M. Grayson - Isabel's run

“Great,” Gary said, sarcastically. “Your basic nutcase. I’ll make sure my men are briefed. Thanks for the heads-up.”

I nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Back to our raid. What do we know about the house?”

“Not too much,” Nancy said. She turned to me. “Danny, you guys staked this house out, right?”

“Not this one,” I said. “The NSSB gang has a total of three houses that we’re aware of. We staked out one of the other ones. But we do have some familiarity with this house.” I squirmed a little as I said this. The police were unaware of my clandestine recon mission the day before yesterday.

“Inside layout?” Radovich asked. “That’s what would really be helpful.”

“A little,” I said.

Nancy looked at me curiously for a few seconds. She cocked her head slightly and gave me a look that was equal parts skeptical and suspicious.

Oh, what fun. When I’d made my little recon excursion into the house, I hadn’t thought that the information I’d gathered would become vital to the success of a police raid. Now, if I held back information in order to protect myself from a possible B amp;E charge, I might possibly be endangering the lives of Radovich’s SWAT team members. I made a quick no-brainer decision. “Look,” I said. “You’re going to have guys putting their lives on the line in a couple of hours, so I’m not going to hold out on you. I’ve been in that house. Don’t ask how.”

Gary and Nancy both looked at me. Then Radovich shook his head and said, “I don’t care how. Tell me what you know.”

Whew! I stepped over to a whiteboard and grabbed a marker. I sketched a rough outline of the floor plan as I described it. “The house has three floors-main floor, upstairs, and basement-except when I was in it, I didn’t know about the basement. The main floor has a big porch and a front door with a sidelight window. You can definitely see outside onto the porch from inside the house.” I drew clever little sight lines to illustrate my point. “Be careful. The front door opens up onto a living room and formal dining room area. There’s also a back door that opens up onto a family room. If the blinds are open, you can definitely see into the backyard from the family room.” I drew more squiggly little lines. “Again, be careful. The kitchen is also in the back near this area. And then there’s another door on the north side of the house that enters into an office area, here.”

“Any bedrooms on the main floor?”

“Yeah, what looks to be a guest bedroom.”

He nodded. “Upstairs layout?”

I drew a separate box and started sketching. “Stairway at one end, here, and then a long hallway with three bedrooms on either side. The last bedroom in the back of the house is set up as kind of a bedroom photography studio.”

He took notes. “Basement?”

“Yeah. Like I said, I didn’t even know about it when I was there. But apparently, there’s a basement with an entry in the office down here on the main floor.” I pointed to it.

Nancy looked at me for a moment, then she looked down at her notes for a few seconds. “The judge talked to our witness-a juvenile female-last night,” she said. “Our witness told her that the gang keeps marijuana in the kitchen pantry and that they keep cocaine, methamphetamine, and weapons downstairs in the basement. Also-and this is very important-she said there are two bedrooms in the basement that lock from the outside; they’re essentially jail cells. We have reason to believe that a missing juvenile-Isabel Delgado-may be held in one of these basement bedrooms. Although the judge gave us our warrant specifically for illegal drugs, the warrant allows us to search those bedrooms-for drugs-and to make sure our officers are safe. If you happen to discover a young girl being held against her will while you’re in there, well, let’s just go ahead and bring her out, too.”

Radovich nodded. “Agreed,” he said.

“Any idea what we’re talking about in terms of dope?” Bryant asked.

“I think there’s at least ten kilos in the kitchen pantry,” I said, pointing to the closet I’d sketched in the back of the kitchen. “I think it’s in one-kilo bricks. I don’t know anything about the blow or the crystal.”

He stared at me for a minute. I didn’t know what to make of his dark, beady eyes. Maybe he just didn’t like me. “You seem to have pretty good information,” he said.

I smiled. “I do,” I said. I didn’t elaborate.

“How about the guns?” Radovich asked. “Do we know anything about their weapons?”

Nancy turned to me. “Well?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No, sorry. I don’t know anything about their weapons.”

“How about lookouts?” Radovich asked.

“The couple times we’ve driven past, we haven’t seen any,” I said.

“So,” Radovich said, “if we’re going to the trouble of searching the house for drugs, and if we happen to find some, we’re going to want to arrest someone. Preferably the ringleader-this Donnie Martin character. How do we know he’ll even be at this house? As I understand it, he and his girlfriend-,” he referred to his notes before continuing, “Patricia Denise ‘Crystal’ Wallace-don’t even live there.”

“True,” I said, nodding. “But every day we’ve watched, Martin and Crystal Wallace leave their house about a mile away and drive over to this house at noon or a little after. We think they hold some sort of staff meeting-maybe to divvy up the previous night’s earnings. But we’ll know for sure whether he’s there or not by whether we see his car-a white BMW.”

“And we don’t need to worry about these other two houses?” He pointed to photos of the big house and the girls’ house.

I shook my head. “Lucky for us, they have their daily staff meeting at our target house. There probably won’t be anyone at all at the big house, and most likely it will be just the girls at the other house.”

“We’re going to watch both of them while we’re raiding the house on Brooklyn, anyway,” Nancy said. “Or actually, Danny’s going to have a man watching each house so that we can concentrate all our guys on the raid. Our warrant includes them, as well-just without the no-knock part. We’ll hit them after we’re all done with the target.”

Radovich nodded. “Makes sense. So here’s our basic plan, then. He spent the next twenty minutes going through a simple but very detailed assault plan that seemed to me to leave nothing to chance.

“Anything else anyone wants to add?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Mickey said. “Remember to be careful with Martin. He’s dangerous.”

Radovich nodded. “So are we.” He looked up at the clock in the back of the room. “It’s eleven o’clock now. We’ll meet at the rally point at noon. I’ll need a couple of minutes there to go over the plan with all the men. At 12:15 p.m. we’ll move to our assault positions. Then, when everyone’s ready, we’ll go. Questions?”

There were none. The meeting broke up, and we started to leave.

“Hey, Logan.”

I turned around.

Gary Radovich approached. “I just wanted to say, I appreciate you coming clean in there. My main goal is to make sure that I go home with the same number of guys I started with.”

I nodded. “Been there, Captain. I get it. Just remember: these guys are going to be either in the back of the house-the family room-or the basement. The living room’s not set up for more than four people.”

“Got it,” he said. “Thanks.”

Nancy walked up and said, “I appreciate it, too. Still, when this is all over, we need to have a little talk,” she said. “Seriously.”

I nodded. You bet. Right after we pull Isabel and Kelli out, I’m all yours.