I remembered sitting in on the briefing for the raid the next morning.  The officer in charge said, at one point, you hit hard and fast just before dawn when everyone is still asleep.

It was the time of least resistance.

That raid went off exactly as planned, the people whom the task force had been targeting were all there, along with the contraband that had arrived the night before and was sitting on the kitchen table.

It was just one of several thoughts going through my mind, an hour before dawn, unable to sleep.

Another and perhaps more potent thought was the aftermath of what could only be described as a witch hunt. 

That task force’s success had slowly diminished, its raids were less effective and then ineffective.  The only explanation, we had an informer on the team

And in the usual blunt force methodology for handling problems, officers were singled out, investigated, and then moved on.  Guilty or not, their reputations are destroyed.

I was one of them.

Of course, I made a mistake, but the thing is I should have known the woman I’d been dating at the time was a relative of one of the crime families we’d been investigating, and for those investigating the task force it was a slam dunk connection.

It didn’t matter there was no link between her and the criminals other than by name.  I didn’t get booted out of the police, just sidelined into a dead-end basement, shuffling paper.

And the woman stayed with me, despite the heavy-handed investigative process that destroyed her reputation too.

I was angry, she was resigned.

I wanted revenge, she wanted to move to a remote croft in northern Scotland and forget about the rest of the world, and I was finding it hard to find an argument against doing just that.

Perhaps then I would get a good night’s sleep.

I heard a cell phone receiving a message, and then a minute or two later, Angelica emerged with the offending cell phone in hand.

“They’re coming,” she said.

The whole ordeal we had been dragged through had taken a toll on her more than me, and she was almost a shadow of her former self.

“Who’s coming?”

“Your people.”

It was not delivered with rancour, just as a statement of fact.

“How do you know this?”

“My father.”

“I thought you had no contact with them?”

“I didn’t, but after all of this, he reached out.  He offered a helping hand, but I declined.  Seems he wasn’t listening.”

She flopped into the seat next to me.

“How does he know?”

“How does anyone know anything?  We should go.”

“Where?  Running is the admission of guilt.”  It seemed obvious to me, knowing how the system worked.  They were not going to let it go.

“So, we’re staying?”

“Do you want to go?”

“Yes.”

“How long have we got?”

“About a half hour traffic withstanding.”

I shrugged.  Why not.  No point in going through another round of meaningless accusations.

“OK.”

We didn’t go far, oddly at Christina’s request, and it made me think there was more to the message she received.

She had insisted I bring binoculars and we took up a position on a carpark roof a little over half a mile from our residence, a sort where we had a perfect view of the front and rear entrances.

We just made it when several cars pulled up out the front and one blocked off the rear.  At least 20 officers in bulletproof vests and a dozen swat officers swarmed around the building.

32 officers versus two allegedly unarmed people.

Overkill.

What were they expecting?  A small army.

I watched the usual briefing of team leaders and then the disbursement of personnel to the front, rear, and escape points. There were three.

Then the swat officers went first, in sync through the front and rear doors, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Just before dawn, at the peak of the targets unpreparedness.

In less than a minute, six shots rang out.  Six.

Angelica looked at me.  She knew the significance of it as well as I did.  “We were not meant to walk away from that.”

It was a simple statement with huge ramifications.

Someone was covering their tracks, and using us as scapegoats.

I watched the front entrance, waiting to see who emerged, and I was betting it would be someone else, other than the usual crew.

Fifteen minutes it took.  About as long as it would take to see that we had stuffed the bed with lifelike dummies, then searched the building, discovering the almost well-hidden entrance to the basement, and then the entrance to an escape tunnel.

The fact only three came out of the front entrance told me there were 20 plus officers down the rabbit hole chasing ghosts.  It would take several hours before they realised, they’d been deceived.

But, back at the front entrance, I knew the three, and none of them would pull the trigger on unarmed targets.

I waited and was rewarded.

Montgomery. A shadowy little man hired to train us in shadowy stuff.  I’d read a file on him that I’d received from an external source and among his many talents, alleged assassinations of people we couldn’t touch, not that any of the crimes his name was attached to had been proved.

The perfect man for an off-book operation.

A few sharp words to the officer in charge and he was gone.

“Scotland’s looking good then,” she said.

”Very good.  How did they know what was about to go down?”

“Bad people need badder people to organise hits like this.”

“And your father…”

“Knows bad people who do bad things.  Be grateful you’re still alive.  And, you know who it is now trying to kill us.”

“But not the person who ordered it.  Now you have an entry point.  If you want to stay, do so, but I’m not.  I’m going to Scotland.  I’ve been innocent of any wrongdoing, and the fact they chose not to believe that means their worst fears are going to come true.”

“They’re not all bad people?”

I wanted to believe that, but it looked more and more like I picked the wrong task force to be on.  It begged the question of how deep the problem was.

“You just saw what happened.  We’d be dead now if it had been for that message.  I think you can safely assume they want a scapegoat and you’re it.  I would have been collateral damage.”

She was right.  I could stay, and talk to friends, but who could I really trust?  And with the sort of lies and manufactured evidence they could create against me, who would believe me?

“Then, two for Scotland it is.”

She smiled and took my hand in hers.  “Good choice.  Time to go.”

Two words with so much left unsaid.  What had been the ‘bad choice’?

…

© Charles Heath 2023