Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [73]
“You can’t have him,” Winslow said as he opened the car door and gestured for Ramona to get out.
“Why not?” Ramona asked, refusing to budge. In the rearview mirror she could see Matt Chacon’s unit coming down the road.
Winslow gauged the angry look on Pino’s face. “Well, I suppose you deserve some explanation.”
“Damn right I do,” Ramona said, picking up her radio microphone, “and if I don’t get one, I’m calling in this little undercover DEA raid so that every citizen with a police scanner can hear what’s going on. It will be in tomorrow’s paper, along with your name.”
Winslow considered the threat and nodded slowly. “Ask your partner to stay back and I’ll tell you what I can, if you promise to discuss it only with your chief.”
Ramona pulled her car door closed, radioed Chacon to hold his position, and told Winslow to get in.
Winslow settled into the passenger seat and turned to face her. “I need your promise, Sergeant Pino.”
“Yeah, you got it,” Ramona said, still steamed.
“Griffin may be able to give me a major drug supplier we’ve been trying to bust and flip for the past year, so we can shut down a Colombian pipeline.”
“How does Griffin figure into your plan?” Ramona asked.
“The supplier offers one-stop shopping to wealthy clients in the privacy of their homes—coke, heroin, speed, grass, designer drugs. He imports the hard stuff and buys whatever else he needs from independent wholesalers here in the States. That ten pounds of grass you found in Griffin’s garage put us on to him. We knew the supplier was buying weed locally, but we didn’t know from whom.”
“Who in the hell told you about the ten pounds of grass?” Ramona demanded. “That’s confidential information. Nothing has been released about it.”
“Think it through, Sergeant,” Winslow said.
Ramona leaned back against the headrest and let out a frustrated sigh. It all made sense; the chain went from Chief Kerney to Special Agent Winslow to Griffin. “What’s in the construction trailer?”
“About three-quarters of a million dollars of high-quality marijuana freshly imported from Mexico. According to Griffin, it arrived right after you busted him. He was planning to hitch the trailer to his truck and tow it away when we got here.”
“So you bailed Griffin out of jail and put a tail on him,” Ramona said. “Where is he?”
“Inside the house,” Winslow answered.
“I need to speak to him now.”
“Not yet,” Winslow replied, opening the passenger door. “Maybe never.”
“You can’t be serious,” Ramona snapped. “He’s a major witness in a homicide case. I need his testimony.”
Winslow got out of the car, bent down to look at Pino, and nodded in the direction of Matt Chacon’s unit parked on the road at the top of the hill. “Talk to your chief, Sergeant, and tell your partner nothing about me or this conversation.”
“What in the hell do I say to him?”
“You’re a sergeant. Pull rank, if you have to. Tell him he has no need to know. If that doesn’t work, I suggest you tell him to ask for a sit-down with Chief Kerney.”
Winslow closed the door and walked away just as dispatch asked Ramona for a status update. She cleared herself from the twenty, and told dispatch she and Chacon were returning to headquarters.
Matt came on the air, asking for information. Ramona had him switch to the secure channel, gave him the ten code for an undercover operation, and told him they’d talk more back at headquarters. Frustrated by Chief Kerney’s actions, she squealed rubber backing out of the driveway.
Chapter 10
Kerney’s attempts to hurry along the approval process for the exhumation of the body buried at the Fort Bayard National Cemetery ran into some serious snags. He thought that Alice Spalding’s permission and a judge’s order would be all he needed, and hadn’t considered the additional layers of bureaucracy he had to go through to get final authorization.
Because George Spalding was a soldier buried at a national cemetery, Kerney faced the daunting task of dealing with the federal government. Both the U.S. Attorney’s Office in