Most of the spiderlings had died before maturity, but this one and a single male one-quarter her size had both survived. The male, of course, had perished after mating, devoured by the female. A papery egg sack now hung on the web. Soon it would open, releasing hundreds of babies.
He had never named the spider. He did not think of her as a pet. She was an avatar of darkness, a creeping symbol of predatory death. He admired her sleek beauty—the glossy black orb of her abdomen, the balletic precision of her gliding legs, and the jaws with their embedded fangs.
The cricket twitched. The spider moved faster, spurred by the shiver of the web.
Treat pressed his face to the terrarium’s side panel. He had pulled down the shades of his bedroom windows to keep glare off the glass. The only light in the room was the glow of a forty-watt bulb in a gooseneck lamp overhanging the terrarium’s screen cover.
The widow reached her prey. Treat knew the procedure she must follow, having witnessed it countless times. She would blanket the cricket in a silken attack wrap, and then her fangs would poison the prey, paralyzing it. Those same fangs would pump out digestive juices, and the cricket would soften, the enzymes doing their work outside the spider’s body. Finally the victim’s gelatinous form would be sucked into the widow’s mouth.
He did not think it was an unpleasant death. Once immobilized by silk and venom, the cricket would know only the slow dissolution of its body in a bath of chemicals. It would simply fade away, its decomposition effected before death.
There were worse ways to die.
Treat knew all about that.
The spinning of the silk began. At some point during the ritual Treat remembered the sandwich in his hand. He had made it himself after coming home for his lunch hour. He had not guessed that it would be the widow’s lunch hour as well.
He took small, distracted bites of the sandwich—tomato slices, feta cheese, and bean sprouts between two slabs of date-raisin bread—feeding along with the widow.
He watched her, rapt, until the cricket was entirely gone. Idly he wondered where the cricket’s music went when it died. Perhaps the same place that women’s screams went.
He finished his sandwich, swallowing a last wedge of bread and bean sprouts, with a soft, precise smack of his lips.
The spider lay on her web, digesting her food, sated. From this angle Treat could clearly see the distinctive mark common to all black widow females—the maroon hourglass on the underside of her belly.
The hourglass, symbol of time. Wasn’t it Ovid who called time the devourer of all things?
They made an unholy trinity. Treat thought—time, the widow, and himself.
3
Life was funny. She could go for weeks, months, believing she had put her past to rest and finally moved on. And then it would all come back in a hot rush, and she would be ten years old again, huddled in the crawl space with a kitchen knife in her hands.
C.J. pushed the memories away. She wasn’t a little girl anymore; she was a woman of twenty-six, doing her job, and at the moment there was a crazy man with a gun to worry about.
The pathway at the rear of the house was narrow and bright under the midday sun. To her left was a chicken-wire fence protecting a vacant lot. To her right, the home’s stucco wall and the large, overflowing Dumpster that abutted it. Above the Dumpster was a casement window, an inch ajar to let in any breeze that stirred on a January afternoon in LA.
No movement in the window. It seemed likely that the back room of the house was unoccupied.
C.J. muted the radio clipped to her Sam Browne utility belt, then lifted herself onto the lid of the trash bin and peered through the window. She saw a cot piled with disarranged sheets, a pair of threadbare oval throw rugs on a concrete floor, a crib, bare walls. and a doorway that glowed with the flickering light of a TV set in the front room.
That was where he was. In the front of the house. If it could be called a house when it was only a wood-frame garage partitioned into a bedroom, living room, lavatory, and kitchenette. The bedroom had a view of a trash bin, and the living room, windowless, had no view at all.
Crouching on the Dumpster by the window, C.J. listened. There was no sound from the television; the volume must have been turned down. Now and then rose the squall of a baby.
She wondered if she could open the window fully without making a noise that would alert Ramon Sanchez, the crazy man with the gun in the other room.
Never know unless you try, she thought gamely, and she gave the casement window a cautious pull, bracing herself for a squeal of hinges.
The window opened silently.
