(This is the fourth in the X series, and is intended to be read after "Xhalation", "Xcogitate" and "Xemplify".)
Malik had a pretty good idea of what he was going to find before they even busted the door down. They'd been running surveillance on Kevin Cooper for about two months now, trying to find out who supplied him with this new X shit that was giving every forensic chemist in the goddamn state fits trying to analyze, and they already knew that Sarah Fuller had entered the building five days ago and had never come out. The missing persons report gave them an excuse to search the premises, and Malik was pretty sure he'd find Sarah in with all the other addicts, stoned out of her gourd on some shit that none of her family knew she was taking. The only real surprise was that she didn't get her fix from a more reputable dealer. Didn't investment bankers get their coke delivered these days?
When he came through just behind the guys with the battering ram, Malik wasted no time in directing the team to the inner door at the back of the dingy living room that 'Kev' used to conduct his business. "Take it down," he called out, his voice calm and confident as he stepped aside to let the SWAT team do their work. He already knew from some of their informants that Kev let some of his trusted customers get high in the spare bedroom, what he called his 'office', and that the upper floor was mostly living space. Kev was probably either going to be there, or down in the basement where he cooked his drugs trying to destroy any evidence.
Or trying to make a break for it, but Malik didn't think he was that stupid. They had the place surrounded, and Kev didn't seem like the type to rush out guns blazing and commit suicide by cop. He was a small-time dealer until X came along, mostly handled weed and ecstasy and some pills he bought from teenagers who robbed their grandma's medicine cabinet. He didn't do any of the hard stuff himself, he probably had some people he could roll over on if he wanted to get a reduced sentence, and Malik felt pretty sure that he wasn't going to do anything crazy.
That expectation got revised a little when the SWAT team flooded the top floor and didn't find anyone. It got revised a lot when they smashed open the door to the staircase going down into the basement and found Kev's private lab unattended and unsecured. And it got blown right the fuck to hell when they busted down the reinforced cellar door and found an empty, dank room that stank of X with a concrete floor and a crumbling hole in the far wall leading down into total darkness.
"Let's get some lights in here," Malik said, directing two men to go back up for the heavy-duty floods they used for night operations. Inside his head, though, he was already frantically reworking his theories about what must have happened since the last time Undercover sent a man in. He'd need to figure it out fast, before his captain started asking awkward questions about why Malik ordered a full raid on an empty building with no Sarah Fuller, no Kevin Cooper, and no drugs on the premises outside of a hydroponic grow lab and three vape cartridges of X.
He reached down and brushed his light brown fingers against the floor, coming away with a trace of concrete dust. A few loose chunks of aggregate were scattered here and there; even though they'd already been kicked around by a number of police officers who had other things on their mind besides forensic contamination, it was pretty easy to tell that they spread out from the hole in the wall, not in. This wasn't Kev's private exit in the event of Shit Going Down, this was an entrance to... Malik took a whiff of the air flowing in from the hole, his nose wrinkling as the stench of human waste hit his nostrils. The sewer. And someone knocked it in. Great.
Whoever it was, they must have used sledgehammers instead of explosives. There were no burn marks, and none of the teams on stakeout had reported any suspicious rumbles or loud noises coming from the house. Meaning that whoever did it probably didn't want to draw attention to themselves. They must have known that the cellar had a sewer grate. Maybe a regular customer of Kev's, or a business associate? One or the other, anyway. No pothead was going to spend hours poring over municipal sewage plans on the off chance that their dealer's house could be accessed from below. This had to be an inside job.
So one of Kev's customers, probably more than one, broke into his house from the cellar looking for X. Must have been X. Nobody went to this kind of trouble over grass or E. And they came up, they found Kev in the basement, and... what, fought him? There was no sign of a struggle. No blood, no bodies. Surveillance said there should be eleven people in this house, and they hadn't found a single one. They didn't just all wander down into the sewer together, did they? Nah. Something must have happened.
Maybe it was Kev's suppliers. They never did find out how he was moving the X into the house, and he sure as hell wasn't making it himself-the shit was so complex it was breaking the fucking gas chromatographs down at the lab, there was no way some stoner hippie who forgot the Sixties ever ended knew how to brew it up. So maybe they had someone climb into a manhole somewhere downtown, wherever they cooked the shit, and handed it off to their dealers through the sewer grates. And maybe, just maybe, Kev got behind in his payments and they decided to bust in and have a little talk with him.
Only when they busted in, they found him with Sarah Fuller, suddenly famous missing person and the darling of the local news. That made sense, didn't it? Even if this hypothetical drug distributor didn't mind offing a dealer in front of his customers, as a message to whoever they went to next for their fix, they wouldn't want to leave someone who knew what they looked like and might talk to the press. They, they must have rounded up everyone in the house and marched them down into the cellar, and from there...
The SWAT team came back with the lights. Malik was already jumping down into the hole as they were setting them up. "Get as many men as you can down here, tell them to hold their noses if the smell bothers them. We're either going to find some bodies, or we're going to find our X supplier down here." He looked around the shadowed, cramped passageway, already certain of what he was going to see.
Because the thing about sewers was, they weren't exactly easy to find your way around in. Even if you had a map and a light to read it by, there were always passageways that looked shorter on paper and diversions from the blueprints and junctions that were easy to miss in the dark. If these guys were sending runners through the sewers, they probably put marks on the walls or something to make it easier to navigate. Unless they were paranoid beyond belief or had a lot more faith in a GPS signal's ability to make it through ten feet of lead pipe than he did. And most criminals weren't nearly paranoid enough, in Malik's experience.
He helped the second man down, then began to shine a flashlight around while the second helped the third and so on. "Don't get too spread out," he said. "Try to keep eyes on the man in front of you, don't wander off by yourself, and keep as close to a straight line path as possible. We're either looking for the missing perps, or for some kind of trail that tells us which way they went." He set off through the knee-deep water, wishing to hell he had a pair of waders in the van.