In response to Polar B's polite request for five facts about ourselves, I humbly submit the following:

1. My daughter blogs on the stream too. She's TC at shatteredknights, and 'Zine at hopelesspoet. We often blog at the same time, and afterwards chortle at or praise the results, as appropriate.

2. We currently live among three cats, two gerbils, and thirty tropical finches. They are my daughter's familiars.

3. A lot of my posts seem to involve the antics of narcotics officers. Am I a narcotics officer? No, and again, no. However, if I were a narcotics officer, I would probably lie to you and tell you I was not.

4. I have never been to Great Britain, and I do not plan on going soon. I understand that people sometimes wear unfeasibly tight shorts there, and sometimes throw people over hedgerows.

5. I can play the pipe organ, like Lon Chaney in the "Phantom of the Opera. Some say I am prettier than he was.

At two o'clock the following afternoon--a fine sunny day--Carlo Quinn, the Marshmallow Man, backed his road-racer Nissan into a slot outside the Norman Suite.

I waited inside, alone but not alone.

On the other side of the connecting door of the suite, in the next room, were Susan, Ashe, Juan, and Juba--locked, loaded, and dressed in full raid gear; blue jackets, ball caps, flak vests, helmets, badges on lanyards around their necks. Sasquatch was offsite in a white van with the chemicals loaded in the back. Carlo needed to show me the money first.

I opened the door, walked outside, and greeted him casually. I could see that he was not armed. He was wearing a tight, green polyester shirt today, and was again resplendent in gold rings that shone against his pasty, puffy flesh. His copper pompadour gleamed in the sun, noticeably so, since I was observing it from above.

Carlo would never utilize his expired-fish-blue eyes to observe the dust that collects on the top of refrigerators, nor would he guage the height of a door that he was passing through. It was not in his nature to do so, his natural perspective on the passing world being at approximate belt level. I have often wondered what it would be like to see nothing but bellies and butts in a crowd-- would it seem normal, since one would see nothing but bellies and butts all day, or would it skew one's internalized explanation of the universe towards an epistemology of bellies and butts? Troubling questions.

"Where are the chemicals?" he asked.

"I know they're close, and I believe they'll be here soon," I said. I shook my head to clear it of epistemological daydreams. Something about Carlo made you want to think of something else. "I'll call my partner on his cell and tell him to bring them here when I've seen the money."

The Marshmallow Man held forth an actual leathern drawstring bag that jingled. I opened it. Gold. I poured it into my cupped hand, and counted the Kruggerands. As we'd agreed.

I called Sasquatch.

"He's got the money. Bring it." I snapped the phone shut. "He'll be here in two minutes."

I waited comfortably, enjoying the sun. This juncture in an investigation is one of my favorite things--everything's going nicely, an arrest is about to occur, and our labors are about to come to a heartwarming conclusion. All nature seems to sing agreeably--I could nearly envision tiny metaphorical bluebirds.

Sasquatch drove up in his van--smiling. I knew he felt the same way.

"Let's load it up," said Sasquatch.

Carlo opened the Nissan's trunk, and we filled the space with bottles and boxes. There was barely enough room.

"This calls for a see-gar," said Sasquatch.

"Yep, a see-gar." I said.

"Carlo, my man, let's go back in the room and I'll give you a really fine Havana. What do you say?"

Carlo eyed us suspiciously. Um. I couldn't remember if he'd ever told us his name.

"C'mon. Five minutes. Best Cuban there is. You won't be sorry."

Carlo seemed to consider this for a moment, then followed us inside.

"Well, here's to a profit for all of us. Hope we can do lots more deals in the future," I said.

(The bust signal to our colleagues in the next room was "pleasure doing business with you". The go-bad signal was "I don't think I like the way this is going").

"Well, twelve thousand for a bunch of illegal chemicals. I think we all came out of it pretty well," I said.

"Pleasure doing business with you," said Sasquatch.

