Cold Blue (18 page)

Despite the dropping temperature, Thorpe removed his hood, favoring hearing capabilities over shelter. It’d been some time since the last arrival. Periodically, Thorpe would do squats in an effort to warm himself. Thankfully, he’d dressed for the occasion. However, the nip was beginning to chew at his ears and through his boots.

Comfort aside, if the group didn’t disperse before daybreak, he’d need to find an alternate location or risk discovery by a homeowner or a dog let out for its morning piss. But he wanted to maintain surveillance as long as possible; there were others who had arrived before him, and they needed to be identified.

Thorpe caught a flash of movement to his left. A figure, possibly Leon based on height, approached on his side of the street. Thorpe noticed the figure disappear around the far side of the neighboring house.
Was the man searching backyards?
Thorpe quieted his breathing and concentrated on his hearing. The sound of rustling leaves preceded the man’s reappearance.
Was he peering over fences?
The man walked to a car parked along the north curb, cupped his hands against the glass, and looked inside.
He’s definitely looking for surveillance
. The gloom made it difficult to see, but Thorpe felt confident he was watching Leon.

Leon must be worried that the ransom call was a setup.
Smart man.
Though not smart enough to arm himself; his hands were empty. If Leon did possess a weapon, he didn’t have it at the ready, but he was probably more concerned with a police sting rather than a revenge-seeking killing machine. Leon stepped away from the car and headed toward Thorpe’s position.

Shit.
He needed to act quickly. He could disappear around the house and hope if Leon noticed the recently constructed hole, he wouldn’t determine it was fresh. Or he could take down Leon now. Both options offered potentially disastrous consequences. Ultimately, Thorpe couldn’t take the chance Leon would see the hole for what it was. Thorpe gathered his equipment and, in a crouched position, ran toward the back of the house. When he reached the rear of the home, he dumped his bag and continued west where he found a gate. Thorpe quietly released the latch and walked to the southwest corner of the home. Peering around the corner of the residence, Thorpe barely caught a glimpse of Leon disappearing around the other side of the house. Thorpe took one quick look before sprinting across the concrete driveway. When he reached the corner of the house, he rounded it without pause, and spotted Leon looking through the hole Thorpe had just abandoned. Leon heard the footfalls and turned to find Thorpe closing in at full speed. Thorpe held a concealed knife in his right hand—handle in palm, blade behind forearm. As Thorpe neared, Leon raised both hands palms forward, above his head, in the classic “I surrender” stance.

Leon obviously thought he’d just been caught in a police operation. Thorpe stopped advancing and played along with Leon’s misguided belief.

“FBI, turn around.”

Leon complied immediately.
This was going to be easy
.

“Get down on your knees…cross your ankles…put your hands on the back of your head.” Leon executed every command, allowing Thorpe to approach from behind and place him in Flexcuffs. Leon began spouting his defense.

“Man, I didn’t have anything to do with this shit, they…”

“Shut up, you’re going to blow our surveillance,” Thorpe interrupted.

“All right, all right, man, it’s cool.”

Thorpe pulled his hoodie over his head in an effort to conceal his identity. He kept Leon facing the opposite direction.

“You’re going to fuck up this whole investigation, asshole. I’m the only one who has surveillance on this side. You’re coming with me.”

“That’s cool, man. I was just gettin’ ready to call you guys.”

Thorpe held Leon’s cuffs and grabbed the back of his neck. Directing Leon from behind, Thorpe retraced his route, picked up his equipment, and took Leon back behind the hole in the fence. He put Leon on his belly with his head facing away from him.

“Do they know you’re out here?” Thorpe asked.

“Yeah, I told them I was coming out here to look around, but I was really coming out here to call you guys.”

Yeah, right. Thorpe hadn’t even discovered a cell phone during his pat-down
. “How long do they expect you to be gone?”

“Man, I don’t know. I said I was going outside to check things out. They just nodded their heads.”

“Remember we’ve been watching this place. Who all’s inside?”

“There’s Price and…”

“I want first
and
last names,” Thorpe demanded.

“…There’s Stephen Price, somebody Baker—I don’t know his first name, Thadius Shaw, Andrew Phipps, Corn Johnson, and another white dude I don’t know.”

