by Chris Culver
“How many shells you have left?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
Paul felt the outside of his jacket pocket. “Seven shells and twenty rounds for my .45.”
I wished we could coordinate with Emilia, but that should be plenty of ammunition for our purposes.
“Our shooter’s dug in there pretty well, so I’m going to sweep around and try to get to his side. If that’s Miguel Navarra, he’s a former special forces soldier, so he’s going to see this coming and try to intercept me. You see him move, you move straight toward him and fire at his back. That will free Emilia, and hopefully she’ll follow. We should be able to flush him to open ground where we can take him down.”
Paul looked toward the shooter’s stationary position. “You sure this is a good idea?”
“No, but it’s all I’ve got.”
He nodded and then took a deep breath. “It’s been nice knowing you.”
“Yeah, you, too.”
Paul fired at Miguel’s position and I ran to a maple tree to my nine o’clock. We waited a moment, and then Paul fired again, giving me cover as I ran to yet another tree, this time about a dozen yards away. Emilia must have sensed what we were doing because she fired as well in the interim, pinning the stationary shooter down. For the first time, I thought this could work.
And then it all went wrong.
The shooter popped up and threw something at Emilia’s position. Our department receives bulletins every day from law enforcement agencies around the world warning of particularly dangerous threats. One recently mentioned that Border Patrol agents had reported confiscating a box containing fifty-five hand grenades, surplus from civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, from a drug runner near the US–Mexico border outside of Douglas, Arizona. The cartels purchased them in bulk for a couple hundred dollars each.
I should have expected Miguel to have some.
The grenade thumped against a tree a couple of feet from Emila’s position before coming to rest on the ground.
“Get down,” I shouted. She dove away from the device, shielding herself with the trunk of a maple tree. The grenade blew like a firework on the Fourth of July, and just like the fireworks, the sound reverberated through the woods. The shooter turned and sprinted. Paul started to give chase, but I waved him off and pointed to Emilia.
“Check her.”
I held my breath and waited long enough to see Emilia move before sprinting after the shooter. He had probably twenty yards on me, and he hit the tree line at a dead run. Even with the distance, I heard his feet bite into the gravel.
I couldn’t let him get to the house. If he carried a grenade on him, I didn’t even want to speculate what he had inside.
As soon as I reached the tree line, I sprinted toward my car to use the hood to steady my shot. If he hit the house, he’d dive behind the steel plate Carla mentioned he had built beside the door, knowing I couldn’t shoot through it. Then this would turn into a siege, and with a pregnant hostage potentially in the house, that wouldn’t end well. Too many innocent people had already died because of this case.
I lined up the shot. As the shooter’s foot hit the stairs at the base of the porch, I squeezed the trigger. The rifle jerked against my shoulder but not as much as I expected. I fired again, and then again, and then again. Four rounds total, each of which hit the shooter in the back. He fell straight to the ground and didn’t move. I held my rifle in front of me in case I had to lay down covering fire, and sprinted towards his corpse. As I reached down to feel his throat and make sure I had killed him, a firearm roared from deep inside the house and the left side of the doorframe exploded. Wooden shrapnel hit my arms, ripping my coat sleeve in several spots. A piece of wood hit me in the chin, almost knocking me back. I could taste blood in my mouth.
Before the shooter could get another shot off, I dove onto the porch and crawled as fast as I could toward the front door. That steel plate inside wouldn’t just protect the shooter, it’d also protect me. I pressed my back into it. The second blast hit that plate with an almost deafening thud, causing the entire house to shudder. The shooter had tracked me via the sound, and by the damage he had caused, I’d say he had a shotgun loaded with lead slugs. At this distance, even had I been in full body armor, those slugs would rip right through me as easily as they’d go through paper. Even with my rifle, he had me outgunned at such close quarters.
