CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I got back to the office to find my desk phone ringing. I picked up the receiver, listened for a moment, then said, “Thanks.” Next I called Hotchkiss. He answered on the second beep.

“I know I promised you a day’s notice on busting that bookie I told you about,” I said. “But you seemed awfully eager the last time we talked. What do you have on the burner this afternoon?”

“Nothing terribly important. You want to do it now?”

“You bet. He’s writing at this very instant. They got several big preseason games coming up this weekend, and my snitch says he’s going at it hard.”

“Can you get the warrant this quickly?”

“Hell, I’ve had the warrant for a week.”

“Let’s go then.”

*   *   *

Linda and two of my other deputies, along with two city cops, got themselves all decked out in face shields and flack gear and did a SWAT team number on the front and rear doors of the house. Quinn obviously wasn’t expecting any problems. We caught him, dumb and happy, working away at his kitchen table like a busy accountant going over his weekly figures. Three cheap cell phones lay on the table alongside his paperwork. He must have thought that by avoiding landlines he would leave less of a paper trail.

Hotchkiss and I watched as Linda cuffed the man, slammed him back down in his little rolling desk chair, and proceeded to stand over him with the stern frown of an avenging angel.

He was a nondescript, pudgy fellow of medium height in his early thirties who would have been utterly unmemorable if the substructure of his face hadn’t still shown the effects of the terrible beating he’d taken a few years earlier. As it was, he looked like something put together by a clumsy child. A bowling pin can be a fearsome weapon.

I motioned my deputies out of the room and stood looking down at Quinn. Finally he snapped, “What?”

“You’ve been a naughty boy,” I said.

“Big deal. A chickenshit gambling charge even if you can make it stick. I’ll be bailed out by sundown.”

“Not this time,” Hotchkiss said.

He looked up at the young agent. “Who the fuck are you?”

Hotchkiss flipped his ID open in Quinn’s face. “FBI. Federal Bureau of Investigation to the uninitiated. Only you’re not uninitiated. You’ve been down this road before.”

“Huh?”

“Federal charges, nitwit. Interstate gambling.”

“Oh, no you don’t. You’ve got no records of my phones.”

Hotchkiss sighed and shook his head, no doubt amazed as I myself had been dozens of times at the monumental stupidity of criminals. “Fool, cell phones leave computer records just like landlines. Besides, the statute has been changed. All we have to do is prove you laid off one single bet on a single out-of-state game and your ass is fried.”

“Aw, shit…”

“Aw, shit,” I said mockingly. “That’s a fitting response if I ever heard one, since you’ve really stepped in it.” I pointed at Hotchkiss. “You need to listen to this young man so you’ll know what the future has in store for you.”

“Right,” Hotchkiss said. “With your prior record, even the greenest assistant on the federal prosecutor’s staff could get you a couple of years in the slammer. Only you won’t draw the greenest guy on the block. The verdict will be guilty, of course, and I’ll make it a personal point to feed plenty of juicy information to the guys doing the presentencing report. You can count on it. So maybe you ought to figure on five to seven, just to be safe.”

“What have you got against me?” Quinn whined, a standard criminal complaint I’d heard a thousand times. Bust them and they think you have targeted them out of some personal vindictiveness. They can never understand that you’re simply doing your job.

“We don’t have a thing against you personally,” I said.

“Bo’s telling you the truth there,” Hotchkiss said cheerfully. “I’ll admit that I don’t like gambling, but you’re nothing special. Just a means to an end for us.”

Quinn rolled his eyes. “Why me?”

“You’re the only bookie in town,” I said.

“So?”

“But you don’t have to be the one left holding the bag.”

“I don’t?”

“Nope,” Hotchkiss said. “There’s another way this whole thing can end. Want to hear it?”

Quinn shrugged morosely. “What have I got to lose?”

“At least five years of your life,” I said. “That prospect would get my attention in a hurry.”

“Okay, okay. No need to rub it in.”

Hotchkiss smiled. “You give us a name and a signed statement and you can walk on the whole deal with nothing more than a fine.”

“What name?”

“The guy you’re laying off bets for,” I said. “Your boss, Weyland.”

“Who?” The man seemed authentically puzzled.

“Sam Weyland, over at Fillmore,” I said.

“Never heard of the guy.”

I gazed at Quinn’s face. He was either a consummate actor or he was telling the truth. “Then who are you working for?” I asked.

“This is my own operation,” he muttered.

“Bullshit,” I said. “You’re dead broke and we know it. Give it up. Who’s backing you?”

It was then that Hotchkiss did something that almost floored me. First he stood and regarded Quinn thoughtfully for a few moments, apparently pondering something. Then he leaned down so his face was only a few inches from Quinn’s and said, “Your boss is Lester Sipes, isn’t he?”

Quinn twitched like he’d been hit with a mild electric current. I probably did too, and I know I felt my mouth dropping open once again. Hotchkiss persisted. “It is Sipes, right?”

“God help me,” Quinn muttered. “Why can’t you guys just haul me in and charge me?”

“You’re the little fish,” Hotchkiss said. “We want the big fish. The guy at the top of the food chain.”

“Listen,” Quinn said, “even if I was working for Sipes, and I ain’t saying I am, do you know what he would do to me if I ratted him out?”

