Magic Line (5 page)

‘Wait a minute,' Sarah said as they got ready to buckle the restraint straps, ‘I need to pat him down first.'

The paramedic, whose ID tag said his name was Blake, was scrubbed, buffed up and impatient. He said, ‘Didn't he just regain consciousness?'

‘Yes. But now he's not a victim, he's a suspect, and I'm not letting him out of here without patting him down.'

Sarah began groping under the big bloody shirt. ‘Come on, Detective,' Blake said, ‘you trying to save his life or make love to him?'

‘Just wait one damn minute.' She searched on down to the ankles and stepped back. ‘OK, he's yours.' While Blake and his driver maneuvered through all the obstacles in the yard to get the gurney back to the rescue truck, Zimmerman recruited an officer out of the yard crew to escort the patient-prisoner. Sarah watched them, wishing she'd taken off his boots. But the big red truck was already pulling away.

Well, we couldn't let him die here.
There'd be outrage, a scandal about the crew that let a victim die while they walked around him investigating a crime. So they'd given priority to speed. Get him to the hospital, let somebody there patch up whatever was wrong with him. Decide later if he was an attacker or a defender. It was certainly the right thing to do, but every single move while she did it felt wrong.

Ollie Greenaway stepped in over the bloody doorsill, looked around bemused and said, ‘Dear me, looks like we had some serious gunplay right here in the Old Pueblo.'

‘Fairly serious. Four dead, so far.'

‘What, have the Mexican drug wars spilled over into our peaceful little community again?'

‘Kind of looks that way.' Ollie liked to ridicule the way Arizona politicians, brushing aside Tucson's long-established position in the drug market, now blamed all drug violence on the cartel wars currently raging across the border.

He was right about the hypocrisy. The drug sales were on the American side. The money came from the US, as well as most of the guns. So why call it ‘the Mexican drug wars?'
Anyway, it is what it is – almost everything we
say about it is a waste of breath
.

Drug dealers, gun dealers, dealers in human transport – they all knew the US–Mexican border was the honey pot, the mark-up line where the price went up for whatever you were carrying. Guns and money going south, drugs and people coming north, the border worked equally well for illegal traffickers in both directions. You could double your money carrying stuff across the border. And the border was sixty-five miles from Tucson.

Tucson cops were stuck with cleaning up the mess illegal traffic left behind. No point in crying about it. Ollie himself, when he wasn't pissed about a night call-back, had been known to point out ironically that the drug trade was job security for them, too.

A burst of loud talk erupted at the bottom of the front yard. Ollie said, ‘What's Zimmy spazzing out about?'

‘Oh . . . one of his death reports turned out to be somewhat exaggerated.'

Phil Zimmerman was standing out by the tape, red-faced and defensive as he turned the scene over to Sergeant Delaney, who must have found his son a ride quickly and burned a lot of rubber on I-19. Across all the hubbub in the yard she could hear Zimmy protesting, ‘I've never made a bad death call before. There's something freaky about that guy, Ross. Make damn sure you keep a guard on him.'

‘Like Delaney would need to be told,' Ollie muttered. His amiable freckled face scanned the room. ‘Tell me about this crime scene, will you? I don't think I've ever seen such a strange arrangement of bodies.'

The two bodies in the yard were in body bags now, being loaded aboard the ME's van. But in the house, the sudden emergency of a waking dead man had taken precedence over everything else. The two remaining corpses in the house had been moved end to end next to the wall, in order to get the revived one out the door.

‘This crime scene has been utterly corrupted,' Sarah said. ‘You just missed a crazy mix-up.' She told him about the corpse that woke up. ‘Luckily, Gloria got in here early and got a ton of pictures. So please, just wipe this picture out of your mind and wait for the one you'll get tomorrow.'

‘OK, I'm standing here not remembering two bodies by a wall.' He posed with his tongue out, looking brain-dead. ‘Now tell me what went on here.'

‘Well, the ex-dead-guy—'

‘Ex-dead-guy? Is that a new classification? It's not exactly the same as a survivor, is it?'

