Page 95 of The Fourth Option
“Yeah. G-2, intel.Call of Duty? Get in the driver’s seat. I’ll be right back.”
The interior light on the old car had failed years ago, so Walker didn’t need to worry about that. The door, however, creaked like a rusted ship hatch when he opened it, making him wince.
“Sorry,” she said from inside the car.
He pulled up the collar on an old surplus Army jacket and kept to the shadows, walking past graffiti-marred homes with plywood-covered windows, to an abandoned store that had been his hide site for the past few nights. He checked out the interior through the broken windows to be sure no one was inside, noting the empty overturned racks were positioned just as they had been twenty-four hours earlier. A few faded posters for liquor sagged behind the register.
At the edge of the building, he paused to observe the street. The only cars were abandoned, missing wheels and any semi-valuable parts. They were now just hunks of rusted metal with rotting seats, some providing shelter for the homeless or giving addicts a place to shoot up.
He found the overstuffed dumpster by the shop. It had been there so long that it was recognizable from the satellite image. Walker dug the toe of his boot onto a hinge and hoisted himself up. He jumped and caught the edge of the roof, pulled to his elbows, swung a leg up for leverage, and rolled over the lip.
Knowing that he might present a silhouette, he stayed low, moving past a long-dead AC unit, vent pipes, and a giant hole with jagged wood splinters. When he’d asked Belle about the hole after his first night of surveillance, he learned that a lot of people in New Orleans kept axes in their attics. When the storm waters surged, those who had heeded that advice had chopped holes in their roofs and waited for help, help that often took days to arrive.
He stopped at the far corner and swiveled his ball cap, so the visor faced backward, and dug a monocular night vision optic from his jacket pocket. He turned it on and brought it to his eye.
Sure enough, as with the past three nights, the same two military-aged males were at the front of the house, one in a yard chair out front, another on the porch.
Stop thinking of them as military-aged males.
That’s exactly how you need to think of them.
The man in the chair was black, shirtless. Even from here, Walker could see that he was jacked. His chest and shoulders were wide and chiseled, a bandana tied around his head. He rested his feet on a full-sized cooler while he screwed around with his phone. His friend on the porch looked younger, skinnier, and wore a flat-brim ball cap on his head.
No lights escaped the house. Like most of the others in the area, it was still without power.
Walker shifted his focus back to the street as a car approached.
A modern Jeep Wrangler with Arkansas plates pulled to a stop in front of the house, a Razorback mascot sticker on the back window.
The guy by the cooler gestured and the Jeep’s headlights blinked out. A blond male, also military-aged, in shorts and a T-shirt, stepped out of the car, thick neck, clean-shaven. Walker could see there was a passenger in the vehicle.
The transaction went smoothly. Razorback walked up to Muscles, handed over some cash. It was hard to see what, if anything, was exchanged. Then Razorback returned to the Jeep and drove off. Walker had seen similar transactions over the previous nights.
Connor’s journal indicated that this was a known trap house. Though there were still blanks without the cipher key, they had figured out that the pills had colorful names: Yellow Jackets, Queenies, Pez, and Snowball. Connor was focused on Snowball. There was something different about it.
No sign of cops. The two guys out front were the same two that he had seen in his earlier observations. The op was a go.
After climbing down, he returned to Belle’s BMW, opened the passenger-side door carefully, trying to avoid the squeak, and slid into his seat.
“You happy?” Belle asked.
“Not happy.”
“Why?”
He glared at her. “Just nervous.”
“Oh, come on. Girls buy out here too. They’re often the ones whoshow up with drugs at the pill parties. Dealers are in it for money. They want repeat customers. And besides, I totally look like a junkie.”
Belle had played up her makeup, giving herself a sickly pallor. From his research on the opioid epidemic, he knew that the drug created an immediate physiological dependence. That was what drove the business. For increased highs, pills were cut with fentanyl. One or two grains too many and the powerful painkiller designed for cancer patients would stop the heart. Addicts continued to service their physiological cravings, and as the government had cracked down on fentanyl, a new drug had appeared on the scene. It was called Snowball.
“We talked about this,” Belle said, reading the doubt in his eyes. “Even though you look homeless, you move like a cop. Like you’re on a mission or something. They’d peg you for a narc in a heartbeat. You don’t know the language. I do, trust me. They won’t sell to you. I can handle this.”
During his surveillance, Walker had noted a derelict vehicle in the front yard of a vacant house from where he could observe Belle’s buy and act as a quick reaction force if necessary.
“I don’t like it.”
“They want the money, Chris. Come on, let’s do this. Hand it over. All we need to do here is confirm that they sell Snowball. The only way to do that is to buy some. Let’s go.”
