Hair of the Dog, Gordon Carroll [top 100 novels of all time TXT] 📗

this city. Back in the day, the sides were kept pretty much even between the Bloods and Crips by a combination of the cops and capitalism (meaning the laws of supply and demand and good old natural price wars) and the streets laws, the laws of Mr. Darwin’s natural selection… only the strongest survive. But now the Crips were nowhere to be seen. Neither were the 13ers, or practically any of the biker gangs. And that just didn’t make sense. There was always somebody or some gang trying to push out the old. All it really took was product, men and weapons. Ziggy hadn’t seen the like since after that bad deal between Gil and Majoqui Cabrera. And that man had been an evil genius; ruthless, with a whole lot of backing. MS13 had moved in hard and fast and knew exactly what they were doing, and in the end, even they couldn’t pull a coup off like what seemed to have happened here. And that was in puny, milquetoast Colorado. This here was Chicago. Gang central for close to a century. Home of Capone, the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the rise of the Mafia in America, long before the Government cracked down and made it possible for the new gangs to move in and start dicing up the territories like prime cuts of meat.

None of this here made much sense to old Ziggy. No, sir it did not. The balance of power had shifted so strongly to one side that it just didn’t seem possible.

The stairways were much darker now that the sun had disappeared behind the giant buildings of the city proper, and these welfare structures were nowhere near tall enough to reach the fading rays of racing light. By the third floor, Ziggy took notice of the lack of people in the hallways. Stairways like this always had passed-out junkies or bums or groups of dangerous teens looking to hit up anyone they could for a few bucks, food stamps, or EBT cards. But there was no one.

In the old days, Ziggy’s radar would having been pinging at full strength and he would have hightailed it out fast as he could, but those days were long gone and his fine-tuned antenna had been blunted by decades of drugs and age itself. So instead of seeing the trap for exactly what it was, he passed it off to the time of day and the differences between the old and new, forgetting his guiding principle that people never really changed.

Ziggy knocked on the door, thinking he should probably have waited in the stairwell long enough to shoot up one last time before going to her room, but he let that go, deciding he’d share the last of his stash if he had to, figuring she would be able to hook him up with the right people to get more.

The door opened right away and Ziggy’s eyes hardly stretched at all when he saw Clyde standing there in his suit and tie, almost as if Ziggy knew all along he would be there. But he couldn’t quite get his brain to put the pieces together like it used too. And then the mountain of a man grabbed him by the throat and dragged him into the room.

Sarah made good time and grabbed up everything she could get from Jared Darling at Aurora PD. She raced to her lab and went instantly to work on the samples. Normally, DNA testing had an average turnaround time of about six months on major felonies. But Sarah was in charge of the lab and what was the old saying? It’s not what you know, but who you know. And Gil knew Sarah.

In order to sequence DNA, there are four main steps; extraction, quantitation, amplification, and capillary electrophoresis. The first, extraction, is basically breaking open the nucleus of the cell and releasing the DNA molecules into solution. It’s also the step where DNA molecules are separated from other cellular material and debris, like say in this case, beer or Oreo cookies. Contaminants like this can be inhibitors in later steps, so it’s best to bleed them off at the beginning. Saves work later and Sarah was all about saving work and stopping bad results before they could get a foothold.

Sarah submitted the two samples into the Maxwell 16 DNA Tissue Purification Kit, a breadbox-sized piece of equipment that cost about four hundred bucks and saved up to three hours from the older, manual, Phenol-Chloroform Organic Extraction method.

Now came the waiting. She hated this part, but dissolving agents had to have time to do their stuff. Once it was done, she would move on to the quantitation step, basically assuring that the matter you were testing was human rather than from something else, like bacteria. It also assessed the quantity of DNA present in the submitted samples. Two different machines are used in this phase; the Quantifiler DNA Human Quantification Kit and the ABI PRISM 7500 Sequence Detection System.

The setup alone took an hour for most people, but Sarah had it down to a cool twenty minutes. Unfortunately, another two hours of waiting were required to get the results. After that, she would move on to the amplification step, which is accomplished through the use of a technique known as Polymerase Chain Reaction or PCR. A process in which millions of copies of a specific sequence of DNA can be made in a matter of only a few hours. This would be essential here, due to the small amount of actual DNA material she had to work with.

And then, last but not least, came Capillary Electrophoresis. Here, the mixture of amplified DNA molecules are separated in order to distinguish the various molecules from one another. DNA molecules carry a negative charge, and when an electric current is applied to the sample, the molecules enter a very thin capillary, filled with a gel-like polymer. They then migrate towards the positive anode at the other