Thank God Liz and the girls were out.
At the threshold to the front door, Hailey paused, drew air until her lungs were full, and yanked the door open.
No shots fired.
She ducked low, crept onto the porch. Empty.
Scanned the front hallway again. Clear.
She crossed to the top of the porch stairs, searching the street. Silence penetrated the dark where the scent of rotting leaves filled the wet air.
No tire sounds.
Whoever he was, he was on foot. Or he was inside. She spun back. Where the hell was Jim?
“Jim!” Panic filled her voice. The only reason he wouldn’t answer was … no. This family could not survive another death.
Pausing in the doorway to the living room, Hailey counted to three and hooked around the doorjamb, flipped the light switch, and dropped behind a Windsor chair.
She rounded the couch and checked the fireplace—only a small mound of ashes sat piled in the center, waiting to be discarded.
She thought of John. An intruder. All the unanswered questions around John’s death—the intruder who shot him. Now there might have been another intruder in the house.
Fear caught in her throat, burned her eyes. Ali and Camilla could have been home.
A trail of dark spots lined Liz’s white Persian rug.
Behind the coffee table, Jim was flat on his back.
He groaned and lifted a hand to cup his ear. Blood seeped between his fingers. She saw John—all that blood—and blinked the image away. “You’re okay.”
Beside him lay a thin, white FedEx envelope. Pinned to the clear plastic on the outside was a round, white button.
Hailey didn’t need to read its anti-gun message. She already had two other pins just like it—one from the Dennigs’ murders and one from Wesson’s.
But she was only more confused by the attack on Jim. Anti-gun proponents were normally people who argued that violence was not a way to resolve violence. But this anti-gun terrorist had taken aim at her father-in-law with the very weapon he claimed to despise.
A gun.
Chapter 2
The van chugging down First Street hardly looked like police transport. If he didn’t know where he was going, Hal Harris would’ve walked right past the white van with green Celtic-styled letters that had once read PJ’s Plumbing. The “J” was faded and the “m” in plumbing was chipped off. What was left was P’s Plubing.
Finally back from shoulder surgery, he was ready to work. Ready to spend fifteen hours a day. Six weeks of watching TV and eating takeout was enough to convince Hal that he’d never retire. Nearly made him insane. Not to mention he’d put on ten pounds that he didn’t need.
He liked to think the department missed him too. At least he knew Hailey had.
He’d known Hailey for most of his police career, had worked with her a few times as a rookie when she’d been called to a case, along with her previous partner, an acerbic chain-smoker named Charlie Foss.
Foss had retired a few months before Hal was promoted to Homicide. After her new partner made one too many overtures, the last one during a department meeting, Hailey had announced she’d need a new partner before she shot the one she had.
With a straight face, as the story went, she’d aimed her finger at the guy and pulled an imaginary trigger. The guy had only lasted a few more weeks in Homicide.
As soon as Hal was in the door, Captain Marshall had assigned Hailey as his partner. “Don’t underestimate her,” he’d said.
Hal hadn’t, and despite the fact that she stood well below his shoulder, or the fact that he could easily lift her in one arm, he knew which of them was the heavyweight.
Then, she’d lost John and something had shifted between them. He kept waiting for her to come back. She would.
Hal stepped into the van, his bulk sinking the van a few inches. Inside the van was a metal box with a computer panel along one side. Two chairs were bolted to the floor in front of the panel and three chairs lined the opposite side. It smelled like sweat and wet pennies. He scanned the ceiling for an air vent and moved toward the plastic chair beneath it. He sat lightly, testing it. Heartier ones had broken beneath him before. The plastic groaned and popped, and he rocked it, testing the bolts. Satisfied, he turned the vent above his head to high.
Triggerlock Inspector Ryaan Berry was the last to climb into the van. She dropped into the seat across from Hal. “How’s it going?”
