Troubleshooter Read online

  “We’re gonna need our locals,” Tim said. “Bikers spread out.”

  “We’re getting a command post up and running. As I’m sure you’re aware, Jowalski’s partnered with Guerrera now. You and Guerrera work together?”

  “Very well.”

  “You’ll be a threesome in the field.”

  “Tip hotline?”

  Tannino nodded. “We beefed up the comm center to handle incoming.”

  “I’ll announce the number during the press conference I called for”—Strauss checked his watch—“about fifty-two minutes from now. We’ll also use the occasion to get the mug shots out there. Gives us a jump on the morning papers.”

  “Any leads?”

  “At this point we’ve got shit,” Tannino said. “The copters had to come from Piper Tech, took seventeen minutes to get on scene. The crew was smart, hit the van between two close exits—a lot of exchanges and intersections in the area, not to mention the fact that there are bikers all over the roads this month.”

  “Whose handle?”

  “Ours. But it’s a mess. Since it was on a highway, we had to back off the Chippies. Sheriff’s will pick up the murder—Walnut/Diamond Bar Station, though I’m sure they’ll roll someone from Homicide Bureau. Oh—and we have the pleasure of an FBI tagalong on the task force. I fought off a joint operation, but their agent sits in. It came from up top.”

  “I understand you’ve worked bikers before,” Strauss said.

  “Some. Not much. I know the Sinners, but so does anyone with a badge in L.A.”

  “Give me the CliffsNotes.”

  “The mother chapter’s in Fillmore. I live just south in Moorpark. We get them through town now and then, pissing off all the off-duties—Moorpark, right? The only thing sacred to a Sinner is his bond to the club. Don’t expect honor among thieves—they’re famous for double crosses, drug burns, cop killings. They’ve been deep into the meth racket for years—last intel briefing we were told they’ve done twenty mil on the western seaboard in drugs and weapons smuggling. And they’re in an expansion, muscling in on the Cholos for who’s gonna move quantity in and around L.A. Other gangs they’ve just absorbed, but their hating Mexicans is a big part of the Sinners’ appeal to the national membership. The Cholos have a more diversified portfolio of controlled substances, but the Sinners want to take the meth away from them completely—get a monopoly. They’ve almost got it with operations in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, West Texas, maybe Oregon. As far as one-percenters go, they rule the seaboard and the Southwest.”

  “One-percenters?”

  Tannino stepped in, “The American Motorcycle Association issued a statement after the Hollister incident—you know, Brando?—that ninety-nine percent of bikers are law-abiding citizens. The outlaws embraced the one-percent tag.”

  “So it’s a badge of sorts.”

  “Would you rather be a loser or an outlaw?” Tim asked.

  “Neither. But point taken.” The mayor shot a sigh. “What other rackets are they into?”

  “They’re strong on handguns, assault weapons, and low-end prostitution. Call girls they leave to the mob, along with gambling and hijacked electronics. They’re smart that way—they mind the terrain, dominate their sectors.”

  “They’re a business,” Strauss declared.

  “More like a conglomerate.”

  Tannino focused his dark brown eyes on Tim. “What’s your gut?”

  “Having looked at no evidence?” Tim asked.

  The marshal waved his hand impatiently.

  “Normally bikers take their medicine and do their time. They don’t want to stir trouble for the whole organization, so they go down nice and quiet. A decision like this had to come from above. Something big’s in the works for the club to take a risk like this. And Kaner and Laurey are key elements of it.”

  “Like what?”

  “That’s what we have to figure out. But whatever it is, it requires their chief nomads back in action.”

  “Who do you think worked the break?”

  “The other Sinner nomads already top your suspect list. They’re the hit men and muscle, the guys with the know-how and the balls to pull off something like this. Guerrera came up in that scene. I’m sure he and Bear are working up the names as we speak.”

  “What are the nomads?” Strauss asked.

  “They’re a chapter not based at a location. Always on the move. No home turf. When a club member becomes a fugitive, they’ll send him to the nomads—it keeps him from the law and insulates the other chapters from investigation. The different chapters help hide the nomads as they move around the country.”

