by D L Barbur
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Did you enjoy Rose City Renegade?
CHAPTER ONE
I wanted to buy my girlfriend an ice cream cone but wound up in a gunfight instead.
Portland had been suffering under an oppressive heat wave for the better part of a week. It was a hundred degrees during the day and only cooled off to eighty-five at night. I wanted to hop in the car with Alex and go to the coast, maybe somewhere high up in the mountains, but we were currently hunting down a bunch of federal fugitives, so a stop for ice cream would have to do.
It was Portland, but I didn’t want hipster ice cream. No vegan soy frozen yogurt for me, thank you. I wanted frickin’ ice cream, made from milk from an actual cow, with plenty of artificial flavorings and additives I couldn’t pronounce. I would give extra attention to any establishment where the staff didn’t have facial piercings and make ironic comments. I’d been spending too much time downtown, and I needed a detox. Fortunately, we were in southeast Portland, and the hipster diseases hadn’t spread this far.
“How about that place?” Alex asked, pointing at a burger joint down the street. It sat between a pawn shop and a nail salon. It wasn’t part of a chain, and as we watched a crew cab pickup with a bunch of landscaping equipment in the bed pulled up and four hungry looking guys got out. The sign out front read “Shakes and Ice Cream! Beat the heat!”
“Perfect,” I said.
Alex waited for the traffic light to change, then she gunned our Dodge Charger through the intersection. There were plenty of people out on foot, and quite a few of them gave us sidelong glances. The Charger was unmarked, but it had plain wheels and a couple of extra antennas on the roof, so to the attentive eye, it still looked like a cop car. The glances weren’t unfriendly, exactly, but they were wary.
We’d been driving around all day, looking for a guy named Francis Bloem. Until three days ago, he’d been a Portland Police officer, and he’d been dirty as hell. He’d been in cahoots with a human trafficking ring and had helped some guys nearly beat my former partner to death, and set me up to take the fall. For a while there, I thought I’d been headed straight to prison, but I’d managed to dig my way out, become a Federal agent, and now we had a warrant for Bloem’s arrest.
Alex slid the car into the last available parking space, and we both hesitated for a second, reluctant to leave the air-conditioned comfort of the car and face the blast furnace outside. I gave first, glad to get out of the car and stretch. The Charger was a decent sized car, but I was well north of six feet, and sitting for hours had left me sore and tight. I tried to tell myself that being in my mid-forties had nothing to do with it, but these days all the things I’d broken, sprained and strained over the years were starting to catch up to me.
Alex was tall, almost six feet, and even though her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing a baggy shirt to cover the gun and radio strapped to her belt, she looked pretty good to me. It had been weird at first, working surveillance with my girlfriend, but after a while, I’d grown to like it.
I pointed to a sign in the window that said “1.99 soft serve special,” and said, “I’ll buy.”
“Big spender,” she said. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”
We refrained from any public displays of affection while out in public, but we probably walked a little closer than a pair of plainclothes cops normally would. Hell with it. Life was short. I’d nearly died more times than I could count in the last few months, and I’d nearly lost Alex too.
Calling us “plain clothes” was being charitable. We both wore khaki tactical pants with all sorts of pockets, un-tucked rugby shirts to cover all the crap on our belts, and boots. If that didn’t scream “cop” loud enough, we both wore plastic ear pieces attached to a curly cord to our radios. I’d long ago mastered the art of listening to radio chatter with only part of my brain while going about my business. Right now, Dalton, who had taken on the role of our dispatcher since suffering a nasty gunshot wound to the leg, was coordinating the other four cars full of agents in our so far fruitless search for Bloem.
I could feel the heat of the asphalt through the soles of my boots, and by the time we finished the twenty-yard walk across the parking lot, I was drenched in sweat. The inside of the burger stand was blissfully cold. The guy flipping burgers at the grill did a double take as we came in, and I gave him a nod and a friendly smile. I figured there was a fifty percent chance he was on parole and a fifty percent chance he was on probation, but I wanted him to know I was there for the ice cream, and not for him.
As we waited, I turned the current search for Bloem over in my mind. Three days ago, we’d been waiting for him at the Portland Police Bureau’s East Precinct, all set to arrest him as he came in for his shift. The Bureau leadership hadn’t been happy, but we’d promised to keep things quiet, and they played ball.
The only problem was he didn’t show up. After an hour of waiting, it became painfully obvious he’d been tipped off by somebody. We hit his apartment an hour after that and found it empty. His wallet and cell phone were sitting on the kitchen counter, and the door to an empty gun cabinet was hanging open. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to put all that together.
That’s where Casey, our resident computer hacker came in. Fueled by Chinese takeout, and an unhealthy amount of Jolt! Cola, she’d started trying to find any digital footprints Bloem might have left. We had a couple of hours of digital surveillance footage of Bloem. Surveillance cameras were frequently hooked up to the Internet these days, and using a combination of facial recognition and gait analysis, Casey had managed to catch him at a convenience store right here in Portland.