There was a crash against the connecting door. Another crash. Shouts of "Police! Police!" The door, flimsy as it looked and probably was in this fleabag of a Bates Motel, was stuck, and wouldn't budge.

"I don't think I like the way this is going," I shouted.

More crashes.

Sasquatch and I lunged for the Marshmallow Man, but he didn't hesitate. He was surprisingly fast. He sprang out the door. Before we could catch up, he'd jumped into the Nissan, started the engine, and was peeling out of the parking lot in a haze of rubber smoke.

Susan, Juba, Juan, and Ashe tore out of the connecting room.

"Go, go, he's getting away," Sasquatch yelled. "There he goes."

You can't fire on an unarmed suspect, and you can't fire on a moving vehicle. We'd have to go after him.

Sasquatch and I threw ourselves into the van. The others scrambled to their cars. We took the lead. Sasquatch jammed the accelorator to the floor, and our souped-up van shot after the fast-disappearing Nissan. Carlo hit the on-ramp westbound on highway 88, crowding a minivan and a motor home. The motor home wobbled uncertainly in his wake.

Sasquatch hit the grill lights and the siren.

"Out of the way. Out of the way," he muttered and screamed.

I'd been stunned, a little, by the turn of events. I realized belatedly that the Nissan was filled with toxic, radioactive, explosive chemicals.

I didn't think I liked the way this was going.

Sasquatch looked at the caller i.d., and picked up the phone. He raised his eyebrows and made a hand-shaking gesture in the air. The Marshmallow Man.

"Yeah, we've got what you asked for......"

"Kruggerands will work......."

"Gold's around four hundred dollars an ounce, so we want thirty-five of 'em...."

"Thirty-five....."

"Yeah, I know that's more than twelve thousand, and you can say what you like, but it ain't cash, is it? Gold don't buy twinkies and pork rinds. You can't use it to pay the water bill. We'll have to sell it before we can get cash....."

"Thirty-four......"

"Okay, thirty-three, but that's....."

"Well, I guess if you want to go somewhere else, you can do that. We can always find somebody else to buy it, even if they aren't as pretty as you are....."

Long pause.

"I didn't think so......"

"Meet us tomorrow at the Bates Motel. You know it? Off highway 88. We'll call you with the time and the room number at noon tomorrow."

Our city really did have a Bates Motel. It was named long before Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" was released--a one-story tourist court in a horseshoe configuration, built in the twenties for sturdy travellers who braved the primitive roads in their spidery black Fords, questing towards Yellowstone Park. It'd gone a bit seedy in recent years--the pink stucco chunking off to reveal gray beneath, weeds dying in a ditch out front. The present owners took full advantage of the serendipitous "Psycho" connection--in the office, they'd planted a bewigged plastic skeleton in a rocking chair, holding a long rubber knife, to greet new arrivals--offered "Mother's Continental Breakfast"--and the least undesirable room, farthest from the highway, was called the "Norman Suite". They didn't make much money, obviously, so we had an arrangement with them in exchange for a few extra bucks. We'd done a lot of deals at the Bates Motel. Besides being cheaper than the Holiday Inn, it was all on one level, there was only one way in and out, our little dramas didn't draw much public attention, and it appealed to our sense of the macabre. ("Breet! Breet! Breet! Breet!" --Don't look behind the shower curtain, bucko.)

Sasquatch hung up.

"You heard."

"I did. Thanks for setting it up for tomorrow."

Sasquatch shrugged. "It'll take that long to get everybody in on the plan and put everything together, anyway."

We drove to the legit company out on Sander Road and picked up the chemicals. You can't sell fake illegal materials--you have to use the real stuff. The manager of the chemical company seemed unsettled about turning the chemicals over to us, even after we badged him. I guess we don't make the best of initial impressions. He insisted on calling our superiors to vet everything, so I gave him Ashe's number. Ashe, of course, told him he'd never heard of us--ha, just kidding--no they're okay. Thanks, Ashe. We loaded the bottles and boxes in the trunk. The manager, a tall, thin bald-headed worrier, followed us nervously.

