King City (26 page)

Wade returned fire. Timo ducked down, and the mirror behind the bar shattered.

A door to Wade’s left flew open and Thomas Blackwater came out firing. Wade shot him in the chest, blowing him back into the room, then continued his advance on the bar, working his way through the rubble.

He heard some more shots outside, but he kept on going. Charlotte and Billy would have to take care of themselves. A dangling glass shard hanging from the mirror frame on the wall showed Wade a skewed reflection of the area behind the bar.

He saw the bottles, the sinks, the rags, and the rubber mats on the floor, covered with broken glass.

Timo wasn’t there.

He leaned over the counter and saw something he didn’t see in the reflection. There was a trapdoor on the floor. It was open, a ladder leading to a storeroom below.

Something stirred behind him. He whirled around, gun drawn, to find Charlotte standing in the doorway to the back room. She was breathing hard, her face dappled with beads of sweat. He could hear someone screaming in agony outside.

“What’s the situation?” Wade asked.

“All clear. Blackwater is dead and Touzee is wounded, shot in the gut. Billy’s got Parsons and one other facedown on the ground and is reading them their rights. You?”

“Timo got away,” he said. Outside, they could both hear a car burning rubber. “That’d be him.”

“What do we do now?” Charlotte asked.

“Call dispatch, tell them what we have,” Wade said as he retraced his steps back through the rubble to his car. “Wait here for the medical examiner, the ambulance, and the detectives to arrive.”

He got into his car.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Where are you going?”

“Same place as Timo,” he said. “The Alphabet Towers.”

“That’s insane. It’s a fortress. You don’t stand a chance against them all.”

“I don’t want them all,” he said. “I just want Timo.”

He backed the car up the way he came in and charged southbound on Curtis Avenue, dragging his front bumper against the asphalt and leaving a trail of sparks.

It wasn’t until he was closing in on Timo’s Escalade, and could see the three Alphabet Towers looming in the distance, that he felt the blood trickling down his leg and the deep sting in his thigh. Either a bullet had grazed his leg or he’d taken a little buckshot. Either way, it wouldn’t slow him down much.

They were nearly at the towers when Wade tried to edge past Timo on the Escalade’s driver’s side. Timo swerved toward him and the two cars slammed together in a shower of sparks and screeching metal.

Timo sped ahead and Wade let him, until the patrol car’s left front edge was beside the Escalade’s right rear bumper.

That’s when Wade executed a routine pursuit intervention technique maneuver, clipping the edge of the SUV.

On most cars, this simple action, when properly done, will spin the fleeing vehicle sideways in front of the patrol car, allowing it to be rammed.

But since SUVs are heavy and have a higher center of gravity than most vehicles, the PIT maneuver can have another, more devastating effect.

Which it did this time.

The Escalade fishtailed, flipped, and rolled down the street, jumping the curb in front of the Alphabet Towers and flattening the wrought iron fence.

The armed sentries scattered to avoid being crushed by the tumbling Escalade before it finally came to rest on its side, crumbled and smoking, ten yards shy of the entrance to Tower B.

Wade parked his car at the curb, drew his gun, and strode up to the vehicle. The Escalade was smashed up and bleeding gasoline, but otherwise, it was intact.

And unoccupied.

The windshield was kicked out and a few drops of blood led from the Escalade to the front door of Tower B.

Wade looked up at Duke Fallon’s penthouse on the twentieth floor and he thought about all the stairs, all the people, and all the guns that stood between him and knocking on Duke’s front door.

So he walked back to his car, popped the trunk, and took out a road flare.

He pulled the cap off the flare, struck the scratch tip, and ignited it, sparking a hissing flame that was like a blowtorch.

The sentries were beginning to regroup and move back toward him when Wade tossed the flare into the trail of gasoline that was leaking from the Escalade and ducked behind his squad car.

“Motherfucker!” one of the sentries yelled, and they all scattered again.

The flames roared along the fuel trail like a lit fuse and into the undercarriage of the Escalade. The SUV exploded in a red‐hot fireball of glass and metal that rose from the ground and into air like a fist of flame and then landed again.

Wade stood, gun at his side, and walked past the flaming wreckage to the entrance of the tower.

And waited.

He didn’t move as the sentries, and some of the residents, closed in behind him, blocking the path between him and his car. They carried guns, knives, chains, lead pipes, and untapped reservoirs of hatred and resentment. There would be no turning back, but he knew that even before he’d left the station.

Within a few moments, an enraged Duke Fallon burst out of the building in one of his expensive tracksuits and holding a gun in each hand. He was flanked by half a dozen very muscular, very angry, and very armed men.

Wade held his ground.

“This shit will not be tolerated,” Duke yelled, gesturing with one of his guns at the burning car. “This is my fucking house you’re disrespecting and that disrespects me.”

Wade shrugged it off. “You think this is bad? It’s nothing compared to the tidal wave that’s about to sweep through here and wipe you out of existence.”

Duke laughed and pressed his gun to Wade’s forehead. “Is that what you think you are?”

“It’s not me you have to worry about.”

“That’s for damn sure,” Duke said, “especially after I put a bullet in your head.”

“The chief knows that Timo was one of the assholes who killed those rookie cops that were slaughtered here. Before the day is out, the chief is going to come and get him with all the men and firepower the department has got. And if you make the chief do that, he won’t stop with just one man, not with a dozen TV news choppers overheard. He’ll have to put on a good show for them. So he’ll scorch the earth of you and every insect that’s crawling on this toxic patch of dirt that you consider your kingdom. The horsemen of the apocalypse are coming, and the only hope you have of stopping them is by giving me Timo.”

Duke glowered at Wade for a long moment before lowering his gun and turning to one of his guards.