She knew she was limber enough to wriggle through, even when encumbered by her vest and her belt.
Question was, did she want to do this?
Ramon was out of his mind—his wife, Maria, had been very clear on that point, expressing herself vigorously in both English and Spanish. He was drunk and angry and out of work, and when he got that way, no one could reason with him. She’d called 911 from a neighbor’s home, and the RTO had put it out over the air ten minutes ago.
“Any Newton Area unit, possible four-fifteen in progress at Fifty-fifth and Sloan.”
C.J., riding shotgun in an A-car, had listened to the crackle of static over the cheap speaker. She and her partner Walt Brasco had been on duty since 6:15 A.M., chasing the radio for most of that time. Now it was one o’clock, and they’d been thinking about taking a Code 7 for lunch.
But Fifty-fifth and Sloan wasn’t far from where they were cruising. C.J. looked at Brasco, who nodded and said, “Take it.”
“Thirteen-A-forty-three,” C.J. reported into the handheld microphone hooked to the dashboard. “We’ll take the four-fifteen.”
“Roger, forty-three. Monitor your screen, incident three-seven-one-four. Code Two High.”
Brasco flipped the toggle that activated the car’s light bar and accelerated through a yellow traffic signal. Storefronts flashed past, bearing signs in Vietnamese and Korean and Spanish. A blind beggar held up a cardboard sign at a street corner, in front of a brick wall spray-painted with gang placas.
Welcome to Newton Area division. Shootin’ Newton, as it was known among Officer Caitlin Jean Osborn’s colleagues in the LAPD. A few square miles of multiethnic slums bordered by five other high-crime divisions, a semicircle of blasted hopes: Hollenbeck, Central, Southwest, Seventy-seventh Street, and Southeast. The infamous Rampart Division, now synonymous with police corruption, was wedged between Central and Southwest, not quite touching Newton but close enough, perhaps, to spread its infection here. Crime rates might have dropped in both the city and county of LA, but no one could prove it in Newton.
C.J. kept her eye on the squad car’s computer until it displayed the address of the crime scene. She read it to Brasco, He turned left at the next intersection and pulled to a stop alongside a curb littered with fragments of beer bottles.
A crowd of two dozen was waiting in front of a converted garage that served as somebody’s home. Half the spectators were children with nowhere else to be on a school day.
Officers Osborn and Brasco got out, surveying the neighborhood. It was like so many in Newton, a barrio of one-story buildings that might have been nice once. Cars sat on blocks and faded in the sun. Graffiti webbed the walls and fences and even the tree trunks; there were gang names sprayed on and X’d out with what the gangbangers called “dis marks”; the number 187—the section of the California Penal Code that covered homicide—appeared prominently, a bright promise of death. Rap music blared from an open window down the street, and somewhere a dog wailed in counterpoint to the throbbing beat.
C.J. approached the crowd. The kids wore pants several sizes too big in the approved gangsta style, their sleeves rolled up to show off crude, malevolent tattoos. The adults glanced at her suspiciously and looked away.
“Who telephoned the police?” she asked in Spanish. Brasco was letting her handle it. He knew she was better at dealing with people.
<
br /> A thin, frightened woman elbowed her way forward from the rear of the crowd, answering in uncertain English. “Me, it was me.”
“Okay, senora. What’s your name?”
“Maria Sanchez. It is my husband in there. My Ramon.”
“You had a fight?” The dispatcher had called it a 415—domestic disturbance.
“No, no fight.” Tears welled in the woman’s large brown eyes. “He lose his job. He get drunk, try to shoot me. He has a gun, he is crazy!”
Drunk and crazy with a gun, C.J. thought. Terrific. “What kind of gun?”
“It is, how you say, six-shooter.”
“A handgun? Like this?” C.J. tapped the Beretta 9mm bolstered to her right hip.
Maria Sanchez nodded. “Like that, but old, an old gun he got from no-good friend.”
“And he tried to shoot you with it?”