"Don't spill any of that hydroflouric acid." He pointed to a big rubber bottle. "It eats glass, and it's extremely toxic. The thorium oxide is radioactive. Not real radioactive, but even so.... The phosphorus is also slightly radioactive. Methylamine will explode if you expose it to open flame. And mercury..."

"Okay, okay. Don't worry. We're professionals," I said. "Hey, Sasquatch, gotta cigarette?" I asked. "Left mine at the strip club when I was getting that lap dance."

We transported the chemicals over to the Agency office, inventoried them and entered them into evidence, and phoned everybody to set up a meet at the office in the morning.

Afterwards, Sasquatch and I went to the Bates Motel to arrange the room for tomorrow. We picked the Norman Suite--first class, or stay home. Paid the owner his usual premium for the use of the room, and rented the rooms on either side. There were connecting doors between.

"I'm thinking a swimming pool," said the owner, a lugubrious, pot-bellied Republican with a congenitally sour expression gone slightly saccarine with the warm glow that an unexpected infusion of cash had produced.

"Swimming pool?"

"You gotta have one, you're in the hospitality industry, you know? Everybody's got one. No one wants to stay at a place don't have a swimming pool. That's the way it is in the hospitality industry."

"I see."

"Hospitality industry's a hard business. Hard business. Wiring gets fried by people with their electric shavers, plumbing gets clogged up with kids shoving a whole roll of t.p. down the toilet, people griping if there's no Movie Channel, people are just slobs, you know, just slobs."

"I can imagine."

"Their kids are slobs, too. Little smarty-pants, I call them. Probably going to be democrat welfare recipients when they grow up. Food stamps, welfare, public housing--I tell you, everything's just gone to hell."

"Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?"

"Huh?"

"Never mind."

He looked into the unpromising middle distance and snorted.

"Now they won't stay anyplace doesn't have a swimming pool."

We didn't have the heart to tell him that nobody wanted to stay in a place with a dead plastic granny in a rocking chair either.

Later, I had to throw all my clothes away.

Tearing down a grow operation is a big job. First of all, in a place like Stanky Flats, most of the lights have to be kept on so you can see. This keeps the temperature high while you work at uprooting plants. Then you carry all the plants out to a truck, and haul them away. After that, you pick up every scrap of fallen leaves, thousands of plastic pots, tons of growth medium, bag and catalog every scrap of paper, account for every photograph, (There are always photographs--sometimes albums. Growers are very proud of what they do.) fool around with high voltage, disassemble the lights and ballasts, tear down the drip irrigation system, arrange to have the generators hauled away, and on, and on. Coke dealers are a lot easier to clean up after.

My clothes wouldn't ever come clean. They were saturated with brown, sticky marijuana resin. Whether it was exhaustion, or whether we had absorbed sufficient quantities of delta-nine tetrahydrocannabinol through our skin, by the time we drove home, we were all goofier than a family of pet raccoons.

I was buzzed out of my head by the time I drove home, watching pretty Christmas visions in the traffic lights, keeping a wary eye for city patrol cars. (I've always had nightmares of being stopped when I was driving home from a grow by a patrol officer who didn't know me. The patrol officer would be confronted with a disgustingly filthy person, hairier than was statistically average, who was covered with scraps of a controlled substance and reeking of marijuana. What was he supposed to think?)

I didn't get stopped, fortunately, although I did drive with the windows rolled down, and turned, I believe, a few heads.

When I was soaping my head in the shower, I decided the clothes were hopeless, got out of the shower, and bagged them up. Let the garbage collector puzzle over them. Garbagemen see more of the grit of ordinary life than anyone else. They probably wouldn't even turn a hair--but their noses might wrinkle a little.

Needless to say, I slept way down deep in a dark hole for a very long time. Dreams, though..... Heh.