Thorpe shook his head. Not counting the unidentified “white dude,” five of the men were, or had been, Tulsa police officers. All five had reputations for being dope chasers. “White Dude” and Brandon “Big Foot” Baker were white guys. The other three men were black.

Phipps served on the department’s Special Operations Team (SOT) as a sniper. SOT was the equivalent of most departments’ Special Weapons and Tactics teams (SWAT). Tulsa’s tactical team was a part-time assignment. SOT members trained twice a month but otherwise held regular positions on the department. Phipps once worked in SID’s day-shift narcotics squad but had been booted out after a year. The whole affair had been hush-hush, and Thorpe still didn’t know the circumstances behind the removal.

Corn, short for Cornelius, was Phipps’ best friend. Whoever said you can’t judge a book by its cover had never met Corn Johnson; a mouth breather, he wandered about with a perpetual look of confusion. He didn’t appear to be very bright, and he wasn’t. He’d once been a member of Gilcrease Division’s Street Crimes Unit. To avoid termination, he’d resigned from TPD after he was caught providing sensitive information to drug dealers regarding investigations into their illegal activities.

“Who else is inside?” Thorpe continued.

“No one, man. That’s it.”

Thorpe wanted to know who owned the house, but didn’t want to ask and sound uninformed. He still needed Leon to believe he was a federal agent on official business and if that were actually the case, he’d damn well know on whose house he’d been conducting surveillance.

“Who else is involved that didn’t show up?”

“Hey, man, I’m willing to cooperate, but I want a lawyer. I need something on paper.”

Leon was thinking about his future—he didn’t have one
. “At least tell me this…is there anyone else involved who’s not here tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“What have you been talking about tonight?”

“They all fucked up. They think we been talkin’ because somebody knows what they done and is blackmailing Price. They trying to figure out how to handle a phone call from some ransom motherfucker.”

Thorpe continued with the FBI ruse. “Do they know we’re on to them?”

“Those niggas didn’t even think about that till I said something. Now they don’t know what to think.”

Thorpe decided he didn’t need to conduct surveillance any longer. Leon would provide enough information. But Thorpe needed to get him to a place where he could question him properly. Thorpe pretended to have a two-way conversation on his police radio.

“Copy…you want me to remove the prisoner? Ten-four…I have to walk him to my vehicle…no, I don’t think he’ll be a problem…we need to get his car outta here, or they’ll know something’s up. Okay, we’ll just take his car then.”

“Okay, Leon, I’ve got a replacement coming, so I’m walking you to your car. Understand?”

“Yeah, man, that’s cool.”

Leon was working so hard at appearing cooperative that it blinded him to the snake pit toward which he willingly walked.

“We’re going to stroll out of here like best friends. You try to run or shout a warning, and you can kiss any deals goodbye. Got it?”

“Yeah, man, I never wanted anything to do with this shit in the first place. I wanna help.”

Thorpe retrieved Leon’s car keys from his coat pocket. “If you do yell out or try to run, I’m going to knock the piss out of you. With your hands cuffed behind your back, you won’t be able to break your fall with anything but your face. Okay, you’re going to listen to my directions and walk in front of me. Let’s go.”

Thorpe easily lifted little Leon by the shoulders, pointed him west, and told him to move. The two men walked to the passenger-side door of Leon’s aging Cutlass with Thorpe keeping an eye on the target house. After stuffing his captive in the car, Thorpe leaned against Leon’s throat with his left forearm as he buckled him in with his right hand. Thorpe walked around the back of the car, made sure his hoodie covered his face, tossed his bag in the back and got behind the wheel. Thorpe turned the car around in the cul-de-sac and made his way out of the neighborhood.

Leon was talkative. “Where we goin’?”

“We have a mobile unit a couple miles from here where we’re monitoring this operation,” Thorpe lied.

“Man, I can’t have any TPD see me with you. There’s too many of those bitches involved in this thing. They’ll kill me.”

“Don’t worry. We have a command post set up in a secluded area. No one is going to see you with us. When we get there, we’ll let you use a phone to contact your lawyer. If we get pulled over by TPD in this piece of shit, let me handle it—you stay in the car.”

“Cool.”