‘Boy, is it ever not. The man on the bottom was dead, we all agreed he was dead, until suddenly he wasn't. Then we had to get him to a hospital fast! So we just completely disrupted this crime scene we'd been walking around so carefully for an hour.' She pondered the two remaining bodies in the room. ‘None of these still-very-dead-guys are Mexican, by the way. All white. And they look home-grown, to me, but I don't know any of them. Do you?'

‘No. But hey, you can't expect to know every drug dealer in Tucson, no matter how good your social life is.' Ollie was in a jumpy, jokey mood. He had probably had two or three beers at home to relax after their long hard day on hot asphalt, Sarah guessed. Enough to get good and sleepy. After the call to the second scene he had obviously goosed himself back up, using humor and probably an upper of some kind with a Red Bull chaser. She was already wishing she didn't have to be around him in a couple of hours when he started to crash.

‘Well, this sure is a pile of crap, isn't it?' Delaney said, walking in. ‘Plenty to do here to begin with, without getting an emergency rescue crew stuck in the middle of it. The firehouse chief's already called to ask me what's going on over here – how come they got sent away and then called back. He says remember every time they take that rig out it costs a bunch of money.'

‘Well, we couldn't just let the guy lie here and bleed out,' Sarah said.

‘I'm not saying you did wrong. It's lucky all the systems were in place to fix the mistake.' He cleared his throat and, apparently, his brain as well, looking down at a list he had already started. ‘So let's see, Sarah, you take the primary on this, please, you've already got a head start on the information. You'll have to watch a lot of autopsies, I'm afraid. I'll give Leo the scene – except, Ollie, I want you to take charge of all the guns and ammo, because you're the quickest with that.'

‘And somebody better be,' Ollie said. ‘I see casings everywhere I look.'

‘Not to mention all the bullets you're going to have to dig out of this building,' Delaney said. ‘I think I'll give you Jason to help with that, or you could be here digging ammo for a week. The rest of the guys, when they get here, can start on the perimeter, canvass the neighborhood. Let's see, Zimmy said there's dope in here?'

‘Spare bedroom – right back here. And the kitchen.' She showed him.

‘You called the narcotics squad?'

‘Not yet. I thought it could wait till we got the bodies cleared out of here. The pot's not going anyplace.'

‘What about money? Must be some here.'

‘I didn't have time to look before the dead guy woke up. I'll do it next.'

‘I got the wallets from the two in the yard before Greenberg bagged them up,' Delaney said. ‘Help me get them from these inside ones before Greenberg gets his crew in here.'

They put on fresh gloves and groped carefully through blood-soaked pockets. A few seconds after he started, Delaney sat back on his heels and asked her, ‘You find any ID on the survivor, by the way?'

Sarah raised her head and said thoughtfully, ‘No. Nothing in his pockets. I looked under his shirt—' Delaney raised his eyebrows. ‘Because it was so big. It looked like the perfect place to hide something. But there was nothing – all he had was a cord, like a bungee cord but smaller around his neck, with a clasp on it. Nothing in the clasp.' He looked at her, dubious, and she shrugged and spread her hands.
If there's nothing in the clasp there's nothing in the clasp.

The dead men in the house had new, sturdy-looking leather wallets and fresh-looking drivers' licenses. No credit cards, and something over five hundred dollars apiece.

‘All cash,' Sarah said.

‘Dealers,' Delaney said. ‘Don't you think? Everything so fresh. This a good place to start the evidence pile?' He spread a plastic sheet and put them on it. ‘We'll check them but I bet the ID's fake.'

He showed her the wallets from the bodies in the yard. Old, ragged and dirty wallets with dog-eared drivers' licenses, credits cards for gas and a few local stores, family snapshots in rundown yards, less than a hundred apiece in cash. The other contents were a few coins, some keys.

‘Well, all this looks real enough,' Delaney said.

‘Who would make up anything so lame?'

‘I'll get Woody to run them. If they're genuine they sure don't say big-time, do they? What the hell are they doing here, bumping asses with these two pros?'

‘You think they are?'

‘Sure, don't you?'

‘Yes. Big-time guns and ammo. The tats and earrings on Baldy, and the way Mr Brush Cut is pimped out. They get like divas, don't they?'

‘Uh-huh. Let's walk the scene now, get the picture.'

