He bent down and did as directed—and that’s when Terry decided to make his appearance.
“Ho-ly shit, buddy, you okay?”
My eyes flicked across to track his booming, breathless voice, and I caught a glimpse of him waddling across the wide street with his gun out, his face all sweaty, his fleshy jowls rippling with the ebb and flow of each heavy step—
—and that split-second diversion was enough for the two goons to try to make their break.
They bolted almost simultaneously, like they were joined by some freaky mind-meld, the two of them charging at me while unleashing demonic yells. Flamehead reached me first, coming at me from the left, but I managed to deflect his first punch with my left arm and pound him with a flat strike from my gun hand that landed flat across his nose and upper lip and sent him staggering sideways all rubber-kneed, but the move had left my right side exposed and Soulpatch was on me in a flash, tackling me around the waist and shoving me down to the ground. The Browning and the BlackBerry tumbled out of my hand as I hit the asphalt hard and I lost sight of them, my attention focused on Soulpatch’s left arm, which was flying down for a hammer punch. I caught it with my forearm and swung his arm away before jabbing his bloodied shoulder with my left fist, causing him to wail out in pain—then Terry shouted, “Stop!”
I saw Soulpatch look up and swung my head sideways and caught sight of Terry standing there, about twenty feet away, with his face all scrunched in concentration and his gun out in a two-handed stance, and he yelled again, “I’m warning you!”
I heard Flamehead blurt, “Fuck this,” and flicked my head to my left to see him run off—then Soulpatch sprang off me and onto his feet and tore off after him.
Terry yelled, “Stop!”
And just then, just as I was shouting “Don’t!” he squeezed the trigger, once, twice, then again, three quick, loud bursts that whipped through the air between us.
“Nooo!” I barked as I pushed to my feet, my eyes rocketing away from Terry to look down the road where I saw Flamehead stumble and hit the asphalt like he was a toy that had his power switch flicked off.
I yelled out to Terry, “Stop firing!” my arms out wide and my hands splayed open. His face flooded with confusion, then he nodded, and I added, “Call nine-one-one and get an ambulance down here,” jabbing an angry finger at the fallen man in the middle of the road, then I turned away from him and scanned the ground for my Browning and my phone. I glimpsed the phone with its back off and its battery scattered by an adjacent car, decided they could wait, and tore my eyes across to focus on recovering my gun, which was lying by some weeds at the edge of the sidewalk.
I scooped it up and ran down the street.
Soulpatch had veered off to the right, and I caught sight of him weaving through some parked cars in an adjacent lot as I got to Flamehead, who was just sprawled on the ground, wheezing with labored breathing and barely moving. With all his dark clothing, I couldn’t see where he’d been hit at first, then I saw it, a small hole in his Windbreaker by the base of his right shoulder blade.
I glanced across and saw Soulpatch disappearing behind more cars, and decided I needed to lock him down fast.
Terry was making his way over, his step slow and deflated. I yelled out to him, “Stay with this guy till the ambulance shows up and send the uniforms after me.”
He nodded. “You got it.” And I was off.
I snaked through more parked cars and hurtled into the next lot, past another messy boatyard and a meat warehouse, but I couldn’t see him anymore. The bastard was moving fast, even though he was wounded. I’d only hit him in the shoulder, in an area I knew didn’t have major arteries that would make him bleed out nor, obviously, any vital organs. I knew my slug wasn’t going to slow him down too much, although from the puff of car seat stuffing I’d seen when I’d shot him, I knew the bullet had been a through-and-through, which meant he had two holes in him and he’d be losing blood from both.
I swung my gaze right and left, searching for any sign of him as a cold, hollow space grew in my gut. All around me, I could see a mess of low-rise structures that housed shipping- and auto-related businesses with big yards of scattered equipment and lots of places to hide—or lots of cars to jack. I advanced again, keeping to the same direction I’d seen him heading in, but with each aimless step, the hollow feeling grew like a black hole and consumed my insides with the doomed realization that the bastard was probably gone.
