But the worst part of a surveillance, even after only a couple of days, was the godawful smell. Thankfully, few cops smoked inside the van anymore, but a closed-up surveillance van quickly collected a variety of odors-fast food of every conceivable kind, sweat mixed with various deodorants and perfumes, fumes from a leaky exhaust, and other, more unmentionable, smells. Leaving the van actually made it worse. The cops grew accustomed to the smell after a couple of hours, no matter how bad it was, and if they then left the van to grab a bite or take a piss, the fresh air made getting back into the stinky, stifling, claustrophobic vehicle that much worse.
The Rosalee subdivision, between Sixty-fifth Street and Stockton Boulevard north of Elder Creek Road, was one of the predominantly white areas of the Elder Creek section of town, with lower- to middle-class homes on generally nice suburban or semirural streets. Go a few blocks in any direction around Elder Creek, however, and it was very different territory. Some houses showed pride of ownership, with clean yards, neat landscaping, and fresh paint; but most were rentals, subrentals, sub-subrentals, or squatter-occupied, and no handyman or can of paint had come near them in years. The area was a melting pot of races and ethnic backgrounds: whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, plus every possible mix.
The house just north of the target address on the corner was a very nice single-family property with a decent-looking lawn, well-trimmed shrubs still wrapped in burlap to protect them against the winter frost, plenty of lights surrounding the place, and a For Sale sign in the yard. The reason for the sale was probably the ramshackle house next door, a one-story frame structure of rotted wood and cracking stucco set in a dirt yard covered with patches of brown grass. It was surrounded by a mangled, rusting chain-link fence, and a huge pit bull terrier prowled the yard, barking fiercely at the slightest provocation. Some of the windows were boarded up, and others caged in steel bars bolted onto the outside of the house.
Usually it’s the dirtbag traffic around a house that gets cops’ attention, but this time it was the dog that had roused the interest of Intelligence and Narcotics again. When the occupants of the house were first busted, they had a fierce rottweiler guarding the place; after the bust, the dog was gone. The new occupants had a dog too, but it was small, a beagle or something like it, just as noisy but no killer guard dog. Drug dealers rarely used beagles as watchdogs. A few kids’ toys in the yard, a morning newspaper, and pizza boxes in the trash cans were more indications that maybe the occupants weren’t dealing or cooking meth.
But a few weeks later, all these domestic touches began to disappear. The foot traffic increased, the toys vanished, the take-out food containers were gone-meth users never ate very much-and the beagle was replaced by a pit bull. It definitely attracted attention.
The objective of this surveillance was to observe and look for opportunities. It had been suspected that the Satan’s Brotherhood was using this house for selling or distributing crank, but Narcotics had never been able to get enough solid evidence to prove it. They had tried every trick in the book: making traffic stops of vehicles that had recently been to the place, hoping to find some crank inside so they’d have probable cause to get a warrant to search the house; tailing frequent visitors, hoping to catch someone on possession with enough stuff to go after the house itself. None of this ever panned out. Neighbors were too terrified of the Brotherhood to cooperate with the police, and there was simply not enough weight moving into or out of the place to attract serious manpower. Surveillance on the house had been spotty at best, and it was finally terminated because the police couldn’t justify the cost or time to the captain, or the probable-cause circumstances to a judge who would be asked to sign a search warrant.
But the house was definitely Brotherhood and probably a meth lab-and it had survived the recent bombings. Even on lean days, the place probably turned several thousand dollars’ worth of methamphetamine a week-if someone was going to wipe out the Brotherhood’s drug outlets, this certainly would have been on the list. That was enough information for Deanna Wyler to order surveillance restarted.
The last three hours of this twelve-hour shift were the real dog part. This was when all the coffee in the thermos was cold and the burgers sat like lead weights in the gut, slowing down blood circulation and acting like a big sleeping pill. The van was cold, the seats smelled musty, and the rubber-covered eyepiece in the 180-millimeter telephoto camera was slimy from all the oily eyes that had touched it.
A few subjects had approached the house this evening, but they had been scared away by the pit bull. One visitor did bring out an occupant of the house; the surveillance teams got some good snapshots of a big biker-looking guy with long, stringy dark hair, a beard, and a leather vest over a bare torso, but little else. The big-ear directional microphone picked up an argument between the two. “What you got, man?” the visitor had asked, his voice coarse and cracking.
“What you need? You need a snort, man? I got what you need.” They had met at the chain-link fence, but it was obvious that the occupant didn’t want to be out in the open too long.
“What the hell is this, man?” the buyer asked angrily. “That ain’t no line.”
“Where you been, muthafucker? There ain’t no shit on the street. The Brotherhood’s fucked. This is it, man. You want it?”
“You rippin’ me off, man.”
The surveillance officer eyeing them through the oneway window scowled. “They could be talking about buying Girl Scout cookies, for chrissakes,” he muttered. He knew there was nothing in their conversation so far to hold up in court. “C’mon, boys, do the deal.”
An exchange was made, and the officers got pictures. The twenty-dollar bag of a white crystalline powder looked like a speck of white paint, a fraction of the normal size of a hit of meth. “They’d laugh that buy right out of the courthouse,” the surveillance officer said. “We need some weight, boys. These mouse-shit-size buys aren’t going to cut it.”
“There’s hardly any dope on the streets,” another officer said resignedly. “Everyone’s scared to be holding any weight. They think whoever took out the Brotherhood might go after them.”
“We should give this thing another week, when the brave cookers start gearing up,” said another officer as the buyer moved off and the seller went back inside. “Nothing worthwhile is happening now.”
“Politics,” the officer watching the front door said. “The chief and the mayor want something for their press conferences, something so they can show folks they’re in control. Election day is coming, and…”
“We got another guy,” the officer with the camera interjected. “Sheesh, I must be getting tired. I didn’t even see him walk up.” He looked up from the eyepiece, rubbed his eyes, then went back on it: “Medium height, about five-nine; husky build… looks like he’s wearing a full set of leathers, jacket and pants. How the hell can those guys wear those things? He’s wearing his helmet too. One of those full-face jobs.”
“I didn’t hear a Harley,” the other officer remarked. “Usually you can hear those things three blocks away.”
“I don’t see a bike.”
“No bike, huh?” Now they were all interested. “What’s he doing?”
“He’s… uh-oh, he just walked right through the front gate. That pit bull’s going to have him for breakfast-I don’t care how much leather he’s wearing.”
“This oughta be good.” The second officer lifted a set of binoculars and peered through the one-way mirror. “Here comes doggie booking around the house.” They could hear the angry barks and growls. “The guy must be a regular. The dog must know him.”