Magic Line (4 page)

She thanked Barry White and walked back to the house with Zimmerman, making notes as she walked. He knew what she needed for a warrant and fed her information in a steady stream, without waiting for questions.

‘The two out here . . .' Zimmerman pointed toward the bodies, which were still being photographed. ‘The nearest one, looks like he got blown away from the step as soon as the door opened, shot several times in the face and chest and landed on his back with his hands up. The one at the bottom of the yard must have been a real fighter; looks to me like he stood here shooting in the door till he was out of ammo. Then he put on a burst of speed and made it almost out of the yard. He's got maybe a dozen bullets in him, Sarah; it's hard to tell with all the blood but he's all shot to pieces.'

‘You got any idea who killed the last man standing?'

‘Good question. Better hope Forensics tell you.'

Sarah looked around. ‘The ME's not here yet?'

‘Nope. I called but you know . . . they're always busy. Fire & Rescue truck roared up a few minutes ago, ready to lend a hand. I sent them packing before they could mess up your crime scene.'

‘Thank you very much. You ready to show me what you know?'

‘Well, I am, but the lab crew's still taking pictures everywhere – let's wait a few minutes.'

‘OK. I wonder if I can still catch a judge working? Maybe save a wait for a warrant.' She made some quick notes while she waited for Judge Berkowitz to come to the phone. When he answered she dictated a warrant for the house, front and back yards, attached garage and all its contents. ‘And let's include the carpet cleaning van that's parked at the bottom of the driveway. I don't know what it's doing there but just in case.'

‘Absolutely, let no floor scrubber go unscrutinized,' the judge said. ‘It seems to me your life gets more interesting all the time, Sarah. Isn't this your second search warrant today?'

‘Yes, Judge. We're all staying limber this month.'

‘Shoot as many suspects as you can, will you? My calendar's crazy already.'

By the time she had his initials on the warrant form, Zimmy was back, saying, ‘OK, I guess we can start in the back.'

‘What, more bodies in the back of the house?'

‘No. Walk right behind me, close to the wall, and I'll show you.'

She followed his heels over sparse gravel, around the corner to a small, barren backyard where she found herself staring down at glass circles and cutting tools. ‘What's this? Somebody was breaking in while the house was being attacked from the front?'

‘Two-pronged attack, as they say.' Zimmy made a small, ironic shrug. ‘Kind of unusual, but not a bad plan, at that.'

‘Well, but . . . how many did you say were inside?'

‘Three. All together, right inside the door.'

‘Like they were all together to start with?'

‘Who knows? This open window says one of them might have come in from back here.'

Sarah stared at the neat circles on the ground. ‘So you figure one man was cutting holes in the glass back here, while the other two tried to fight their way in the front?' It sounded crazy when she said it out loud. Who cuts glass during a shooting war?

‘Well, there was also the man running away.'

‘But you don't know for sure he was running from here.'

‘Damn funny coincidence otherwise.'

‘True. Has the lab crew been inside?'

He nodded. ‘That red-haired girl with the camera. I don't know about prints.'

‘That'll take all night, I'm not going to wait for that. Is this back door unlocked?'

‘Yeah, we opened it when we saw the window.'

‘It was locked until then?'

‘That's right.'

‘Let's go back out front and ask Gloria if we can go in.'

By the front door again she said, ‘Gloria?' to the elegant backside of the six-foot self-designated ‘Glamma Tech,' stretching her skintight uniform pants to get a better photo of a yellow plastic bucket and green towel on the ground a few feet from the door.

Gloria said, ‘Say wha'?' without looking up. Pulled both ways between hardscrabble roots in South LA and the chemistry degree at UA she was working toward, she still talked a little ghetto sometimes. ‘Got to maintain my edge,' she had told Sarah. ‘Don't want to go all country like these Tucson cowboys.'

Sarah asked her now, ‘You finished photographing inside?'

‘Well, I did the bodies. Zimmy said they's all dead so I thought . . . whaddya
want
?' she said, standing up hipshot, frowning. It was amazing, Sarah thought, how much funky chic Gloria managed to impart to a tech's uniform.

