Deep Cover (12 page)

"You
got it," answered Parkins. "I'll recommend they give her a transfer right away to a job with less access to police files. We can at least slow down their flow of information."

Atwood
stood up. "Okay then, who wants pizza?"

I arrived at Mike's at about ten P.M. Dog and Iron Man were at the bar having a beer and bullshitting with the bartender. A member I hadn't met yet was playing pool in the back room with one of the locals. There were three women with them. One of them appeared to be his girlfriend. In between shots he would stop to tongue-kiss her and run a hand over her butt. There was no one sitting at The Henchmen's regular table. Since I wasn't a member yet, I couldn't sit there without an invitation. I ordered a beer and leaned against the wall to watch the pool game.

Counsel,
Dog, and a member I hadn't met yet arrived at eleven. "Come on over, Doc," said Dog.

"Hey,
Dog. How's it goin', man?" I sat down next to Counsel. Dog went to the pool room to bring the other member over. Iron Man was still at the bar.

"This
is Smitty."

"Smitty,"
I said, as I shook his hand.

"Doc,
Smitty used to be real close to Irish before he left the club," said Counsel. "He'll take you past his house so you can get started."

"I'd
like to take a couple of days to watch his movements, who he lives with, you know."

"He
lives with his old lady, that's all. Just Sandy and him in a three-room bungalow," said Smitty. Smitty looked like an old-timer. His colors were dirty and worn. He was thin, with huge veins on his tattooed arms. He had a Fu Manchu-style mustache and bushy eyebrows. All he needed was a hook, and he would have made a perfect pirate.

"Does
he work?" I asked Smitty.

"Yeah,
most times. He paints boats down at the marina."

"Good,
we can take a cruise past his place tomorrow and check it out. Can we use one of the vans?"

"Sure,"
said Counsel. "Take the blue Ford. You can get the keys from Snake at the clubhouse tomorrow morning."

The
rest of the night we spent drinking beer and shooting pool. I was lucky that Smitty had been willing to come along on the McBright thing from the beginning. I didn't even have to ask. I found out that night that Smitty had been with the club since the late six ties. He bragged about beating the shit out of two cops in Laconia, New Hampshire, back in 1979. Laconia is the biggest bike run on the East Coast. It takes place every June, and over twenty thousand bikers attend. Smitty said the cops tried to give him a ticket for running a red light. He was willing to take the ticket, but when the cops asked him to peel his colors they went too far. It took six more cops to bring Smitty under control. He did eighteen months in jail for that. He referred to his stretch in prison as "the time I went on vacation."

Chapter
10

The RV needed a tune-up badly. It had been backfiring ever since Sam and Louise Ginsberg had left Albuquerque. "When are you going to get this junk pile fixed?" whined Louise, in between bites of her tuna melt.

"Come
on, Lou, stop breaking my balls. After this run we'll have enough money to fix up this baby and party for a couple of months. Any more orange soda in the cooler?"

"I'll
check," Louise sighed. She huffed and puffed as she maneuvered her five-foot-two, two-hundred-forty-eight-pound frame to the cabin. "Only root beer and cola!" she shouted.

"Give
me a root beer." Louise warmed up her tuna melt in the microwave before struggling back to her seat. She handed Sam the can of root beer.

Louise
and Sam had been married for over twenty years. Sam had worked as an accountant for a mob family in Vegas, and Louise had been a coat-check girl in one of the casinos. They were married the night they met. The Varrantino family controlled the hotel that Louise worked in. Sam worked for the Boracchis, a rival family, so Louise had to quit her job at The Pyramid. In 1973, when the FBI broke the back of the Boracchis, Sam did three years. He refused to testify against the family, in spite of an offer of amnesty and witness relocation for him and his wife.

While
in prison he met an associate of The Henchmen. He set Sam up with the club after his release. He began as a distributor of drugs and weapons in the Los Angeles area. After a while he began making regular runs to major Eastern cities, with caches of marijuana and methamphetamine. Louise stayed home at first, but eventually became a partner. For the last six years they'd been making runs six to ten times a year between California, Chicago, and New York.