  “An Underground Railroad for shitheels,” Strauss observed.

  “Right. And in exchange the nomads do the dirty work for the national club, since they’re already wanted.” Tim turned to Tannino. “One thing should be clear: Guys like this, they rarely come in alive.”

  Tannino’s weariness showed in his face, the kind of tired that anger wore down to. “Fine by me.”

  “They’re white guys, right?” Strauss asked. “The Laughing Sinners?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. The press can’t play the race card. That’ll make it easier to sell the body bags.” Strauss observed Tim, his face holding a hint of curiosity. “You do know why you got called in for this case, Deputy Rackley?”

  “I have an idea.”

  “That freelance work you did a while back. Infiltrating and dismantling that crew of vigilantes.” Though Strauss offered the for-public-consumption version, the gleam in his eyes showed he knew better. “We have a name for you around City Hall.” Strauss drew out the pause, his expression an odd hybrid of respect and disdain. “ ‘Troubleshooter.’ So this case? As we’d say in the Rangers, it’s a free-fire zone.”

  Tim met Strauss’s eyes. “I’m gonna bring them in alive if I can.”

  “And if you can’t?”

  Tim studied the mayor, then Frank Palton’s twisted badge on the desk. “Then I won’t.”

  4

  The right side of the six-foot-by-four-foot face was a mass of bubbled scar tissue. Were it not for the mug shot thrown from the computer projector onto the far wall, the command post would have been pitch black. Staring out from the nomad’s right eye socket was the flaming skull, etched onto an otherwise realistic glass eye.

  Bear Jowalski walked in front of the image, his enormous frame cutting a black outline from the stream of light. His somber tone matched the mood in the room. “Gents, Goat Purdue. He went over the high side in ’02, left half his face on the asphalt in Malibu.”

  Ordinarily Goat’s appearance would have elicited a volley of off-color commentary, but there were no chuckles or wisecracks today. The deputies functioned through a post-disaster haze; Tim hadn’t felt morale this grim since reporting to duty as a Ranger platoon sergeant in the wake of 9/11. In Frank Palton’s usual place beside Jim Denley sat an FBI special agent, Jeff Malane—a slender man with fine hair and sad, intelligent eyes.

  Bear bent over the laptop, and a new photo flashed up on the wall. A surveillance shot, taken from some distance, showed a biker with pencil-thin strips of facial hair—a stenciled beard. He couldn’t have been taller than five-four. His barrel chest seemed transplanted from a larger torso.

  “His tag is Chief,” Bear continued. “He earned the nickname because he rides an Indian instead of a Harley.”

  Guerrera ran a hand through his gelled hair. “Chief’s the Sinners’ intel officer. He keeps the files on the rival clubs, law enforcement, you name it.”

  “An Indian,” Tim said. “Sounds like our lead biker on the bust, right Jim? Jim?”

  Denley rustled in his chair. “Yup?”

  “You said the short guy rode an Indian?”

  “An Indian, uh-huh.”

  “He the one who sliced up that club mama a few years back?” Thomas’s voice called out from the dark.

  “No, that was our good friend Den Laurey,” Bear said. “H
e’s the knife man. Legend has it he cut one of the club mamas from her hips to her ankles, like a pair of chaps.”

  “But it was Kaner who nailed his old lady to a tree a few years back?”

  “Through the hand, that’s right, out near Devil’s Bowl.” Guerrera’s accent turned that’s right into thass ride. “When CHiPs found her a day and a half later, home girl didn’t want any help. Said her man told her to wait there.”

  “Quality girl.”

  “Den and Kaner are the most vicious of the nomads,” Guerrera said. “Which is no small claim.”

  A click brought the next photo up on the wall. A leering mug shot, the wide face peering out from beneath a mop of white-yellow curls. Faint, nearly invisible eyebrows.

  “Tom Johannsson, aka Tom-Tom. An explosives specialist. And a nomad.”

  No neck was in evidence; Tom-Tom’s head was set directly on his shoulders.

  “I saw some white hair peeking out from beneath the helmet on the Harley man.” Jim’s voice, flavored with a strong Brooklyn accent, was always slightly hoarse and strained, as if he were yelling.