“Give me a fucking phone,” Duke said. The guard held a cell phone out to him. Duke traded it for one of his guns and made a call. “Send Timo down here now.”

Duke pocketed the phone.

An instant later, Wade heard a scream of such unmitigated terror that it made him shiver. He looked up and saw Timo plummeting from one of the upper floors, his arms and legs flailing.

As Timo’s body dropped through the air, his scream became louder and almost musical, conveying with bone‐chilling intensity the betrayal, disbelief, and mindless terror that he felt as he stared down at his unstoppable fate.

Timo’s body smacked into the burning Escalade and burst like a water balloon filled with guts. There was a loud hiss as the moisture hit the jagged, red‐hot metal and the air filled with the coppery, acrid stench of burning flesh.

There were more screams and wails, from within the crowd and from the scores of onlookers drawn to the windows and balconies of the tower above, but none were as haunting as Timo’s final cry.

Wade almost felt sorry for him.

“Are we done here?” Duke asked. “I don’t want to miss
Dancing with the Star
s.”

Wade nodded and Duke went back inside.

The King City Police rolled into Darwin Gardens, but not in the numbers or with the force that would have accompanied a search for cop killers and aroused the widespread interest of the news media.

Outside the Alphabet Towers, a special weapons and tactical team formed a defensive perimeter around Timo’s Escalade, and a police chopper circled overhead, to ensure the safety of the authorities processing the crime scene. Another SWAT team did the same thing at Headlights, though they need not have bothered. The residents of Darwin Gardens, and those in Duke Fallon’s direct employ, remained inside and out of sight, doing nothing that might provoke the police.

There was no media presence because the public didn’t care about crime in Darwin Gardens and the department didn’t make it seem like anything more than business as usual. It wasn’t newsworthy or surprising that the police sent SWAT teams to protect the officers who were cleaning up after yet another murder in that hellhole. It was common sense.

Chief Reardon certainly wasn’t going to reveal that the shooters of the two rookie cops years ago had actually slipped through the massive, and bloody, police offensive in Darwin Gardens that immediately followed the ambush.

Or that it was Tom Wade, the man who’d exposed widespread corruption of the MCU, who’d finally solved the case. Or that Wade had done so mere hours after capturing a serial killer that the department didn’t even know existed.

But with Clay Touzee and Willis Parsons, two of the cop killers, in custody and Friar Ted confessing to multiple murders, Chief Reardon wouldn’t be able to keep things quiet for long.

Wade was certain that the chief spent his afternoon huddled with the district attorney, trying figure out how to spin the facts so that, when they quietly came out, they showed the department in the best possible light and downplayed, if not completely eliminated, the roles played by Wade and his two officers.

Not that Wade cared. He didn’t want the attention or need the vindication.

It was satisfaction enough for him that the chief, the police department, and the people of Darwin Gardens knew the truth of what had happened.

It wasn’t until that night, after all the forensic evidence had been gathered, after all the bodies had been taken away, and after all the reports had been filed, that Tom Wade, Charlotte Greene, and Billy Hagen finally got together again at the station without anyone else around.

They sat at their desks, facing one another, exhausted by it all. But Wade knew it had been especially stressful for Charlotte and Billy. They’d just been through their first gunfight, and one of them had gut shot a suspect, enduring his screams of agony until the paramedics took him away.

Wade didn’t know which one of his officers had fired the shot, and he couldn’t tell from the expressions on their faces. They both looked emotionally and physically wiped out.

Billy gestured to the bloodstained tear on Wade’s right pant leg. “Did you get hit?”

“Just a scratch,” he said, though it was one that had required a few stitches to close up, but he saw no reason to tell them that. “Are you both OK with how things went down today?”

“Hell no,” Charlotte said.

Wade glanced at Billy. “How about you?”

“I’m cool with it,” Billy said. “We took care of business.”

Wade nodded and looked back at Charlotte. “So what was your problem?”

“You,” she said.

“What did I do?”

“You drove through the fucking door.”

“It gave us the element of surprise,” he said.

“It certainly surprised me,” Billy said.

“That’s the problem, Billy,” she said. “
They
should have been surprised, not us. We should have known exactly what our leader was going to do and been prepared for it. But he couldn’t tell us his plan because he was making it up as he went along.”

“I told you I’d take the front,” Wade said. “And I did.”

“But you didn’t tell us you were going to drive your car into the middle of the club and come out shooting,” Charlotte said.

“You can do all the planning you want, but it doesn’t mean shit once you are out there. You aren’t in control of everything. Situations change and you have to be flexible. You can’t rely on the plan to carry you through. So I plan very loosely.”

“You don’t plan at all,” she said. “And that put you and the two of us at greater risk than we needed to be.”

Wade looked over at Billy. “Do you feel the same way that she does?”

Billy shook his head. “I was fine with everything but the screaming.”

So now Wade knew who’d shot Clay Touzee.

“It’s always difficult to see someone suffering,” Wade said. “But know this—you shot him because he was shooting at you. You didn’t cause his pain. He brought it on himself.”

“I’m glad he was hurting,” Billy said.

“You were?”

“The bastard had it coming,” Billy said.

“So it was just the noise that got on your nerves?”

“I shot to kill and I missed,” Billy said. “All that screaming meant that the son of a bitch still had plenty of gas in him to keep shooting at me, or you, or Charlotte.”

“But he didn’t,” Charlotte said.

“Only because he dropped his gun when he got hit and it landed out of reach,” Billy said. “If he hadn’t, things might have turned out differently. I let you both down.”

“No, you didn’t,” Wade said. “Neither of you did. I know you both have my back and I’m proud to have you as my partners.”