20
“Where are you?” Walker barked into the phone.
“I’m in the Barrio,” Ricky “Scrape” Torres replied. “It’s all gone to shit, man. I’m hit.”
Walker could hear the strain and the desperation in his bike brother’s voice. “What? What the hell happened?”
“The fucker just came out of nowhere and jumped us. One minute he’s behind the gates in the warehouse, next thing you know he’s got his gun in Booster’s face. I was going for my piece and he shot me in the shoulder, man. I’m bleeding bad.”
“What about Booster?”
“He’s down, man. This fucking security guard put one in his back when we made our move. I don’t know if he’s dead or what.”
“Goddamn it,” Walker spat, his veins swelling with fury. “How the fuck did he get the drop on you?”
“I don’t know. We messed up, all right? But I need help here, I’m losing blood, I need someone to fix me up.”
Walker thought for a second, and as he did, he saw the rest of his guys staring at him, concern and anger burning in their eyes. Then his gaze settled on the Mexican, who was also watching him—the goddamn Mexican and his fucking fed from hell. He cursed inwardly at having brought this down on the club, at not having pulled out as soon as he became aware that an FBI agent was involved. He’d been blinded by the easy money he’d been paid for grabbing the others for the Mexican, and he’d had no reason to suspect that this last snatch would turn out to be such a disaster.
Regardless, they were in it now, and he had a man down in the field. And Eli “Wook” Walker always took care of his men.
He asked, “You said you’re in the Barrio?”
“Yeah, I just crossed under the bridge.”
“What, on foot or you driving?”
“On foot, man. The car’s history.”
Walker wasn’t worried about that. It was stolen anyway. “Can you drive?”
“Yeah, I think so. But I need to jack me a ride.”
Walker thought it over quickly, then said, “Okay, get yourself some wheels and head out to the grotto. Think you can make it there?”
“I guess.”
“Do it. I’ll send someone around to sort you out.”
“You gotta do it fast, man,” Scrape pleaded. “I’m wasting here.”
“Just get your ass over there as soon as you can and sit tight. You’ll be fine.”
Walker hung up and found himself facing a wall of questioning stares. Before he could start filling them in, the Mexican spoke up.
“Is there a problem?”
Walker was in no mood to cajole the man. “Yeah, I’d say there’s a fucking problem,” he growled. “I’ve got one man down and another with a slug in his shoulder because of you.”
The Mexican got up from the couch, calmly, and took a step toward Walker, sending a ripple of tension across the room. The rest of the bikers straightened up and inched forward threateningly, clearly ready to rumble, as did Navarro’s two aides.
Navarro stilled his men with a small, calming gesture without even looking at them while studying Walker with a curious smile on his face. “Because of me?”
“You should have told me the bitch had a goddamn fed for a boyfriend from day one,” Walker hissed.
Navarro remained calm. “Well, you did know she was ex-DEA. And if you and your babosos hadn’t been so pathetically incompetent, the boyfriend wouldn’t have been around, would he?”
Something about the way the Mexican spoke tripped a small circuit deep inside W
alker’s brain. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it made him uneasy. Still, the man was standing there, mouthing off in front of Walker’s own crew and doing it in his own fucking clubhouse. Not too many people had done that and lived long enough to brag about it.
“Listen to me, you wetback sonofabitch. I don’t know what you’ve got yourself into or what the hell this is all about, but I know we’re done here. So how about you get that chickenshit shrink of yours out of my basement, give me the rest of my money, and get the fuck out of my face while I’m still feeling charitable.”
Walker stared down the Mexican as a loaded silence choked the room. From the corner of his eye, he could see that his men were ready to deal with any threatening move. There were six of them facing three Mexicans in the room and one outside, odds that Walker was more than comfortable with. He knew the Mexican’s heavies had to be packing, but his own guys weren’t exactly there to play bingo and their guns were also ready to rip.