We didn’t have to lean on the store owner very hard to find out he’d bought a pre-paid cell phone with cash. From there Casey determined Bloem had made a phone call to a guy named Earl Maddox, an ex-con with links to white supremest groups and a penchant for illegally converted machine guns. We all thought that was an interesting guy for a cop to have in his contacts list.
Since then, we hadn’t been able to get our eyes on Maddox, but Bloem had turned on his phone a half a dozen times, for only a few seconds each, probably to check for a text message. We’d never been able to refine his location better than a square mile or so but it was something.
We were next in line, and I was debating between chocolate, vanilla, or the further complication of swirled ice cream when Casey’s voice came over my earpiece.
“Bloem just turned on his phone. It’s definitely in South East Portland. I’m trying to refine the fix to an exact location.”
It looked like ice cream was going to have to wait. I opened my mouth to say something to Alex when another voice br
oke in on the radio.
“I see Maddox’s car. He just passed us headed east on Division. We’re westbound, but turning around.” It was Byrd, a young guy, barely thirty. He and his partner Drogan were riding in a car together. She was older, well into her forties. They were the two agents on my team I’d worked with the least.
In unison, Alex and I turned toward the door. If Maddox and Bloem were both active in southeast Portland, that likely meant they were trying to link up.
Dalton broke in on the radio. “Maddox’s car is a black Chevy, license plate NTJ-891.”
“Yep. That’s it,” Byrd said. In the backg round I could hear the engine of his car revving. “We did a U-turn and we’re catching up.
“They’re going to blow it,” I said to Alex as we stepped out into the heat. I’d been worried about this. Our team had been chomping at the bit for days. People were tired, bored and ready for action. Drogan and Byrd should have kept driving and let one of the other member’s of the team pick up the tail. Some of our cars were more discreet, but Drogan and Byrd were driving an unmarked Charger just like ours. I didn’t see any way that Maddox wouldn’t notice an obvious unmarked police car doing a u-turn behind him.
“He’s speeding up a little,” Drogan said over the radio. She had probably taken charge of the radio so Byrd could concentrate on driving.
“Shit,” I said as we reached our car. Alex unlocked the door and reached to open her door.
“Hold on,” I said. “Armor first.”
I had a set of keys to the car as well. I popped the trunk and pulled out a heavy armored vest. I handed it to Alex.
“We need to get there,” she said. The radio traffic was fast and furious. Bolle, our boss, and Big Eddie, his assistant were in separate cars, and they were converging on Maddox. Casey and Henry were driving the surveillance van, and even they weren’t far behind.
“We need to not get shot.”
She blew a strand of hair out of her face, something she’d done for as long as I’d known her and reached for the vest. She threw it on with a grunt and turned back towards the driver’s door.
“Helmet,” I said. She rolled her eyes, a gesture that never failed to remind me that I’d known her since she was a teenager, and planted the kevlar on top of her head. I threw my own vest on, then grabbed my own helmet and a guitar case from the trunk. I popped the back door and squeezed into the back seat.
“Why are you back there?” Alex asked as she slid behind the wheel.
“I can shoot out of the left side this way without sticking my gun in front of your face.”
“Oh,” she said as she backed out of the parking spot. “Good idea.”
Once we were on the street, she stomped on the accelerator and my head snapped back. The chatter on the radio was growing more excited, and I was starting to have grave concerns about how this was going. I forced myself to be calm and deliberate. I resigned myself to the fact I was likely about to get into a gunfight in the next few minutes.
“He just stopped at a bus stop and picked up a male. I think it’s Bloem,” Drogan said.
“We’re three blocks behind you,” Bolle said.
There was quite a bit of communication, but very little planning happening over the radio. I resisted the urge to get on the air and start barking orders. That was Bolle’s job, and if I stepped in right now it likely wouldn’t go well. I just concentrated on owning my own little part of this developing cluster fuck.
I made sure the straps on my vest were tight, strapped on my helmet and put on a pair of amber-tinted safety glasses. Then I unzipped the guitar case in my lap.
When it came to guns, I was pretty old school. Assault rifles were all the rage these days, but I was still a fan of the 12 gauge shotgun. When I’d been with the Police Bureau, I’d clung to an old Remington pump that was older than me. Now that I was a fed with my very own government purchase card, I’d upgraded to a semiautomatic Benelli M2 with a 14” barrel. My one concession to modern technology was the compact little electronic dot sight mounted on top.
The shotgun was a thinking man’s weapon. It could fire a wide range of ammunition, from less-lethal bean bag rounds, door breaching ammo, buckshot, and slugs. I pulled a box of the latter out of the gun case. Instead of multiple projectiles, this ammo contained a single giant bullet almost three-quarters of an inch across, effectively turning the shotgun into an immensely powerful short range rifle. The slugs were made by a company named Brenneke, and made of a specially hardened alloy. This fight was probably going to happen around vehicles, and I wanted to be able to shoot through stuff.
