply.
And Court had been right. He followed the gaunt young man seven blocks, finding this surprisingly difficult to do because the man was amped up and paranoid, always looking back over his shoulder, ducking down behind things and even moving in and out through traffic racing by on Wheeler Road. But Court kept the tail, because he knew the low-level dealer was going someplace Court wanted to be.
The man finally arrived at this single-story clapboard house on Brandywine Street, where he knocked four times on the iron door, and then transferred something—almost certainly cash—through a slot at chest level, before receiving something—almost certainly drugs—in a paper bag. He headed off up the street and Court watched the man go, and soon another equally strung-out-looking white kid appeared and repeated the sequence, giving Court all the evidence he needed that he’d come to the right place.
Court had considered making his way into a neighbor’s backyard to get a better look at the property behind the stash house, but the angry pit bull snarling there encouraged him to change his mind. The dog went positively ape shit every time one of the men stepped onto the property to knock on the front door, so Court decided he couldn’t get any closer to the house without raising the alarm. Instead he moved to the derelict asphalt-covered park, stood on the playground, and cased the location from the front, planning his next move.
While he felt certain he knew what was inside the house, he had no idea who was inside the house. They could be MS-13, the Salvadoran gang, or they could be white supremacists. From the three motorcycles lined up and locked together on the drive he knew they could be some biker gang, as well, but the old, beat-up bikes weren’t nearly as impressive as Court’s mental image of what a biker gang would be riding, so he was betting against Hells Angels or Outlaws MC.