No Angel by Jay Dobyns

him.”
    I did. I went to Pops’s place in Tucson—he lived there with his wife and two whip-smart girls—and asked him if he wanted to work a big case for me. “Hell yes,” he said. I gave him the details. He said he was game to play a big role. I told him I couldn’t give him that, that he’d just be an associate. I didn’t make any bones about it: “You’ll get five hundred a week, no overtime, plus expenses. You’re going to make runs to Mexico for us. Agents can’t go down there. You’ll be traveling with another, less trusted informant—make sure he stays in line. As always, you’re our drug guy. You know the shit better than we do, and if there ever comes a time when one of us needs to take a bump or a puff, when we got no dodge or escapes left, then you gotta come to the rescue and be that guy.”
    “All right.”
    “Think you can handle that? Without getting hooked again?”
    “Jay, I hook that shit again, I’m telling you now to go ahead and arrest me when it happens. That or shoot me. It won’t happen.”
    “Good.”
    In addition to the undercover crew, Slats put together a stellar task force staff of cops from a broad spectrum of agencies: ATF; the Phoenix, Glendale, and Tempe police departments; the Arizona Department of Public Safety; the Maricopa County sheriff’s office; and the Drug Enforcement Agency all contributed. Put together, the task-force members had over two hundred years of law-enforcement or military training and experience. Slats couldn’t persuade Sugarbear to come on board. He opted to see the Riverside case to the end. He eventually arrested all of the guys in that case and sent them each away for quite a while.
    Every case gets a code name. We wanted something mysterious—“The Sonny Barger Investigation” or “The Arizona Hells Angels” didn’t have any pop. We also needed a name that would help keep the case hush-hush. Undercover work cuts both ways—we try to get in on them and, one way or another, they try to get in on us. There are plenty of cops who are buddy-buddy with Angels or Angel associates, and the Angels have plenty of friends, usually wives or girlfriends, who work for state or municipal offices. For those reasons we needed to keep our case on the down-low. Slats was a huge Detroit Red Wings fan, so he decided to call our case Black Biscuit, which is slang for hockey puck.
    We were ready to go.
    The Saturday before the day-to-day operations were to commence, Slats had a barbecue at his place. His wife cooked up a feast. Everyone was invited, including wives and kids. Making a weekend of it, Gwen and I checked into a hotel and left the kids with the grandparents. At the party we laughed and drank beer and sweated in the Slatallas’ backyard. It was a blissful state of communal denial.
    At the height of the party, Slats made his way through the crowd, asking people to come inside. Gwen and I were chatting with Carlos, who was there alone, when Slats came up to us. We followed him, and on the way he threw out an empty beer can, grabbed a dripping fresh one out of an ice bucket, and snapped it open.
    Once inside, he took his wife by the arm and climbed a few steps leading to the bedrooms upstairs. He turned around.
    “Friends. Everyone. Please. You may think otherwise, but I’m not much for speeches. I just wanted to thank you all for coming. This meal we’ve made for you is a very small token of appreciation for what you are about to undertake. This is gonna be a long haul. It’ll take nearly all our time and energy. Make no mistake, no one has done what we’re about to do in the way we intend to do it. It’s going to take all the brains and balls and heart that each of us has.” He paused to take a long swig of beer. “I gotta warn all of you: This is going to be a shit detail.” Slats’s wife nudged him for cussing with kids around. He continued, “The work will be big and good, but the demand will be high. So I’m here to say now that if