"I'm Cuban."
"I don't think," Krindon said, "our girl will discern the difference."
As Guerrera dialed, Tim kept the binoculars trained on Terry's kitchen window. She rose, picked up the phone. Guerrera hissed, "We got your hombre, puta. We gon' kill heem." He hung up.
Terry slowly replaced the phone's receiver. She stared at it, as if expecting it to ring again. She was surprisingly calm, a weathered deed. Tim had been betting on her to maintain her composure, to think matters through. She sat down at the kitchen table, set her elbows in the puddle of newspaper. She thought long and hard. Krindon's mike picked up some of her whispering with remarkable clarity. "…a scam. Just a fucking crank call." Her agitation grew. She paced a few times, her bare feet squeaking on the cheap linoleum. With his own spouse comatose on a hospital bed, Tim couldn't help but feel a jolt of empathy.
Terry picked up the phone, then hung it up abruptly as if it had shocked her.
"Go on," Krindon purred. "Go on."
She disappeared down the hall, popping back into view in her bedroom window. She pulled a cell phone from the pocket of her jacket, which was slung over the doorknob. Three beeps as she started to punch in the number, and then she hung up. She sat on the bed, phone in her lap, whispering a mantra. "God, let him be okay. Let him be okay."
She dialed. Krindon made a fist at his side.
Terry let out a deep exhale. "You all right?…No, course I'm not on a landline… Weird call. From a Cholo, sounded like…Okay, baby. Me, too."
Terry clicked a button and flopped back on the bed, relieved.
Krindon pulled back from the window and replayed the eleven tones he'd captured as she'd dialed. He matched them slowly on his Nextel until he'd duplicated the tuneless melody. He jotted down the number, handed it to Tim, and vanished out the RV's narrow door.
Chapter 26
They materialized from behind parked cars and the narrow alleys between broken-down houses, crouching in makeshift formation, MP5s pointing up like the tips of a wrought-iron fence. Indistinct forms in one-piece olive drab flight suits. U.S. MARSHAL patches on the left arms, subdued gray U.S. flags on the rights. Black Hi-Tecs with quiet neoprene soles. Marshals' stars machine-embroidered over their hearts like targets. Wearing a thigh holster at crotch level, each deputy sported a. 40 Glock.
Except one.
Tim thumbed free the cylinder on his. 357, gave it a spin to watch the six brass dots whirl. With a jerk of his wrist, he snapped the wheel into place, then reholstered the revolver, letting it sling off his thigh. Chief's safe house was barely visible down the street, a block of darker shadow against the moonless sky. Husks of leaves littered the gutter and car windshields, glowing green, then red in the flashing Christmas lights.
Guerrera arrived at the staging point last, pulling into the curb between a battered VW van and a dilapidated hearse that provided further ambience. He emerged in a low crouch, document flapping, Judge Andrews's signature a fountain-pen smudge at the bottom of the page.
"Ready to light up this pendejo?" Guerrera whispered.
Miller folded the warrant into a cargo pocket and nodded at the abandoned hearse. "His ride's waiting."
Guerrera squatted and got a jingle. He emptied a few coins from his pocket onto the asphalt, then removed his watch and set it on the tire of the hearse beside him-no on-the-hour beep or night-glow dials across the dark threshold. The deputies extinguished the volume on their Motorola portables and pulled into a tight-stack formation, drifting silently across asphalt.
Miller halted, the explosive-detection canine and the column behind him freezing on the sidewalk. The house had been split into a duplex, both sides staking claims on the address Pacific Bell had relinquished.
They studied the matching doors, the dark, still windows.
"''Twas the night before Christmas…'" Jim intoned quietly.
A whispered conference. Tim drifted closer to the house. An Indian bike leaned against the side wall of the left duplex unit, unchained but secure behind a locked gate. Tim gestured Guerrera over for confirmation, and Guerrera nodded excitedly and whispered, "The kick starter's been cut in half and raised an inch or two. Only a little guy would need the extra leverage for leaning into the ignition."
They approached the row of tacked-up deputies, who'd pulled back to the neighboring house. "Left duplex," Tim said.
They hugged the wall to the front step, Maybeck pressing the top of his beloved battering ram up against his cheek. Miller directed Chomper to sniff along the door, and Chomper hesitated but didn't sit-no booby trap.
Tim lined up in the number one, Bear behind him toting his cut-down twelve-gauge Remington. Jim started his nearly inaudible pre-entry hum. For good luck or as a private show of respect, Jim tapped the black band at his biceps-Frankie Palton remembered. It struck Tim that the loss of his partner, only three days old, was still fresh to Jim. To Tim it felt distant, dulled by the fresher horror of seeing his wife shot off her feet time and time again. Even now as he muscled toward her maybe killers, her body wavered, indifferent to his desires or hers, making up its own damn mind.
The men lowered their night-vision goggles into place, Maybeck drew back the battering ram, and Tim rode its momentum into an unfurnished living room.
Before the hazy green world pulled into focus, a blaze of fire erupted from the couch, throwing Tim's view into violent brightness. Four slugs pinged the wall at his head, and one hit the stock of his MP5, shattering it and spinning him in a half turn. He slammed against the wall and struck carpet, flinging the NVGs off his head. Bear and Guerrera dove for cover as the others stacked at the door, the lead deputies trying to push back against the inward rush so as not to be driven into the line of fire. The familiar gunfire cadence continued, the song of the converted AR-15.
Though Tim's vision was still bleached out, the gun-muzzle star-bursts from the couch gave him target acquisition. He slid the. 357 from his thigh holster and fired sideways over his head. A cry of pain, masculine but surprisingly high-pitched. The automatic weapon clattered to the floor.
Tim's eyesight had recovered enough for him to make out a diminutive form scrambling across the room. Tim rose and charged after him, the other deputies just beginning to recover at the door. Chief ran in a furious limp and dove through the pass-through window into the kitchen. As Tim came around the jamb, a skillet took flight at his head. He ducked, and the aluminum dinged drywall, expelling a cloud of scrambled eggs. He dove and caught a leg, but Chief kicked free and bolted down the hall, Tim seconds after him as he slammed through a doorway. In a mad dash for his bed, Chief threw a rolling chair behind him; Tim got a foot on the bucket and leapt. He crashed down on top of Chief, pinning him to the mattress, his pistol to the back of his ear. Chief's hand froze half withdrawn from his nightstand drawer, gripping a Colt. 45.
Tim's adrenaline had ignited an explosive fury. He heard the low, rageful growl of his own voice as if it were separate from him. "You choose."
Chief's defiant eyes strained to take in Tim. His biceps tensed, and then his gun hand whipped from the drawer, finger dug through the blank eye of the trigger guard.
Tim squeezed.
Breathing hard, he remained for a moment with his knee dug between the slack shoulder blades, listening to the moist descent of brain matter on the opposing wall. Then he drew himself up, checked the closet, and shouted "Clear!" down the hall. Spread on top of the nightstand were diagrams of explosives. He gathered them up, doing his best to make out the cramped scrawl in the dimness as he headed back toward the front of the unit. Pipe bombs. Scored tubes to create more shrapnel. He flipped to another diagram, squinted at the dark sketch.