‘Just information. Don't let me distract you just when you've got that bucket right where you want it.'

‘This bucket got shot in the bottom, let's give it some respect. You can go inside,' she said, turning back to her work, ‘just don't breathe. We got a lot of dusting to do in there.'

‘That one's got a mouth on her, hasn't she?' Zimmerman said. They followed their own track around the house again. At the back door, they put on plastic booties and gloves. Inside, she followed Zimmie's lead. ‘If you can stay out of this blood spatter here . . . now step over the feet of the guy in the doorway, stand by the wall there . . .' They stretched, pivoted, hopped to reach the dry spots where they could see without doing any harm.

As Zimmerman had said, the three inside the house were close together. The big man sprawled over the doorsill must have taken a hit in the midsection, doubled up and fallen forward. The rest of his wounds appeared to be stitched across his shoulders and back. His shaved head and what she could see of his face appeared undamaged. He wore several small gold rings in each ear and had the massive shoulder and arm muscles of a bodybuilder or wrestler. His arms, from wrist to shoulder, were covered with tattoos: elaborate, skilfully drawn and tastefully tinted – a small fortune in skin art.

The second man lay on his left side, three feet behind the first. An assault rifle was near his outstretched hands, as if he'd dropped it when he fell. He must have been firing out the doorway after the first man fell.

‘Had the weapon on full auto, looks like,' Zimmy said, ‘spraying bullets in an arc across the two men in the yard. Bullets hit the doorjamb on both sides at the end of each swing, see?'

‘Yeah. Hard to see how anybody got a shot in through a wall of fire like that, but one of them must have, huh?'

He'd worn his thick dark hair in a short brush cut and had a soul patch and a carefully trimmed line of beard that traced the outline of his jaw. His jeans were Tommy Hilfiger and his Dan Post boots had a spit shine – he had cared a lot about his appearance, which was amazingly unmarked except by two congealed lines of blood that ran down his face from a crease in his scalp. More blood had erupted out of his mouth, soaking the man beneath him.

‘That cut on his scalp isn't very deep,' Zimmy said. ‘That can't be what killed him, but I don't see anything else, do you?'

‘No.'

The third man had ended up almost entirely under the second. As if they went down together at almost the same instant.
Maybe the same bullet?
But then why would they end up head to toe like that? The third man must have been hit first, been already falling a second or two before his partner got hit. She could see his nose and one hand, just poking out on the other side of the top man's thighs.

‘How come the bottom one's wearing latex gloves? The other two aren't.'

Zimmerman said, ‘Maybe he's an invader?'

‘Broke in just in time to get shot by his team-mates out front?' Sarah bent lower for a closer view. ‘Some game plan, huh?'

Zimmy treated her to the wry smile of the seen-it-all-twice patrolman. ‘I don't think there's an entrance exam for home invaders.'

The bottom victim's feet were extended toward the back wall. The head of the man on top rested on the lower one's knees. Blood had pooled under the two of them, soaking their clothing, smearing their weapons and the two casings she saw glinting in the gore.

If they fell at the same time why didn't they bump? But if they smacked into each other you'd think they'd fall away from each other
. . .

‘The ME's here,' Gloria said, poking her head in. ‘He says so many bodies and it's gonna get dark pretty soon, he's going to take them all down to the morgue right away and examine them there. Anything in particular you want to know about the bodies, besides everything?'

‘The position of that body underneath . . . it's hard to understand; I can't see how he fell the way he did,' Sarah said. ‘Did you get plenty of pictures in here?'

‘Hundreds,' Gloria said.

‘Straight down?' Sarah asked her. ‘Did you take any from directly overhead?'

‘Several. Sarah, I
got it
,' Gloria said, and then, with shock on her face, ‘Whoa, what's happening?'

A hand had moved. Was moving. The gloved hand of the body underneath jerked forward . . .

‘Rigor mortis starting,' Zimmerman said. ‘Sure is early, though.'

