The splintered end of Sonny Chareaux's bat was lying on the cement floor about six feet away, and Lightstone was already going for it- knowing that he'd be too late, but trying anyway-when the roar of new gunfire reverberated through the barn.
In quick succession, three. 45-caliber jacketed hollow- point bullets caught Kiro Nakamura in the chest, neck, and forehead, slamming him backward into the broken and splintered wall boards like a rag doll.
As both Lightstone and Stoner spun around, they saw Larry Paxton standing on one crutch and braced against the doorway, a smoking SIG-Sauer pistol in his outstretched right hand.
"Karate, mah ass," the cut, bruised, battered, and seriously wounded agent grinned through his broken teeth.
"Where-?" Lightstone started to ask, looking around quickly as he crawled over and retrieved the stainless-steel automatic from the lap of the now-dead black belt. Then he remembered what the curly haired body-builder with the submachine gun had yelled:
Come on, let's blow this place!
"How the hell did you get here?" Dwight Stoner rasped through his swollen and bleeding lips as he stared up at Paxton.
"Thought you candy-asses might need help," Larry Paxton shrugged, wincing from the pain as he moved his left shoulder cautiously, "so I dragged my ass out of the swamp and-"
Then, in the light from the far open door, Lightstone saw the wires running to sticks of dynamite that had been taped to three of the ten-gallon gas cans sitting next to the tractor.
"This place is wired! Get out of here, now!" Lightstone yelled, and then frantically helped Paxton pull and drag their partner out of the barn and across the grass until, suddenly, the monstrous explosion behind their back sent the agents tumbling to the ground in a shower of shattered wood, broken tools, flaming gas cans, and the bloody remains of Sonny Chareaux and Kiro Nakamura.
"Okay, Lieutenant, here's what we've got so far," Sergeant Peter Balloch, senior homicide investigator for the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, said as he spoke into the phone. "You got the recorder on?"
The tired voice at the other end of the line muttered something affirmative.
"Okay," Balloch sighed, "at approximately eleven twenty-five hours, this date, a Mrs. Wanda Perkins reported what she believed was a gunshot fired in the vicinity of her next-door neighbor's home. According to the informant, the neighbors were on vacation and the house was supposed to be vacant. A two-man car was dispatched to check it out. However, before the patrol got to the scene, the informant called back to say that she had just heard numerous gunshots-some of which she thought came from an automatic weapon, because they sounded like what she watched on TV-in or around her neighbor's barn. According to dispatch, she was still on the line when they heard one hell of an explosion in the background that basically blew the neighbor's barn all over the fucking neighborhood.
"What? Yes, Lieutenant, of course I know you're recording this. I asked you to, remember?" Balloch said, rolling his eyes skyward as he asked himself for perhaps the five hundredth time how the man had ever managed to pass the lieutenant's exam.
"Anyway," Balloch went on quickly before he said something on tape that he might actually regret, "when our guys arrived, they found four bodies. One of them has been positively identified as Sonny Chareaux. C-H-A-R-E-A-U-X. There should be some kind of warrant on file for him out of Louisiana."
Balloch paused as the man on the other end of the line apparently said something.
"Yes, I think that would be a real nice idea to call Louisiana and let them know," Balloch said, wondering if there was any chance that one of the captains might listen to the tape some day.
"Anyway," the homicide sergeant went on, "at least two of the other bodies have been tentatively identified as Dwight Stoner and Larry Paxton, federal agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Yeah, right. As far as suspects go, we've got witnesses who saw two Caucasians-one male, short, curly blond hair, armed with an automatic rifle of some kind, and one female with shoulder-length blond hair-take off in a silver van, no plate, in one direction. Yeah, right. And one Caucasian male, six feet plus, running away on foot in the opposite direction. Yeah, go ahead and put it out on the wire. I'll keep you posted if we pick up anything else."
Shaking his head sadly, Homicide Sergeant Peter Balloch hung up and then looked over at the man who was sitting in his favorite lounge chair.
"That about what you guys want?" he asked.
"I think so, buddy," Henry Lightstone nodded. "How long do you think you can keep it running?"
"The way that asshole handles things, probably not very long," Balloch said. "Probably depends on how much cooperation we get from your head honchos."
"John Marsh, Chief of our Law Enforcement Division, promised me that he'd be on a plane heading this way within six hours. And if he can pull it off, he'll have the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service with him."
"They know who you are?"
"Marsh knows my name, but we've never met," Lightstone shrugged.
"What about the big guy?"
"The way I understand it," Lightstone said, "all he knows is that he authorized Marsh and MeNulty to run a wild-card agent completely outside the parameters of the federal government's personnel rules and regulations."
"And seeing as how your entire operation has apparently gone headfirst right down the toilet, I assume that means both their asses are hanging out a mile?" Balloch guessed.
"Yeah, I imagine so," Lightstone nodded.
"So let me see if I understand this right," Balloch said as he settled back in the overstuffed chair and massaged a throbbing temple. "What you're trying to tell me is that the only people who can vouch for you being a real, honest-to- God federal agent-as opposed to someone who probably ought to be locked up for his own good-are these two basket cases here?" He gestured with his head over at the sprawled bodies of the two men.
Dwight Stoner was stretched out on Balloch's living room couch with his badly swollen leg tightly strapped into a temporary cloth brace. Larry Paxton lay semicomatose in the other chair, his left arm in a sling, his left leg tightly bandaged, his head back and eyes closed. He looked exactly like someone who had been shot out of the air, crashed his airplane into an alligator-infested swamp, then escaped an exploding barn with a three-hundred-and-ten-pound human anchor on the end of his one good arm. All within the past forty-eight hours.
"Outside of Snoopy-uh, Mike Takahara, the tech agent we haven't been able to contact-and maybe Scoby, if he's still alive, yeah, that's about it."
"Okay," Balloch nodded after a minute of quiet contemplation. "I can probably guarantee you twenty-four hours on my say-so, just 'cause I'm getting old and slow and grouchy, and nobody really wants to screw with me too much if they can avoid it. But after that, somebody like my lieutenant is liable to start counting on his fingers and wondering how come we've got only two bodies in the freezer instead of four. What'd you say the FBI guy's name was?"
"A1 Grynard. Assistant special agent in charge of their Anchorage office."
"What's he like?"
"Old, slow, grouchy and curious as hell about anything that even looks halfway suspicious," Lightstone said. "You two ought to get along just fine."
A pained expression appeared in Pete Balloch's eyes. "And you figure this guy's probably going to be down here checking up on all this?" he asked.
"Yeah, I'd bet money on it."
"Why?"
"Because as soon as he gets the word that Stoner and Paxton are dead, he's gonna think I'm the one who's responsible," Lightstone said.
"Oh."
"Ain't gonna blame him none, either," Larry Paxton muttered through his badly split lips. "Ah'm just about convinced of that mahself."