The Last Witness (Badge of Honor 11)

Just as Ramírez knocked twice on the door, wondering if there was an eyeball on the other side of the dirty peephole, he heard dead bolt locks turning.

The door swung inward. The row house interior was dark, but just beyond the door—and behind a wall of thick, clear plastic sheeting that hung from ceiling to floor—Ramírez could make out two human forms standing midway in the room. They were aiming the Kalashnikovs he’d brought at him.

“Get inside, Ricky!” the one on the left gently urged in Spanish, lowering the AK-47 he’d converted to fully automatic.

Ricky, recognizing Héctor Ramírez’s voice, went through the door. It was immediately closed behind him and the dead bolts thrown. An overhead lightbulb came on, and Ricky saw the short Hispanic male who had locked the door and hit the switch. He now was pulling the sheeting from the wall. He gestured for Ricky to go through.

There was another motorcycle, a big Kawasaki, by the door. Duct tape held more of the clear plastic sheeting over the windows, sealing them. Ricky crossed the big front room of the house. It was mostly empty except for a ratty sofa, a wooden box that served as a coffee table, and a big flat-screen TV mounted on a wall.

“Hola, mi amigo,” Héctor said, his tone friendly.

Just hearing that caused Ricky to start feeling a little better. They had developed a strong relationship—maybe ’cause of our Latin thing, and being from the islands—one far better than what Ricky and Dmitri had. Héctor’s calm demeanor helped ground him, balancing out Ricky’s quick temper and his tendency to be reckless.

Héctor was a swarthy forty-year-old whose hardscrabble life had included spending his early thirties in a Cuban jail. After growing up on a tobacco farm in central Cuba, he had made his way to Havana. He worked various jobs in the restaurants and bars, then wound up running hookers to the tourists out of a Havana apartment building. And got busted. He discovered that his primary crime against the socialist motherland wasn’t pimping—which, unlike the prostitution, was illegal—it was his failure to pay off the correct policía with U.S. dollars or free putas or both.

In jail he had heard about the smugglers who, for a fee that he could work off, would get him to Florida. When released, he had wasted no time seeking them out. Once in the States, and owing ten grand for his passage aboard the fast boat, he had his horticulture skills put to the test. The smugglers were Cuban exiles and had grow houses near Miami. Héctor found cultivating marijuana indoors much easier than hoeing rows of tobacco under the Cuban sun. He also found himself almost back behind bars—someone had tipped off the house to the DEA. His handlers sent him to Philadelphia, subtracting a little from his bill for transporting a kilogram each of black tar heroin and cocaine.

Ricky Ramírez, after getting a call from Dmitri Gurnov, had taken delivery. When he heard Héctor’s story—and Héctor convinced him that running a grow house would be easy money—Ricky set him up in the rented row houses in Kensington. Ricky had lied to Dmitri that that money—which had included what he advanced Héctor to satisfy his debt in Little Havana—was a loan. It really was Ricky using Dmitri’s money. Héctor now worked for him.

Ricky knew he’d luckily gotten away with all that. So far.

“I’m glad that you are here, Jefe,” Héctor said, patting Ricky on the back. “It’s been months. I have something to show you.”

Ricky motioned in the direction of the teenagers outside.

“Your halcónes look about ready to shoot someone,” he said.

Héctor laughed. “They all want to think they’re sicarios. But those two, Tito and Juan, they are only couriers. One drives and the other rides to deliver the pot.”

“Courier, assassin,” Ricky said, “only difference is a shooting.”

Héctor laughed again.

“Yes, I guess that is true, Ricky. Now come with me. . . .”

[TWO]

Liberties Bar

502 N. Second Street, Philadelphia

Monday, November 17, 4:45 P.M.

“Teenaged kids in foster care are ripe for the picking by pimps,” Mickey O’Hara said, sliding the files on the two missing West Philadelphia Sanctuary case workers that Matt Payne had given him back in the envelope. He then put that in his laptop case at his feet. “It is tragically simple.”

Payne and Jim Byrth, having arrived at Liberties first, were seated at the far end of the enormous dark oak Victorian bar that ran along most of the wall. They had a view of the entire room, including the front window—through which could be seen the back of the bar’s five-foot-tall replica of the Statue of Liberty—and the front door. O’Hara, his back to it all, stood near them at the corner, leaning with his forearms against the bar as he nursed a Guinness Black Lager. Matt had before him a half-finished eighteen-year-old Macallan single malt whisky, slightly cut with water and two ice cubes. Jim sipped at a Jack Black on the rocks. They picked at two overflowing baskets of hand-cut onion rings and fries.

The narrow brick-faced three-story Liberties was at the end of a hundred-year-old building that went the entire block. A half circle of canvas awning with an inviting Lady Liberty painted on it overhung its front door.

The heavy wooden interior was rich in character, warm and intimate, what came from decades of crowds drinking,

eating, laughing, living. The crowd was light now—only one other man at the bar, close to the window and talking with the bartender, and two couples, one at a table in the middle of the room and another in one of the wooden booths lining the opposite wall—but it would quickly build as people stopped in on their way home from work.

O’Hara went on: “Like all kids, the ones in foster care are hungry for love and attention. Arguably more so. Their fathers and mothers who should have provided that instead failed them miserably—often because their parents had failed them, too. It’s a vicious cycle.”

He paused and took a sip of beer. Then he chewed on an onion ring as he gathered his thoughts.

“Okay,” he went on, “so here’s the fairy-tale version. Let’s give our foster child a name. Call her, oh, say, Joyce. She’s fourteen. Her parents die in a car wreck, leaving her an orphan with no other family. The courts take custody, put her in the care of CPS. She’s matched with a foster family, who raise Joyce as their own. She graduates high school, then at eighteen exits CPS and maybe goes to community college down Spring Garden Street here, or to a beautician’s school, or just gets married. And Joyce lives happily ever after.”