Copyright 2026 by DJ Rawlings

The Briefing

Seven people knew where Vic would be tomorrow afternoon. I trusted all seven.

Chief Richard Harding closed the conference-room door at nine sharp, and the last scraps of conversation died with it. Darin and Jake had slipped into the final two chairs less than a minute earlier. Harding set a folder on the table and gave the room a quick scan.

“I’ll spare you the budget speech. Hiring is frozen, overtime is being cut, and everybody’s being told to do more with less.” He nodded toward me. “This operation is the exception. Detective Benson gets what he needs.”

I stood beside the whiteboard. Seventy-six boxes covered it in a rough pyramid, most of them crowded with photographs, names, addresses, arrest dates, and two years of police work. The box at the top was almost empty.

OSCAR.

“That’s why we’re here.”

Everyone in the room understood what Oscar’s organization had done to the city. We didn’t need another photograph of a dead teenager or another lecture about fentanyl. We needed the man whose name kept surfacing above the people we could actually arrest.

“We’ve identified most of the structure beneath him,” I said. “Suppliers, couriers, stash-house operators, street crews. Seventy-four people we can connect to the organization. Oscar is the exception. We still don’t have a confirmed photograph, an address, or a vehicle.”

I tapped Gordo’s booking photograph one level below him. Three days earlier, we had taken him down with nearly three-quarters of a million dollars in cocaine and pills.

Jake leaned forward. “Still not talking?”

“Not a word.”

“Even with a deal on the table?”

“Gordo knows what happens if he takes one.”

Jake sat back. He didn’t make a joke, and neither did anyone else. Gordo had been the closest person to Oscar we had ever identified. Now his position was vacant, which gave us the first real opening we’d had in months.

I moved my finger to two photographs beneath it.

“The likely replacements are Hector and Juan Rodriguez.”

Juan Rodriguez was Vic’s undercover identity.

As far as we knew, nobody inside Oscar’s organization had connected Juan to Detective Victor Johanson. Vic’s mother was Mexican, and he had grown up speaking Spanish with her, so the language and cultural background came naturally. The department had built the rest of the identity around him.

The photograph on the board wasn’t his department picture. It showed the man Oscar’s people knew: longer hair, several days of beard and clothes Vic would never have worn to work.

Juan had entered Oscar’s organization as a recruit almost nobody knew, then spent two years earning his way upward. The original plan had been simple in the way dangerous plans always looked simple on paper: let him climb high enough that Oscar would eventually have to deal with him.

Now that possibility had arrived.

“We weakened Hector by taking one of his stash houses before Gordo went down,” I said. “Yesterday Juan, I mean Vic, received a message. Four o’clock tomorrow. Denson Park, north lot. Wait for instructions.”

Chairs stopped creaking. Nobody touched the coffee.

Darin folded his arms. “You think Oscar comes himself?”

“I think we prepare for it without counting on it. Maybe he sends a messenger, moves Vic somewhere else, or spends the afternoon seeing whether Vic follows orders. He may not show at all.”

Jason, seated across from me, tilted his head toward the top of the board. “Oscar doesn’t do handoffs.”

I switched the monitor to two aerial photographs. In each, Gordo stood beside a commercial dumpster, lifting green garbage bags that had been left among the trash.

“We followed him twice with aircraft. Different locations, same method. No visible supplier, no vehicle we could tie to the drop, nobody close enough to follow afterward.”

Jake studied the photographs. “That’s really where the name came from?”

Jason’s mouth twitched. “Oscar the Grouch.”

A few people laughed. The sound lasted only a second.

“Tomorrow Vic goes in alone,” I said. “Jason and I will be the nearest cover. Darin’s team stays farther out until called. Vic will carry a modified key fob with GPS and live audio. If he believes he’s in immediate danger, the distress phrase is ‘you’re scaring me.’ We hear that, we move.”

“And before that?” Jake asked.

“We stay invisible.”

Jake glanced toward the photograph of Juan on the board.

“Vic knows how far back you and Jason will be?”

“He helped set the distance.”

Jake frowned. “So if something goes wrong, he could be alone for a while.”

“That’s why he has the distress phrase.”

“And if he uses it, you don’t wait for somebody else to confirm he’s in trouble?”

“No. We move.”

Jake nodded once.

“Good. If Vic is scared enough to say the words, that’s all the confirmation I’d need.”

Jake had bent one corner of his notes until it split. He flattened the page when Harding stepped forward.

