11th hour wmc-11 Page 7

  The boy chugged down the milk, put the twenty inside his shoe, rolled up the mouth of the bag, and then put it under his shirt. He looked at Revenge.

  It was thank-you enough.

  “I gotta go.”

  “Another time.”

  Traye got out of the vehicle, crossed the street to the alley between the buildings, and went from there to a basement hole, where whatever was left in the bag would be commandeered or the kid would get hurt — or both.

  The man known as Revenge worried about Traye, wondered how long he would survive. Another year? Another week?

  Deafening so-called music grabbed Revenge’s attention, coming from a car heading up the avenue behind him. He checked the mirror, saw the black BMW with the death’s-head stencils on the chassis.

  Okay.

  Now things were getting interesting.

  Revenge put the SUV in drive and when the BMW passed him, he pulled out into traffic behind it.

  Chapter 33

  Revenge knew who was driving the BMW and who was going along for the ride.

  Jace Winter, Bam Cox, and Little T Jackson were small-time drug dealers with long sheets for heavy crimes. They forced children into theft and females into prostitution; they broke down families; they caused destruction and desperation; and they sent young kids toward certain death.

  They were, in a word, scum.

  Revenge took a Boost phone from his glove compartment. He’d confiscated it during a bust and it couldn’t be traced to him. He dialed 911 as he drove up Sunnydale, the BMW’s taillights in view right up ahead.

  The 911 operator asked him what his emergency was, and he put on a ghetto accent stained with panic.

  “They’s a shooting going down right now. Oh God. They’s shooting at cops. They shot a cop!”

  He gave an address three miles south of his current location, then clicked off and tossed the phone out the car window.

  Revenge followed the BMW east on Sunnydale, and as the gangsters sped up, he followed them through the thick of the ghetto and out the other side to where the housing was single-family homes, flat fronts with garages and driveways on the street level.

  The BMW took a right onto Sawyer and when it hit Velasco Avenue, Revenge put on his siren and his grille lights. Stuff started flying out of the windows of the BMW. Small glassine packets, a couple of guns.

  He spoke into the bullhorn. “Pull over. Pull the car over. Now.”

  The BMW did slow, went from sixty to forty down Velasco, took a right onto Schwerin, and stopped next to an abandoned lot fenced with broken chain link and filled with garbage.

  Revenge braked behind the BMW.

  He left the engine running as he screwed the suppressor onto the muzzle, grabbed his flashlight, and got out of his car. He approached the driver’s-side window of the BMW, shone his light in the driver’s face.

  The smell of weed coming from the BMW was so strong, one good inhale could produce a profound contact high.

  The driver, Jace Winter, said, “Wus up, Officer?” He was smirking. Laughing with his homeys. Unafraid. Stoned out of his mind.

  “Cox. Jackson. Put your hands on the ceiling,” Revenge said.

  “Man, how’m I going to show you license and registration with my damned hands — ”

  “Winter, keep your right hand on the wheel and open your jacket.”

  “Yo, what was I going? Twenty-eight in a twenty-five zone?”

  “Good night, you piece of crap.”

  Revenge pointed the gun into the interior of the car. He shot Winter first, two shots in the chest, another round in the neck. Jackson and Cox went crazy trying to get out of the car, and then the last man they would see in this world sent several shots into various parts of their upper bodies until no one moved.

  Revenge stripped off his jacket, balled it up with the gun, and dumped the bundle into Winter’s lap.

  A car went by fast, didn’t stop, didn’t even slow. Revenge went back to his vehicle, took out the plastic liter bottle filled with gasoline, and returned to the BMW. He poured gas inside the car, front and back, made a good job of dousing the dead men.

  Then he lit a match and tossed it inside the drug-mobile.

  There was a loud puff as the flame caught, then the car started to burn, and within a few seconds, the whole of it was engulfed in fire.

