by DL Barbur
Maybe it was an apt analogy. I felt my nostrils flare, like a wolf scenting prey.
I was about to get something I wanted for a long time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Eddie drove while I sat in the seat beside him, a shotgun held between my legs muzzle up. Dalton was in the back seat. In another vehicle behind us were Drogan and Byrd. The five of us were kitted out in tactical vests. The third vehicle in the convoy was a van carrying Casey and Alex. They were wearing vests too, but hopefully would only be processing evidence. Alex also had a medical kit, in case things really went to shit.
I’d wanted to leave the conference room and punch Lubbock’s ticket right away, but Bolle put the brakes on. He actually wrote a search warrant and only moments ago had called us to tell us he’d had it signed by a Federal judge. Right now he was in the air, in the Little Bird. Jack would fly and Bolle would monitor things via the cameras mounted on the helo. We doubted Lubbock would try to run, but if he did, we would have eyes in the sky.
Part of me hoped Lubbock would try to run.
It was the middle of the night, and the streets were quiet around Lubbock’s house. There was a light on in an upstairs bedroom. Our plan was pretty straightforward. Since this was terrorism-related, we’d gotten a no-knock warrant. We could just kick the door in. Drogan and Byrd parked their vehicle in front of Lubbock’s garage, denying him the ability to escape in the car inside. They both bailed out and ran around to the back door in case Lubbock tried to flee that way. Eddie, Dalton and I ran up to the front door.
I wanted very badly for Dalton to blow up Lubbock’s front door, but since we were in a residential neighborhood, and there was no evidence Lubbock had fortified the door, I was going to have to settle for the next best thing. I was carrying a stubby little sawed-off shotgun. Instead of the usual buckshot or slugs, it was loaded with special frangible “doorbuster” rounds. They were made of a compressed metal powder and would blow the lock to pieces, but not hurt anybody standing more than a couple feet from the door on the other side.
Eddie held the screen door open, and I placed the muzzle of the shotgun against the door jamb at a forty-five-degree angle, right where the lock went into the frame. I triggered two quick shots, let the shotgun hang, then kicked the door. It flew open and bounced off the wall inside. I pulled my pistol and we were in, sweeping the living room and seeing no one.
From the back of the house, I heard breaking glass as Drogan and Byrd broke a window, so they could pull the drapes aside and cover a back room. Eddie, Dalton and I sprinted for the stairs. It was a calculated risk. We’d seen lights flicking on and off upstairs while we were waiting for the warrant, but no sign of anyone downstairs.
“Police! Search warrant!” I yelled as I ran up the stairs. At the top, I broke right, headed for the bedroom with the light on. I passed through the doorway and saw Lubbock standing beside the bed, which was covered with piles of clothes and suitcases. He was standing in profile to me, with his right hand reaching into a satchel.
“Put your hands up!” I yelled and holstered my pistol as I ran towards him. I wanted to put my hands on him so bad I could taste it.
It was a dumb mistake. I saw a flash of silver in his hand, and by the time I realized it was a little snub-nosed revolver, he shot me in the chest.
The impact of the slug into the hard armor plate barely registered. I crashed into him and slammed him against the wall. The gun was trapped between us and I heard it go off again. I got my right hand around his neck and drove his head into the wall. I had just enough time to see the dent in the drywall as we both tumbled to the floor in the narrow space between the bed and the wall.
I grabbed the revolver with my left hand and trapped it to his chest, squeezing hard in the hopes of stopping the cylinder from rotating. With my right, I blasted a hammer fist to the bridge of his nose and felt it pop and flatten. That seemed to work pretty well, so I let another one fly that hit him square in the teeth. He went limp and I twisted the little Smith and Wesson out of his grip.
Things got a little fuzzy after that. I remembered raising the little gun over my head and slamming it into Lubbock’s face, more than once. Part of me was in a white-hot rage like nothing I’d ever felt before. Another part of me was detached, and noting the alarming number of blood droplets collecting on the wall, thought maybe I should stop because the whole point of this was to get Lubbock to talk.
