Troubleshooter (23 page)

A wall behind the counter segregated the workshop proper--though, judging by the eye-watering intensity of the paint fumes, not well. Tim ran in a ducked position, kicking away the handgun and squatting over the biker as he secured his wrists with cuffs. Tim kept his eyes on the beaded curtain behind the counter. "Danny Pater?"

The biker's head jerked, clearing the hair to reveal eye shadow and a delicate nose. Blood colored the lips, flecked the chin. The woman on Richie Rich's arm at the funeral.

Tim's eyes pulled to the framed business license on the wall: Danielle Pater.

She coughed, her shirt fluttering above the chest wound, and died with her mouth open against the worn carpet.

A scurry of footsteps in the back. Something toppled and made a clamor on the floor. Smith & Wesson straight-armed in front of him, Tim headed behind the counter. He paused to the side of the curtain, pulse quickening at the prospect of being in the same building as Den Laurey. The gaps between the still-rippling beads showed darkness. He reached through, groping for a light switch but having no luck.

He gathered his courage and sprang through, landing flat-bellied against the inside wall to control the silhouette threat. He blinked hard to stimulate his night vision. Proning out made him vulnerable to ricochets, but he didn't want to get on his feet until he had his bearings.

A wall of paint cans protected him. A few had been knocked over, Lion's Tongue Red puddling across the slick concrete.

He found his feet and shouldered against a ceiling-high metal rack that held elaborately painted gas tanks. Natural light leaked around a closed door in the rear, maybe a bathroom with a window. Tim caught a giggle, and then a wide form topped with a familiar mop of hair flashed across the faint glow--Tom-Tom having fun. Tim's aim was an instant late. He didn't fire, not wanting to broadcast position, but his barrel must have given up a glint, because a spray of yellow erupted from the far corner, and the tanks behind him jumped and spun. He rolled maybe ten feet, winding up with a back wet with paint and his face pressed to the wheel of a Harley. The barrage of gunfire quieted, and then Tom-Tom made kissing noises at the darkness, as if calling a cat.

Something metal clattered across the concrete, and an explosion blew the rack off its moorings. Empty tanks rained down, making an impressive racket. The brief blaze wisped off in blue curls, picking up extra mileage from the paint fumes.

Tim watched the darkness through the spokes of the wheel. His soldier's ear told him that two men were circling the space separately.

A sliver of red footprint stood out between a couple of half-sprayed Harleys. Moving silently, Tim followed the trail, weaving through bikes, the drip of grease into oil pans penetrating the silence with maddening regularity. The tread impressions grew fainter. Tim reached the north wall, easing around a workman's bench.

A form up ahead, a pair of hands holding a Glock upright next to a cheek.

The head turned, the faint light giving Tim an eclipse profile of the right side--choppy hair, eye patch, armband. Then Tim made out the upside-down FBI patch stitched to the jacket, a trophy for burying two bullets in Raymond Smiles's chest as the agent had eaten dinner. Tim took aim at the block of critical mass. He pictured his target reclined on his bike, sneering at Dray, You'd better back off, bitch.

Dray's voice cut through Tim's rage: He's no good to us dead.

Richie Rich's pinkie ring blinked a star of light, removing all doubt, and Tim stepped forward and swung the butt of his gun into his temple. Rich grunted and collapsed, and Tim darted for cover before Tom-Tom could track his movement by Rich's thud to the concrete. Too late he heard the pipe bomb scuttling across the floor after him like an angry rodent. He opened his mouth, exhaling hard so his lungs wouldn't rupture with the overpressure, an instinct pounded into him in Ranger training.

The blast slammed him against the far wall. A bank of blacked-out windows blew, permitting a sudden insurge of light, and Tim came to in a heap against the Sheetrock, covered with a film of dust.

Breath jerking, ribs aching, torso slick with red paint or blood or both, he heard a shuffling and looked up. Still half blinded from the explosion and the sudden sun, he barely discerned the movement before him, but the tip of the auto pressing against his throat was all too clear.

Tom-Tom dimly resolved into view, a pale, stocky outline against Tim's still-bleached field of vision. Platinum curls, a boulder of a head set directly on broad shoulders, the amused, irrepressible grin of a misbehaving child. Stubble dusted his cheeks like white sand. Another pipe bomb protruded from his pocket like a rolled-up comic book. He looked down at Tim over the sights, one-arming the AR-15 so the stock rested against his meaty biceps.

"Couldn'ta been worth it," he said.

Tim felt no fear, just the slow-motion grimness of reality setting in, and he thought, So this is where it ends.

The sharp report of a bullet. Tom-Tom fell stiffly, as one rigid piece, revealing not Bear but Rich Mandrell. The right side of the biker's face was swollen so badly from Tim's blow it looked as though the skin might split.

Rich said, "Goddamnit," as if he'd dinged his Porsche with a shopping cart. He thrust the barrel of his Glock into Tim's hands and said, "Cuff me. Get them on now. Handle me rough and get me the fuck outta here."

Chapter
35

Who the hell are you?" Bear asked.

Richie Rich reclined on the wall-mounted bench, his shoulders and head propped against the bars. They'd put him in Cell Block's keep-away zone, behind the holding pens for the standard fare--gangbangers and second-tier mafiosos awaiting court appearances. Additional steel doors covered the mesh gates back here, protecting the identities of the detainees. Witnesses offering testimony against high-profile defendants were stored here, as well as HIV-positive prisoners, hard cases, and juveniles. The single-occupant cells were metal wonderlands--aluminum toilets, steel-reinforced security cams, sturdy sink columns. Everything was bolted or welded down.