  Keeping his head down, Revenge returned to his SUV. He watched the BMW explode as he backed out, then he made a U-turn and drove through the projects again.

  He felt cleansed and almost high.

  Like he was younger, and lighter, the very best version of himself, and since he would never get credit, he thought it was okay to give himself a pat on the back for a very clean shooting. Three heinous sewer rats were dead.

  In twenty minutes, Revenge would be sitting in front of the TV watching the game, but he’d be thinking of Jace Winter’s smug face and then his expression when he realized he was going to die.

  Revenge listened to the police band, learned that cops were still investigating a report of a cop down but hadn’t yet determined who had been shot or where. He turned off the police band, found a rock station on the radio. He was whistling as he drove home.

  Book Two

  MEDIA CIRCUS

  Chapter 34

  I paced around a garbage-strewn vacant lot off Schwerin Street, a potholed one-laner that ran between the Sunnydale Projects and through Visitacion Valley.

  Normally desolate, tonight Schwerin was impassable in both directions, cordoned off and hemmed in by twenty-odd police cars, three fire rigs, two ambulances, the fire investigator’s truck, the scene-mobile, and the coroner’s van.

  Outside the lot, between the broken chain-link fence and the street, an incinerated car was turning the night sky opaque with smoke.

  I coughed into my sleeve, kept a good twelve yards between myself and the smoldering car as Chuck Hanni, our chief fire investigator, processed the scene with his crew. One of his key associates was Lacy, an ignitable-liquid-detecting K-9, a black Labrador with an excellent nose.

  The last time I saw Hanni, a meth lab disguised as a school bus had exploded on Market Street during morning rush hour. There had been casualties, but none of them, thank God, were children. Hanni had detailed that horror show with his first-rate expertise, as he was doing now with the remains of a fatal fire that looked to be a triple homicide.

  As I watched, the K-9 alerted Hanni. The fire investigator pulled something out of the car, shone his Maglite on it, then sealed it in a paper bag. Claire and Charlie Clapper walked over to Hanni and had a powwow with him, and then they took over the scene.

  Techs were taking bodies out of the vehicle as Hanni came over to brief me on what he’d learned so far.

  He massaged his scarred right hand as he crossed the lot, the result of an injury he’d gotten in a fire. He wore his everyday chinos and white shirt under a sports jacket, and although Hanni was the first to get his hands dirty metaphorically, I’d never seen him with so much as a smudge of soot on his clothing.

  “I’ve got a lot to tell you,” Hanni said.

  I wanted to know everything.

  He couldn’t tell me fast enough.

  Chapter 35

  “The fire started in the passenger compartment,” Chuck Hanni said. “See, the engine compartment is in relatively good shape. Flames probably vented through the open window.”

  “The windows were open?”

  “Just the driver’s window.”

  “License and registration, please,” I said. “Could have been a traffic stop. Go ahead, Chuck. I interrupted you.”

  “Not a problem. So, this is what I see happening. As the interior burned, the windshield failed and the rear seats were consumed. Then the fire entered the trunk and destroyed the back of the car.”

  “Yeah, the rear tires are melted,” I said. “So what caused the fire?”

  “Lacy alerted on what was left of a plastic bottle that had rolled under the front seat. I t
hink gas was inside that bottle, but anyway, some kind of accelerant. It looks to me like the passenger compartment was doused, and the fire was started with a match or a lighter.

  “I doubt the lab is going to get prints or DNA off that bottle,” Hanni continued. “But they can try. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  I was taking it all in, trying to picture it.

  I said, “Someone pulls the car over, throws gas inside the vehicle, sets the fire. So why are the victims still inside? When the fire started, why didn’t they get out? Were they already dead?”

  “Claire is swabbing their nasal cavities now. She’ll be able to tell you in about five seconds if the victims breathed smoke in or not.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  Hanni grinned at me and said, “Patience, Lindsay. I’m getting there. I removed all of the debris that fell from the dashboard, headliner, and door panels, and I found a spent round for you. Twenty-two caliber.”

