“Hang on, there was a black guy in the—”
“This ain’t Ohio, buddy.”
The chief nodded for Paulson to ratchet down the cuffs tight to the wrists.
“You can’t just grab your nuts and blame the black guy.”
CLEVELAND, OHIO
9:27 A.M.
THE DEA ARRIVED WITH PLANE tickets to Georgia on the first day Joe Pritchard had with his new partner, a kid named Lincoln Perry.
You were supposed to get to know your partners by working with them, but Joe had actually been watching Perry for a week, and not feeling optimistic about the pairing. Every night, Perry went drinking alone at a bar on Clark Avenue called the Hideaway. He was drinking alone because two weeks earlier he’d busted his childhood buddy, a guy named Ed Gradduk, on cocaine-dealing charges on the very streets where the two had grown up more like brothers than friends. To say that Perry was now persona non grata in his old neighborhood was an understatement. Given the chance to choose badge or buddy, he hadn’t hesitated.
Thus the promotion.
Joe had heard the story and was impressed by it, but as he sat running surveillance on his own partner-to-be, watching Perry sip beer and stare into the middle distance as if unaware of the building rage his presence was creating in the bar, he was worried. Coming back down there, insisting on sitting down in the lion’s den, was baiting trouble, and for what?
So on Friday morning he had a plan for the day, and the plan was his “no cowboys” lecture. Then the DEA showed up and told him he was packing Perry along to Georgia, cowboy or not, to try to find Antonio Childers.
Antonio Childers was a viral plague of Cleveland’s crime scene, an east-side banger who’d spread his empire wide, pushing across town. He sold everything he could, from stolen cars to physical enforcement, but lately he’d made his name on Colombian cocaine. He was a suspect in more than a dozen murders in the past two years alone.
He’d also been missing for nearly a month.
For a week, maybe ten days, investigators had entertained the hopeful notion that he was dead and his body would turn up in the trunk of a car on Eddy Road, or maybe wash up in the Flats of the Cuyahoga River, or the Lake Erie breakwater. Joe hadn’t shared that enthusiasm. None of his informants gave the slightest indication that there had been a power shift, or a power vacuum. The system purred on, and Antonio Childers remained at the wheel.
From where, though?
They’d heard a lot of rumors. Georgia wasn’t in the mix. But here were two DEA agents with plane tickets. One of them was a stocky white guy with a crew cut who chewed Nicorette for the entire briefing, popping in fresh pieces but never removing the old ones, so that by the end of things he was working on a damn golf ball in the corner of his jaw. He didn’t say much, but he nodded a lot and occasionally made a finger-gun pointing gesture when he agreed with something. The other was a tall woman named Luisa who had packed the brains while her partner packed his gum.
“The coke Antonio is moving has come through Atlanta for about nine months,” she explained. She held a folder in her hands but kept it closed. “He’s one of four, maybe five players working off the same supply. But they always transported it to him. When that stopped, he decided to head south himself.”
“Why’d it stop?”
“We think they got a little uneasy about surveillance.”
“That would be DEA surveillance?”
She nodded.
Joe thought this made sense. Antonio was not the type of guy who’d give up on a good thing when he found it. He’d be more inclined to go down and sort it out. If you stayed untouchable in your own neighborhood long enough, you could begin to think the same rules would apply elsewhere.
“You’ve known this for a while,” Lincoln Perry said.
They nodded.
“You also know we’ve been looking for him for a while. Yet you didn’t think it was worth sharing?”
“Let her finish,” Joe said, but he didn’t disagree with the kid. Still, feds were feds. He’d spent too many hours in too many meetings like this to want to debate what they should have shared and when.
All he wanted was Antonio Childers.
“Where is he?”
“He was in Atlanta,” she said. “Blew out of town three days ago and our team down there figured he was northbound. They were partially right. He went north, but not far. Ended up in a small town up the mountains a couple hours northwest of the city. Best guess is he was waiting on a courier, or he was testing his back trail to see whether he was being followed. We’re not sure.”
“But he’s still there?”
“Possibly.”
That didn’t sound encouraging.
“His car is there. This morning, local police found that for us. With a few bricks of cocaine, some cash, a half-dozen semiautomatic handguns, and . . .” She paused and opened the folder for the first time. “One Nora Simpson, now deceased, of Helen, Georgia.”
She passed them a photo. It had come through on a fax and the image quality was grainy but you didn’t need any better clarity to see the gunshot wound to the stomach.
“This happened this morning, or the car was found this morning?” Joe asked. “Or both?”
The crew-cut guy made the finger-gun gesture.
Joe figured that meant it was both.
“So you think our boy Antonio did the shooting, but now he’s missing,” Perry said.
Luisa nodded.
“Then the locals are also looking for him,” Perry said. “Yet you want us to go to Georgia. With a warrant for a lesser charge. Explain that?”
Joe explained it for her. “They don’t want him jailed in Georgia. Not yet, at least.”
Crew Cut gave him the finger-gun again.
More points for the home team.
“We’ve got questions about the local police,” Luisa said. “Not only that, but we have another officer in custody for the situation. A Detective Jeffrey Tolliver of Birmingham, Alabama. Originally from a little town called Sylacauga. Played football for Auburn. His lieutenant hates him, but he has a good reputation for the most part. A sheriff named Clayton Hollister speaks highly of him, too. Doesn’t seem likely he was running cocaine with Antonio Childers.”
“So what was he doing in Georgia with the dead woman?”
“Before she was a dead woman, she was a live woman with a hotel room,” Luisa said. “It seems that even Mr. Tolliver’s staunchest defenders will admit that he has a proclivity for finding his way into hotel rooms with women who may be, um, recent acquaintances.”
“Happens to the best of us,” Perry said, and Joe gave him a warning look.
“Listen,” Luisa said, “what we need is to get Antonio Childers in custody in a hurry, but also in the right cell. We’re giving the lead you’ve been looking for. Hell, we’re even giving you plane tickets for the cause.”
“Why so important that it’s Ohio?” Joe asked.
She chose her words carefully. “Because we believe he has friends in Georgia who are a lot more important to us than he is, and we don’t want them to get early chances with him.”