The crowd was thinning at the marina by now, most of it surging up into town. Monks didn’t hear any more gunfire, but there was still plenty of panic. Cars were ramming each other, driving over curbs, through yards, into buildings. The metallic crunch of collisions pierced the air, and shards of splintering glass from windshields and storefronts sprayed out here and there, glittering in the sunlight. Thousands more were fleeing on foot, swarming like locusts along the highway, through the shops and restaurants, up the streets and into the clusters of condos on the hills. Police helicopters hovered close overhead, megaphones bellowing warnings, but it looked like nothing short of napalm could stop the frenzy. At least a dozen people had fallen and were lying motionless or struggling feebly. A couple of them were wearing police uniforms. Monks remembered that he had heard the words over the police bullhorn: There are snipers in the crowd.
The paramedics with Glenn had reached a Life Flight helicopter and were loading him on.
“Don’t worry, we’re not going to let anything happen to him,” Pietowski said.
Monks nodded, but he knew the bitter truth behind that concern. Glenn was a big prize, the only one the FBI had apprehended so far in connection with the Calamity Jane murders. He was also the best hope they had of tracking down Freeboot.
The nearest of the fallen bodies was the Highway Patrolman who had shot Glenn. Several angry-looking cops were hovering around, and another team of paramedics had arrived, but Monks was quite sure even from a distance that he was dead. The crash had dumped him in an ugly sprawl, with one jackbooted leg still tangled in the handlebars of his bike.
“Stand aside,” Pietowski said again, flashing his badge. “This man’s a doctor.” The cops and paramedics moved back.
Monks knelt beside the man who had tried to kill his son. He had been shot twice. He might have survived the round to the helmet, but the second one, just below its rim, was lethal. Monks knew that that was a preferred target of SWAT-team and military snipers-through the spinal cord into the medulla oblongata.
Then he recognized the thick-featured face, and his rage turned to shock.
“This isn’t a cop,” he said to Pietowski. “He’s one of Freeboot’s men. Hammerhead-the one who had that jade pendant.”
Monks was still crouched there, trying to grasp this new insanity, when one of the FBI undercover agents stepped away from the group, pressing his hand against his ear, listening.
Then he yelled, “They spotted a guy with a limp, up on the highway!”
Agents and cops took off running, the younger men at a sprint. Monks and Pietowski followed, lumbering and panting. Other uniformed men with raised weapons were running on Highway 1.
“He’s getting into that RV!” someone yelled.
Monks saw the vehicle, a huge white box on wheels, almost the size of a bus. There was no way that it was going anywhere in this jam. Anybody inside it was trapped.
“Attention! Inside the RV!” the megaphone on the sheriff’s truck bellowed. “Come out with your hands up!”
Dozens of cops, Coast Guard, and SWAT-teamers ringed the RV, taking cover behind parked cars.
“Everybody stay the hell back,” Pietowski yelled. “That thing could be rigged to explode.” He looked pleased but wary. There was still plenty of risk, and the possibility of a drawn-out siege.
Monks started to hear a bizarre sound that seemed to be coming from inside the RV-a screaming whine like a dozen chain saws being revved. The others heard it, too. Talk stopped and the megaphone went silent.
Then the RV did explode, the entire barn-door-sized back panel bursting free with a gut-wrenching kuh-whump, spinning through the air like a giant tin can lid showering shrapnel. A cloud of thick smoke billowed out with it, sending the nearest cops spinning away and clawing at their faces.
In the midst of that, several MX-type dirt bikes came flying out of the RV’s rear section. The gas-masked, helmeted riders hit the pavement, submachine guns slung across their chests, spraying full automatic bursts that hammered into the parked cars and buildings. The bikes tore through the smoke, splitting off in different directions. Cops fired back furiously, and one bike went into a skid, sliding into a curb and throwing the rider hard against a car.
Monks saw that another of the riders, incredibly, had bare feet.
“That’s Freeboot!” he screamed. “The barefoot one!” He ran forward into the acrid reek of the gas, covering his nose and mouth with his sleeve, pointing with his other hand. Through burning eyes, he saw the barefoot rider jerk suddenly, in the convulsive spasm of a man hit by a bullet. But he recovered, popping the bike up in a wheelstand and skidding around in a half-circle. Front wheel still raised, he tore back through the heart of the smoke cloud and appeared again a few seconds later, weaving and leaping like the others through the jammed traffic. Helicopters thundered overhead in pursuit.
Pietowski watched them go, his face taut with controlled rage.
“He looked like he got hit,” Monks said.
Pietowski nodded grimly. “That makes me feel a little better.”
They walked to where the fallen rider lay, surrounded by glowering cops, red-eyed from gas. The body was crumpled and motionless against the car it had struck. The torso looked padded, and Monks realized that the rider was wearing body armor. Probably all of them had been, along with bullet-resistant helmets. But blood was seeping from under the jaw-a lucky shot for the cop that had fired it, the end of luck for the rider. Monks knelt to feel for a pulse, but he already knew, again, that life was gone.
“He’s dead,” Monks said, standing. “You can move him.”
“Let’s see who we got,” Pietowski said.
A deputy knelt and eased the helmet off, revealing soft auburn hair and a thin, almost pretty face. He stepped back in shock.
“Jesus,” he said, “it’s a woman.”
“Shrinkwrap,” Monks said. This time, he felt neither anger nor pity, and by now, not even surprise.
Pietowski nodded. “Nice catch, gentlemen,” he said to the cops. “She was a kingpin.”
Highway 1 looked like a mile-long junkyard, crammed with vehicles too impacted to move. The remnants of the crowd were still spiderwebbing out in the distance, over the headlands to the north, across the crescent beach south, and up into the coastal hills to the east. At least another thousand still lined the streets, many huddled on the ground or crouched behind shelter, and there were new casualties from the motorcyclists’ gunfire, explosion, and general mayhem.
“I’d better get to helping,” Monks told Pietowski, and walked out into the chaos, scanning the injured, doing triage in his head as he decided where to start.
40
Thirty hours later, Monks walked into Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa to see Glenn. Most of the serious casualties from Bodega Bay had been taken either to Santa Rosa Memorial or to Bayview, in Marin County. But the FBI wanted their star witness separated from the pack, and the Queen was known for its top-notch trauma center. He was under full-time guard by teams of two armed agents, in case Freeboot’s maquis came looking for him to silence him.
Glenn wasn’t yet strong enough for serious interrogation. So far, the impatient agents had been limited to a few brief sessions. But he was able to talk a little, and, knowing now that Freeboot had set him up to be killed, was cooperating fully. He had already given them valuable information, including details on hideouts and communication systems, and a description of what Freeboot looked like now.
And he had tacitly admitted hacking the computer information on the “Fortune 500” list.