I grabbed the largest chunk of wood I could find and tossed it to my left. Two more shots rang out, splintering the home’s exterior where the wood hit the ground. Most of the shotguns I’ve fired have a 4+1 capacity, meaning they can hold four shells in the magazine tube and one in the barrel, but I know of several that hold eight rounds or even more if someone’s modified them. I wouldn’t win this by going toe-to-toe with him. Worse than that, I had maybe twenty yards of open space between me and my vehicle. If I made a run for it, he’d pick me off. I needed a plan.
My lip had started bleeding heavily, and I could feel the coppery blood begin to travel down my chin, so I spit onto the porch. The liquid glimmered black in the moonlight and that gave me my idea. Hansel and Gretel. I looked at the door and bit my lip hard enough to tear open the wound a little more. What had been a trickle turned into a flow. I spit again, forming an even bigger mark on the porch. Next, I spit into my hand and laid it on the ground, forming a print. I glanced at the door, half expecting to see somebody coming out. For this to work, I needed to move now.
I pressed my back against the house and crept to the far corner of the porch, periodically leaving a new mark in blood in my wake. Once I reached the corner, I slipped off the porch but kept my back to the house. I dropped the rifle and took my handgun out of my pocket, and there, in the shadow thrown by the eaves, I waited.
I could hear the shooter as he walked inside the house, presumably searching for me through the windows. His footsteps faded a moment later, but then I heard them again, this time unfiltered by the home’s walls. He had stepped onto the porch. The night stopped dead. I held my breath, my body tensing.
Come on. Follow the trail.
The steps came toward me, lighter than I would have expected, and then they stopped altogether. I slowly inhaled. His footsteps started again, haltingly. He couldn’t have been more than five feet away now. I could hear his heavy breathing.
And then his breath stopped, and in that moment, I knew he planned to move. I was ready.
He whipped around the corner faster than I would have given him credit for, but not fast enough. Instead of stepping back and drawing my weapon on him as he probably expected, I stepped toward him before he could bring the shotgun around, stopping him from leveling it at my chest. I hooked my left arm over the heavy weapon, pinning the barrel against my side. He pulled hard on the shotgun with both arms. In the moonlight, I caught sight of a teenager’s acne-scarred face.
I brought my pistol up to his chin. His body instantly tensed.
“Your partners are dead. I don’t want to kill you, but I will.”
He snarled and then yanked hard on his gun. Even though I probably had forty pounds on him, I knew I couldn’t hold him off with one hand. I closed my eyes and squeezed the trigger.
It was over.
Chapter 34
While Paul tended to Emilia in the woods, I cleared the house and found Valerie Perez gagged and tied up in a second-floor bathroom. She’d go to the hospital, but she looked physically okay to my eyes. I helped her stand and then took her to the front porch.
“Paul, it’s clear.”
He didn’t say anything, but I saw him carry Emilia from the woods a moment later. Blood had seeped through one of her pant legs, but her head swiveled left and right, telling me she was still alert. He set her on the steps and then took a deep breath.
“I’ve got to stop smoking,” he said, his lungs wheezing as he breathed.
“You okay, Emilia?” I asked, kneeling beside her. She nodded.
“Shrapnel wound, I think. It’s not
bad. Bleeding’s mostly stopped. Everything copacetic here?”
I nodded. “Yeah. We’re safe.”
Valerie started sobbing as soon as I said the word safe. I would have put my arm around her, but Emilia beat me to it. Since none of us had a cell phone signal, I went to the gunshot-ridden wreck that was my car and hit the emergency button Agent Havelock had given me. The four of us sat in silence beside Miguel Navarra’s corpse until four black SUVs skidded to a stop with anticlimactic flurry. Four black-clad FBI agents jumped out of each vehicle, their weapons drawn. They spread out, looking for threats. Special Agent Havelock climbed out of the driver’s seat of the lead vehicle gingerly. I stood and waved him over to the body.
“Everybody’s dead but Carla. I have no idea where she went.”
“I see you shot Miguel Navarra,” he said, focusing on the body at my feet.
“I guess I did,” I said, glancing at the corpse.
“You want to tell me what happened?” he asked, looking at the damaged farmhouse and surrounding woods.
“Eventually,” I said, looking back at my team. “I need a pair of ambulances. I’ve got wounded.”