Ryaan and Hal had worked plenty of cases together—homicides and guns went hand in hand—but this was the first time he’d been on one of their stings. And there was no guarantee that he’d get anything from being there. The Triggerlock informant wasn’t sure if these gunrunners had stolen the guns from Dennig Distribution. If one of them was the thief, he might also be the Dennigs’ killer.
Or this could be a dead end.
Someone had to know something. Hal was counting on it.
The engine revved, and despite the air blowing hard on his face, Hal felt the sweat pool beneath his arms and down his spine.
It was winter, but still warm. Hal preferred the cold; the brisk air made it easier to breathe—especially when he sat in a confined space.
Like a van.
As they bumped across the pitted department parking lot, Hal stared out the window, his stomach twisting and churning. From the outside, the van panels appeared solid. From inside, they looked like regular windows, which should have made him feel better. Behind him, two other vans carried members of the department’s task force.
“Uh, Hal?” Ryaan asked. “You okay?”
“Fine,” he lied, fighting the nausea.
He’d never suffered from claustrophobia until he was sitting in the back of a black and white a day after his father died. He was twenty-three. The panicked sensation in small spaces had never gone away, like the shadow of his father’s death that he couldn’t shake.
After one particularly harrowing experience in a basement during a domestic call, he’d gone to see the department shrink, but her endless theories on his condition just seemed like fluff. He’d never been locked in a box or a trunk. His childhood was as normal as childhood could be. His mother was a kind woman who worked as a nurse at Children’s Hospital. His father had been a well-adjusted man, despite the horrors he saw on the job as a cop in Oakland. His two older sisters were healthy. No one else suffered from any phobias.
When Hal had applied to the academy, his father had told him to make sure the committee knew Hal was a legacy. So he had used his old man as a stepping-stone, and it had worked. Departments liked legacies. They were proud to foster the notion that the department was a fraternity to which membership could be passed down, generation to generation.
At least, it was like that until his father was killed.
Hal had been in class when it happened. The academy had given him a week to grieve, and two days after the shooting, his father had received a full police burial. Hal and his two sisters—then twenty-six and twenty-nine—had been pallbearers, along with his father’s partner and two other patrol officers.
The day his father was buried was so hot that sweat had soaked all the way through Hal’s uniform coat, through the pants at the backs of his knees. But it was hotter the next day when he’d gone outside to get the paper, wearing only his shorts and tennis shoes, and had lifted it off the dew-covered grass, unfolded it, and seen the headline.
“Slain cop charged with three counts of felony.”
His father’s name was in the first line. They claimed his father had been accepting bribes from a few local businessmen. That he was crooked.
Hal had shoved the paper deep into the trash can. He didn’t go back into the house. Instead he started to run. He ran hard, fast, the way they made him run in the academy, but without his sergeant there to drill him. He felt like he could have run forever.
Ryaan flipped on the interior lights, bathing the inside of the van in a ruby haze. Hal put his hand over his mouth. The red light protected
their night vision, but it also worsened Hal’s nausea.
He felt his pockets and pulled out a piece of gum—his last piece—and wadded it into his mouth.
This was Ryaan’s team. Hal had met most of them before. Lopez was the driver, and in back were Erickson and a third guy—Hal couldn’t remember his name. Michaels. He had triplets—three boys.
The last man in the van sat at the control panel. A gray-haired white guy, his large girth filled the chair so completely that his sides spilled beneath the metal armrests, and the gray hairs in his reddish beard stuck out like frizzy white sprouts. Hal didn’t recognize him, but he wasn’t about to open his mouth to make an introduction, for fear of losing his breakfast.
“Inspector Ryaan Berry,” she said, offering her hand. “You’re new, right?”
“Sam Gibson,” he replied, his fingers never leaving the keyboard, eyes fixed on a screen displaying their destination. “Transferred down from Seattle.”
Ryaan studied the feed on the screen, which originated from cameras positioned on roofs surrounding their destination. The images had been enhanced to make the details emerge, even in the dark.
