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Disclaimer: Numb3rs, its characters, and its scenes are not mine. I own nothing. Really. Please don't sue me.
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It was well after 6pm when David and Colby arrived at the address, a crappy house in a rather nice neighborhood. The neighbors probably hate this guy, thought David as they approached the door. Overgrown lawn, rusted mailbox, in need of paint. It's hard enough to sell a house these days without the neighbor being a slob.
There were two cars in the driveway. Either one would have cost an FBI agent's yearly salary. Slob or not, this guy had cash. Considering the company he kept, David's assumption was "drug dealer." It's never a fun thing for a cop to knock on a drug dealer's front door. They don't tend to react well to that sort of visitor. David looked at Colby, who raised an eyebrow. Neither had to say a word--they'd both come to the same conclusion. The men kept their hands on their respective weapons as they walked up the path to the front door. Once on the porch, David stood to the right of the door and Colby to the left. Colby knocked, politely. No need to make the inhabitants jumpy. They might shoot. Or run. Colby hated when they ran--especially when it was 90 degrees out.
"Yeah?" came a man's voice through the door.
"FBI. We'd like to talk..." He didn't even get to finish the sentence. There was a clatter, a voice farther back in the house's interior, and the sound of a toilet flushing. Colby signaled to David, telling him to stay in front while Colby ran around back, grumbling about the heat. David made a quick call to control, informing them of the situation and requesting backup before pounding on the door. "FBI! Open this door or I will open it!" A crash and a shout from the direction of the back yard told him Colby had found someone.
Colby rounded the corner into the back yard as a short, fat man came out of a door with his arms full. The man saw the agent, dropped his armload, and turned as if to reenter the house at a run. He made it about three steps as, shouting "freeze!" Colby tackled him. "You stupid, stupid man," started Colby, snapping cuffs on the fat man, "we just wanted to talk to you. And now we've gotta arrest you." He pointed toward the pile the man had dropped in his haste, several Ziploc bags of plant matter spilling out of a brown shopping bag. "And there's a LOT of paperwork involved with that stuff. I hate paperwork."
"You OK back there?" David called from the front.
"Yeah--I'm thinking we've got cause to take a look inside though." He looked at the fat man, still sitting on the ground, then took out another pair of handcuffs and fastened the man to a nearby railing. "Stay."
David went in the front door, gun drawn, as Colby did the same in back. The sound of the toilet flushing yet again met both agents' ears a second later. David turned toward the sound as Colby cleared the back of the house, going from room to room, finding nothing but a moldy pile of dishes in the sink. David followed the sound of flushing and scrambling feet down a hallway off the left side of the living room, into a master bedroom and to an enormous bathroom beyond. A forty-something woman turned, startled, from the toilet, into which she'd been tossing the powdery contents of a pile of small Ziploc bags. "GET OUT!!" She shrieked. "GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!! YOU (insert curses here. Some of you are far more creative than I)!!" She ran toward David, her fists flailing, her face contorted into a drug-laced rage. "YOU..." The woman didn't finish her second invective as David neatly sidestepped her attempt to rush him, took her right arm and swung it behind her. She collapsed forward onto the tile floor.
"Nice one." Said Colby, behind him. Colby covered the woman with his Springfield as David bound her wrists in handcuffs. "Rest of the house is empty. I'm gonna go fetch my friend outside, and then we can sort this mess out."
Colby headed back out to the yard while David picked his charge up off the bathroom floor. She kicked and tried to bite him. "None of that." He held her from behind and guided her, growling like a caged animal, toward the living room.
Sirens could be heard approaching the house as David and Colby seated their respective prisoners on the living room couch. The woman continued to hurl a loud and, David thought, very creative string of invectives which the agents pretended not to hear. Colby glanced out the window at the approaching marked police cruisers and then at David questioningly. David chuckled a bit. "That would be the backup I called for. That you didn't wait for."
Colby shrugged and turned his attention to the man and woman on the couch. The woman was now doubled forward over her knees, trying to bring her cuffed wrists up, backward, over her head. Since human arms don't really bend that way, Colby ignored her efforts and focused on the man, whose driver's license identified him as Samuel James. "Believe it or not, we just wanted to talk to you. If you had just answered the door, and answered our questions, we probably would have just thanked you and gone on our way. But now…" he glanced at the woman. She had given up twisting her arms backward and was now trying to scoot the handcuffs under her backside, presumably to get her hands around front by going under her feet. That worked sometimes, but most people's arms aren't long enough. Colby shifted his attention back to the man.
David pulled the photo of Rust out of his pocket and showed it to the man. "Have you seen Danny lately?"
The response was exactly as the agents expected it to be—vague and obfuscating. "Huh? Danny who? I don't know that guy."
"Yeah," replied Colby. "We know. Complete stranger. Never heard of him. Except you have. You've bailed him out of jail three times in the past year. You used a credit card, in your own name, in two different county jails, where you were recorded on camera. You wanna take another look at the photo?"
David opened the front door to four uniformed LAPD officers, pointed them toward the back yard and master bathroom with a few words. He came back to the living room as the man answered "Yeah. OK. Yeah. I didn't recognize him with that shiner on his eye. OK, so I know Danny. But I haven't seen him in months. If you find him, tell him he owes me twenty bucks."
"Uh huh." David glanced at Colby. "Well, see, it's pretty important that we find Danny. Important enough that maybe we talk to the Judge you're about to meet about that bag in the back yard. Tell him that you've been very helpful to us. If we find Danny real fast."
The man's eyes shifted from David to Colby and back. "Why? What'd he do?" David suppressed a grin.
Just then, two of the police officers came back into the living room, each carrying a large black garbage bag. Green-brown leaves poked out of the tops of the bags. One of the cops grinned at the FBI agents. This was obviously going to be a good day for LAPD. The officers dropped their cargoes and headed back toward the rear of the house.
Colby gave the bags a significant glance, then looked back at the man on the couch. "Looks like you might want to chat with us a while before seeing that judge."
Surprisingly, the sight of about 25 pounds worth of pot seemed to quiet the struggling woman. She stared at the garbage bags longingly and mumbled "Danny was s'posed to pick those up." Colby and David's attention shifted to the woman.
"Yeah?" asked David. "It's Danny's pot? When was he supposed to pick it up?"
The woman seemed surprised to have been addressed by the agent. She began screaming again, the four letter words interspersed with wordless screeching. Just recognizable in among the invective were the words "He said he's gonna get it outta here." And later "Three o'clock he said. But was he here?" She seemed to forget that the agents and the fat man were in the room with her, but her screaming didn't stop. Its target simply shifted to Danny Rust. Apparently, the man hadn't shown up to take delivery of the two (no, Colby thought, as the police officers returned—four!) garbage bags of marijuana he'd agreed to buy. At least not yet. The sound of sirens came again as the glimmer of an idea formed in both David and Colby's minds.