  “Does he have the skills to have designed the boom ball that flipped the Suburban?” Tim asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Guerrera said. “Word is Tom-Tom came up in the Michigan Blood Patriots. Those boys could teach the ragheads a thing or two about improvised explosives.”

  Freed opened the blinds, revealing the modest view from Roybal’s third floor, and everyone blinked against the light.

  “We know of any other Sinner nomads?” Haines asked.

  “Nigger Steve, but he was shot off his bike three days ago,” Guerrera said.

  “A black guy?” Thomas asked with surprise.

  “No,” Guerrera said. “Just tan.”

  “And dead,” Bear added.

  Guerrera said, “He’s the first Sinner nomad to be killed by another club. The Cholos took advantage of Den and Kaner’s lockup to take him out.”

  Thomas again: “You think that’s why the Sinners busted them out?”

  “That’s my guess,” Bear said. “Protection and—coming soon to theaters everywhere—retaliation.”

  “You know how Sinners avenge the killing of one of their own? They take out five.” Tim set down his pen, noticing he’d chewed the cap flat. “We’re gonna see more blood.”

  “Yeah.” Miller’s face was tense with anger. “Theirs.”

  “Thomas and Freed, establish contact with the Cholos,” Tim said. “See if you can get in with their boss man in the mother chapter, the dude with the headdress—what’s his name?”

  “El Viejo,” Guerrera said.

  “It’s probably an exercise in futility, but if that’s where Den and Kaner are headed, we’d be remiss not to touch base and see if we can post a few men around the clubhouse.”

  “No way, Rack,” Guerrera said. “They’ll never go for it. Bikers handle biker problems, sabes? Plus, the Cholos are all over the roads— we couldn’t run surveillance on them even if they wanted us to.”

  Freed shrugged, the creases vanishing from his Versace suit. Growing up in a family business—money from which supplemented his GS12 paycheck—had taught him great respect for particulars. “We’ll get on it. Can’t hurt.”

  Thomas gestured at the now blank wall. “So you have those three beauty queens pegged as the break team?”

  “Looks like it,” Bear said. “They’re the remaining nomads—it is their job. Plus, we’ve gotten back corroborative buzz from our CIs, for what that’s worth.”

  A number of the Service’s confidential informants had biker ties, though their veracity was open to question.

  “We have last-knowns on any of the nomads?” Tim asked.

  “They’ve been in the wind forever.”

  Jim was picking his ear, his eyes glassy. “Cynthia just had her sweet sixteen.” He was talking too loud. Everyone tried not to look at him.

  “You all right, Jim?” Tim asked.

  Jim stared down at the tabletop. “Frankie’s daughter.” Of the four deputies injured in the escape, he was the only one who’d already returned to duty; he’d checked out of the hospital and come straight back to the office. He’d trashed his jacket, but his shirt was still marked with blood—thin lacings at the collar like ink. Palton had been his partner nearly eight years. Jim, the point man for lifting spirits on the Warrant Squad and ART, hadn’t shown a glimmer of his irreverent humor.

  “We’ll get ’em,” Bear said lamely. He mustered a smile and aimed it awkwardly at Jim, a small generosity that reminded Tim why Bear was the first person he and Dray called when they had good news or bad. And they’d had plenty of both in the past few years of their marriage.

  Tim flipped through the file before him, refocusing. “Any angle into the mother chapter?”

  “The Feebs—er, the Bureau—tried to nail Uncle Pete when Den and Kaner went down,” Bear said. “They rousted him under Continuing Criminal Enterprise but got nowhere. You remember the subpoenaed-credit-card-records debacle?”

  Tim and Dray—like most everyone else in the state—had followed the case closely. When on the stand, Uncle Pete, the droll three-hundred-pound Sinner national president, had made mincemeat out of the prosecutors over some innocuous credit-card charges they’d interpreted loosely to make their case. They’d had no better luck trying to untangle the knots in his drug-distribution network and his money-laundering operation.