Havelock looked past me to Emilia and Valerie and then nodded. “I’ll put the call in.”
While we waited for paramedics, Havelock and his men separated my team and interviewed us individually to find out what had happened. I looked forward one day to reading Paul and Emilia’s action reports, but for now I just wanted the situation over. Mike Bowers and Sylvia Lombardo arrived about an hour later, so I repeated my story to them. And then I repeated it to a major from the state police, and then to an assistant US attorney, and finally to an attorney from the Indiana Attorney General’s Office. I imagined I’d have to repeat the whole thing once more to my car insurance company when they saw my wife’s VW, but that could wait. After approximately two hours, a state trooper volunteered to drive me to Martinsville, where I could get a cell phone signal. I called my wife. Captain Bowers had already let her know that I was okay, but I wanted to hear her voice. Thankfully, she didn’t ask me what had happened, so I simply told her that I loved her and would be home when I could.
Everyone I had shot carried a driver’s license, so we ID’d the bodies quickly. I had gotten Miguel as he ran toward the house and Jacob Valdez as he tried to kill me around the side of the house. Havelock identified the body in the woods, Miguel’s partner, as Andrew Salazar, Tristan Salazar’s little brother. Murder apparently ran in the family. We closed our case, but rarely did that come at such a cost. I didn’t even know how many people had died.
I answered questions most of the night, but Paul Murphy drove me home at about two in the morning.
The next week went quickly. Our department’s forensic accountants went through Carla’s holdings and found almost two dozen properties held by half a dozen corporations. Some she used for legitimate businesses—a gym in Carmel, a strip mall in Zionsville—but we found four additional marijuana grow houses and a number of other vacant homes she could turn into grow houses with a little preparation. In addition, we found brokerage and bank accounts containing assets totaling nineteen million dollars. Since many of Carla’s financial transactions involved complex financial crimes that IMPD didn’t have the resources to investigate, we ended up bringing in the FBI. Given time, our departments would fight over the seized assets, but for now, they focused on building cases against the men and women who had helped Carla launder her money. Using Carla’s information as a toehold, our forensic accountants would be busy for years.
As for Carla, we never found her body, but Mexican police found her head beside a Santa Muerte shrine in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Karma’s a bitch, I guess.
Upon finding out that his Uncle Miguel had died in a gunfight with the police, Danny Navarra turned on his gang and gave up everybody in exchange for a plea deal for his numerous crimes. IMPD closed six homicides—two of which we knew nothing about—because of his intel, and arrested four Barrio Sureño members for murder. We also picked up almost every other active member of the gang on lesser charges. A couple of the youngest members—boy and girls who couldn’t even drive—escaped without arrest, but hopefully they had learned a lesson. You live by the sword, you die by the sword.
With Barrio Sureño effectively gutted and neutered, my family and I tried moving back into our house, but with the first step inside, I knew it had stopped being home. We put it up for sale and moved in with my sister temporarily. Megan went back to school, though, and Kaden continued to surprise us every day with how much he grew and the new things he could do. My wife continued reviewing awful movies on her blog and making coffee so horrible a little part of me dies inside every time I think about it. As the days passed, and my experiences shifted into memories, I found myself less and less horrified at the prospect of civilian life. I loved being a police officer, but I didn’t need to be a police officer. Nearly losing my job had taught me that.
Life more or less returned to normal for everyone else connected to the Santino Ramirez trial, too. Two days after being rescued from the house, Valerie Perez had a little girl. She named her Michelle, after her friend. Brian and Jasmine Alexander didn’t even miss a single lunch service at their soup kitchen. Despite committing perjury in a murder trial, none of them would go to jail anytime soon, at least not for their testimony. All of them, though, would carry the guilt of their friends’ deaths on their shoulders for the rest of their lives.
Santino Ramirez had a comparatively rougher go of things. The state of Indiana dropped all charges against him relating to the shooting death of Angel Hererra, but he never made it out of prison. The day before his release, the Laporte County Prosecuting Attorney charged him with attempting to hire a hit man to torture and murder his wife. I’ve never met two people who more deserved each other.