Frantic nodding. “Point it at me, and I run out the door. But he still in there. He got Emilio. I no have time to grab him.”
“Emilio?” C.J. asked, hoping it was a dog.
“Mi nino!”
My boy. This was getting better and better.
“How old is Emilio?” C.J. asked.
“Seis—six months.”
“We’re gonna need backup,” Brasco said abruptly. Tension had pulled his broad, pockmarked face into a stiff mask. “This isn’t no goddamn four-fifteen. It’s an ADW that’s turned into a hostage-barricade.”
“Let’s see if we can talk to him first.” C.J. didn’t wait for Brasco’s reply. She asked Mrs. Sanchez if her husband spoke English, and when the answer was yes, she rapped on the front door, raising her voice. “Mr. Sanchez, this is the police. Open up, please. We need to talk to you.”
Silence from inside.
“Mr. Sanchez, we just want to talk.”
Nothing.
“Open the door, Mr. Sanchez.” She tested the knob and noted that it did not turn. Locked. “This is the police. Open up and let us talk to you, okay?”
Still no response.
“Fuck this,” Brasco said. “I’m calling it in. We need SWAT down here with a CNT.”
C.J. nodded, but she wasn’t happy about it She didn’t want to bring Metro SWAT into this. What had started as a drunken dispute could end up in a bloodbath.
She heard Brasco on the radio while she gathered additional information from Maria Sanchez. Layout of the house, possible exits, time elapsed since she fled the residence. Brasco came back and reported, “ETA ten minutes for another squad, thirty or more for SWAT and a negotiator.”
C.J. pointed toward the back of the house. “There’s a rear window. I’d better cover it. You watch the front door.”
“Okay. Hey, C.J., you’re just gonna watch the window, right?”
“Right,” she said, though she wasn’t at all certain what she would do.
And now it was decision time.
She could wait by the window until another A-car arrived, then wait much longer for the SWAT boys to get here with the negotiator. When Ramon Sanchez learned he was surrounded, he might surrender—or put the gun to Emilio’s head and pull the trigger.
And if SWAT went in ...
Five men with machine guns bursting into this tiny house, screaming orders, ready to fire at any shadow ...
The baby shrieked louder.
C.J. made up her mind. She tried to ignore the trickle of sweat down her back as she drew her Beretta and climbed through the window.
4
When she dropped onto the cot, the springs creaked, but she was pretty sure the sound was inaudible in the front room, drowned out by the baby’s cries.
C.J. shifted her service pistol into a two-handed combat stance. She didn’t want to use the gun. Only once in her three years on the force had she shot anybody, and even then, the injury hadn’t been fatal. She didn’t deserve the damn nickname the other Newton cops had given her, and she didn’t want to start living up to it now.
The baby began to sob.
She eased herself off the cot and planted both shoes on the floor. The bedroom was minuscule, and the front room couldn’t be much larger. She estimated the home’s total floor space at less than five hundred square feet. A few steps would carry her through the doorway, into the red zone.
The red zone. That was what Walt Brasco called it, Walt the football fan, in reference to the critical territory inside the twenty-yard line. As if going after the bad guys was no different from scoring a touchdown.
Shouldn’t be doing this, C.J., a small voice warned. This is cowboy stuff.
She silenced the voice. It was wrong. This was not cowboy stuff. It was cop stuff. It was what she did, what any cop would do who wasn’t a glorified paper pusher.
She advanced, treading silently, staying clear of the doorway. She reached the far wall and crept to the open door, the glow from the TV brightening as she approached.
The baby had quieted, its sobbing wails subsiding into hiccups. Hugging the door frame, C.J. listened for any other sound. She heard an electric hum—a fan or a refrigerator motor—and softly, a man’s voice.
“Dios mio,” Sanchez was murmuring, “Dios mio, Dios mio ...”
The chant continued. The voice was low and close. Sanchez must be positioned near the bedroom. She couldn’t tell if he was facing her way or not.
There was only one way to go in, and she did it, pivoting through the doorway, staying low to make herself a smaller target.