Hotchkiss nodded like a wise old philosopher. “I see your point. I really do. But the grim truth is that you really don’t have the choice of not giving him up.”

“Oh yes, I do.”

“Oh no, you don’t. You either roll on Sipes or we’ll just go ahead and bust him tomorrow on a federal warrant naming him as your co-conspirator on an interstate gambling charge. Which will, of course, make it appear that you rolled on him even though you didn’t. He’ll get bonded out quickly, and so will you because he’ll have his Coastal outfit go your bail. And like you said, you know what happens to people who rat him out. You’ve heard the same stories I have.”

“You can’t do this to me!”

“Oh, but I can. And I will too, if you don’t get cooperative.”

“So I’m screwed no matter what? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“No,” Hotchkiss said. “You give up everything you have on him and you can go into the federal witness protection program.”

“Jesus!”

“What’s the problem? Do you have family you don’t want to leave behind?”

“That’s a laugh. I got a girlfriend, though.”

“Then maybe she can go with you. At any rate, witness protection is better than getting fed to the crabs off the Galveston jetties.”

Quinn shivered and looked as miserable as any man I had ever seen. I turned to Hotchkiss. “We need to talk,” I told him quietly.

“Sure,” he said with a nod.

I called Linda back in the room to ride herd on Quinn and steered Hotch out on the front porch. “What’s going on here?” I asked. “What gave you the idea he was working for Sipes?”

“You think he is too?”

“I don’t see how there’s any doubt about it. He damn near turned green when you mentioned the man’s name. But what I want to know is why you mentioned it. What did you know going in here today that I didn’t know?”

“Nothing, Bo. I swear. I just made a lucky guess.”

“Lucky guess, my ass—”

“No, really. Some recent intel we have on Sipes says he has about a dozen guys running book for him all over the eastern part of the state. Actually, what he’s done is muscle in and take over a couple of other operations. Maybe even this guy Weyland’s. When Quinn didn’t seem to know Weyland, I just took a wild shot in the dark.”

“Let’s say for a moment that’s true—”

“It is, Bo. Think for a minute. If I’d known, why would I have waited for you to bust him when I could have done it on my own?”

I pondered this for a few seconds and then conceded the point. Besides, the boy had been straight with me so far. “But why in thunder is Sipes into gambling all of a sudden?” I asked.

“If I had to guess, I’d say he’s trying to generate some quick cash.”

“To pay the Colombians for the missing cocaine. Right?”

“Must be. Besides, it’s a lucrative sideline, and he is a gangster, you know.”

I nodded. “Okay, but at this point I want to give you some unsolicited advice about this witness protection business. Don’t you ever promise something you can’t deliver if you’re going to stay in law enforcement. To be effective as a lawman you have to have the reputation of keeping your word and treating your snitches right.”

“I can deliver.”

“Are you kidding me?” I asked, peering closely at his face. “You mean you can really get the guy into the program over a gambling charge?”

“Sure.”

“And Mack will back you up?”

“He’ll fall all over himself to do it, Bo.”

“But why? Quinn is a two-bit nobody and you’re willing to put him on the government tit for a lifetime?”

“The RICO statute. Under RICO interstate gambling adds a bunch more years. One more nail in his coffin.”

I shrugged. “I hope it’s worth it to you. I hope it’s worth it to the taxpayers.”

“It will be. We want Sipes to walk out of that courtroom wrapped in chains and staring down into the better part of a century of hard time. In that first debacle he made us look bad and he made the attorney general’s office look bad. Hell, he crapped on the whole criminal justice system.”

I could have told him that all the crap fell on the Feds, and that the state and county boys came out looking fine. But there was no point in rubbing it in since they hadn’t really been at fault.

*   *   *

Quinn rolled and rolled big. He’d been dealing directly with Sipes, and at one point the man had even foolishly given him a personal check. You would think a banker would have known better. But if I have learned even one thing about hoodlums in my three decades of sparring with them, it is that what they lack in judgment they make up for in arrogance. I suppose Sipes’s first acquittal made him feel omnipotent.

But what Quinn told us proved we were wrong about one thing: this was no recent move on Sipes’s part. He’d been into gambling for well over a year. In fact, he’d had a couple of college kids writing for him down in Nacogdoches for several months. Quinn had simply moved the operation to Sequoya when he signed on because he had inherited the house where he was busted from his grandmother.

“You live and learn,” I told Hotchkiss. “With a guy like Sipes your information is always going to be incomplete no matter how good your snitches are.”

“I guess you’re right. But keep in mind that our informant knows more about the drug side of the operation.”

“Well, this is something new for this part of the country. Generally the gamblers stick to gambling and the drug people stick to peddling drugs.”

“Things change, Bo.”

“Do they really?” I asked with a laugh. “I never noticed.”

*   *   *

We installed Quinn in the tank at the new jail where we lodged federal prisoners. Hotchkiss called Mack Reynolds, and he dispatched a couple of agents up from the coast to take him back to Houston. Neither of us waited around for them to arrive. The kid went to his motel room and I drove home, brooding the whole way. I couldn’t help but wonder how far the Feds were willing to go with their witness protection offers.