“No ma’am, but there’s a shady dude at the Pizza Hut.”
This got a laugh out of her, but her mind was elsewhere, really, as she scanned the shabby front of the house down the street.
“Adam-one-nine, you there?” came a squawky call on the radio.
She spoke into her throat mic.
“Adam-one-nine copy.”
“Adam-one-nine, we in place. You can go any time.”
“Air-one, stat. You there, Tom?”
“I read you Adam one-nine.”
“Tom, you bring it on in and when you see me at the front door, you have Mike open up with the big lamp on the back of the house, you got that?”
“I read you, Adam one-nine.”
She turned to Swagger.
“Please don’t make me look bad. Sheriff doesn’t know about this. But I figure the dad gets to watch as the fellow who tried to kill his daughter goes down.”
He could tell she was uneasy, and the breath came hard and shallow. She ran a dry tongue over dry, cracked lips, and for one second did something amazingly feminine that totally contradicted the image of a tough cop about to make a bust. She grabbed a role of lip balm from the dash, and smoothed it, dainty as an expensive French lipstick, across her lips.
“Yes ma’am,” said Bob, as she got out of the car and walked slowly to the front door.
He wondered why they didn’t do it bigger; ten cars, lights flashing, loudspeakers. But maybe that would spook an icehead like this Cubby, legendary maker of bad decisions, and the next thing, there’d be another big gunfight. Give Thelma the benefit of the doubt. She’s done this, you haven’t. You don’t know so much, and as it is you are riding the raw edge of a term in jail on any one of a dozen charges.
So he sat back and watched the police theater.
Thelma arrived at the doorwell, hesitated. Her hand flew to her pistol, made certain it was where it should be and that the retaining device still held it ready and secure until the moment she drew, if she drew.
She knocked.
She knocked again.
No answer.
She slithered next to the door jamb and edged the door open. She had a Surefire in her nonshooting hand, and she used it to penetrate the darkness. He heard her yell, “Cubby? Cubby, it’s Detective Fielding. You in there? You come on out now, we’ve got business.”
There was no answer.
Don’t go in, Bob thought. One-on-one in the dark of a house against a violent offender whose head is all messed up on account of the skank he eats and makes every day, who’s paranoid, maybe crazy, oh lady, don’t go in, it isn’t necessary. Drop back, watch the exits, call for backup, let the boys in the Tommy Tactical outfits earn their dough.
But Thelma slipped in.
The moments passed, and before he knew it Bob had gotten out of the car and crouched in the lee of its wheel well, watching, waiting for shots or something.
Oh, Christ. Through the windows, he could see the beam of her flashlight dancing against the walls and ceiling of the dark interior of the small place, which couldn’t have more than a few rooms.
Come on, he thought. He wanted to see her come out with the suspect cuffed, and the boys with the guns come racing around the house to take him away. Nice job, great job, good work, good old Thelma but-
From under the line of the house-it must have been a cellar window cut against a gap in the foundation-he saw someone squirm free, low crawl across the yard into the bushes lining the house next door.
Suddenly a flash-bang erupted in Cubby’s house, the loud smack of percussion breaking the still of the night, and the helicopter dropped low and its light came on hard and bright. The sounds of windows breaking, doors being busted in told the story: The FAT guys were assaulting from the rear. Maybe Thelma had him or he’d clonked her and she’d just awakened and given the green light to the FAT team. But the shadowy figure that had slipped out and squirmed across the yard suddenly broke from his hiding place and began to run crazily down the sidewalk, trying to put as much distance between himself and his pursuers as he could. He raced right toward Bob, who had a sudden almost comic memory flash over him. It was so football, the running back, broken free of the line of scrimmage, scurrying down the sideline, the lone safety, the only man between him and the end zone. He knew it was a bad idea, a sixty-three-year-old man with a bum leg and everything, but it didn’t matter what he knew, it only mattered what he did, which was to launch himself, run through his sudden hip pain, find the right angle, and close the distance.
At the last second, Cubby saw him and from somewhere produced a handgun. But Bob was too far gone and just plunged ahead, driving his shoulder hard into the man’s ample gut, trying to drive clean through him and bring him flat to the ground, hearing some ancient coach from somewhere back in the Jurassic scream, “Drive through him, Bobby, take his legs out, give him your whole damn shoulder, explode through him.” And that’s what he did, textbook perfect. Both men went down in a bone-bruising crack, lights flashing through each head, knees abrading bloodily on the pavement as they tumbled, limbs flying, breaths knocked free.
He didn’t feel the knee to the head. It couldn’t have been planned. It was just one of those football things, when two flying bodies collide and torsos hit with the smack of wet meat falling off the table, legs and arms go screwball. And it so happened that Cubby’s knee flew up in a spasm as his breath was belted out of his lungs, and the knee hit Bob flush upside the head, a little forward of the ear. It was having your bell rung, and Bob’s rang so loud it knocked pinwheels of light, illumination rounds, spasms of tracers, sparks from a bonfire, fly legs and spider heads through his brain. He went to the ground all tangled with Cubby, but his limbs and his brain were momentarily dead. In a second, he came back to consciousness first to sound. The sound of running steps. The sound of a powerful helicopter engine. Then came light as the copter nailed Bob and his prey in the bright circle of thirty-five hundred lumens, and they were like as on a stage, shadowless and drained of all color except the lamp’s eerie cold pure moonlight. He blinked, felt the pain, tried to breathe, and realized Cubby had linked himself to him with an arm around his throat tight, squeezing off the breath until Bob coughed and shook and the grip loosened a little.
“Goddamn you, Mister, you keep still or I will put a goddamned bullet through your head,” Cubby yelled so forcefully that the message was conveyed just as eloquently by the jetstream of saliva that hit Bob. Bob saw something in his peripheral vision and felt it go hard against his head. He recognized by its circularity that it was the muzzle of a revolver.
Oh, fuck, he thought. Now you have gone and done it.
“Goddamn you, Thelma-you said-you said-Goddamn you, Thelma.”
“Cubby, you hold on now. Don’t you do nothing stupid. That fella ain’t a cop, you got no grudge against him. You let him go and put the gun down and we’ll get all this straightened out.”
He could see her, about twenty-five feet away, just out of the cone of illumination; behind her, the three FAT officers had gone into good strong kneeling positions, their weapons jacked dead on the target, which he hoped was Cubby and not himself. Aim small, miss small, boys, go to semi-auto, think trigger control and breath control, he thought, gasping for air.