“The guys we’re going after are moving a big shipment stolen from Dennig Distributors more than a year ago. Estimates are these kids have fifty to seventy-five guns. That many guns means some big losses when we show up.” She scanned their faces. “Expect a fight, you hear?”
Hal felt a jolt of adrenaline. Homicide inspectors rarely dealt with live scenes. It was good to get the blood moving again.
The air shut off above his head, and Hal fiddled with the vent without success.
“Lopez,” Ryaan called to the driver without so much as a glance in Hal’s direction. “Turn the air up while we can, would you?” Using a whiteboard, Ryaan drew a box to represent the building where the sting was to go down then added two rectangles for the double doors.
Hal kept his gaze in her direction but had to focus out the window, the gas fumes and lack of air making him feel worse.
“Front of the building is glass.” She shaded in the windows. “Doors are glass. Windows next to the doors and on the second floor above too.”
Glass was easy to shoot through.
She added a line of Xs to the right side of the doors to represent members of the task force. “Special Ops will circle from the back of the building and be here, ready for our call.”
The Special Ops group handled anything that required a large, coordinated offense—stings, riots, or hostage situations. Sam adjusted his monitor with a few keystrokes until Hal could pick out the Special Ops sharpshooters along the roofline.
“Gibson, you show a view of the cars?”
Gibson struck at the keys and the screen displayed a ground-level view of the building Ryaan had drawn. She pointed to a black Lexus and silver BMW parked in front. “These are the suspects’ cars. We think there are two guys in each car. Recon believes the weapons are in the Lexus.” She turned back to Gibson. “Can we look at the sharpshooters again?”
Gibson changed screens and Ryaan pointed out the silhouettes stationed along the roof.
“As soon as we confirm the merchandise, we go. Get the suspects down on the ground. I’ll lead. You—” She pointed to Erickson and Michaels. “You’re on my back, so watch your fire.” She turned to Hal. “You just hang tight unless all hell breaks loose.”
Hal liked watching Ryaan at work. She was intense, focused. Her people respected her and so did he. Every time they worked together, he wondered about her personal life. He’d never heard anything about her personal life. Was she married? Did she date?
One of these days, he was going to gather the courage to find out.
The van stopped at the curb about twenty yards south of the two cars. Lopez cut the engine, lifted his tool belt off the floor, grabbed his toolbox, and exited the van for his post down the street.
As soon as the driver’s door clicked closed, the circulating air inside the van slowed until it was like breathing through a straw.
Streetlights on either end of the three central buildings created a glowing box around the cars and the front of the building. The department had probably sent down folks from PG&E earlier in the day to make sure the lights were functional. Unlike almost anywhere else in the city, there wasn’t a single light out on the entire block.
The target cars sat quietly at the curb, their windows dark—no sign of action from inside. It was now only a question of when they decided to come out.
“You okay?” Ryaan asked and Hal nodded. She leaned across Gibson anyway and flipped a switch to turn on the generator and low-level fan system.
Hal felt the wind on his back and was grateful.
“You sure you want to do that?” Gibson asked.
“From out there, it just sounds like a cool-down cycle,” she answered. “Can’t leave it on too long, though.”
Despite the fan, the air continued to thicken with the odors of so many people in the cramped space. Gibson gave off the gritty stench of cigarettes, which mixed with the taste of stale chewing gum in Hal’s mouth and the bitter scent of sweat.
Mind over matter. Hal shifted slightly in his seat and put his face close to the van’s cool metal wall, hoping these guys didn’t sit in those fancy cars much longer.
One of the Lexus’s doors cracked open.
“Here we go,” Ryaan announced.
No motion from the BMW, but four young men eased out of the Lexus. They could’ve been his sister’s kids, in their hooded sweatshirts and low-ride jeans, boxer shorts exposed like the stripe of a flag across their backsides. Only the bulges at their sides and ankles suggested they weren’t just a bunch of harmless punks.
