“The risk the baggage handlers would run would be getting caught with this stuff before they could get rid of it. Which means they would have to know when the plane with the drugs was arriving, and when the plane for, say, Allentown was leaving. And then they would have to arrange it so they worked that plane too.”
“How do you think it’s being done? Or do you think it’s being done?”
“It’s being done, all right,” Martinez said. “And I think we have a dirty cop involved in it.”
“How?” Wohl asked.
“Nobody searches the cops. And nobody, except maybe the sergeant, or one of the lieutenants, asks a cop what he’s doing. He’s got keys to get onto the ramp, and keys to open the doors leading off the ramp onto the conveyors and into the terminal. I went onto the ramp and watched them unload arriving international airplanes, and nobody said beans to me. I could have been handed, say, three-, four-, even five-kilo bags of coke or heroin, and just walked away with it.”
“Five kilos is ten, eleven pounds,” Wohl said thoughtfully.
"Worth twenty, twenty-five thousand a K,” Martinez said.
“How would you have gotten it out of the airport?”
“Passed it to somebody in the terminal. Put it in a locker, and passed the key to somebody. Or just put it in my car.”
“Let me throw this at you,” Wohl said. “Add this to the equation. I had a long talk with a BNDD agent. I got him to tell me something his boss didn’t happen to mention. There have been two incidents of unclaimed luggage. Both about five weeks ago. Each piece had four Ks of heroin. That’s why they’re so sure it’s coming into Philadelphia.”
“The luggage is marked in some way, a name tag, probably with a phony name. If the baggage handler gets to take the stuff out of the bag, he also removes the tag. When the mule gets to the carousel, and sees his baggage, and the tag is still on it, he just doesn’t pick it up.”
He didn’t think about that before replying, Wohl thought. He’d already figured that out as a possibility. He’s as smart as a whip.
“That means giving up four Ks, a hundred thousand dollars worth of drugs.”
“The cost of doing business,” Martinez replied.
“I don’t suppose you have any idea which cop is dirty?” Wohl asked.
“No,” Martinez said.
That was too quick, Wohl thought.
“I’m not asking for an accusation,” Wohl said. “Just a suspicion, a gut feeling. And nothing leaves this room.”
“Nothing yet,” Martinez said.
That was not the truth. The moment Jesus Martinez had laid eyes on Corporal Vito Lanza, he had had the feeling that something was not right about him. But you don’t accuse a brother officer, or even admit you have suspicions about him, unless you have more to go on than the fact that he gambles big money in Las Vegas, and dresses and behaves like a Guinea gangster.
Wohl suspected that Martinez was concealing something from him, but realized he could not press him any more than he had.
One of the telephones in his bedroom rang. Wohl could tell by the sound of the ring that it was his personal, rather than his official, telephone.
That makes it fairly certain, he thought as he turned toward the bedroom, that I am not to be informed that one of my stalwart Highway Patrolmen has just run though a red light into a station wagon full of nuns.
He had used that for instance as the criteria for telephoning him at his home on weekends. Any catastrophe of less monumental proportions, he had ordered, should be referred to either Captain Michael Sabara, his deputy, or to Captain David Pekach, commanding officer of the Highway Patrol, for appropriate action.
“Excuse me,” Wohl said, and went into his bedroom.
The fact that this is on my personal line, he thought as he sat down on his bed and reached for the telephone, does not mean that I am not about to hear something I do not wish to hear, such as Mother reminding me that I have not been to Sunday dinner in a month, so how about tomorrow?
“Hello?”
“From that tone of voice,” his caller said, “what I think I should do is just hang up, but I hate it when people do that to me.”
“Hello, Matt,” Wohl said, smiling. “What’s up?”
“I was wondering how welcome I would be if I drove over there.”
Not at all welcome, with Martinez here. And from the tone of