I fed the fat shells into the gun’s magazine as we careened around corners, blew through red lights and passed a bus in the opposite lane. Alex was technically a Federal agent, but only in a consulting status. She was a forensic pathologist by training, but her hobby up until recently had been racing sports cars at Portland International Raceway. I’d ceded the wheel to her without hesitation.
“He’s turned into a neighborhood and is making a bunch of random turns,” Grogan said.
“Shit,” I said again. That was an obvious sign Maddox was on to us.
“I’m right behind you. I can see you,” Bolle said. “Eddie is right behind me.”
So now Maddox had three cars behind him, following every random turn he made.
“This is going to be bad,” I said to Alex. I chambered a round in the shotgun, made sure it was on safe, and slapped an elastic card full of buckshot onto the Velcro on the shotgun’s left side.
She nodded, concentrating on her driving. We were tearing through a residential neighborhood, and I did my best to look everywhere at once. School was out for the summer and the last thing we needed was a little kid to step out from between two parked cars in front of us.
“Bloem just pulled a long gun out of the back seat,” Grogan said.
“Felony stop. Do it now,” Bolle said.
We rounded a corner and there they were. Up ahead was Maddox’s black Chevy, followed by Grogan and Byrd in their Charger. Close behind came Bolle in a BMW, one of our low profile cars, and behind him was Eddie in a Toyota.
They all had low profile flashing lights, and now they all lit up in blue and red. Maddox’s response was to floor it.
“I’m going to PIT,” Bolle said.
“No, no, no,” I said, as I held onto the headrest of the front seat with a death grip. Bolle was going to try a Pursuit Intervention Technique, a fancy cop turn for running another car off the road. We didn’t want this to end in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Everywhere I looked there were houses and duplexes.
Bolle pulled around Grogan and Byrd, matched speed with the Chevy, and planted the right corner of his front bumper behind driver’s side rear wheel of Maddox’s Chevy. It should have spun the other car out.
It didn’t work. The Chevy was a big sheet metal beast, from back when Detroit Iron wasn’t just an expression. The BMW was lighter by hundreds of pounds, and all Bolle managed to do was lock the two bumpers together. The Chevy literally dragged the smaller car down the street, fishtailing, until Byrd floored his Charger and rammed the Chevy from behind.
Maddox lost control of the Chevy and veered off to the right, the car rolled over a sidewalk and came to rest in the parking lot of an apartment complex. It sideswiped one of the parked cars and stopped. Bolle followed it right in, slamming into a small tree and coming to rest with only a foot between the side of his car and Maddox’s.
Eddie narrowly avoided rear-ending Bolle, sliding to a stop next to the BMW. Now all three cars were lined up in a row, with barely enough room between them to open a door. Byrd at least managed to stop short of the whole mess, sliding to a stop fifteen yards or so behind the whole mess.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” I yelled, and Alex obliged by standing on the brakes. I was grateful for the ceramic plates of my vest when I slammed into the back of the front seats. I bit my tongue and wished I’d buckled my seat belt.
We we
re stopped in the middle of the street, twenty yards or so behind Grogan and Byrd. I pushed my door open. For a second everything was quiet, except for the sound of steam hissing out of the busted radiator of one of the cars. I fought to get out of the back seat.
As soon as my boot soles hit the pavement, the shooting started.
CHAPTER TWO
As usual, it all seemed to happen in slow motion.
Maddox poked the muzzle of an AK-47 out the driver’s window and laid on the trigger. It must have been one of his backyard machine gun conversions because a long burst of bullets pulverized all the glass in Bolle’s and Eddie’s cars. At the same time, Bloem leaned out of the passenger seat window and fired back toward Grogan and Byrd.
Grogan was getting out of the passenger seat when Bloem pulled the trigger. She flinched, dropped her gun, and put her hands to her face before dropping to the ground. I started to bring the Benelli up, with an eye towards putting a round in Bloem, when Maddox turned his attention towards us.
He leaned way out of the driver’s side window. I had a fraction of a second to register the muzzle of Maddox’s AK swinging towards us when the windshield exploded. A bunch of glass fragments hit me in the face and I was grateful for the safety glasses. I dropped to my knees as the car seemed to fly apart around me. Bits of plastic, stuffing from the seat, and more glass flew through the air and pelted me, as I squatted behind the body of the car. The car wasn’t really cover. It just slowed the rifle bullets down a little as they passed through.
I scooted back to the rear bumper, relieved to see Alex squatting there with her pistol in her hand. She looked at me wild-eyed and we both tried to make ourselves small. A bullet passed through the car’s trunk between us, leaving a jagged finger of sheet metal sticking out of the trunk. At this range, the rifle was abominably loud.
It seemed like it was taking him entirely too long to run out of ammunition. The AK had a thirty round magazine. Maddox was firing in bursts of four or five rounds, pausing for a fraction of a second to let the gun settle before triggering another one. There was no way to count the individual shots, but I still thought he should have run out by now.