“Shit,” Ryaan whispered, pulling the radio to her lips, her voice low and tense. “We’ve got four in the first car, not two. Expect as many as eight.”
Hal palmed his gun, trying to remember the last time he’d been involved in an active shooting. Not since he was a patrol officer, six years ago. A fleeing suspect had shot at him and his partner, Jimmy Delucca, a kid from New York. They’d lost the perp. When he’d gotten home, Hal had felt battered himself.
Sweat dripped down Hal’s spine. The van air had gone completely still again. He released his gun’s magazine, checked it, and snapped it in place as the BMW’s doors cracked open.
Five more emerged, and the radio crackled to life as officers prepared to move.
“Count is nine, not eight,” Ryaan said into the radio. “Hold for my call.”
Hal wondered who had done the reconnaissance. So far their numbers were way off. He hoped they had enough backup to cover it.
The guys from the BMW joined the others.
The group milled around the Lexus. Hal shifted his focus back to the suspects in the street.
“Whitie here’s got three,” Ryaan said, pointing to the guy in the white hooded sweatshirt. “See it?”
“Right pocket and back side,” Jefferson added.
“And right ankle. Watch how he turns,” Ryaan went on.
The kid stepped back from the car, and the subtle bulge was visible above his shoe. Damn. Three guns.
The jacket on one of the kids flapped open. Hal’s eyes widened as he zeroed in on the weapon stuffed into the low-hanging jeans.
Ryaan had spotted the same thing he had. “Guy in the yellow-striped boxers has got a Norinco SKS.”
The van hushed.
The Norinco held armor-piercing rounds.
Beside Hal, Erickson touched his hands to his vest. “That’s a cop killer.”
“Right. We take the cop killer first,” Ryaan announced into the radio. “I’d expect about three weapons on each guy, but be ready for a fourth. Overkill is key here, emphasis on kill. Drop them if you need to. It’s them or us.”
Hal shifted in his seat. The chance of something going wrong—of someone getting killed—was high. Either one of them, or one of these kids.
After a moment, the driver of the Lexus slapped the top
of the car and swaggered down the street, heading north. He displayed maybe five inches of red boxer shorts, his dark hood pulled down, his Afro like a Q-tip coming unraveled.
“Where’s he going?” Ryaan asked into the radio. No one answered, and the Q-tip didn’t turn back. “Who’s got a line on the walker?”
“He’s headed for a dead spot,” Gibson said. “If he gets beyond the hydrant, the sharpshooters won’t have an angle on him.”
“Roof’s going to lose him in fifteen feet,” came the crackled response.
“Just hold as long as you can. I’ll go for the loner myself.” She clicked off the radio and turned to Erickson and Michaels. “You got that?”
The other kids ignored the walker and paused in front of a cement building, its front windows broken, the gray surface painted white in big patches where someone had attempted to cover graffiti. Next to the white patches were a series of tags, arranged side by side and on top of each other, as though the artists were competing. Cardboard littered the streets and newspapers blew softly down the sidewalk like urban tumbleweed.
“Is the loner still in sight?” Ryaan asked into the radio.
“For about four feet.”
“Where the hell’s he going?” Erickson asked.
Hal imagined the kid might be meeting another contact, going to take a piss in private, or maybe just getting the hell out of there, which would make him the smartest of the bunch.
The radio crackled. “He’s gone.”
Ryaan leaned across the van to see the computer screen. “Any way to adjust your position on the roof?” she asked.
“Not without giving ourselves away,” came the response.
She shook her head. “Hold your place, then. We’ll try to pick him up from the street.”
Hal tightened his grip on the gun, felt the slip of sweat, and dried his hand on his pants before returning the gun to it.
The radio crackled with officers shifting, ready to move, but Ryaan thumbed the radio button, gave the order. “No one goes until I call.”
Outside, the kids grew louder, more animated, as two black faces appeared through the broken glass of the storefront and scanned the sidewalk before stepping outside.
The Rookie Club Thriller series Box Set Page 31