“Right. And that applies to people, too.”
“I know,” Romeo said. “I just figured that the arrest would be legal here, so the search would be, too.”
“What do you need for an arrest?” Bates asked.
“Probable cause.”
“Right. And what you have here is not probable cause. It’s probably cause, though.”
“Probably cause?”
Bates cracked a smile. “Relax, Rook. It’s an old joke.”
Romeo nodded and forced a smile back. He didn’t like being called ‘Rook,’ but when he asked around, he found that Bates called all of his recruits that.
“So how do we solve this little dilemma?” Bates asked him.
Romeo thought about it for a while, watching Antoine through the binoculars again. Finally, he said, “Well, I guess it would pump things up some if we saw him make more than one contact.”
“You guess?”
“It would.”
“Good,” Bates answered.
Another car came along five minutes later and the brief contact at the window repeated itself, complete with the swift hand exchange. Three minutes later, a third car pulled up for another sale.
“That’s it,” Romeo said. “Let’s go arrest him.”
Bates shook his head.
“Why not? That’s three contacts inside of fifteen minutes. Along with everything else, that’s enough PC to arrest him.”
“You’re right,” Bates told him.
Romeo hesitated. “If I’m right, then let’s arrest him.”
“No.”
Romeo sighed. “Why not?”
Bates moved the toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. Romeo felt a tickle of frustration high in his chest.
“You want him to go to jail or to prison, Rook?”
“What?” Romeo looked at him, confusion mixing with his frustration.
“You go down there now in your pressed, new uniform and shiny new badge, and arrest Antoine, you’re just wasting your time.”
Romeo clenched his jaw. “How’s that? I’d be arresting a drug-”
“Yeah, you would.” Bates removed his toothpick, examined the wet, chewed end and tossed it over the side of the building. “I ever tell you the story about the young bull and the old bull?”
Romeo pressed his lips together and shook his head.
Bates reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a fresh toothpick. “It’s an old story,” he said. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard it.”
Romeo didn’t respond. He wished Bates would get to the point.
“There was this old bull and a young bull and they’re up on top of a hill,” Bates explained. “Down below there’s a dozen or two cows, just grazing away. The young bull says to the old bull, ‘hey, I’ve got an idea. Let’s run down there real fast and fuck one of those cows.’ The old bull shakes his head and says, ‘I’ve got a better idea. Let’s walk down there…and fuck them all.’”
Bates watched him as Romeo processed the information.
“You see?”
Romeo shrugged. “Sorta.”
“If we go down there now, we have enough PC to arrest Antoine. We’ll get his dope and he’ll go to jail. Everyone down there will see you’re a bad-ass rookie, built like a linebacker and taking no shit. That’s all fine and good. But the case isn’t going to get signed up by the prosecutor, so he’ll go free. He won’t go to prison.”
“Why?”
“Say the prosecutor has a hundred cases. He can take maybe two of them to court. Those are gonna be against his high profile dealers. After that, he has time to work out a plea for another thirty, maybe forty. That means sixty of them have got to go.”
“Sixty?”
“Facts of life, Rook. Sixty percent of them just die on the vine. But if we take our time and pile on the contacts before we head down there, there’s no way the probable cause gets questioned and maybe this case moves into the forty percent. Now you see?”
Romeo nodded reluctantly. “That’s messed up.”
“Welcome to the real world.”
They watched Antoine from the rooftop for another thirty minutes. He made four more contacts in that time and each time Romeo considered telling Bates he figured that they had sufficient probable cause to make an arrest. But he hesitated.
After the fifth contact, Bates said, “Tell me something else.”
“What?”
“No,” Bates said, “I mean, tell me something else about what’s going on down there.”
Romeo watched for another two minutes, then shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Who have his customers been?”
“Guys in cars.”
“What kind of guys?”
“Young ones, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Young ones,” Romeo said. “Except for the guy before last. He looked about forty.”
“What color?”
“Color?”
“What color of guys?”
“Oh. White, except for one.”
Bates waited while Romeo thought some more. When he didn’t say anything, Bates asked, “See any women?”
“No.”
“Any walk-ups?”
“No.”
“So what’s he selling?”
“Crack, right?”
Bates narrowed his eyes.
Romeo thought some more. No women meant no hookers. Most hookers were stuck on crack. Or heroin. He opened his mouth to say heroin, then paused. How many crack or heroin addicts had cars?
“Get it yet?”
Romeo chewed his lip. Maybe it was just suburbanites coming downtown for a rock of crack.
“You had it before,” Bates told him. “Earlier.”
Romeo thought for a moment longer, then his face broke into a smile. “Weed. He’s selling weed.”
Bates nodded approvingly. “Number one cash crop in Washington, even with the B.C. bud coming down from Canada to compete. And even though selling marijuana is the same charge according to the law as selling crack-”
“The judges don’t come down as hard,” Romeo finished.
“Exactly. So now what?”
Romeo watched Antoine through his binoculars. The man shifted his stance and leaned against the stop sign.
“I say we get one more contact and then go arrest him.”
Bates nodded his head. “That,” he said, “is a good choice.”
They didn’t have to wait long. A Honda with two college age white males pulled up next to the stop sign and made a quick purchase. Romeo repeated the license plate back to himself and pulled out his notebook to write it down.
“Oh, shit,” Bates said while Romeo scrawled.
“What?”
“Shit,” Bates repeated.
Romeo brought his binoculars up to his face and found Antoine on the corner. A police car pulled up next to him and a young officer was out of the car. Wild Afro walked away from them and the officer waved his hands in that direction.
“No way has he been watching him,” Bates muttered. “There’s no vantage point.”
Romeo brought his glasses in tight on the officer. He recognized Lee Vickers from their platoon. He was pretty sure Vickers had barely a year on the job. Vickers gave up on Wild Afro and concentrated on Antoine. The black man eyed the officer coolly and slid his hands out of his pockets, holding them in plain view. Romeo imagined the conversation.
You got warrants, Antoine?
Nope.
You holding?
Nope.
What are you doing down here?
Just kickin’ it.
After a short exchange, he heard Vickers come over the air with a name check.
“You see that?” Bates asked him. “That’s the young bull, right there.” He shook his head in disgust. “He’s got nothing or he would’ve already put him in cuffs.”
“Should I radio him to hook him up for us?”
“Hold on,” Bates said. “Maybe he has warrants. I didn’t check.”
Romeo didn’t respond, but he knew that Bates had made a mistake. If Antoine was wanted and Bates hadn’t checked, they’d wasted a lot of time watching him when they could’ve been arresting him.
The dispatcher called Vickers on the air. When he answered, she told him Antoine was not currently wanted.