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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.

Chapter twenty seven

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?”