The Mexican seemed to read the situation the same way and after a few seconds of deliberation, his body language eased off. Then he spread his arms wide in a brotherly, conciliatory gesture, and shrugged.
“I understand you’re angry right now. I would feel the same way. But we’ve done good business together in the past, and it seems a shame to me for us to throw that away and kill the chance of doing more good business in the future because of this. So how about we shake hands and conclude this unhappy experience and move on without poisoning our relationship with any further disrespect? Deal, amigo?”
Walker eyed the man curiously. The Mexican just stared at him with a cordial, even expression.
The man had indeed paid them good money in the past for relatively easy work, and the pragmatist within Walker agreed that there was no need to kill off any future prospects between them. And given all the heat that the club would probably be facing after the shoot-out, Walker preferred not to have four more bodies and a whole lot of forensic evidence to bury, to say nothing of a potential Mexican shitstorm from the wetback’s compadres south of the border.
Walker nodded. “Deal.”
The Mexican spread his arms wider and gave him a look that was part reproachful and part relieved, then stepped toward Walker and brought his arms together, his hands inviting a handshake.
Walker shrugged and took a step in himself, and extended his hand.
Walker’s gaze locked onto the man’s eyes, and the same circuit in the biker’s brain tripped again as the Mexican’s hands wrapped themselves tightly around his right hand. And in that instant, the Mexican’s eyes hardened, giving Walker a peek into an abyss of darkness he knew he’d encountered before as he felt something sharp cut into the inside of his wrist.
His skin lit up with a burning sensation, and Walker flinched and tried to yank his arm back, but the Mexican’s grip stayed solidly locked on his wrist and held it there for a moment longer while his icy stare dug deeper into him—then Walker tugged back and pulled himself free.
He studied his wrist with confused, angry eyes, saw the small spouts of blood appear from where he’d felt the cuts—then he looked up to the Mexican’s hands.
“What the fu—”
Walker didn’t have time to finish the word. From either side of the Mexican, the two sicarios—professional gunmen—were whipping out their silenced handguns and unleashing a torrent of rounds with deadly accuracy.
Three seconds later, Walker’s men were all dead or dying where they stood.
Walker’s jaw dropped an inch as he stared in disbelief at his fallen brothers and watched in dumbstruck shock as the two enforcers went around calmly pumping confirmation slugs into their heads, then he tore his gaze off the slaughter and swiveled it back onto the Mexican—and then two things hit him.
The first was who the Mexican really was.
The second was a complete and sudden loss of feeling in his arms and legs.
He just fell to the ground, collapsing on himself like someone had turned all his bones to Jell-O.
Walker couldn’t move anything. He couldn’t even twist a shoulder or lift a finger to straighten himself out. Nothing worked. The realization sent a rush of terror through him as he just lay there, on his side, his cheek and nose squashed up against the wood flooring, his eyes locked at a disturbing sideways angle and giving him no more than a close-up view of the dust and the scrapes that littered it.
The Mexican’s boots edged closer until they were right up against Walker’s face, and from the corner of one eye, he could see the man towering over him and looking down at him like he was no more than a cockroach.
Then he saw the Mexican’s boot rise up.
21
I got back to the street outside the bonded warehouse to find a black-and-white pulled up where I’d left Flamehead. One of the Harbor Patrol uniforms was talking to Terry while the other was busy on his radio. Within seconds, another cruiser swerved in and discharged two more officers. I gave them all a quick description of Soulpatch, and one of them radioed it in and asked for an immediate BOLO to be sent out. The uniforms then jumped back into their cars and tore off to look for him just as an ambulance screamed in.
Flamehead wasn’t doing well. He was still lying in the middle of the road, sprawled on his belly. I couldn’t see much blood under him, but although he was conscious, he was just staring vacantly at the asphalt and barely responsive. I stood back with Terry and watched as the paramedics went to work on him, hard and fast.
