"Hey, Chief! Some guy here to see you!" the desk sergeant shouted across desks and a booking station.
A basset-hound face came out of one of the offices, chewing something. "Who?" he shouted back.
"Who are you?" the desk sergeant asked.
"Remo. Tuscadaro."
"Remo Tuscadaro?"
"Yes."
"Name's Remo Tuscadaro!"
"Never heard of him! I'm busy!"
The desk sergeant was clearly pleased to be of disservice. "Ya heard him."
"Ask him if I can wait until he's not busy," Remo asked.
The sergeant shrugged and shouted to the rear again, "He wants to wait until you're not busy!"
The chief's head popped right back out. "He can wait until hell freezes for all I give a shit."
"Great!" Remo said, and took a seat on the wooden benches, ignoring the bemused look from the desk sergeant.
In the next forty-five minutes he listened to the low-grade murmur of activity. Pueblo wasn't Newark, but it was big enough to have its full share of violence and crime on any given day. Junkies and street gangs and dealers and hookers. There were a lot of grumbling cops, but most of them were grumbling from the stress of the job. The city of Pueblo, like a thousand other
cities, had a just-enough police force—just enough cops to keep the assembly line of arrests in motion, with no time left for its officers to do any real good. Remo could feel the anxiety in the place—way too many protectors of the public on an arrest-them-and-book-them treadmill. Still, most of them were doing their best, struggling to make a positive impact.
A few of them had become a part of the problem, but they didn't reveal it in what Remo Williams overheard.
Remo was staring into a three-year-old issue of Golf Getaways magazine when he heard the voice he recognized as Chief Roescher, informing the desk sergeant he'd be out of the office for an hour. The desk sergeant told him about the guy who was still waiting out front and they shared a chuckle. Chief Roescher left through the rear.
Remo stood and stretched as the desk sergeant returned to his throne, which towered over the waiting area. "I think I'll get a burger down the street. Could you let Chief Roescher know I'll be back in a little while if he has a minute?"
"I'll be sure and let him know."
"Thanks so much."
Outside, Remo raced to his own rental and was soon following an unmarked car with Chief Roescher at the wheel. He stayed several car lengths behind and kept an eye out for other suspicious vehicles. He knew the chief was supposed to pay for his corruption this afternoon, but that was about all he knew. The attack could come at any minute.
He fell behind as the chief's unmarked car pulled into a squalid neighborhood on an isolated patch of gravel that was cut off in the rear by railroad tracks and walled in on either side by warehouses. Remo parked and pursued on foot, moving in a fast glide of motion that would have looked impossibly fast if there had been anyone watching him cross the street. Nobody was.
The neighborhood was a ghost town, with bright orange Condemned stickers on every building. A peeling billboard on the street announced that the site would be the home of a beautiful new manufacturing campus, ready for occupancy in May 2003. Remo found the chief's car pulled up in front of one of the squalid houses, this one with an entire corner collapsed. Another squad car was also parked and empty—Roescher's collaborators in crime from the police force.
The chief squeezed in around the half-open front door, which was jammed in place, and a moment later a swaggering trickle of young men began appearing, coming from across the tracks in the rear and from the main street out front. They came singly, they came with attitudes and they came wearing their colors—and there wasn't a single matching gang insignia in the whole bunch.
"Ah, crap," Remo said to himself. This meeting looked like Chief Roescher's monthly conference with the gang lords of the city. Every gang in town sent its top dog, and any gang that decided not to attend the meetings was automatically out of business. Chief Roescher and his partners in crime would see to it.
This was where they planned strategy and handled the logistics of distributing the narcotics that Roescher had trucked in from Mexico. This was where the chief accepted payment for same. Usually there would be arrangements made for some sort of a drug bust during the ensuing weeks, just to keep the public satisfied that he was indeed a competent law-enforcement official. The chief was careful to distribute the drug busts evenly among all the gangs throughout the year. Nobody got special treatment.
The arrangement worked well. The chief got rich, the gang leaders made a lot of money and police interference was usually limited to the lower ranks of the gang hierarchies. Only the top men in each gang knew about this arrangement anyway. Smith had related that the federal probe had twice coerced one of the city gang lords to turn informant and gather evidence, only to find said gang lord dead within days. When a gang lord betrayed him and was killed, Roescher shut down the gang with a series of spectacular arrests that had earned him accolades and a national award from a law-enforcement association.
Chief Roescher clearly knew he was being investigated, but his activities continued and the Feds had nothing, which meant Roescher had to be a pretty slick weasel. The lone surviving gunman from the courthouse battle, if he struck, wasn't going to strike from the inside. There would be no bursting in with his machine gun firing. Roescher would have defenses in place for any kind of a raid. So where would the attack come from?
Remo moved from his hiding place, crossing the street and snaking through overgrown yards until he was lying in weeds at the back of the drug house. A cop was standing at the back door, one eye watching what was going on inside, the other on guard for anything suspicious outside. He never had a clue that Remo Williams was close enough to spit on.
"All right, you punks, first things first. I want to know who killed the kid in the playground last Saturday." It was Chief Roescher speaking inside the condemned house. There was a chorus of mumbled denials from the gang leaders.
"Listen up," Chief Roescher said. "Somebody shot that kid on the merry-go-round. It was a member of one of your gangs, or at least one of you knows who did it. I'm taking serious heat on this one. There's going to be no merchandise until I get an answer."
"Aw, man!"
"What's this shit?"
"You can't do that!"
The chief let the anger die down. "Well?" he said. "I'm waiting. Whoever you are, you're just ruining it for everybody else."
Remo had always hated it when the nuns pulled that kind of thing. Usually they withheld recess for everybody until they found the guilty party. Eventually somebody would rat out the guilty one, and often paid for it later on the playground. He imagined the stakes here were higher.
"I gotta leave today without a delivery date, then somebody here is gonna die!"
"None of that, Jimmy," the chief ordered gruffly. "Nobody is going to kill anybody over this. It's just business. My business is to look like a good cop in the eyes of the taxpayers and that means locking up somebody on this kid killing. I don't care if it's one of your boys, and I'm not going to hold it against you."
More mumbling. Finally, "Okay, Chief, it was one of my guys. It was Fran Kee Z. His real name's Zuder, or something like that."
"Thanks, Leonard. You did the right thing coming forward."
"I knew it! You fuckin' nig—!"
"Jeremy! We will have none of that here, do you understand!"
"But what the fuck, Chief, he tried to shank you, man!"
"Now, Jeremy, we all make mistakes. Remember the two old men your guys shot in last year?"
"That's different! They was asking for trouble!"
"They were playing chess on a park bench, Jeremy. They just got caught in the cross fire, didn't they?"