"This
soda's piss-warm," complained Sam. "Remind me to get some ice when we get to Pedro's."

LAST
GAS FOR 80 MILES—6 MILES AHEAD. The sign was so weather-beaten it blended in with the harsh, golden-brown background of the desert. Louise was sleeping, her head thrown back, snoring, her sandwich still in her hand. Sam turned up the volume on the tape deck to drown out her annoying snorts. His throat was sore from the desert heat, and his sweat-soaked T-shirt hugged the fat on his body like an extra layer of skin. With his stubby, hairy fingers he tried to adjust the air-conditioning controls. "Shit, it's hot as an oven out there, and this fucking thing won't pump out no more cool." He looked at the thermometer. The inside temperature was eighty-one degrees. He took another gulp of soda.

He
steered carefully past Pedro's gas pump and stopped the camper next to the garage. There were two bikes parked under a sign that read PEDRO'S—GAS, FOOD AND DRINK. A young blond-haired woman, a little on the plump side, was soaping down the forks, handlebars, and wheel spokes. A mangy dog walked lazily toward the camper and lay down in the shade the bulky vehicle was now providing. "Wake up, Lou." Sam nudged her. "It's already after three. I want to be back on the road before five o'clock. Why don't you get the cabin ready?"

Louise
just nodded. She smacked her lips a few times, swallowed, then frowned. "Any soda left in that can? My mouth tastes like a camel's ass."

"Just
a sip." Sam handed her the warm, flat beverage.

As
she awkwardly climbed out of the vehicle, her sandwich fell to the ground right in front of the panting dog. It gulped it down in one bite. "Fucking dog." Louise opened the padlock on the side door of the camper. The floor had been built up eight inches, to provide a false bottom that could conceal drugs for transport to the East. Louise stepped inside and began opening the clips that held the back wall onto the camper. When she was finished she moved to the outside of the camper and started to remove the screws that held the facade covering the opening to the storage compartment.

"
Buenos
tardes
, Serior Ginsberg," said Pedro, a small-framed Mexican in his late forties. "Tacos today,
muy
especiales
."

"Maybe
later, Pedro, I'm a little rushed right now. Maybe I'll just grab one of these." Sam helped himself to a KitKat bar from the counter. As he peeled off the foil wrapper, he looked around Pedro's store.
It
never
changes
, he thought. The store was littered with car and motorcycle parts. With the exception of members of The Henchmen who might work on their bikes when they had business at Pedro's, the parts and garage were seldom used. Occasionally a motorist would happen by and need a fill-up, or a new fan belt and some water or coolant for the radiator. The old desert road wasn't traveled much anymore. In fact, it didn't even appear on any of the new maps.

Behind
the counter were two soda coolers and some scantily stocked shelves, containing potato chips, cookies, soup cans, and other non-perishables. Pedro slept on a cot in the back room. This dilapidated service station was his home.

The
back room contained a stove where he did all of his cooking—Mexican dishes mainly. Guaranteed to burn your taste buds and give you heartburn for two days. The stove had an exhaust that extended through the roof. Another pipe, barely noticeable, came up from the floor and joined the stove exhaust. The smell of fried beef and Mexican spices made the taste of the candy bar less enjoyable for Sam. As much as Sam loved to eat, he could never get used to Mexican food. "Okay, Pedro, let's go down."

"
Ciertamente
,
señor
." Pedro removed a poster from the wall next to his bed, a poster of Marlon Brando in the movie
The
Wild
Ones
. It revealed a numeric dial pad with a blinking red light. He punched in the numbers 9-9-2-2. There was a distinctive click, and a small section of the floor rose slightly. Pedro reached down and pulled the door open. Sam walked sideways down the stairs, his three-hundred-pound girth making it impossible for him to walk straight down. He huffed and puffed with every clumsy step. Pedro lowered the door and returned to his stove and his fried beef. The trapdoor automatically locked behind Sam.