I was livid with myself. I’d started off with two potential living, breathing leads into finding out who had targeted Michelle and why, and I was down to one half-dead extra from a Mad Max movie who didn’t look like he was going to be doing any talking anytime soon.
I put my BlackBerry back together and watched as one of the paramedics checked his blood pressure while the other used some trauma shears to cut through Flamehead’s Windbreaker and T-shirt to reveal an oval entry wound in his right upper back.
“BP’s one hundred over palp,” one of them announced.
“I’ve got one GSW through the lung. Let’s roll him over.”
They moved together expertly like they’d done this a thousand times before and used the shears again to cut through the front of his shirt. There was a two-and-a-half-inch sucking-air chest wound just below his right nipple.
The lead paramedic, a striking brunette with steel-blue eyes, a lush mane of wavy hair that she wore tied back, and the name Abisaab embroidered across her chest, examined him with agile, calm hands, then told her colleague, “He’s hypoxic, his oh-two sat is eighty-nine percent and it looks like the bullet punctured his lung. I think he has a pneumo. Get the mask.”
They quickly strapped a high-flow, non-rebreather oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, then ran a couple of IV lines into his forearm as my phone’s software finally finished its interminable reboot. I felt my spirits sagging as I dialed Villaverde to bring him up to speed.
I heard the other paramedic, a short, muscular Latino by the name of Luengo, say, “Systolic’s down to eighty,” sounding more alarmed than before, then Abisaab said, “I’ve got frothy blood coming out of the wound, we need to seal it now,” and within seconds they were at full throttle, taping a seal tightly across the wound while keeping one side open. When they were done, Luengo broke away and prepped the gurney.
“Guys, I need an update,” I told them.
Abisaab replied without taking her eyes off Flamehead. “His lung’s down and he’s very hypoxic and tachycardic. He can hardly breathe. We need to get him back to the ER to put in a chest tube.”
I asked, “What are we looking at here?”
She got my drift and turned to face me, and her eyebrows rose up with a doubtful look, but she didn’t say anything—standard procedure given that the victim was still conscious and quite possibly hearing everything going on around him.
I stepped back to give them some room and gave Villaverde her read. I heard him blow out a frustrated sigh, then he said, “Ther
e’s not much more you can do out there. Why don’t you head on back up to Broadway and look at some faces?”
Villaverde was right. It was pretty obvious that even if Flamehead made it, I wouldn’t be able to go near him for days. Which infuriated me to no end. For some reason that I still couldn’t figure out, these goons were tailing me, and I didn’t fancy sitting around looking over my shoulder while waiting for this bastard to get his vocal cords back. I needed to find out who these guys were.
I watched as Abisaab and Luengo lifted him onto the collapsible gurney, then strapped him in.
“I need to check his pockets,” I told them as I moved in.
Abisaab stayed on task. “We’ve got to go.”
“I’ll be quick,” I insisted, my fingers already rifling through his pockets.
“Sir—”
“Just give me a second!”
He had nothing on him—no wallet, no ID. Not that I expected to find anything, but sometimes you get lucky. He did have a cell phone, though, a cheap prepaid, which I pocketed.
I stepped back to let them take him away, and as they did, I noticed something on Luengo’s arm. The bottom of what seemed like an elaborate tattoo, just peeking out from under the edge of his sleeve.
An idea slapped me.
“Hang on, hang on.” I rushed right back up to them and pushed through to get to Flamehead.
“We have to move him now,” Abisaab objected.
“I know, just—” I moved the cut fabric of his T-shirt aside, one side, then the other. I couldn’t see anything. I turned to Abisaab and said, “Give me your scissors.”
“What?”
“Your scissors. Give them to me.”
“We have to move him, agent,” she insisted, her eyes drilling into me.
“So stop wasting his time and give me the goddamn scissors.”
Abisaab looked at me and must have read the utter seriousness on my face as she shook her head and rummaged in her medical kit before handing them to me grudgingly, like I’d just snapped the neck of her pet cat.
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