Sanchez hadn’t seen her. He faced front, sitting in what looked like a rusty beach chair. No lights were on, and the only daylight came from the bedroom behind her. The room was illuminated solely by the shifting glow of a muted black-and-white TV resting on an apple crate. A car commercial flowed past in a ribbon of roadway vistas, and then a double-decker cheeseburger filled the screen.
The picture tube’s bluish light flickered over the sweaty nape of Sanchez’s neck, his loose shirt collar, and the curly-haired baby boy in diapers nestled in his lap.
C.J. took a quick survey of the living room. Mismatched odds and ends of furniture, an ironing table, a fake plant, a velvet painting of Jesus on the wall. No mirrors, no polished surfaces—nothing that might betray her by a reflection.
Her gaze circled back to Sanchez. With his left hand he stroked Emilio’s belly, calming the child. In his right hand he held his gun, a long-barreled revolver, maybe an old Colt or Smith—a six-shooter anyway, like a relic of the Wild West.
“Dios mio ... Dios mio ...”
Emilio had ceased crying. It was Mr. Sanchez who was sobbing now.
C.J. almost called out to him, identifying herself again as the police, but if he panicked he might turn and fire, and she would be trapped in the doorway, unable to shoot back without endangering the baby.
She had to get the gun away from him.
The distance between herself and Sanchez was six feet. She could reach him in three short steps and snatch the gun.
Dangerous, but facing danger was what they paid her for, right?
C.J. moved forward, still bent low. She dragged her feet in a cautious slide-step, maintaining her balance, textbook high-risk-felony procedure.
One step. Two.
The revolver almost within reach.
Emilio screamed.
The baby had seen her coming, and his cry alerted Ramon Sanchez, who spun, rising, the revolver blurring toward her, and on pure instinct C.J. reached out with her free hand and grabbed it by the cylinder.
A revolver couldn’t fire if the cylinder was prevented from turning.
That was the theory, at least. The reality was that some revolvers—the ones that were old, damaged, defective—might fire anyway.
Past the gray shape of the gun she saw Ramon’s eyes, inflamed with weeping, big with rage.
“Policia,” C.J. snapped. “Suelte la arma.” Drop the weapon.
She could shoot him now. She could fire past Emilio, wrapped in Ramon’s left arm like a small pink shield—fire into the man’s abdomen o
r groin.
But if she did, he would try to fire back, if only in a reflex action. And his gun was pointed at her face from inches away, close enough for her to smell the lubricant on the muzzle.
An old gun, Maria Sanchez had said. A piece of junk, from the look of it. The kind that might fire even if the cylinder was immobilized.
She repeated the command taught to all recruits at the police academy. “Suelte la arma.” Even though Sanchez spoke English, it was a fair bet that he was more fluent in Spanish.
He must have understood her, but he still didn’t comply.
She and Sanchez watched each other over the barrel of his gun. C.J. waited for him to pull the trigger. Waited to find out what kind of luck she had.
But he didn’t try to shoot. Slowly he relaxed his grip on the revolver and let her take it from him.
“Dios mio,” he said again in a hoarse, defeated voice.
She snugged the gun inside her belt. “Put the baby down,” she ordered, “Put him down. All right, raise your hands. Now on your knees. Your knees! Lie on your stomach. Hands out, away from your body. It’s okay, Mr. Sanchez. It’s okay.”
She had her knee planted in the small of his back, and she was cuffing him while he lay in the felony-prone position. She didn’t relax until the second handcuff clicked shut.
She searched him for other weapons, found none. When she was certain he posed no threat, she bolstered her Beretta. Outside, Brasco was yelling something through the door. He’d heard her shouting inside.
“I’m all right,” C.J. called back as she stood up.
Emilio was crying. She took a moment to comfort the child and to stop herself from shaking.
Close call. For a moment there, staring into that gun and those red eyes, she’d felt she was facing her old enemy once more—facing him, maybe, for the last time.
Last Breath Page 3