Next to the hand, the head of the man underneath pushed forward a couple of inches. Then the weight of the body above it shifted, rolled off a little. The head of the lower man turned up toward Sarah, who leaned above it. The eyes opened a slit in the blood-smeared face – glinted, where they caught the light.

A tongue snaked out to lick dry lips. Then a whisper: ‘Who are you?'

THREE

W
hen a patrol car circled the Walmart parking lot, Zeb had to grip the bench and talk to himself to keep from running. If that patrolman who took his picture had transmitted it to all the cars . . . Zeb hung out with a guy who got arrested a couple of months ago for possession of a controlled substance plus paraphernalia. After his parents won his release all he seemed to want to talk about was the awesome camera equipment in patrol cars now. Took front- and rear-view stills and video, he said. Zeb had seen the flash, so he knew he'd been photographed.

Now, every black-and-white he saw, Zeb felt like the driver was noting his resemblance to that picture.

It was time to move, anyway. That rosy glow from the setting sun wouldn't last much longer. All his instincts were telling him to get inside before dark – he was too tired to deal with the predatory creatures of the night. And he felt much too furtive to enjoy the glorious desert sunset painting the western sky.

He walked to the Sun-Tran bus stop in front of the Blockbuster store, got on the next bus marked ‘Downtown,' and paid with a handful of coins, almost his last. He rode it to the stop on Valencia that was nearest to his sister's address and walked half a block to her apartment. She lived in a featureless stucco block of cheap rentals with high turnover, where the occupants avoided eye contact and seldom spoke. Zeb had always thought she had picked a soul-sucking place to live, but tonight he was grateful for the cold indifference of the people around him.

There were no lights on in his sister's apartment. He paused just inside the door, listened, heard only silence. The door to Janet's bedroom stood open so she wasn't in there. OK, she wasn't home from work yet but she might be any minute. He crept into her kitchen, tore one paper towel off a roll under a cupboard and quickly loaded into it whatever he could see that she might not miss – a few crackers, one carrot, a handful of raisins and some peanuts out of a can. Careful not to spill anything, he scuttled into the laundry room where he took off his shoes and dark glasses, sat down on his folded sleeping bag and ate his meager picnic. As soon as he finished, he slid into the bag and covered his head with the flap.

In the dark bag, feeling a lot like a rodent in a nest, he began to think scurrying, mouse-like thoughts.
Is Robin dead or what?
He couldn't think of a way to find out without exposing himself to risk. He didn't care if the other two men on the job were alive or dead. Except . . .
could they ID me
? They didn't know his last name. Might not even remember his first . . .
Yes, they would.
Robin had called him, tauntingly,
Zeb-you-lon
. They might not be mental giants but one of them was sure to remember that.

His name was on the arrest record for the DUI. And how many Zebulons were likely to be living in Tucson at this moment? If some detective put it together, found his picture . . . he imagined Darrell-and-Darrell, nudging and leering as they picked his picture out of a line-up, the way people did on TV. Offered any incentive, maybe a little relief at sentencing, they would jump at the chance.

He thrashed around in the bag for a few minutes, feeling as if he ought to get up, find a newspaper or turn on the TV – there must be some news by now about the shooting. But Janet might come home any minute and she'd throw a fit if she found him any place in the apartment but the laundry or bathroom. Fright had killed his hunger all day and the scanty feast he'd just eaten satisfied the little that had come back. He was comfortable for the first time in fourteen hours. It had been a long, hard day and the laundry room was dark and quiet. In a few minutes he was snoring.

FOUR

T
he first ten minutes after the third man opened his eyes were utterly crazy. Gloria ran and told the ME they had a live one, hold up a minute. Greenberg, cursing about gross ineptitude taking up his time, began rechecking vital signs on the other four bodies. Zimmerman placed a call to turn around the rescue squad he'd just sent away, and in less than a minute they heard its siren coming back.

Zimmerman was indignant, insisting, ‘This man was dead before, I know he was dead.' He leaned above the not-quite-dead victim, asking, ‘What's your name, son?' He got no answer and had to stand back, reluctantly, when the paramedic and driver came in with the wheeled cot.