NED STARTED LAUGHING. “If this isn’t the shit. This is it, isn’t it, Bruno? This is a lead the Feebs don’t have. And all they had to do was ask the local mailman.”
That wasn’t exactly true. Ollie had a big hand in it, and I’d still owe her the money, and the favor with her nephew.
Dad shook his head at Ned’s language.
“Yeah, I think we can work this,” I said. “It’s going to be a little easier to track her than the Bogart Bandit, but not by much. So don’t get your hopes up.”
Ned stood, wandered over to the couch. “I have faith in you, partner. Mind if I sleep here tonight? We’re gonna want to get an early start tomorrow.” He didn’t wait for the perfunctory “yes,” stretched out on the couch, and laid his arm over his eyes.
“Sure,” Dad told him. “You’re welcome anytime, Ned, my boy, as long as you come back with a brush and a bucket of high gloss white, to repaint our walls.”
Ned chuckled. “Oh no, old man, my lovely and perfect little Beth doesn’t know how to draw, especially on walls. That’s all on Olivia.”
My turn to chuckle. “You have any proof of that?”
He raised his right hand as if testilieing in court. “I don’t want to be a rat, but I saw the whole thing, Your Honor.”
Dad smiled and waved his hand. “Sure, you’re right. See you all in the morning. I’m going back to bed.”
I waited for him to get down the hall and his bedroom door to close. “You going to tell me what the problem is, the one Wicks knows about and I don’t?”
“Naw, why ruin a good high. I mean, I can’t believe you came up with a name like that, right outta the blue. Hey, after I left, did Wicks chew your ass like we thought? Over disrespecting the FBI?”
“Not at all. He said he thought it was great. In fact—” I stopped short. I didn’t want to give Ned, of all people, the go-ahead to disparage the FBI at every opportunity. He already did that too often.
“Then what did he want?”
I pulled a chair over, closer to the couch where, at the same time, I could still see out the door, if unwanted guests tried to approach the house from the street. “I guess I should tell you what’s going on.”
He didn’t look too concerned. He pulled his arm down, opened one eye to gaze at me. “Damn straight you better fill me in.”
“The FBI is running a game on us.”
“And you’re surprised because why? I’m not. Go on, give it to me.”
“They started up this whole bank robbery team for one reason. They want us to chase one particular crew that’s causing them a problem.”
“Okay … and?” He closed his eye, unconcerned.
“No, this is a real turd they handed us. This crew they want us to take down is made up of fourteen- fifteen- and sixteen-year-old kids.”
Ned sat up. “You’re shittin’ me?”
“No, and it gets worse, a lot worse. A guy by the name of Amos Leroy Gadd recruits these kids off the basketball courts, right here in my neighborhood. Well, a little north of here anyway, Rollin’ Sixties turf. Good kids from good families. He brainwashes them. Then he offers them a thousand dollars each—more money than they’ve ever seen. He arms them with real guns and gives them a stolen van. He tells them no matter what happens they can’t go to jail ’cause they’re juvies. He follows them to the bank, watches from a car down the street, and follows them back here to the ghetto. They’re doing two banks a week. He rotates the whole bunch of these kids, so they never work the same job together. This makes it harder to identify them, and to backtrack to Gadd.”
Ned whistled and shook his head in amazement.
“The bad part,” I said, “is that a couple of those kids have gone missing. Word on the street is, Gadd snuffed them to keep all the others from talking, and it’s worked. No one is saying a word. No one. And we’d need a witness to arrest Gadd for conspiracy, or he’s just going to keep on corrupting and endangering these children. The children will go to jail, and Gadd won’t. If we don’t flip one of the kids, there’s no way we can touch Gadd. And even then, I don’t think testimony alone will be enough to put Gadd away. We’ll need some kind of corroborating evidence that isn’t there.”
Ned moved to the edge of the couch. “So, let me get this straight. We’re supposed to follow some armed kids around until they rob a bank and then take them down in progress? What if they shoot at us? We can’t fire back, not at a bunch of kids. And what if they flee in a van? We can’t chase ’em. They might crash, and get hurt or killed.”
“Exactly.”
“FBI. Those bastards.”
“No, but listen. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and this might be for the best.”
“How in the hell do you figure that?”
“Another team on these kids might not give them the chance we would.”
Ned looked away from me and out into the night through the front door. After a moment he said, “That means … I mean if it’s what I think you’re saying, they can shoot at us, and we can’t shoot back at them. And we still have to try and take them into custody.”
“Something like that …”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, as he pondered that dilemma—the same one that continued to bang around in my head. Put in that situation—where it’s the kid or me—could I pull the trigger? Not likely. Then what happens to Olivia?
Ned finally said, “Hey, I need to ask a big favor.”
“You got it.”
“If anything ever happens to me, will you take care of Beth?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you.”
He looked back at me. “No, I’m serious, will you?”
“Of course I will. You didn’t have to ask. That’s a given.”
The sad part was that I couldn’t, in clear conscience, ask Ned to look after Olivia if something happened to me. I loved Ned like a brother, but I couldn’t do it. He was a sharp street cop, but he tended to make the wrong decisions in his personal life.
Ned said, “Looks like we need to go after this Amos Gadd and light his ass up. That’s the only way we can stop this violent scenario he’s put in play. He called the game, so I won’t feel bad about it one bit.”
“Wicks left it up to me, but he said, if he were chasin’ Gadd, it would be all about the blood and bone.” A term Wicks used when he caught up to a crook who didn’t want to go to prison, and the crook, weapon in hand, took a stand against Wicks.