I’ll never know which one of those competing voices in my head would have won out because the decision was taken out of my hands. I felt myself being lifted up and dragged backwards. I struggled for a second to free myself. There was a grab handle on the back of my vest, put there so we could drag a wounded teammate to safety. I realized Eddie was pulling me backward with one hand. With my gear on I probably weighed close to three hundred pounds, but in Eddie’s grasp, I might as well have been a feather pillow.
“Need to cool it, Dent. You crack that guy’s head open, he ain’t gonna be able to tell us what we need to know.” He said it in a tone that on the surface sounded like he was talking about the weather, but underneath was some steel. Beneath his affable, laid-back islander exterior, Eddie was a dangerous man. I wasn’t sure who would win in a fight between us, but there was a big possibility both of us would lose.
Lubbock struggled to rise to his hands and knees. He was still alive then. I looked down at the little revolver in my hand. It was caked with blood and the trigger guard was bent into the trigger. I was lucky the thing hadn’t gone off again when I hit him with it. Eddie still had a firm grip on the back of my vest. I made myself relax and stifle my anger.
“I’m good,” I said. Eddie relaxed his grasp and I stood up.
Lubbock’s face was pretty messed up. Dalton moved forward, pulling his first aid kit off his vest.
“They told me it would just be a pipe bomb, and nobody would get hurt,” Lubbock said, and spit out part of a tooth.
Eddie and I looked at each other. That was a pretty significant admission. My cop brain kicked in. Lubbock hadn’t been read his Miranda rights, but he’d said it spontaneously, without any prompting or questioning from us, thus his statement would be admissible in court. I automatically started writing my report in my head, which made me realize I hadn’t written a single report since I joined Bolle’s crew. Since some of the stuff I’d done could easily put me in prison, maybe that was a good thing.
“What the hell happened?” Bolle said from the doorway. I turned and saw him standing there with Alex behind him. She had her medical bag over her shoulder. There was a grassy field down the street just big enough for the Little Bird. Apparently, Jack had dropped Bolle off. I belatedly realized I could hear the helo’s rotors overhead.
“He, uhhh… resisted arrest,” Eddie said with a sidelong glance at me.
“Check him out,” Bolle said with that little hand gesture of his that irritated me so much. It reminded me of a rich guy giving orders to his servant and made me wonder if that was how he saw us.
Alex’s eyes flicked to me, then she pulled her bag off her shoulder and started towards Lubbock, who had that dazed, vacant look of somebody with a concussion.
“Uhh… Dent got shot,” Eddie said.
Alex’s head swiveled towards me and her eyebrows went up. “You got shot?”
“Oh yeah. I got shot.” I fingered the hole in my vest. It was about the size of my pinky and could I could feel the slug in there on top of the armor plate of my vest.
“Come.” Alex grabbed my wrist and tried to pull me towards the door.
“I really think my vest stopped it,” I said.
Bolle looked at me. “Go,” he said.
I let Alex lead me into the spare bedroom. The place had been ransacked. Drawers were opened and clothes were strewn all over the floor. She tapped the plate carrier.
“Off,” she said and dug in her bag.
I was tempted to make a crack about her wanting to get my clothes off but had enough sense to tell she was in no mood. I pu
lled the carrier off, feeling instantly lighter by about 30 pounds and skinned out of my shirt. There was a little red mark in the “n” of my “Front Towards Enemy” tattoo.
“Sit down on the bed,” Alex said. I complied and she stuck her stethoscope on my chest. I flinched at the cold metal.
“I think I’m fine,” I said.
“Shut up and take deep breaths,” she said.
I complied and she moved the stethoscope around, then palpated my chest, which despite everything else, actually felt kind of good.
“You know, if you hadn’t been wearing your vest, you’d have a collapsed lung right now. Might have even hit your spine and put you in a wheelchair.”
“Glad I was wearing the vest,” I said.
“Let’s work on not getting shot in the first place,” she said. She wouldn’t meet my eyes as she stowed her stuff back in the bag. I wanted to grab her hand and say I was sorry, even though I wasn’t exactly sure for what, but I realized Bolle was standing in the doorway.
