Pieces of the Ford Focus, the debris that lay atop it, the Kawasaki, and the biker also chased Sam through the window. All along the street, windows shattered and car alarms blared and people screamed because they thought it was all starting up again.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Calpurnia called the turns and I fought the traffic. D.C. looked like a war zone. I was hoping that it actually wasn’t, that we were wrong about what was going on.
I also hope that politicians are honest and Santa Claus is real.
The sky was filled with helicopters of every stripe, and there was blood on the sidewalks.
The street Doc thought might be a location for another bomb was impossible to access because of damage and emergency vehicles. So I parked, put on a vest that could stop shrapnel, fished a tool kit from the back, clicked my tongue for Ghost, and told Calpurnia to lock up. Walking was painful as all hell. I said fuck it and jogged.
That was fun. Every nerve ending from my shoulder blades to the tops of my thighs was sending me hate mail. Ghost ranged ahead and glared people out of our way. I had a DHS badge hung around my neck on a lanyard, but nobody stopped to look, and no one asked to see the badge up close. Everyone was dealing with their own stuff, and they had a lot on their plates. I saw two Latino boys, both dressed like they were either in a gang or wanted to be seen that way, doing first aid on an old white man with a leg injury. I saw a young Asian man sitting cross-legged in the middle of the street, face in his hands, weeping. He looked untouched, but that was a relative concept. I saw a heavyset black woman whose face was covered with ash walking slowly across the street, eyes seeing nothing. She had pieces of burned newspaper sticking to her clothes. A dead cat lay on the hood of a crushed Volvo. There were two houses on the corner where I parked. One had collapsed into a sinkhole and smoke curled up from the splinters of the room; the other was absolutely untouched.
Flash images of hell.
Or maybe purgatory. Not sure of the difference. Ask a priest, or maybe a surrealist filmmaker.
We ran.
The target was on Second Street, Northwest, just off of Whittier. The through street was ruptured and water shot upward from a broken main. I had to circle wide to keep from being drenched. Cars on both sides of the street had been upended and lay on their sides, or on lawns, or atop one another like copulating metal turtles. A few people were with the cars, removing stuff, or maybe stealing it. Looks the same in a crisis. Three teens were huddled together, laughing at something inside one of the cars. It annoyed me so I told them to fuck off. Then I saw that the windshield was cracked and splashed red, and they weren’t laughing. They were crying. A figure sat belted into the car, but from the slack way the head lolled on the neck I could read the story. It did not matter that the kids hadn’t heard me yell at them, but I knew I’d just bought myself some evil karma for my quick and stupid judgment.
Damn.
I moved on quickly, coward that I am, and I applied a thin veneer of salve to my conscience by calling it in to the TOC. Someone would come, I told myself. Sure. And that would make it all better, right?
There was a Harley-Davidson parked near four cars that were heaped like discarded toys, and to the left of that a man stood on the end of the soaked lawn. He looked ordinary enough. About my height, with sandy blond hair and sunglasses, jeans, and a heavy leather jacket. There was tension and frustration in his body language, but that seemed to fit, especially if one of the cars was his. But as I got closer my brain began picking out details that did not really fit with the moment. Two things really stood out. First, he was absolutely unmarked by blood, dirt, ash, or trauma. And the second thing was that he held a crowbar in his hands.
I slowed as I approached from his blind side, and signaled Ghost to be ready. The man was unaware of us. When we were fifty feet away I heard a cell phone ring. It was surprisingly loud, as if the ringer was turned all the way up. The man shifted the crowbar to one hand and removed a sleek cell with the other. I couldn’t hear what the caller said, but the man stiffened into a posture of animal alertness.
He began looking around as if suddenly expecting to find someone creeping up on him.
Which is when he saw me. At that same moment, Bug’s voice was in my ear telling me bad things about Sam Imura. I went for my gun. The man dropped the crowbar and ran, vanishing around the end of the pile of wrecked cars.
“Ghost— own!”
The big white shepherd, tired as he had to be, exploded into motion, transforming into a pale blur as he raced across the lawn and around the cars. I broke into a run, too, but it was slower, spoiled by pain and limping legs and a fatigue that had not yet been overwhelmed by adrenaline.
Then I heard Ghost utter a high, sharp cry of terrible pain.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
I ran. Pain or not, I ran.
As I rounded the mound of dead cars, I saw Ghost first. He lay on the wet grass, twitching with terrible spasms, foam and spit flying from his gaping mouth, eyes wide, legs straight and rigid. It took my brain a microsecond longer to see and understand the two silver wires that ran from my dog’s shoulder to a tiny power pack that lay next to him. I knew that kind of gun. A multishot Taser that discharged the power pack of each round and automatically loaded the next.
I shot the man in the chest but he shot me almost at the same time. My brain processed the fact that my rounds should have knocked him way back, but didn’t. In the too-little time I had to understand it, it was obvious that he had some high-end body armor that absorbed impact as well as protected against penetration. But before I could adjust and park the next round in his brainpan, the flechettes of his Taser hit me in the shoulder.
He stayed on his feet and I went down.
If you have never been hit with a Taser, try it sometime. It’s almost exactly as much fun as being punted in the balls by an enthusiastic NFL placekicker, but there are no crowds to cheer. The power can range all the way up to a molar-melting million volts, and most shots will drop even a supermax prison yard monster for a minimum of thirty seconds. The one he used on me was a son of a bitch. You can feel it start, and for a split second you think, I got this. I can do this.
You can’t.
The electricity opens up your nerve endings and commandeers your nerve conduction and you go the hell down. Your entire body contracts into one massive cramp and even though you can scream, all that you manage is a prolonged and inarticulate howl.
Sure, there are stories of people shaking them off. I’ve even done it with some of the lower-wattage versions they use in training and demonstrations. This wasn’t one of those. This was military grade, and on the higher end of that scale. These are designed to put anyone down. It did not help one damn bit that I was twitching around on wet grass.
The power pack had a thirty-second charge, but the aftereffect of that level of stunner was going to leave me about as spry as a Gumby left out in the sun, and it would last for maybe five minutes. The man bent and picked up my pistol, and stuck it in the back of his belt. He did not shoot me with it. He glanced at my Department of Homeland Security badge and nodded to himself.
Then he went and fetched his dropped crowbar.