On the next--and bizarrely tilted--morning, I met Sasquatch at Sky High Chemical Supply. Coffee didn't help. Although I still felt as if the insides of my head had been painted with a cheap, olive-green oil-based paint, Sasquatch seemed the same as usual. I'm not sure what that says about my perception, or about Sasquatch's normal behavior.

"Shouldn't we call the Marshmallow Man?" he asked.

"Later," I answered. "Much later. Afternoon, later."

"Oh. Okay." He smiled. "Feeling a mite edgy, eh?"

"You might say that."

"I just did."

"Please don't do that."

"DEA guys were really excited. We handed those rookies a real cupcake, you know? They couldn't wait to get back to the federal prosecutor. They're going to follow the Kubarton Land Development Company wherever it leads, and see what else they can come up with. I think the part they like best is that their bosses are going to come up stinkin' for not taking this more seriously."

"Arno Desmond, the major guy, ever turn up? I lost track of what was going on, there at the end."

"Negatory. He lives out of state, and the last I heard, he wasn't at home when the feds dropped by for a chat. If he's got any sense, he'll beat feet."

"Most likely. But sometimes they don't have any sense at all, do they? They keep coming back for more."

At that moment, the phone rang.

Sasquatch and I called Carlo Quinn and put him off--told him we'd hit a snag, and pulling everything together would take a few more days than we'd thought. We didn't want the two cases popping at the same time--Carlo could wait.

Turns out you can't flush two tons of dope, but you can flush a dope grower.

Juan and Juba set up for three nights at Stanky Flats. They hid out across the road, recording the comings and goings of the bandits, concealed under some of the same camouflage netting we'd used to disguise ourselves when we were working the Highway Interdiction Team. The cover of darkness rendered Juan and Juba effectively invisible to the eye, but delightfully visible to the mosquitoes. On the third night, lumpy and itchy, they observed the arrival of three overfed American SUV's and the same straight-axle truck at three in the morning. It was a timely arrival--Juan and Juba were heartily sick of the overwhelming stink of growing marijuana that larded the atmosphere.

"Break, break. Vehicles arriving at suspect location six--no, eight---no, twelve suspects getting out. Stand by."

Two clicks in response, difficult to hear over the throbbing of engines and the roar of blowers that constituted the near-permanant ambience at Stanky Flats.

Good thing we'd convinced the feds to leave their swat team in the kennel, or there'd be black ninjas all over the place by now, and helicopters, and armored personnel carriers, and who knows what else. The feds surely loved to put on a show. Instead, they'd limited themselves to supplying three low-ranking DEA agents. I don't think the federal desk-monkeys who made decisions believed there was anything to it.

"Four suspects approaching second building. They've rolled up the doors. They're messing around with something at the entrance. Entry--stand by."

The late moon illuminated the field, throwing the shadows of the truck driver and the workers into strong relief. The video was going to be quality. A second camera was recording the scene with a starlight scope, sharp green figures moving about.

"Three coming out, carrying trash bags. Stand by."

Not too soon, now....

"Loading the truck now. Suspects are on the public-access road--stand by."

Four more trips, two dozen bags, and....

"Go. Go. Say again. Go."

The patrol vehicles hidden a half-mile away lit up, and sirens began to wail, setting off all the farm dogs for miles around. Patrol began to converge from the east and the west, clamping together on the bandits like a vise. Alarmed, the bandits rabbitted in all directions. Juan and Juba shook off their camouflage and smiled at each other. They joined the chase.

After a few madcap adventures, the fugitives were rounded up. They looked like garbage-smeared campers with a long bear-infested night ahead of them.

And hey presto--what's this? There were drugs in the bags after all--nothing but the fattest and choicest resinous buds. None of your stinkin' leaves. It was the Dom Perignon of dope.

Now to satisfy our curiousity...

