“My friend is in labour you useless dipshits!” Sabrina yelled. “You need to take her to the nearest hospital!”
Another cruiser drew up behind the first car.
Doors opened and slammed shut.
Disembodied voices crackled over the radio.
The policemen started arguing amongst themselves.
“That shithead might have paid the Captain to turn over that fucking commune!” One man protested. “Nobody said anything to me about rousting a bunch of kids or bringing in a pregnant woman!”
Sabrina and Judy were left alone in the back of the car.
“Dipshits!” Sabrina muttered.
Judy was trying, and failing, to stay calm.
“If my ex-husband has anything to do with this I’ll cut his balls off!” Sabrina went on.
“This has happened before?” Judy asked breathlessly.
“Not for a while. The LAPD aren’t as crooked as some places…”
The door behind Sabrina opened.
“Hold still,” the cop, hardly more than a kid and a little shamefaced, complained as he fumbled to unlock Sabrina’s hand cuffs.
Judy had been trying to distract herself staring at the street light across the road. At that moment the light blinked out. The cops outside the car stopped talking.
“What’s happened?” Sabrina demanded imperiously.
“The city lights have just gone out,” she was informed. From where the cars were parked the broad sweep of the sprawling city ought to have been brightly laid out before the cops standing in the road.
Instead, there was only the blackness of the night.
“All of them!” Somebody else added, worriedly. “All the lights have gone off across the whole city!”
The car radio which had been constantly spewing background noise, chatter and static had also fallen silent. Only the headlamps and tail lights, and the low rumbling of the idling engines of the LAPD cruisers broke the still darkness.
Judy groaned as her second contraction began.
Chapter 50
Rescuing Dwayne John — the Civil Rights ‘courier’ — from the clutches of the FBI had been relative child’s play because J. Edgar Hoover’s men had ridden a coach and horses through Dwayne John’s constitutional rights. However, getting hold of the court order necessary to extricate Darlene Lefebure from the ‘protective custody’ of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been a nightmare. California Attorney General Stanley Mosk, had been reluctant to involve his office in what was basically — however one felt about it — a lawful ‘federal enforcement situation’. He had had to wait until the FBI men guarding Darlene Lefebure actually infringed, unambiguously, the young lady’s rights. This they had now done by refusing her access to counsel on three separate occasions.
But something was very wrong.
Even in the distance the flashing lights in the street were a bad omen.
Up close there were Berkeley PD patrol cars and other, unmarked vehicles parked where they had skidded to a halt in the road and on the front lawn of the big timber-framed house within a short walk of the University campus.
A gaggle of stern-faced uniformed officers guarded an ad hoc perimeter and two ambulances were waiting, engines running and tail gates open.
Miranda Sullivan stepped out of Harvey Fleischer’s Lincoln and viewed the surreal scene over the roof of the car. On the other side of the car Stanley Mosk marched up to the nearest cop and identified himself.
“What’s going on here?”
“A shooting, sir. Four dead that we know about so far.”
Miranda followed the California Attorney General up the path to the house, and in a dream, followed him inside.
A dapper man wearing an Inspector’s badge barred their way.
“Careful where you step, sir,” he cautioned, recognising Stanley Mosk. “There’s a lot of blood. It looks like some kind of contract killing. We don’t know if anybody escaped. Hell, we don’t know how many people were in the house.”
“Three or four men and a young woman,” the Attorney General retorted.
Miranda realised that the vile iron taint in the air was the smell of freshly spilled blood. She wrinkled her nose, distracted.
“We haven’t found the body of a woman so far,” the detective reported. “But my guys are still searching the back yard.”
“When did this happen?” Miranda asked numbly.
“Maybe an hour-and-a-half ago. The neighbours reported gunfire and a man in the street shooting towards the house from the middle of the road with an automatic weapon. The first patrol car was on the scene about ten minutes later. It was all over by then.”
Miranda drifted after Stanley Mosk, deeper into the house.
In the back room where she and Lieutenant Brenckmann had met Darlene Lefebure there were two bodies. Two bodies covered in blood and lying in puddles of blood. There was blood spattered all over two walls. The left side of one victim’s head and face was missing, scrambled across the floor.
Miranda gagged, pushed past the detective and ran out into the darkness.
Where she was violently sick.
Chapter 51
All the lights had gone out, the air was full of dust and smoke and Gretchen’s ears were ringing. At first she heard nothing but the ringing, and then, slowly, she thought she sensed other sounds, all coming from a long way away as if she was wearing ear mufflers. She tried to move but there was something pinning her legs to the floor.
Gretchen had no idea what had happened, or initially, no memory of where she was.
Suddenly, the building around her seemed to lurch sideways again and more dust, glass and smoke billowed over, around her, and onto her prostrate body. This she registered disinterestly, like an observer from afar, her conscious mind too shocked to be afraid. She thought she was blind. After an interminable period lapsing into and out of awareness she discovered she was still face down, covered in debris; pulverised plaster, shards of glass, splinters of wood, brick and concrete dust, shredded papers, and a section of curtain, smelling of burning, but otherwise nothing very substantial other than whatever was pinning her legs to the ground.
She listened, numbly, to a woman crying.
There were voices somewhere in the murk.
The weight lifted off Gretchen’s legs and she was unceremoniously rolled onto her back.
A torch was waving over her.
“She’s alive…” The words reached Gretchen’s brain through the humming, ringing noise in her ears. Her eyes were full of grit. She hurt all over, and thought she was going to pass out when strong hands reached under her arms and raised her to a sitting position. The moment came and went and left her blinking into the dusty gloom trying to make sense of the wreckage in the shifting loom of the torches.
Her face was wet.
She stared stupidly at the blood on her hands.
“You have to get up!”
The man who said it looked like a scarecrow, his face blackened and his suit filthy and torn, his eyes like white saucers in the darkness.
“We can’t stay here!” He was shouting; she was barely hearing what he was saying.
There were small explosions somewhere beneath Gretchen’s feet as she swayed unsteadily, supported by the man who had shouted at her.
Small explosions?
Many, many small explosions and an odd, faraway bang, bang, hammering. With each new detonation the floor flinched.