“Can you please tend to Lubbock, Dr. Pace?” Bolle asked. Alex nodded and walked out of the room without a word or a backward glance. I pulled my shirt on.
“Leave the plate carrier,” Bolle said. “It’s evidence.”
I nodded and turned to walk out of the room, but Bolle blocked my way.
“You know, Dent, it’s ok to fuck somebody up if they try to shoot you,” he said. “But it’s hard to justify it when you’re using their own gun to beat them with.”
It didn’t take a forensic science genius to figure out what had happened in there. I just stood there, not sure what to say. Beating Lubbock had been wrong, in a strictly legal sense, but I was having a hard time feeling sorry about it.
“I’m closer than I’ve ever come,” Bolle said. “I want Todd and Marshall, and Lubbock is a link in the chain that leads me to him. You’ve been useful to me, but don’t jeopardize my work by losing control.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Ethical issues aside, if Lubbock’s brains were too scrambled to give a coherent statement, I’d lost a major opportunity for us to move forward in the case. I was starting to feel like a dumbass.
“Ok,” I said finally.
Bolle’s expression softened. “I don’t know when you slept last. You’ve been kidnapped and in a couple of gunfights in the last few days. You’re off the street. It isn’t a punishment. I think you’ve gone too long with too little rest. Drogan is going to drive you back to Troutdale.”
My eyes flicked towards the master bedroom, where Alex was working on Lubbock.
“After she patches up Lubbock, I’m going to need all the help I can get searching this place because I don’t trust the locals,” Bolle said. “We’re not doing anything else operational. I won’t let anything happen to her.”
“Ok,” I said again. I realized Bolle had a point. I felt spacey and disconnected from what was going on around me, courtesy of not enough sleep, and too much adrenaline. Everybody had a limit. My eyes felt like someone had taken sandpaper, to them and I had a pounding headache. My entire body hurt. I hadn’t felt this wiped out since Ranger School when I was twenty years younger and much dumber.
“Thank you,” Bolle said. He looked like he meant it. “I’m glad you weren’t hurt.”
Then he stepped aside and I walked out in the hall. Alex was wrapping gauze around Lubbock’s head. She paused long enough to give me a look I couldn’t quite read, then went back to work.
I shrugged, turned and walked out the door.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I remember getting in the car with Drogan and driving past a bored Portland police officer that was blocking the street for us. I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew I was waking up in a panic, unsure of where I was. I had my pistol half out of the holster before I realized we were right outside the roll-up door to the factory. Dale Williams was standing outside smoking a cigarette.
Drogan was giving me a look out of the corner of her eye. I slid my pistol back in the holster and got out without a word to her.
“Dent, your eyes look like two piss holes in a snow bank,” Dale said.
“I’m a little tired,” I said. My own voice sounded far away.
“How’d it go?”
“Lubbock shot me,” I said. It felt strange to have those words come out of my mouth.
Dale looked me up and down.
“In the vest,” I added.
He nodded. “Then what?”
“I beat the shit out of him.”
Dale nodded as if that pleased him.
“It probably went a little too far,” I said after a moment. “Lubbock pulled me off the street.” I felt like I was admitting to doing something dirty when I said it. I think it reminded me too much of when I’d been fired from the Police Bureau.
Dale blew smoke out of his nostrils. “Lubbock still breathing?”
“Mostly.”
“Well, that’s a start. Why don’t you tell it to me from the beginning?”
So I unloaded it all on him, from the minute I blew open the door to when Lubbock kicked me out of his crime scene. It felt good to tell somebody who maybe would have an inkling of what it was like. I realized then that there was an Al-sized hole in my life, and part of me really wanted Dale to step into it.
Dale stubbed out his smoke and dropped it into a coffee can half-filled with dirt he’d scrounged from somewhere.