  I got a little chill. The good kind you get when your hunches pay off. Doesn’t happen every day. There are a million. 22-caliber guns on the street, and our cop shooter had used one of them on Chaz Smith. Maybe he’d used the same gun to take out a few drug dealers from the projects.

  I thanked Hanni and started to call Claire to find out if she’d found soot inside the victims’ nostrils but got distracted by the loud whoop-whoop of a siren announcing that another cop car was arriving at the scene.

  It was Conklin and he came toward me at a trot. He was hyperventilating and it wasn’t because of the thirty-yard sprint.

  “She’s here,” he said. “We’ve got our witness.”

  It felt like Christmas and my birthday and Mother’s Day all wrapped up together and tied with a bow.

  A witness had seen a cop pull a car over on Schwerin just moments before that car had become a fireball.

  The witness had given her name and number to the 911 operator. She wanted to talk.

  Chapter 36

  Anna Watson sat across from us at the fold-down Formica table inside the RV that served as our command post. She was sixty-four, black, small, chain-smoking Marlboros and stubbing out the butts in a tinfoil ashtray.

  I tried to keep my expectations in check but failed. Anna Watson knew the victims and she’d seen them just before they were shot and their car burned to a turn.

  “I was driving along Schwerin,” Watson told us. “I was going to my daughter’s house over in Daly City? I was a ways back from Jace’s BMW,” she said, hooking a thumb in the direction of the crime scene. “But I recognized it easy from the decals, and I know the boys driving that car. I’ve known them since they were small. I used to babysit two of them.”

  I pushed a pad and pen over to Watson’s side of the table and asked her to write down the names. As she did it, I saw her eyes tear up and her lips quiver.

  Reality was hitting her. Three people she knew were dead. She passed the list over to me and as Conklin continued to question her, I ran the names through the computer: Jace Winter, Marvin “Bam” Cox, Turell “Little T” Jackson.

  Winter, the oldest of the three, was nineteen.

  All three were gangbangers and had been arrested many, many times while they were still juveniles: possession of illegal substances, possession with intent to sell, attempted murder. Robbery, multiple counts.

  They had gotten off because all their cases had been thrown out. Witnesses had failed to show up in court. Evidence got lost. Nobody wanted to go against these young hoods and have their homes shot up, their kids ambushed on the way to school. No one wanted to get murdered.

  Anna Watson was saying to Conklin, “I was feeding my grandkids in front of the TV and I saw the news chopper, you know? And it’s taking video of that car burning up. God Almighty.”

  Her hands were shaking. Another cigarette came out of the pack.

  “Could I have some water, please?”

  “Sure,” Conklin said; he got up, pulled a bottle of water out of the minifridge, handed it to Watson.

  “So I called nine-one-one,” Watson said, “because I saw that car right after it was stopped by the police. I drove right past it on my way to Malika’s house.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Conklin said. “At about six o’clock, give or take a few minutes, you were behind that BMW and then you passed it on the side of the road because the driver had been pulled over by a cop.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The car was speeding?” Conklin asked.

  “No, Jace wasn’t speeding. He probably had a warrant or something. That’s what I thought when I saw him stopped by this cop car with all the lights a-blinking.”

  “Did you get a good look at the cop?”

  Watson shook her head no.

  “His back was to me and he had a flashlight in his hand and was pointing it at Jace. I was looking at the flashing lights and I was looking at Jace.”

  “You got a look at the cop’s vehicle though?”

  “I wasn’t paying attention to that car. I slowed down so I didn’t get stopped myself, and then I just kept going.”

  “Was it a cruiser? A black-and-white?”

  “No, it was one of those SUVs.”

  “Was there any kind of insignia on the car?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Can you describe the flashers?”

  “Front headlights were blinking, first one, then the other.”

  “Wigwags,” said Conklin.