Ashe and Susan drove off to wake up a judge, and the rest of us settled in for a wait. No hurry now. The grow wasn't going anywhere, and--although we'd probably have a long day ahead of us--it promised to be entertaining.

We didn't ask the bandits any questions. Plenty of time to let our ten suspects sniff the bad omelette life had served them up.

Ashe and Susan returned in just over an hour. They had our warrant in hand. It didn't contain a no-knock provision, but that didn't really matter. We walked over to the second shed.

"Police," we yelled, "Police." The door was still open.

And the second door, just inside the first, was also still open. A massive steel bank-vault door. Inside, the shed was empty--four walls, and a floor. Not much bigger than a luxury outhouse. But all around, the roar of great engines and the whine of blowers. Hmm. This was a puzzler.

Sasquatch walked back to the line of sullen bandits, picked one according to some system of his own, and dragged him back to the shed.

"Okay. So what's the deal? We're going to figure it out one way or another, so you might as well show us how it works."

The bandit hung his head. He nodded, finally, and opened a switch box on the wall, revealing a key pad. Entered the numbers--4-7-7-9-2-5. A low electrical hum grumbled from beneath the floor, and the floor began to rise on a hydraulic ram. After the floor was raised, the bandit pressed a green button, and an industrial-weight lift rose into the room.

"You're going with us," said Juan.

We stepped onto the lift, a button was pushed, and we descended into another world--a green, well-lit one.

The first thing you noticed was the heat. Hundreds of 1000 watt halogen bulbs, dwindling away in ranks along the ceiling raised the temperature to near ninety degrees, despite the continuous draft supplied by the industrial blowers drawing air from the first shed and blowing warm air out the third shed. Spaghettis of black drip-irrigation tubes ran in all directions. Timers. Pumps. Heavy electrical cables. Four large military-surplus generators fueled by diesel supplied the power. The ceiling and walls were supported by trusses and beams made from railroad ties. It was built like an underground mine, converted to agriculture.

And what an agriculture: Row upon row upon row of growing marijuana plants in various stages of growth--some near harvest, some freshly-planted clones, some sprightly younglings. Thousands of plants. And if each plant was worth around two thousand dollars and you harvested a crop every week or so, well....

We were going to get some great pictures.

On our third walk-through, Susan noticed a manhole cover in the floor.

"Where's this go?" she asked.

Good question.

We brought our tamed bandit over and put him to the question. He cracked in no time at all.

"That's the emergency drain--if this place ever starts to flood, we open it up. It opens into a six-foot culvert that runs a hundred yards to the south. We spliced it to the culvert that goes under the main road."

"Do tell. Why six feet high?"

"It's our escape route, too. You don't want just one exit out of this place. You could get trapped."

"Let's see," said Juba, scratching his chin, "Twelve of you got out of the SUV's and the truck. We've got ten of you in custody, so...."

"There's a cubbyhole room about fifty yards in, off the main culvert. If things go bad, we can hole up in there until things cool off."

"Well, we're parked near the culvert on the main road, so they didn't come out there. That means they're probably still waiting it out down there."

"I guess so."

"I guess so, too."

Hmm.

"I suppose we'll have to go in there after them," said Susan.

"I don't think so," said Ashe. "We'd have to climb down the ladder one at a time, facing the wrong direction. We could get shot."

"How about if we go in from the culvert at the main road?"

"Still a problem. We'll be lined up single-file, in the dark, with flashlights. I don't like it."

Hmm.

"Bwah-ha-ha," said Sasquatch. He pointed to the wall, where the main irrigation pipe came in from above.

We closed the stopcock, disconnected the pipe from the drip irrigation system, removed the manhole cover, and directed the pipe into the culvert. Juan went above to alert the troops waiting at the main road. We waited for him to return.

"Now, I think," said Juba. Sasquatch opened the stopcock. A river of water chugged into the culvert.

"Not too much, Sasquatch, we don't want to drown them."

And so two very wet scoundrels were delivered into the waiting arms of the law.