“Oscar has stayed invisible because he notices things other people miss. Assume there are lookouts. Assume parked cars are being logged. Anybody who appears twice becomes a problem.” His gaze traveled around the table. “Seven people know the operational plan. It stays seven.”

Nobody needed to ask whether that included spouses, partners, or friends.

“Anything else?” Harding asked.

“Vic comes before the case,” I said. “If I think he’s exposed, we pull him.”

Jason’s eyes stayed on me a moment longer than the others.

Vic and I had known each other since we were fifteen. After my mother died and the rest of my family became mostly a collection of absences, Shirley’s house had given me a place to land. Vic came with it. We had grown up, become cops, and somehow ended up here, with his picture beneath the name of a man who would kill him if he learned the truth.

I had helped put him there.

Harding opened the door. “Keep your phones on.”

The room emptied. Jason stayed behind until Jake and Darin were gone, then picked up the key fob from the table.

“We’re too far away tomorrow.”

“Vic knows.”

“That isn’t what I said.”

“It’s what he’ll say.”

Jason turned the fob between his fingers. “One lookout recognizes either of us and Vic’s finished. I understand the problem. I just don’t like our answer.”

Neither did I. There wasn’t a better one.

“We’re meeting him again,” I said. “You can tell him yourself.”

***

Fritz made us wait forty-five minutes in the back corner of a Walmart parking lot.

Jason checked his phone, put it away, then checked it again. “He does this because he knows it annoys me.”

“He does it because you keep reacting.”

“That’s worse.”

Fritz finally climbed into the back seat wearing a faded baseball cap and carrying enough cigarette smoke with him to change the air inside the car.

“What ya got for me, Boss?”

“Anything moving since Gordo went down?”

“Nope.”

“Hector?”

“Quiet.”

“Anybody asking about our investigation?”

Fritz scratched at his jaw. “Not where I can hear it.”

Jason turned halfway around. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure nobody told me.”

For an informant, that was almost a guarantee.

I handed him sixty dollars. He counted it before putting it away.

“You hear Oscar’s name tonight, call me.”

“Night rates cost extra.”

“Call me anyway.”

He grinned and climbed out.

Jason watched him disappear between two rows of cars. “Useful as ever.”

“If Oscar knows about Vic, the people under him don’t seem to.”

“That make you feel better?”

“A little.”

More than I wanted it to.

***

Vic had taken the rear booth at a small café across town, facing the entrance without seeming to. Two years undercover had changed little habits first.

Jason sat across from Vic. “I'd like it noted that I still hate the distance.”

“Noted,” Vic said. “Stay there anyway.”

He had earned the right to insist. Months earlier, moving closer would have put our car in direct view of a lookout. Tomorrow, if Oscar was watching, Vic needed to arrive as Juan Rodriguez, not as the man we were trying to protect.

“If Gordo’s job is mine,” he continued, “Oscar has to deal with me somehow. Drugs can move through dead drops. Money can’t stay invisible forever. That’s our opening.”

“And if he shows?” Jason asked.

“The aircraft stays on him.”

“Until?”

Vic finally picked up his water. “Until he stops.”

His old watch slid toward his hand. He pushed it back and caught me looking.

“Shirley put a new strap on it.”

“The watch survives. My socket set doesn’t.”

“It’s in my garage.”

“For eight months.”

“I know where everything is.”

He didn’t. Dale had stopped lending him tools years ago. I still did, which was probably why he kept borrowing mine.

I gave the answer a few seconds to settle. “Carry an ankle gun.”

“No.”

“Something small.”

“Steve.”

“If the location changes, you could end up anywhere.”

“And if they search me, I could end up dead before you hear the distress phrase.”

“Drug dealers carry guns.”

“Not when they’re summoned by the man above them and expected to come alone.”

He was right, and being right required him to walk in unarmed.

“A vest, then.”

“A vest is worse. No weapon. No vest.”

Jason studied his glass, wisely staying out of it.

Vic smiled at me. “You look like Shirley when she’s mad.”

“That’s because you give us the same problems.”

“She likes me better.”

“Debatable.”

He laughed, and for a moment I could see the fifteen-year-old version of him again, the kid who had once dared me to jump from Shirley’s garage roof into a swimming pool that was farther away than either of us had measured.

Then he checked his watch.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

“Four o’clock.”

He stood. I caught his forearm before he could step away.

“If anything feels wrong, leave. I don’t care how close we are.”

The smile disappeared.

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

I released him.

Vic took two steps toward the door, then turned back. “Steve?”

“What?”

“If I walk in carrying a gun, I’m as good as dead.”

He left before I could argue again.