The houses on 146th were at least sixty years old. A lot of tracts in San Atanasio were of this vintage. They’d gone up after the Second World War to house the vets and their Baby Booming families. Jobs were easy to come by and paid good money, the houses were cheap, and San Atanasio boomed along with the babies.
Then the neighborhood changed. As blacks bought in—the houses were still pretty cheap—whites and Japanese-Americans moved to Torrance or the Valley. Some stayed, but they said the city wasn’t what it had been any more. There’d always been Hispanics in San Atanasio. Some of them had been there longer than anybody else. Now more came. A big chunk of police work started to involve riding herd on gangs.
As he and Gabe rode up, a uniformed cop pointed to a yellow stucco house. “He’s in there!” she called to them.
“He didn’t run out the back door and hop the fence or anything?” Colin asked.
“Don’t think so, Captain,” the uniformed woman answered. “We’ve got a guy in the house behind it, the one that faces on 145th. He’s probably in the back yard now, and he’ll be able to see if the perp tries to bail.”
“Sounds good.” Colin nodded. “Anybody else in the yellow house? Does the bad guy live there? Does he have friends? Or are there hostages?”
“I don’t know,” the uniformed officer said. “Nobody’s screaming or anything. No shots fired.”
“Okay.” Colin got off his bike and walked toward the house. He stopped across the street, behind a parked car whose tires had gone flat. Maybe this would be easy. Maybe the kid in there would realize he couldn’t get away and come out with his hands up.
To help him realize that, Colin yelled, “You can’t get away! Come out with your hands up!” Then he yelled it again, in his bad Spanish.
A yell came back from inside the house, out through a partly open window: “¡Chinga tu madre!” English followed a moment later: “Motherfucker!” Not quite an exact translation, but close enough. The robber went on, “Don’t fuck with me, assholes, or I’ll blast the shit out of all of you!”
“That won’t do you any good,” Colin said. He didn’t say the kid couldn’t do it. A guy with a pistol might well miss him from across the street. A guy with an AK might well hit him. The bullets could punch right on through the stupid car he was standing behind, too.
He’d carried a gun for the San Atanasio PD for more than twenty years. He’d drawn it a few times, but he’d never once pulled the trigger except on the practice range. He was proud of that; it was the kind of thing he wanted to keep intact till he retired. He especially didn’t want to try shooting it out against an AK-47. Not quite coming to a gunfight with a knife, but the next worst thing.
“You cocksuckers better clear outa here or you’re gonna be sorry!” the robber shouted. “I ain’t bullshitting, dude!”
To show he wasn’t bullshitting, he started shooting. Glass exploded out from behind that partly open window. Colin had thought the guy was there, but curtains had kept him from being sure. Well, he wasn’t in much doubt now.
A bullet cracked past his head, maliciously close. Next thing he knew, he was on his belly behind the car. His suit would never be the same. Better my suit than my carcass, he thought as he yanked out the .38.
Pop pop pop pop pop pop! Those were all the San Atanasio cops’ pistols going off at once. The bastard with the assault rifle was still banging away, too. The AK’s reports were louder than those from the pistols, and seemed to come about as fast as all the pistol shots put together. It wasn’t even full auto, either, or Colin didn’t think it was. Fully automatic assault weapons were illegal in the States, and hard to come by. Semiautomatic fire seemed quite horrible enough, thankyouverymuch.
“Holy fucking shit!” Gabe yelled from somewhere behind Colin. That summed things up as well as anything.
The cops’ fire began to stutter as they paused to reload. There was also a brief pause from inside the yellow house. As soon as the robber swapped out his empty thirty-round banana clip and slapped on a full one, though, he was back in business. The barrage from out here must have left the front of that house looking like a colander. Why the hell hadn’t it left the bad guy looking the same way?
A bullet blew out the windshield on the car. It was safety glass, but even so… . A sharp fragment bit Colin’s left hand. He swore and slithered toward the front bumper. He could pop up behind the engine block, and it would shield him some while he fired.
He popped up. He fired three times, as fast as he could. There went all those years of being a peaceable cop. And then he felt as if somebody’d slammed his left shoulder with a Louisville Slugger. Next thing he knew, he was lying on his back. A Louisville Slugger wouldn’t’ve hurt this bad. A Louisville Slugger wouldn’t’ve made him bleed like a stuck pig, either.
“Colin’s down!” somebody shouted. “We’ve got to take that fucker now!”
That sounded like a good idea. Colin groped for something he could stick in the wound to slow the bleeding. Soldiers carried first-aid kits. Mostly deskbound cops didn’t, dammit. I could use a morphine needle, too, he thought vaguely. He’d never hurt so much. The world grayed out. He’d just started to worry about it when he couldn’t any more.
Kelly’d last been at San Atanasio Memorial when she had Deborah. This time, she’d had to give Deborah to the neighbors across the street. She wanted to call Marshall and Vanessa. (No, she didn’t much want to call Vanessa, but she knew she should.) She couldn’t even do that, not with the power out. All she could do was ride in the cop car and numbly worry.
“He’s in surgery, ma’am,” one of the uniformed men said. “Ambulance took him. It got there as quick as it could, as soon as the bad guy couldn’t shoot it up any more.”
“Couldn’t shoot it up because he’s dead?” Kelly asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good!” Kelly said. The fury of her response amazed her. Any punk who shot her husband had no business staying alive afterwards.
“He tried to beat it out the back door,” the cop explained. “And our guy in the yard of the house behind the house where he was at, he stopped him.”
“Shot him, you mean.”
“That’s right.”
“Good,” Kelly repeated. Most ways and most of the time, she was a liberal. But no, she couldn’t find sympathy for someone who’d hurt her family. “Can you tell me more about how Colin is?”
“No, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am. All I know is, they took him into surgery. The doctors, they’ll be able to tell you what’s going on.”
Only they didn’t—they were too busy doing what they needed to do to patch Colin up and put him back together again. She sat in a waiting room whose couch and chairs wore the hide of a particularly hideous Nauga. Gabe Sanchez was already there. He gave her a hug and showed her about where Colin had been hit. “He’ll pull through,” he said. “He’s a tough son of a gun.”
“I know,” Kelly said, wishing Gabe didn’t sound so much like a man whistling in the dark.
After a bit, Gabe gave an apologetic bob of his head and ducked out of the waiting room. Cigarette break, Kelly realized. She glanced at the magazines on an end table. None of them went back to the days before the eruption, but a couple came close.
When Gabe walked in again, he had Malik Williams with him. The chief hugged Kelly, too. “They’ll fix him up good as new,” Williams said.
“Yeah.” Kelly made herself nod. The hospital had lights, computers, all the fancy gear that repaired people in the twenty-first century. Everything worked. Faintly, she could hear a generator chugging to make sure it all kept working. Most of the world could learn to live without electricity a lot of the time. It was a pain, but it could be done. Not in a place like this.