And that went for my husband, too.
CHAPTER 66
OFFICER EVELYN FINLEY drove me slowly and carefully to the Hall that morning, as if she were transporting vintage glass Christmas ornaments. She also walked me through the lobby and waited with me until the elevator came.
“Following orders,” she said.
Damn it.
“Thanks, Finley,” I said. “I can take it from here.”
I rounded Brenda’s desk at the entrance to the bullpen and saw that Conklin, Chi, McNeil, and Brady were in some kind of huddle near Chi’s desk. Apparently, a meeting was in progress. Maybe I hadn’t been purposefully excluded. Maybe it just felt that way.
Conklin waved me over and both he and Brady scrambled to get me a chair. I almost laughed. Instead, I muttered, “Thanks. I’ve got it. I’ve got it.”
Cappy McNeil is almost fifty, carrying too much weight around his middle, but he’s a steady old hand and a very good cop.
His partner, Sergeant Paul Chi, is ten years younger and one of the sharpest cops in the city. The two of them were getting their first look at my face of a million cuts, but they’d already heard about the turkey shoot last night.
Cappy said, “Ahh, sheet, Boxer. This is just wrong.”
He patted my arm and passed me one of his two untouched donuts.
Once I was settled in, Chi resumed his briefing.
“Lindsay, to bring you up to speed, I have a CI who lives over a grocery store on the corner of Jackson and Stockton. He called me last night to say he’s seen about four Asian businessmen, well dressed, driving deluxe vehicles, coming and going at odd hours. They’re apparently based in a crappy apartment building right here.”
Chi pulled up a map on his computer, street view. He stabbed a location on Stockton, middle of the block, east side.
“This is it,” said Chi. “Ten Thirty-Five Stockton. Low-rent joint with a dry cleaner downstairs. Now, the tenant of the presumed crappy apartment is Henry Yee. Two small-time drug busts. He works in the noodle shop over here. Corner of Jackson. He’s subletting his place to these guys, sleeps at the restaurant.
“Now, rumor has it that these men are here on some kind of government business. They’re not into drugs or—”
I stopped him. “Wait. What government?”
“Chinese, I’m guessing, but no one knows,” Chi said. “My CI called last night because last week, he sees these men unloading long, heavy boxes from a black or blue SUV. He didn’t think much of it until last night.
“According to my snitch, around eight p.m. last night, one of those slick Chinese guys parks his SUV on Stockton near the corner of Jackson. The car’s got two busted headlights. And now my snitch is thinking back on those heavy loads that were taken out of the SUV last week and wonders if that stuff wasn’t artillery. My guy’s a junkie, but he’s not stupid. I tend to believe him.”
I said, “Some kind of dark vehicle smashed my front end last night. And then I backed hard into the vehicle behind me. This SUV you’re telling us about had to be one of those cars.”
Brady called Jacobi, who came downstairs and joined us. An hour later, we had a plan.
CHAPTER 67
BY FOUR-THIRTY that afternoon, three teams from Homicide and our SWAT unit were deployed discreetly around Stockton and Jackson, a neighborhood known for its traditional Chinese shops and also for its drug, gambling, and gang activity.
I took it all in from where Conklin and I waited in our parked car on Stockton.
Our focus was on a three-story beige stucco apartment building across the street from us in the middle of the block. Next to the dry cleaner Chi had referred to was a gray-painted door that led to the apartments upstairs.
SWAT SUVs bracketed the apartment building and covered the open stores, their bins of merchandise spilling out to the sidewalks teeming with shoppers and passersby. Traffic stopped and started at the intersections, delivery trucks double-parked, a school bus dropped off children, and laughing tourists came out of a restaurant.
I kept scanning the street.
I could see Lemke and Samuels of our squad, parked at the corner of Washington. Michaels and Wang, also in Homicide, were in their car at the Jackson end of Stockton, watching the noodle shop where the waiter worked.
Brady was across the street from us, leaning against the wall of a ginseng company, reading a paper.