‘OK. You think Zimmy's calmed down enough to walk it with us?'

‘I sent him back to the East Side where he belongs. Zimmy has to process this a little before he can talk about it any more. He hates to make a mistake.'

‘Well, Gross is right out there and he was number two on the scene, shall I get him?'

‘Yes, let's walk it before it changes any more. Ollie, you come along, hmm?'

The ME crew was loading the two bodies out of the yard. Gloria had painted Day-Glo frames around them before they left, and their ghostly silhouettes gleamed now in the fading light.

Barney Gross came and stood beside the outline nearest the door, shaking his head. ‘This guy – the tactic must have been that he was trying to look like a carpet cleaner to get in the house. Looks like he was carrying this clipboard, see?'

‘So that's why these brochures are all over the place,' Delaney said. ‘Makes sense.'

‘Yeah. But evidently the boys inside didn't buy it, they just opened the door and started to shoot. Shot this guy full in the face and knocked him over backward.'

‘He got hit in the hand, too,' Barney said. ‘Did you see that, Sarah?'

‘Yes. Big chunk of his hand was missing.'

‘So's his weapon,' Ollie said. ‘But I bet it was a Glock.'

‘Why do you . . . Oh.' Delaney watched as Ollie gloved up, picked a flat piece of black plastic out of the gravel and turned it over.

‘What do you know, it says Glock,' Ollie smirked, pleased to demonstrate his firearms expertise. He put the base plate of the magazine, intact except for a nick in one corner, back where he'd found it, and planted a marker by it, muttering, ‘Bag it later.'

‘One casing over there.' Sarah pointed. ‘And hey, isn't that the spring?'

‘Sure is,' Ollie said, planting more flags. ‘Now where's the magazine?'

‘Right there under that aloe,' Sarah said.

‘Gotcha.' Another flag.

‘Isn't it strange,' Barney said, ‘how often people will shoot the gun instead of the person holding it?'

‘I guess that muzzle pointed at you is kind of mesmerizing,' Sarah said. ‘You think you're aiming at the shooter but you seize up on the little round hole.'

‘And when the base plate flew off and the innards dropped out,' Ollie said, looking around, ‘where do you suppose the rest of that Glock flew off to?'

‘Come on, play find-the-gun later,' Delaney said. ‘Let's talk about how this went down while we still got Barney here.'

They walked to the bottom of the littered yard and stood over the outline of the man who had gone so far with so many bullets in him.

‘So this one gets the tough-hombre award, huh?' Sarah said.

‘Probably in shock too, sometimes that helps,' Barney said. ‘See all the wood chips on the gravel? Both trees in this yard are all shot to hell. Front of the house is riddled with bullets. Must've been good and noisy here for a few minutes.'

‘Didn't draw much of a crowd, though – that's a break.' Delaney looked down the quiet street to where a couple of cars nosed into the police barrier, their occupants talking with the officer there. ‘Who called this in?'

‘The woman in that corner house across the street.' Sarah pointed. Several cars were clustered there now. ‘Barry said she was crying all while she talked to him. Not surprising – over there alone with two babies, hiding with them under the bed.'

‘What's her name?'

‘Josephina Quintana,' Sarah said. ‘Victim/witness people are there with her now.'

Back inside the house, Doctor Greenberg and his helpers were bagging the bodies against the wall. No use making any outlines here, Sarah told Delaney. ‘This part of the crime scene is hopelessly muddled. We had to move them to get the ex-dead-guy out. But we've got plenty of pictures of the way things were.' She described the odd pile-up, one body on top of the other – that still bothered her. ‘Didn't you think their position was hard to understand, Barney?'

‘I didn't notice that,' Barney said. ‘The timing is what caught my attention. This dark-haired guy that was on top, remember how he was, on his side with his hand out toward the AK47? Well, if you look at all the slugs in the door frame, and around it in the wall, you have to figure he stood right here and just sprayed. But he could only have done that after the bald guy took a blast in the belly and fell out over the step. My guess is that first shot that killed Baldy came from the big Smith & Wesson down there by the runner.'

‘So Brush Cut here got shot at the same time as the guy we just sent to the hospital,' Ollie said, ‘or a little after, I guess.'