A Prayer for the Night by P. L. Gaus

Author:P. L. Gaus
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
Published: 2010-11-15T23:00:00+00:00

15

Friday, July 23

6:50 P.M.

AGENT Tony Arnetto of the Drug Enforcement Administration stood with his back to the north-facing windows in Bruce Robertson’s office at the jail and struggled vainly to bring a measure of calm back into his voice after the shouting match with Robertson had played to a draw. He was short, wiry, and dressed in a thousand-dollar suit more appropriate for the halls of Washington, D.C., than for the hills of east-central Ohio. The big sheriff’s belligerence had brought his blood to a boil in record time.

His intransigence marked by the set of his jaw, Robertson stood behind his desk, as angry with Arnetto as he had ever been with anyone. Branden sat between them, in a chair in front of the sheriff’s desk, surprised, despite long experience, by how quickly Robertson had been able to provoke the DEA agent into an outburst.

After a labored breath to calm himself, Arnetto said, “We can’t take them down now. There’s the bar, the house in Gahanna, and a score of dealers out on the street in Columbus alone. We’re just not ready.”

“You’ll never be as ready as you want to be,” Robertson argued, still heated.

“Look,” Arnetto said, “it’s complicated.”

Pounding his desk, Robertson said, “It’s not complicated! More likely than not, Sara Yoder is down there. She’s sure not in Holmes County anymore, or we’d have turned something up. We’re going after her. You can take these drug clowns down at the same time.”

Frustrated, Arnetto snapped his hand through the air and said, “You’re not going to flush seven months of undercover work down the toilet on the off chance that she’ll be in that bar. I keep telling you, we haven’t seen her!”

Robertson kicked back against his chair and knocked it into the bookshelves behind his desk. He scratched furiously at his stiff burr haircut and scowled into the middle distance. He pulled the chair back to rights and sat down heavily. Ellie Troyer-Niell came into the office and stood tapping a steno pad with her pen, her face passive. Robertson gave her a glance, calmed himself on her account, and said, less aggressively, “Then send your man back into the Gahanna house. Find out if she’s there.”

“It’s too soon,” Arnetto said, responding in a measured way to Robertson’s moderated tone. “Look, there’s the bar on 62. You know about that from your videotape. Then there’s the house in Gahanna. I shouldn’t have told you about it, but there you are. If we take one or both of those places, we’re going to lose all the Holmes County people this guy is running. That’s five midlevel pushers and a dozen retailers out on your streets. We’re just not ready to move.”

Branden turned in his chair to face Arnetto more squarely, and said, “It is likely going to be this redhead’s crew who took Sara away, Agent Arnetto. It’s more than likely that this same crew is tied into John Schlabaugh’s murder. Maybe Spits Wallace’s, too.”

“Who?” Arnetto asked.

“William Wallace,” Branden said evenly.

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