  Malane had sat quietly through the first part of the intel dump with an expression of reserved superiority that Tim had learned was the prevailing attribute of an FBI agent. Malane cleared his throat and spoke, not lifting his eyes from the Cross pen that he tapped on the blank pad before him. “Uncle Pete is careful to keep the mother chapter free and clear of anything incriminating.”

  “Why’d you hit dead ends on the drug charges?” Tim asked.

  “Same reason we always run into trouble with bikers—their drug network is self-contained and resilient. They are the distribution network, so they control the scene from the stash houses to the wholesalers to the street-level pushers. They’re set up in the liquor stores, the mom-and-pops, the gas stations, doing little hand-to-hand deals that collectively move big product. They have a lot of free labor, in their women and their pledges. The threads of the operation are buried. You make a bust, that’s all you got. One bust. Minimal product. Plus, they’ve got a reliable and internal pipeline for flowing drugs to other chapters and cities—themselves. During run season especially, forget it. You got hundreds of bikers on the roads, you’re not gonna get cleared to implement cavity searches to suss out the few mules.” Malane’s face had contracted as if he’d tasted something sour. He was angry, but also humbled; he and his agency had been well and publicly spanked.

  “Why don’t we haul Uncle Pete in for a close look?” Tim asked.

  “He’s got that hotshot TV lawyer,” Bear said. “Dana Lake.”

  “I would advise,” Malane said, “treading lightly on that front.”

  Tim leaned forward, rubbing his temples, mulling over what little evidence they’d managed to acquire. The break itself had left few clues. The precision of the strike indicated that the route survey run by the transport team Monday—the day after Nigger Steve’s murder—had been carefully surveilled. The operation itself had been impeccably planned and executed. Minutes behind the advance car, the driver of a venerable yellow Volvo had locked up the brakes on the 10, slant-parking across two lanes and leaving a smoke grenade in the backseat. Wearing a helmet, the person had fled on foot, vaulting over the freeway barriers, hopping onto a waiting Harley, and racing off. The car left behind to block traffic had as yet yielded no leads.

  The sheriff ’s lab had already determined that the saddlebag explosive was an ANFO special, initiated by a dynamic detonator. Ammonium nitrate fuel-oil bombs, composed of ingredients obtained at any hardware store or construction site, are easily home-cooked, leaving a generic forensic signature and no Taggants microtraces to be run
through the system.

  The break team had used high-grade weapons: AR-15s were a step up from the Uzi-style MAC-10 blow-back grease guns wielded by less sophisticated offenders. Civilian versions of M16s, the AR-15s had been converted to full-auto machine guns. The process takes all of twenty minutes with a seven-piece mail-order conversion kit; a basic home workshop stocks the tools to machine out an AR-15’s lower receiver and make room for a drop-in autosear. The best investigative bet would be tracking the rounds, but even armor-piercing ammo could be bought for cash at gun shows these days. The armor on the Dodge transport van, like all bullet-resistant protection, was designed only to buy a little time. For all his experience, Hank Mancone hadn’t gotten off the X when the bullets started pounding, and that had cost him and Palton their lives.

  Tim stood and walked to the head of the table, the others regarding him with anticipation. “Listen, we got our cages rattled pretty good. Frankie was a close friend to everybody here. I didn’t know Hank as well, but whenever one of ours goes down, we all feel it.”

  Malane was wearing a bored expression, and Tim hated him for it.

  “But being hotheaded isn’t going to get us the perpetrators. Sheriff’s is working Frankie and Hank’s murders, so that frees us to focus on what we do best—catch fugitives. That’s how we’ll honor the dead. Work your CIs. Former cellmates, known associates, hangouts—you know the drill. Talk to gas-station attendants along biker routes, let them know there’s a reward. Get the word out to motor shops, wrecking yards, swap meets. Let’s ask our locals to red-flag bike thefts in case they’re stealing new rides to throw us off the trail.”

  “But don’t bother with Jap Scrap,” Guerrera said. “Or chasing VIN numbers on frames. Outlaws grind and restamp. That’s the problem with choppers—they’re almost impossible to trace. Every part can come from a different bike.”

  “Can you narrow it down more on the bikes?” Freed asked. “What we’re tracing and what we should keep an eye out for when we’re in the field?”