  “And there was blue and red lights, I don’t know if they came from the grille or the dashboard…”

  “That’s very good, Mrs. Watson.”

  “Oh Jesus. Do you think that cop set Jace’s car on fire?”

  “We’d just be speculating at this point,” Conklin said. “We’re going to have to check out the names you gave us, and we’d like you to come down to the Hall and look at some photographs. Vehicles and people. Is that okay with you?”

  Watson said, “What if I had stopped? Maybe those boys would be alive.”

  I said, “If you had stopped, you might have been killed, Mrs. Watson. This isn’t your fault. You’re helping us to find who killed those kids.”

  And then she started crying. Anna Watson was maybe the only person in the world who felt bad that those gangbangers were dead.

  And then she said to Conklin, “I don’t know who’s going to take care of me now.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Jace is gone. How’m I going to get my — ”

  Conklin held up his hand and said, “Mrs. Watson, I’m sorry you lost your dealer. I can’t help you with that.”

  Watson nodded. She said to my partner, “If you drop me off at my house for a minute, after that I can come with you to look at pictures.”

  Chapter 37

  It was after eleven when I got home. I was hoping for some quiet time with a half-pint of ice cream, just me and Martha and Baby made three.

  I put my key in the lock, but the front door was open. I went inside, saw lights on in the living room. The TV was on too. Heyyy. Joe wasn’t supposed to be home for a day or two.

  How great was this?

  “Joe?” I called out.

  Martha galloped into the foyer, and a person in loose clothing came up behind my dog. The figure was backlit, in silhouette, and was definitely not my husband. I started and had my hand on my gun before it clicked.

  The woman with the long red hair and cute glasses was Karen Triebel, Martha’s “nanny,” and as far as I knew, she wasn’t even a little bit dangerous. Still, my heart was pounding as if I’d walked in on an armed robbery in progress.

  My fear reaction was quickly followed by mortification.

  I’d forgotten to call Karen to say I was going to be late. I apologized now, thanked her for hanging in.

  “We watched a movie,” Karen said, then added to Martha, “Didn’t we, big girl? And I baked a potato,” she said to me. “And finished off the ice cream. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Sure,”
I said. “Of course. I’m sorry that I lost track of the time.”

  “Martha has a real crush on Tom Cruise,” she said.

  I walked Karen out to her car, stood on the sidewalk until I couldn’t see her taillights anymore, then I went back upstairs to my dog.

  The phone was ringing when I got inside.

  I looked at the caller ID and saw it was my sister, Catherine, who lives a little way down the coast in Half Moon Bay.

  I’m four years older than Cat; we’ve both been divorced, and she has two girls. She’s been coaching me on the care of my child onboard, name to be determined, sex unknown to me and Joe.

  I grabbed the receiver off the hook, took Joe’s big chair in the living room, and put my hand on my tummy; Martha circled, then collapsed onto my feet.

  “Linds, why don’t you call me back? I get worried.”

  “I just walked in,” I told her.

  “Joe is still out of town?”

  “He’ll be back tomorrow, I think.”

  “You sound like the walking dead.”

  “Thank you. That’s how I feel, if the walking dead feel anything.”

  “Yeah, well, pregnancy does that. It also makes you feel like you’ve lost about fifty IQ points, as I recall.”

  I laughed, and my sister prodded me to tell her about my two active cases. I held a few things back, but I gave her the basic rundown on the heads found at the Ellsworth compound. And I told Cat about the triple homicide that had kept me working late tonight, first at the scene, then at the Hall, then at the morgue, and finally at the forensics lab until a half hour ago.

  “The guy is some kinda vigilante,” I told Cat. “I guess he doesn’t trust the cops will bring in the bad guys so he figures he’s the man to do the job.”

  “Lindsay. You’re saying he’s armed and dangerous. And you’re trying to bring him down. Why won’t he go after you?”

  “I’ll be fine, Cat, really.”

  “Bull. You can’t know that.”