Sam
was now inside The Henchmen's drug-manufacturing lab. Unlike the dingy, disorganized shop above it, this underground room was the epitome of cleanliness and organization. It was almost square, measuring fourteen by thirteen feet. Four sets of fluorescent lights hung from the eight-foot ceiling. Sikati Kim, a U.S.-born Korean, sat at a large aluminum table, mixing the proper ratio of phenylacetone and N-methyl formamide. He would then cook the mixture for six hours to make the granular white methamphetamine.

Kim
had been a freelance chemist in Los Angeles until three years ago, when The Henchmen had informed him that he would be their exclusive manufacturer. To ensure his cooperation they'd moved him to this secret lab, where he manufactured millions of dollars' worth of the drug each year. Although he was seemingly free to come and go as he pleased, he remained a prisoner of The Henchmen's ever-growing need for the drug.

Two
members of the Los Angeles chapter were also in the lab—Arnold "Park" Parker and Little Vinney. They were bringing a supply of crank back into Los Angeles. They were also there to supply Sam and Louise for their run east and to record this month's transactions. As treasurer, Little Vinney kept the books for the club's drug operation. The club had sent him to an extensive course in business accounting and computer programming early in 1980 to bring the operation into the modern age. The computer base contained an extensive list of customers and drop-off points throughout the U.S. and Canada. If a name wasn't on that list, he or she didn't buy from The Henchmen. A name could be added to the list only if supplied by a chapter president. Chapter presidents communicated directly with the computer via a modem and telephone lines. Little Vinney was transmitting order confirmations to Houston, New York, Philadelphia, and New Jersey, complete with delivery date and pickup point. The confirmation order for New Jersey read MERCHANDISE ENROUTE—ETA N.J. TPK 14-99. The Paterson, New Jersey chapter would consult their code list and determine the exact location of the delivery point. Each city had over five delivery points that alternated at the discretion of the member in charge of distribution. This ensured the safety of the deliveries.

Park
greeted Sam by the stairs. "Hey, Sammy. Pretty soon you won't be able to fit down those stairs." He patted Sam's huge stomach.

"Yeah,
yeah. I'm gonna go on a diet… as soon as I lose some weight." Sam laughed, patting his belly.

"Some
KitKat?"

"No
thanks, Sam. Where's Louise?"

"She's
getting the camper ready. We're a little behind schedule, and I want to get out of here as soon as possible."

"No
prob, everything's ready to go." Park pointed to four rows of plastic bags. Each bag contained two pounds of methamphetamine. There were one hundred bags in all. "Your first stop is Chicago for twenty bags, then Philadelphia for forty, New Jersey for eight, and New York for the rest."

For
the next forty minutes Park and Sam went over road maps, planning routes and timetables. Park would contact the other chapters and let them know the route Sam was taking into their area, and they would have the option of dispatching an escort when the camper was close to the drop-off site. This would be done for the security of the shipment, since many of the points of delivery were on the edges of dangerous neighborhoods.

"Okay,
let's get started," said Sam.

"Here,
Sam, here's your bread." Park handed Sam an envelope containing five thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills, his standard fee for a four-city run.

Park
and Little Vinney carried the bags outside and began loading them under the floor of the camper. Louise was inside Pedro's kitchen, giving him advice on how to make his tacos tastier. After the drugs had been loaded, Sam returned the paneled facades to the back of the camper and padlocked the side door.

"Come
on, Lou, let's go." Sam beeped the horn. Louise appeared in the doorway with two of Pedro's tacos in her hand.

"I'm
coming, goddammit, I'm coming." Some of the taco filling oozed out of the sides and fell to the ground as she scurried toward the camper, taking bites along the way.

"How
can you eat that shit Pedro makes?"

"If
I can suck your dick, I can eat this," answered Louise.

The
couple laughed as they cruised back onto Route 71.

"Get
me a soda, will ya, honey?"