“What the fuck …”
Injun Joe had the microphone back at his lips in the next instant, not bothering to remove his headset this time as he spoke.
“Central, this is Fifteen.”
“Go ahead, Fifteen.”
“I have shots fired — repeat, shots fired — at the Oliveras residence! 1112 Forest Avenue. Request backup!” More screams filled his ears. “Jesus Christ, lots of backup!”
“Roger, Fifteen. Backup is rolling.”
“So am I.”
The big car lurched forward as Rainwater jammed the pedal and shifted into drive at the same time. The tires spun madly before finding the road surface, startling several of the college couples strolling nearby.
The screams were still reverberating in Injun Joe’s ears when the big car bore down on one of those couples as they crossed the street with twin Walkmans donned.
“Shit!” Rainwater bellowed, as he turned the wheel to avoid them.
The car wavered out of control and sideswiped a tree. Injun Joe braked and composed himself, giving the big car gas slower the last stretch to Forest Avenue. Once on Forest, though, he floored the pedal. The engine’s roar almost drowned out the torturous sounds still raging in his ears.
Then suddenly, just like that, the sounds ceased. A few stray gunshots lingered before silence took over. Where chaos and death had run rampant less than two minutes before, there was, simply, nothing.
Joe Rainwater drove straight up to the main gate of the estate and lunged out of his car. The gate was locked, but the brick fence was only five feet high. He scaled it and dropped to the mansion’s sprawling front lawn. His 9mm Glock pistol palmed, Injun Joe advanced warily toward the house.
He came upon the first body ten feet in, at least what was left of it. Cooling blood and entrails steamed upward into the night. The smell made him gag. The guard’s midsection had been shredded. He had been virtually disemboweled. His face was frozen in agony.
Rainwater came upon the remains of two additional men before he reached the mansion’s entrance. There might have been more, but for the last stretch his attention was focused on the empty hole where the front door used to be. Wooden shards of it lay all over the porch. Injun Joe had to step over larger fragments as he crossed the threshold. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of gunpowder. Its telltale smoke still hung in the air. Around him bullets had shattered virtually every visible window — bullets fired from the inside by Oliveras’s guards toward whatever was killing them.
Another trio of bodies lay at absurd angles at various levels of the curving staircase. The blood of the lowermost one oozed to the marble foyer and formed a pool. Injun Joe did his best to avoid it as he mounted the spiraling steps toward the mansion’s second floor.
Jesus Christ …
Like the guards outside and on the stairs, the men on the second floor had been torn apart. Two lay facedown at the head of the hallway in widening pools of their own blood. Rainwater could hear the wail of approaching sirens now and debated whether to go on alone. The chance that whoever had done all this was still within the mansion was quite real, and the thought of facing them with only the Glock did not strike Rainwater’s fancy. Then again, he was a cop who was looking at the upshot of eight months’ work that might have cost him a marriage. The cop in him made a mental note that the walls on this floor, like those of the first, had been peppered by bullets. Oliveras’s guards hadn’t gone without a fight, then, but there was no evidence that they had scored a single hit on whatever had killed them.
The sirens were really screaming now, and Rainwater proceeded on down the second-floor hallway. He took a long step across one body lying crosswise in the hall and leapt over a second that had been turned into little more than butcher meat. A third corpse’s eyes were cocked right on him as he skirted it and headed toward Oliveras’s bedroom.
The drug lord’s door resembled the front one downstairs except that there was even less remaining. Part of it still stood attached by the hinges, but the result was almost comic. The inside of Oliveras’s bedchamber was anything but.
Joe Rainwater tried to tell himself it was for the best, that justice had been served perversely, though appropriately. But there was nothing even remotely pleasing about the coppery, musty smell or the sight of red splashed across the floor and walls. Only a single reading lamp was on, and the lack of light spared Rainwater the full brunt of the sight. In three tours in ’Nam and fifteen years on the force, Injun Joe had never seen anything like this.
The remains of Ruben Oliveras were … everywhere!
He could hear the police cars rolling onto the property now, more sirens already blazing in their wake, as he backed out of Oliveras’s bedroom. Outside in the hallway Injun Joe leaned over and inspected the guns of the nearest corpses. The clips of two automatic weapons had been nearly drained. A pump-action shotgun had been emptied of all six shells. Again, though, there was no evidence to suggest that they had hit a damn thing. A dozen heavily armed men, professional men, plus Oliveras, cut down in two minutes tops without taking one of the attackers with them.
Joe Rainwater gazed one more time at the impossible and then headed for the stairs to greet the arriving officers.
Chapter 4
“May i help you, sir?”
“Yes, I think you can,” Blaine McCracken said to the proprietor of Collectibles, who was standing near a display of smoked glass.
Collectibles was located in Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco’s answer to Boston’s Faneuil Hall or New York City’s South Street Seaport. Ghirardelli took its name from the chocolate factory that had once occupied the red-brick structure now housing dozens of stores ranging from trendy knickknack shops to upscale boutiques. There were actually six separate buildings with as few as two and as many as five levels. The buildings enclosed an outdoor courtyard, lined with benches and small tables that provided the square with a parklike atmosphere.
McCracken had strolled purposefully about this courtyard for nearly a half hour before making his way to the first of the Clock Tower Building’s two floors where Collectibles was located. He wanted to make sure he had not picked up any unwelcome escorts on his way to the antiques store that the business card in the envelope had directed him to. It was warm for April, with only a slight breeze. So the lunchtime rush had seen the courtyard grow more crowded by the minute and McCracken became more edgy. He took no comfort in a crowd that would allow a potential enemy to easily become lost.
Cursing his own timing, Blaine had moved on to Collectibles and let the jingling door bells announce his arrival to the proprietor.
“I believe you have something for me,” McCracken continued, handing over his jagged piece of parchment.
The proprietor took it and stepped behind the counter, eyes reluctant to leave McCracken. He was a tall, lean man, floral shirt worn over baggy pants dominated by pleats. His skin and eyes were dark. He might have been Arab, but not necessarily. Blaine tensed as the proprietor’s hand dropped beneath the counter and then came up fast. He relaxed when he saw it was holding a second piece of torn parchment. The man fit the two fragments together. The jagged edges filled in against each other. The match was perfect. The proprietor gazed again at McCracken.
“I have what you have come for in the back. If you’ll give me just a minute …”
Without waiting for a reply, the proprietor disappeared through a bead curtain behind his counter. No further discussion was either required or expected. The fact that an elaborate signaling procedure had been set in place indicated to McCracken that the proprietor had no idea who would be coming to make the pickup. He was simply a go-between.