Troubleshooter Read Free Page B

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 GS-12 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