Thorpe allowed Leon to nervously ramble on about irrelevant topics as he drove past the North Side’s only significant grocery store. Well, it used to be—shoplifters had looted the recently constructed business to an early death; now it was an abandoned building. And though he traveled through a fairly harsh neighborhood, it was on one of the nicer streets in Tulsa. The four-lane concrete road enjoyed an elevated median with decorative trees and flowers. Thorpe was very familiar with the area, though it did look different from his days as a rookie officer. The changes were mostly aesthetic as it still provided an excellent opportunity to get shot. Now you just got to bleed out on a handsomer street.

He guided the Cutlass right on 36
^th
Street North and passed a Tulsa Housing Authority complex on his left. Thorpe had worked shootings, murders, stabbings, rapes and engaged in numerous foot pursuits in and around this complex. Just east, on the north side of the street, a dirt road disappeared into a large wooded tract populated with working oil wells. Sometimes car thieves would drive their newly procured “hot boxes” to this secluded area, where they could strip the vehicles in privacy. Thorpe pulled left onto the dirt road that he knew from experience branched off into additional tracks.

“You guys are back here?” Leon asked, finally getting a whiff of something that didn’t smell right.

“You don’t want to be seen do you?” Thorpe reassured him.

“No…look, man, I don’t know….this is…can you show me some I.D.?”

Because it was dark inside the car, Thorpe obliged and pulled out his neck badge waving it in Leon’s direction.

“Look, man, this is fucked up. Why don’t you just take me to the FBI office?” Leon’s survival instinct had finally tossed the bullshit flag.

“The command post is right around this corner, Leon. Relax.”

Thorpe could tell his passenger was considering bailing out of the car. He sensed him eyeing the door release.
Too late now, asshole
.

They drove past a working pump jack. Also known as a nodding donkey because of its appearance, the machinery was an over-ground drive for a piston pump on an oil well. Tulsa was once considered the oil capital of the world and is still home to a number of wells, though most are out of view from the casual motorist.

Thorpe heard the click of the seatbelt release and the distinctive zip of the belt retracting into its housing unit. Leon, realizing he’d stepped into some deep shit, was attempting to escape. Unconcerned, Thorpe stopped the car, lowered the front windows, removed the key from the ignition, grabbed his gear bag from the rear seat, and stepped out of the Cutlass. He rounded the back of the car just in time to watch Leon slide through the open window, land on his head, and somersault onto his ass and up to his feet—an acrobatic move and probably a painful one considering he was still cuffed behind his back. The man was motivated.

Just as his prisoner gained his feet, Thorpe delivered a front heel kick to Leon’s kidney. The blow sent the small man crashing to the ground on his left shoulder. Not being able to use his arms to control his balance or break his fall, Leon landed awkwardly. When he stood again, his shoulder drooped at an unnatural angle, the fall apparently dislocating the joint. Enough adrenaline coursed through Leon’s system to block the pain. Only determination registered on his face. There were no cries of agony.

“Take these cuffs off, motherfucker, and let me go to work on you…fucking bitch,” Leon screamed.

Thorpe slung the gear bag over his shoulder, sidestepped a kick, and grabbed Leon by his coat collar. He dragged him over to a pair of 15-foot tall oil tanks. A metal staircase led to a small catwalk spanning the tops of the tanks. Thorpe propped Leon against the steel railing, unzipped Leon’s coat, and using the garment as a makeshift straightjacket, pulled the coat’s shoulders down to his captive’s elbows. He then looped another cuff around the plastic still attached to Leon’s wrists and wrapped it around the railing. Thorpe cinched the cuffs tight. He didn’t want to leave any space—desperate prisoners have been known to tear off their own skin in an attempt to free themselves.

Thorpe stepped back from his prisoner, knelt down, and pulled off his hood. The two men stared at each other until recognition flooded into Leon’s eyes.

“Aw, fuck, man! That shit wasn’t supposed to happen.”

It was bitterly cold, but Leon sat drowning in sweat, fear and pain. Thorpe attached Flexcuffs to Leon’s ankles, cinching them tight. Then he retrieved a rag and told Leon to open his mouth.

“Fuck you,” Leon spit.

Thorpe walked behind his captive, isolated Leon’s index finger from the rest and torqued it sideways until a joint gave way. Leon let out an agonizing moan but didn’t scream.