The Catch by Archer Mayor Read Free Book Online Page A

“What d’you think?”
    “He hasn’t thrown us out yet.”
    When their host returned a quarter of an hour later, he merely leaned against his own doorjamb, his hands empty, and asked, “What d’you want from us, assuming we want to play?”
    Joe and Sam exchanged glances.
    “To be part of the team that knocks on the door of this Dot Ave address.” Joe patted the printout resting on Botzow’s desk. “I am still deputized with you folks,” he mentioned for good measure.
    The SAC pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I think we can improve on that, especially since we don’t know where this might lead—how about forming a task force?”
    Joe raised his eyebrows. “What exactly did you find out?”
    “Luis Grega is suspected of killing at least one dealer in Canada, and he’s mentioned in a couple of our ongoing smuggling cases. Best of all, he’s now in this country illegally. Let’s just say for the moment that we’re very interested in meeting him—and the Canadians are flat-out eager. But we haven’t had an angle on his whereabouts until now.”
    “Cool,” Sam murmured.
    Botzow laughed. “Yeah. I agree.”
    He bowed slightly at the door, gesturing them to precedehim out. “Let’s meet our guys who kick in doors for a living.”
    Later that night, Joe and Sammie, clad in borrowed ballistic vests and stuffed into the rear of an overcrowded, anonymous delivery van, sat and waited for instructions, reduced for the most part to glorified onlookers.
    It had been an educational few hours. From the SAC, they were introduced to the DSAC, his deputy, and then taken to meet the group supervisor, or “group supe,” overseeing the Drugs-and-Gangs squad, who in turn brought them before the special agent running the actual case in which Luis Grega was a source of interest.
    This last person was named Lenny Chapman. A tan, athletic man in his mid-thirties, Chapman had worked for eight years with a midwestern municipal police department, which made him kindly disposed to the likes of Joe and Sam. During the briefing that followed and the subsequent strategy session with the ICE entry team—who would do the actual forced entry so popular on TV—Chapman made a point of deferring to the two Vermonters, asking for their opinion and input, and making sure they felt as much a part of the team as everyone else.
    It was quite a team. Each participant seemed relaxed while at the same time exhibiting a real keenness to get going. Sitting among them, Joe was reminded of a pack of bloodhounds, penned up for too long in the kennel.
    Now that they were finally on stakeout, though, the mood was different still. From bloodhounds, most of them had become something less definable—predatory,but not as suggestive of raw impulsive energy. There was a watchful, almost patient tension in the van that Joe could see most clearly in Lenny Chapman, who’d positioned himself closest to the rear door and sat there, half crouched, a radio to his ear, waiting for the entry team’s surveillance crew to give them the go-ahead. Joe watched the young man’s profile, barely visible in the half light leaking in through the tinted windows, and studied the way his jaw slowly and methodically worked the piece of gum he’d slipped into his mouth just before heading out.
    This, Joe imagined, was a man who made a point of keeping his emotions under control.
    He glanced at Sam and saw a similar eagerness in her body language—the proverbial spring under restraint. She and the Lenny Chapmans of the profession thirsted for events like the one they were now facing. And Joe had to concede that he’d once shared their enthusiasm—a long time ago.
    He shifted his gaze out the window beside him. This section of Dorchester Avenue was a tired, depleted, run-down place, populated with a mixture of peeling, clapboarded duplexes and larger, stained brick apartment buildings whose very blandness suggested illicitness.
    He didn’t doubt that his sheer exhaustion