Throughout the week, I think I met every lawyer in the state—or at least it felt like that, as I sat through meeting after meeting, repeating the same story every time. When I wasn’t sitting in meetings with lawyers, I was at the house, fixing things in the hope that would sell quicker. I also managed to reassemble my wife’s rocking chair. Remarkably, that turned out okay. When I finished, it didn’t squeak, it didn’t wobble, and it didn’t feel as if it would break as soon as I sat down. One day, maybe Megan or Kaden would rock their children in it. I hoped they would. Randy, my lawyer, called every day asking if I had decided to accept my promotion. I fended off his inquiries for a while, but by the following Monday, it became clear I couldn’t anymore. First, though, I had something to do.
I put on a suit and tie and went into my office to fill out paperwork, the same thing I had done every day of the previous week, but instead of going home at lunchtime, I walked to the City-County Building and met Captain Bowers and Special Agent Havelock in the homicide unit’s conference room. Both men wore suits and ties as if they planned to go to court.
“You ready for this, Ash?” asked Bowers.
“I guess I’m going to have to be,” I said.
Havelock patted me on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine, Lieutenant.”
The three of us took the elevator to the lobby, where about a dozen reporters—local and national—and Sylvia Lombardo awaited us. As soon as the three of us arrived, Sylvia turned the reporters.
“Thank you all for coming. We’re here to discuss the events of the past week. As you know, we’ve had a busy week here at IMPD. Seventy-nine people died in a coordinated assault on our city seven days ago. I’m here to announce that detectives working alongside their counterparts in the FBI have officially closed that investigation. And let me be absolutely clear: it was a tragedy, but it was not terrorism. Members of a violent criminal organization smuggled men and women into our community and then subsequently murdered them when it became apparent that our detectives had discovered their illegal activities. To cover their tracks, they burned their places of business down, they shot their associates, and they murdered everyone who could identify them to the pol
ice.
“Our detectives tracked these heinous men down and attempted to arrest them. Rather than face their punishment, they opened fire on our officers, and in the ensuing fight, every suspect died. This is a tragedy all around, but it didn’t have to be. These men chose to take up arms, and they chose to kill. Let me be absolutely clear, though: this is over. Thanks to the courage of our officers, this tragedy has come to a conclusion.
“For specific questions, I’ll turn this over to the leaders of our team. Captain Mike Bowers, who leads IMPD’s Crimes Against Persons Division and Special Agent Kevin Havelock, the agent in charge of the local FBI field office.”
I waited, expecting her to say my name, but she didn’t. The cameras focused on Bowers and Havelock, and I took a reluctant step back.
And so my career ends, with not a bang but a whimper.
I had hoped for more than that, but it didn’t matter in the end. I counted down the minutes for the press conference to end. At almost exactly an hour, Sylvia Lombardo interrupted a reporter and drew the press conference to a close. The crowds began to disperse quickly, but before he could leave, I put a hand on Mike Bowers’ elbow.
“Hey,” I said. “Can we talk in your office?”
He looked at me up and down before nodding. “Sure.”
We took the elevator to his floor in relative silence. Once we had arrived in his wood-paneled office, Bowers took off his coat and threw it on an empty chair while gesturing to the one beside it.
“Have a seat,” he said, sitting behind his desk. Instead of sitting, I reached into my jacket for an envelope and put it on his desk.
“This is my letter of resignation. You were my last real supervisor, so I thought I should give it to you.”
Bowers reached for the envelope, but he didn’t open it. “Why don’t you sit down? We’ll talk before you do anything rash.”
I shook my head. “We don’t have anything to talk about. Tell Sylvia Lombardo that I appreciate the promotion, but I can’t take it. Hannah and I put the house on the market, and I’ve put a deposit down on an office in southern Indiana, near Evansville. After shooting Dante, and the riots and the brick through my window, I’m spent. I’m hanging out my shingle and starting a small legal practice. I’ll write wills and help people adopt kids.”