Holding the laser in both hands, I kept it focused on Victorino’s face as I dodged out of his probable line of fire. I was yelling, “Drop the weapon, get down on your belly!” repeating the commands over and over as I approached. But the man was in such obvious pain, I doubted if my words registered.
When I was close enough, I slapped the machine pistol out of Victorino’s hands. When he tried to take a blind swing at me, I grabbed him by the collar, kicked his legs from beneath him, then pinned the man to the ground.
I had one knee on Victorino’s chest as I jammed the Dazer hard into the socket of his left eye. The laser’s megawattage was radiating heat through its aluminum casing that even I could feel despite my leather gloves.
I held the gang leader there for several seconds, ignoring his screaming pleas, his wild promises, until I was certain he had had enough. Then I switched off the laser, pressed my nose close to his and said, “Tula Choimha. The Guatemalan girl you abducted-where is she?”
Victorino started to tell me, “I don’t know nothing about no-” but I didn’t let him finish.
I speared the Dazer into the socket of the man’s right eye and held the pressure switch, full power, as he tried to wrestle away. Even when he had stopped fighting me and was screaming, “I’ll tell you anything! Anything!” I kept his head pinned to the ground. I held him there for another few seconds before switching off the laser, then I tried again.
“Where’s the girl?” I asked the man. “Did you kill her?”
In the stark light of the inferno, Victorino was crying now-perhaps an involuntary ocular response to the laser or because he was afraid. The teardrop tattoo beneath his left eye glistened with real tears. The irony might have struck me as vaguely amusing had I been in a different mood.
I placed a finger on Victorino’s Adam’s apple, my thumb on his carotid artery. As I squeezed, I said, “I’m not going to ask you again. Where is she?” and then I lifted until the gang leader was on his feet.
He didn’t try to fight me. “You blinded me, man,” he said. “I can’t see! How the hell you expect me to answer questions when I can’t see nothing?”
When I squeezed his throat harder, though, Victorino opened his eyes and blinked a few times before telling me, “Okay, okay. Everything’s real blurry, man. And my eyes fucking hurt, man. It’s like you stuck a knife in my brain. You got to give me a minute.”
I gave him a shake and said, “Tell me where you have her-the girl. And what happened to Harris Squires?”
I released the man long enough to confirm his partner was dead. Beside the body was a. 44 Smith amp; Wesson, a small cannon that caused my pants to sag when I stuck it in the back of my belt.
My attention had shifted to the wooden building, flames shooting out the door now. It caused Victorino to turn his head, and I felt myself cringe when he finally answered my question. “Last time I saw that little girl,” he said, “she was in there.”
I got behind the gang leader and shoved him toward the flames. If Tula Choimha was still alive, she wouldn’t last long.
We had to hurry.
I slapped Victorino in the back of the head, then pushed him harder toward the building, yelling, “The girl might still be alive. Run! Help me get her out, I won’t kill you!”
The man replied, “You serious?”
When I pulled my hand back to hit him again, Victorino took off running.
Together, we sprinted toward the wooden structure, the heat from the burning RV so intense that we had to circle away before angling toward the door of the shack. As we ran, I took the Kahr semiautomatic from my pocket, already aware that Victorino was faster than I and he might decide to keep running.
That’s exactly what he had decided to do-until I stopped him by skipping two rounds near his feet.
“Goddamn it, man!” he yelled. “I’m not escaping, I’m trying to get to the back side of this place. I think there might be a window there.”
Victorino had long black hair. I grabbed a fistful, then used it like a leash to steer him, saying, “We check the door first. Get as close as you can and take a look.”
I gave the man a shove toward the opening as my brain scanned frantically for a better way to clear the building. For a moment, I considered the possibility of ramming one of the walls with Squires’s truck-but that might bring the blazing ceiling down on the girl, if she was still alive inside.
But Tula wasn’t alive. She couldn’t be. I knew it was impossible, as my eyes shifted from the truck to the building that was now a roaring conflagration of smoke and flames.
Twenty feet from the door, Victorino dropped to his belly because of the heat. He yelled, “There’s something you don’t know, man! This place”-he gestured toward the building-“it’s a cookshack for steroids. It’s got a bunch of propane tanks all lined up. Any second, they’re gonna start-”
There was no need for him to continue because that’s when the first propane canister exploded. Then three more followed in staccato succession, each shooting a fireworks tapestry of sparks into the night sky.
When Victorino got to his feet and tried to sprint to safety, I caught him by the hair again and yelled, “We check that window next. I’m not giving up until I’m sure.”
From the expression on the gang leader’s face, I knew there was no window. He had been lying. Even so, I herded him to the back of the building, where a small section of the wall had been blown outward. From a distance of thirty yards-that was as close as we could get-I could at least see inside the place.
I was positive then. No living thing could have survived that fire.
For several seconds, I stood there numbly, taking in the scene. Had I arrived a few minutes earlier, spent less time interrogating Dedos and Calavero, maybe I could have saved the girl. It wasn’t the first time my obsession for detail had thwarted a larger objective. But it was the first time an innocent person had died because I could not govern what secretly I have always known is a form of mania-or rage.
Obsession is rage, a Dinkin’s Bay neighbor had once told me-a man who also happens to be a Ph. D. expert on brain chemistry and human behavior.
The fact was, I was doing it now-obsessing-and I forced myself to concentrate. Later, I could wallow in the knowledge of my inadequacies. Tonight, I still had work to do.
There were a lot of unanswered questions. Unless I was willing to risk prison, I had to understand what had happened here. Obsessive or not, details are vital when manipulating a crime scene.
I asked Victorino, “Is Squires in there, too?” The wooden building, I meant.
I knew the man wasn’t telling me the whole truth when he replied, “I think so. Him and that woman, Frankie, they did some weird, kinky shit. But she got pissed off at him. That Frankie is crazy.”
I watched Victorino’s head swivel. “Where the hell that woman go? She’s the one you ought to be hammering on, man. Not me.”
When I told him the woman had been in the RV when it exploded, he did a poor job of hiding his reaction-a mix of relief and perverse satisfaction.
Victorino and Frankie had been sexually involved at one time, I guessed. Hatred is often catalyzed by the pain of previous intimacies-or infidelities.
I asked, “Were his hands tied? His feet? What about Squires?”
I was trying to assemble a better overview of who had done what to whom. Before crime scene police could understand who the bad guys were, I had to understand it myself.
Victorino replied, “Man, I had nothing to do with that shit.” When he saw my expression change, though, he added quickly, “But, yeah, I’m pretty sure Frankie had them both tied pretty good. She was getting ready to do a video deal, you know? So later she could have fun watching herself do shit to the girl, and her old boyfriend, too. A freak, man. I already told you.”