“Here. Come down here to the water. This helps.”
The other two cops bumped their way to Tasker and shared the hose. Soon they had a system where any two of them could be washed at a time.
After three or four minutes, Tasker felt well enough to step back and consider what happened. He cautiously crept back onto the porch. He had seen the van leave, so he wasn’t worried about the inside anymore. The hanging pots were all cracked on the ground. He found in one a ripped plastic container that had held the chemical.
“Looks like it was CS. Old-fashioned Mace.”
Sutter barely looked up.
Over half an hour later, they had regained their composure enough to look in all the windows. They opened the rear door with a rope so no one was in danger and entered the double-wide.
Tasker, still red-eyed and blotchy around his face, walked through each room.
Sutter, his Glock in his hand, waited at the kitchen unless needed.
They still hadn’t called for backup. No one had mentioned it.
Sutter opened the subject. “Okay, it was Mace. We’re not gonna die. But the question is, Do we need to tell anyone?”
Driscoll was quick to answer. “Hell, no. My guys would never let me hear the end of this shit. Caught in an ambush and letting a fugitive escape. Fuck me, we can’t ever tell anyone. In fact, you can drop me at home and I’ll clean up before I go back to the PD.”
Tasker turned and looked at Sutter, who said, “I couldn’t agree more.”
They searched the house for any information that might help locate Wells. Twenty minutes later, they walked through the yard, then back to Tasker’s car. He was just starting to feel normal, except that his clothes were still soaking wet from his rinsing.
Sutter started yacking about how he wasn’t worried on the porch and that now he had a personal stake in Wells, too.
Tasker looked up and down the street, which was deserted. Something didn’t feel right.
At the same time, Tasker and Sutter opened their door and heard another bang. Tasker felt a fresh burning from the new booby trap.
He didn’t panic this time as the Mace burned his eyes and nose again.
As he stumbled back toward the hose near the trailer, all he heard was Sutter scream, “Fuck!”
eighteen
Bill Tasker blinked hard, still clearing the CS from his eyes. CS was older and not used as much as the modern pepper spray, but not because it didn’t work. Police had moved to pepper spray because it was safer. CS was effective, lingered and was a bitch to clean up. Eight hours and five showers had cleared most of the irritant from his face, but every few minutes he’d feel a burning sensation and blink. It was probably as much psychological as it was physical. But the gallon of snot that had poured out of his head wasn’t psychological, just gross. Driving his personal Cherokee, because the CS had also made his issued car unusable for the foreseeable future, he turned off Pines Boulevard in western Hollywood into the new set of housing developments. The miles of new, similar houses caused the native Floridian in him to flash in anger. The houses were needed for New Yorkers escaping the cold and people escaping Dade County. It didn’t change the fact that the land had been a marshland next to the Everglades just a few years ago, and now it was a wasteland.
Camy Parks was a perfect example of a former Dade resident now living on what should have been a wildlife preserve. Tasker had been able to get her address in about five seconds on the Internet and was on his way to set her ass straight about this case. It was her investigation, and ATF needed to be involved. Tasker sure could use the help.
He found the cream-colored, two-story, zero-lot-line abomination of a home with no trouble. Camy’s ATF-issued Ford Crown Vic sat in the driveway next to a Saab that Tasker assumed was hers. There were several cars on the street near the house. No lights were on in front. It was only about nine, so Tasker wasn’t worried about waking her. He rapped on the front door, then rang the doorbell to be sure she knew she had a visitor. He had thought about bringing along Sutter, but after their little confrontation at the ATF office and Sutter’s lingering misery from the CS he’d decided to leave his partner out of this plan. Besides, after dark all he’d be interested in was getting the lovely lesbian ATF agent in bed.
Tasker heard Camy call through the door. “Who is it?”
“Bill Tasker.”
She opened the frosted glass door a crack, then said, “Billy, what are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you.”
She opened the door wider and looked at him. “What happened? Have you been crying?”
“Yeah. Most of the day, as a matter of fact. Can I come in?”
She hesitated.
“It’s important.”
Camy sighed and opened the door for him. She had on a terrycloth robe and her hair was loose around her shoulders. She looked almost wild like this.
“Thanks,” he said, stepping into the open room with high ceilings.
“First, tell me why you were crying.”
He explained the event at Wells’ trailer in decent detail, only leaving out that he and Sutter had fallen for the second trap in his car. He could see she was at least slightly amused by the story once she knew no one was seriously hurt.
Camy said, “I’m sorry, Billy, but just because this guy Maced you, I can’t rejoin the case.”
“What are you talking about? It’s an ATF case. He is the guy who bombed that cruise ship. I know it. I also think he’s got something else planned.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, but this afternoon in his van I saw he had a big metal tank welded in the back. Unless he’s driving across the Kalahari, I don’t think the tank is good for anything but blowing up.”
Camy considered this.
“Are you gonna let a disagreement get in the way of saving people’s lives?” Tasker looked hard into her eyes.
He jumped when he heard a male voice say, “Letting Wells out wasn’t a disagreement, dawg. It was a double-cross.”
Tasker snapped his head in the direction of the man and was shocked to see Jimmy Lail in a silk, flowered dressing robe standing near the entrance to the bedrooms.
Tasker stared, speechless, then turned to Camy. Without thinking, he blurted, “I thought you were a lesbian.”
She froze, then smiled. “I never said I was. That rumor started and it was no one’s business, so I ignored it.”
Tasker looked back at Jimmy Lail, saying, “Or were you just ashamed of your culturally challenged boyfriend?”
Camy didn’t answer, but Jimmy crossed the room toward Tasker, his bathrobe flapping open slightly. “Listen, dawg. Don’t try an’ dis me.” He moved past the couch and kept coming at Tasker.
In a smooth motion, Tasker wrapped his right hand around the handle of his ASP expandable baton in his back pocket and pulled it, not snapping it open but holding it in his palm like a eight-inch stick. He held up his hand and applied a little forward thrust as Jimmy came to him. The weight of Jimmy’s body running into the point of the closed ASP aimed right at his solar plexus knocked the wind out of his sails and then the man off his feet. He stayed on the ground, gasping for air.
Tasker calmly turned his attention back to Camy like nothing had happened. “So what about it? Help me stop this guy.”
“If I ignore orders, it could be the last case I ever work.”
“Seems like it’s that way with every case for me.” He smiled.