“When was the last time you slept?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Back in Nam, we used to have these guys that would go out on a recon patrol, hide in the bush, for five, six days. They’d live in a hole in the ground and catch a cat nap here and there. They’d have Charlie all around them so they couldn’t talk, had to eat fish and rice so Charlie wouldn’t smell American food. Sometimes things would drop in the pot and they’d wind up shooting it out with Charlie. Some of those six-man teams killed a hundred or more VC before they got extracted.”
By force of habit he tapped another smoke out of his pack, then caught himself and pushed it back in.
“Those guys would come back still all wired on adrenaline. They’d shit, shower, and shave and think they were ready to go out again. The times we let them, it was usually a disaster. A person can only take so much, no matter how hard they are. We’d keep them back at base and about twelve hours after the helo dropped ‘em off they’d fall asleep for a whole day, then wake up and have the shakes for a day after that.”
“You look just like one of those boy,s Dent. My advice is to go get something to eat and get some sleep. When that gal of yours comes back, see if she’s up for a roll in the hay. That’ll put you back on an even keel.”
I wasn’t sure if a roll in the hay with Alex was in the cards, but sleep and food sounded good. Dale and I walked through the roll up door and he pressed the button to shut it behind us.
“I’m going to turn in myself. Henry set me up in one of those little trailers. I guess Bolle wants me to hang around a few days, get statements from me and such. I think he’s trying to figure out how he’s going to explain how a broke down old rancher wound up strapped to the side of his toy helicopter shooting it out with a bunch of skinhead assholes.”
He gave me a wave and headed towards the trailers.
“Hey, Dale,” I called after him. He looked over his shoulder.
“Thanks.”
He gave me a thumbs up and kept on walking. Maybe after all this was over, I’d see if Dale needed a hired hand. I’d always wanted to be a cowboy when I was a kid.
The halls of the building were dark and deserted. It hadn’t actually been bustling with people before, but now only me, Henry, and Dale were in the building. Henry was looking at half a dozen computer monitors and seemed to be doing several things at once. He was monitoring police radio traffic and monitoring the security cameras all over our building. He was also running some kind of simulation that involved figuring out the probability that the Cascade Aviation Gulfstream je
t had landed at any particular airport in the world, based on a set of parameters that he was tweaking on the fly. Finally, on a laptop over in a corner, he was playing a computer game.
There were stacks of fast food wrappers and empty energy drink cans on the desk around him. Henry was engrossed in his work, so I left him to it. I didn’t particularly feel like talking anyway so I went into the break room and ate two ridiculously large sandwiches.
I needed to go to sleep, but I found myself pacing around the little trailer, aimlessly opening and closing the various drawers and cupboards, looking for what, I didn’t know. I found myself fingering the spot on my chest where the bullet had struck me. For some reason, I felt both sweaty and cold at the same time.
In the bathroom, I pulled off my shirt and looked in the mirror. There was still a little red mark, right there in the middle of my tattoo. I imagined a bullet hole there, and my lungs filling up with blood.
I found myself kneeling in front of the toilet, throwing up the food I’d just eaten. I retched long after my stomach was empty, and then lay there on the bathroom floor shaking and shivering. For several minutes I would have sworn I could smell the tires burning in the streets of Mogadishu. The last time I’d felt like this was after the fight that left eighteen of us dead. I was proud that I’d kept my shit together, but when we finally got back to the airport I’d puked up my chow just like this.
Finally, I rinsed out my mouth and dragged myself into the bed. The last thing I remembered was making sure my pistol was within arm’s reach on the nightstand, and then I was asleep.
I dreamed. I dreamed about the shootout in the house in south-east Portland, only this time I got shot to pieces. I dreamed that back in the trailer when I hit Dolph in the head with the flail, he just turned around and laughed. I dreamed about Struecker getting shot, only this time it wasn’t Curis lying under the truck, it was Lubbock lying there with his little .38 and he shot me too.
Mostly, I relived that moment in the bedroom when Lubbock shot me. Each time it was worse. I wasn’t wearing armor and I felt the bullet bore through my chest, and started coughing up blood. It was like watching a video over and over again, seen from outside my body. Each time I’d try to yell that I shouldn’t go inside, but I went anyway. Each time Lubbock would shoot me again.