Foreign Influence by Brad Thor Page A

about six hundred bucks. Owners, whether it’s a small-time guy with a handful of cabs or a big conglomerate like Yellow, also do weekend leases for about two hundred bucks if they’ve got extra vehicles sitting around not making them any money. That’s the surface material. When it starts to get interesting is when you get beneath that.
    “Like gas stations and mini-marts, cabs are a popular entry job for immigrants. In Chicago, the taxi subculture is composed of three predominant cartels: the Middle Easterners, the Pakistanis, and the East Africans.”
    “What about the Russians?” asked Vaughan.
    “The Russians and Eastern Europeans own a lot of cabs, but I’m talking about drivers. The Eastern Europeans are more into the limo business.”
    “You know all of this from being in Public Vehicles?”
    “I know it because I have initiative. Public Vehicles may be a safe place to work, but it’s frickin’ boring. After a year of wanting to put a gun in my mouth, and I’m kidding by the way, I decided to get out on the street. I got my sergeant to approve a sting operation I wanted to run on gypsy cabs at the airport. I was busting these guys left, right, and center. You should have seen it. I’d pop the glove box and they’d have ten grand in cash and a stack of food stamps. It really pissed me off.
    “I wanted to learn more, so I started building a network of informants. When I caught a guy I thought could be useful, I’d let him go.”
    “Which meant he owed you.”
    “That’s right,” said Davidson. “I started visiting the pool parking lot where they all wait and got to know as many drivers as I could. I became friendly with a lot of them and learned what restaurants they hung out at and started eating in those places and so on and so forth. What really surprised me was that nobody was doing this. Not the CPD, not the FBI, nobody. I mean before 9/11 I could understand them overlooking these guys, but not doing it afterward was nuts. Nevertheless, that’s the way it was and still is. I’m it.”
    “How does this play into Alison Taylor’s case?”
    “I put the word out to all of my informants. I wanted to know if they’d heard of anything that fit with our case. Was anyone suddenly out sick? Was anyone suddenly remorseful or guilty? That kind of stuff.
    “I pumped my contacts at the cab restaurants, the roach coaches, the hummus stands, the hookah bars; everywhere. I even spent the last two nights cruising the neighborhoods most of these guys live in, looking for cabs with damage.”
    “How’d you do?”
    “I struck out,” replied Davidson. “I didn’t get anything.”
    “So?”
    “So I reached out to another driver I know. He’s not a regular informant, but I let him slide on something a ways back and he owed me.
    “I wanted to put myself in the shoes of the guy we’re looking for, so I called him up and laid out the scenario for him. I asked if he had been involved in a hit-and-run, what would be going through his mind.”
    “I would assume, getting caught by the cops,” said Vaughan.
    Davidson shook his head. “Not quite. According to this driver, he’d be more afraid of his owner learning that the cab had been in an accident.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Yup. And to prevent the owner from finding out, the guy we’re looking for would need to get the cab repaired as quickly as possible. Enter the Triple P.”
    “What’s the Triple P ?”
    “Piss, paint, and pray,” replied Davidson, as the waitress set his breakfast down on the table. “It’s an under-the-radar taxicab mechanic and body shop. They’re all over the city and fix damaged cabs while driverswait. And they’re fast too. The Muslim ones have little prayer rooms in them and the joke is that as soon as you’ve taken a piss and said your prayers, the paint on your cab would be just about dry.”
    Vaughan was fascinated.
    “If you’re a Middle Eastern driver, you go to one of the Triple P’s owned and run by a