The paint on Tim's shirt had hardened, staining the fabric Lion's Tongue Red. A trickle of a less virile tint had dried behind his ear; he'd spent the ride back to Roybal picking bits of windshield glass from his matted hair. Tannino had swapped out his .357 at the command post, wearing a droll expression--"And to think you objected to the nickname." The marshal was back in his office now, lighting up the phone board.

Tim and Bear had pulled in Guerrera, who leaned quietly against the bars, preoccupied. Bear had presented him his St. Michael medallion from the Impala's rearview mirror, and he'd taken it reluctantly, like a war widow accepting Old Glory. The bullet-riddled vehicle had required a flatbed tow.

"We have you on tape shooting Raymond Smiles." Bear grimaced and rubbed the red indentation on his forehead. His headache and the ribbing he'd gotten in the command post--Thomas and Freed had wrapped bandages around their heads like turbans, and Jim had adhered a battery-operated police light to his crown with heavy-duty rubber bands--didn't seem to be helping his mood. "FBI agent you capped in a restaurant in October. You left him facedown in his tiramisu. You remember?"

Rich tore off a dirty thumbnail with his teeth and spit it on the floor. "He was still on the entree."

"Did you switch teams, Richie Rich?" Bear pressed. "You go on someone's payroll?"

Rich gingerly touched the nasty bruise by his temple.

Tim watched him closely. "You're undercover," he said. "Customs or DEA?"

Rich's lips barely moved. "FBI." His first unsnide utterance.

"FBI?" Bear said. "Great. Spectacular. So now you wanna tell us why we can't scrape you guys off our boots?"

Finally Rich raised his head. A blood vessel had burst in his eye, a red flare across his unhealthy-looking, yellow-tinted sclera. "It's worse than you think."

A double knock on the door--the detention enforcement officer's warning--and the steel swung back with a creak. Dressed impeccably in an olive suit, Raymond Smiles walked into the cell. The black agent paused and raised his hands ever so slightly, a magician's flourish to underscore his resurrection.

In a Spanish murmur, Guerrera invoked saints' names and swear words. Rich held up his wrists, and Smiles unlocked the cuffs.

Bear stared at the FBI agent, risen from the dead. "What the hell," he said, "is going on here?"

Tannino was at the cell door, Jeff Malane beside him. "Why don't you two come back to my office, and we'll get this goatfuck untangled as best we can."

Tannino had one foot up on his desk, providing the others in the couches and chairs an inadvertently vulgar vantage. He'd cracked a window before sitting, but still the office air was stale and warm.

"We've had our task force on the ground in Los Angeles for three months," Smiles said.

"It's called Operation Cleansweep," Rich said.

"We have an operation going on, too," Bear volunteered from his arms-crossed lean against the wall. "It's called Operation Take a Fucking Shower."

"You got a lotta mouth for a guy knocked himself unconscious with a police light." Rich's black eye had gone from purple to an unlikely shade of brown; he'd had to score it with a razor blade to take the swelling down.

"You were firing an AR-15 at us."

"I told you, that was Tom-Tom. I was in the back when the caps started flying."

"The roses," Tim said abruptly.

His non sequitur drew looks from all quarters.

"We saw the video clip of your fake hit on Smiles at the restaurant," Tim continued. "Nice clean angle for the eight o'clock news. But the table you were sitting at"--a nod to Smiles--"had a tall centerpiece. Roses. Live rounds would've knocked over the flowers on the way to your chest. Blanks wouldn't."

Rich nodded, impressed. "I'm glad Chief didn't have your eye."

"You knew Smiles was already in Chief's hit binder, so when given the choice of targets, you picked him."

"Only way to make striker and ride with the crew," Rich said. "Cap a copper."

"You did nothing while a pregnant sheriff's deputy was shot point-blank in the chest." The intensity of the anger in Tim's voice brought Tannino upright in his chair.

Rich spread his hands, palms to heaven. "What the fuck was I supposed to do?"

The vehicle-cam footage remained vivid in Tim's mind. The twitch of Rich's scowl. You'd better back off, bitch. Tim registered the words now as a hidden caution. Rich's cry the moment before Dray stepped into range had not been an angry shout but a panicked warning--Get the fuck outta here! And after the shotgun blast, Rich's taut face and bared teeth were, Tim realized, an expression of horror, not atavistic release.

"Look, my hands were tied at the scene." Rich's cheek twitched; the guilt had been working on him. "I took a risk right after and made the anonymous call to the station that probably saved her life."

"Let me dust off a medal of valor for you," Tim said.

"My hands were tied. There were five of them."

Six if you count Marisol Juarez.

Tim picked up Dray's rebuke. "Six if you count Marisol Juarez."

"Who's that?"

"She was the Mexican girl on the back of Kaner's bike who we found disemboweled last night in a warehouse. You met her at the same time you let Den Laurey shoot Andrea Rackley right above her highly visible pregnancy. Guess your hands were tied there, too."

Contrition flashed on Rich's ragged face, a surprisingly soft expression beneath the scars and stubble. He shored himself back up, adjusting his eye patch with a snap that had to sting. "Some Mexican girl they killed doesn't make their top ten. These boys'd put a hole in someone's head just to have a place to rest their beer. A girl who got cut up is--sadly--the fuckin' least of it. I've got bigger responsibilities, a task force living on what I can feed them. I don't have the luxury of breaking cover just to get myself and their intended victim killed. There are bigger stakes here. I can't tell you the shit I've seen."

"You'd better start," Tannino said. "Right now."

The three FBI agents offered one another an array of eye contact that suggested staging, and then Smiles, the head suit at supervisory special agent, cleared his throat and said, "Allah's Tears."

Tannino said, "Huh?" with great annoyance.

"A new form of extremely fine heroin. The purest to hit our radar. It's a liquid concentration, translucent like water. AT's potency, compared to regular heroin, is off the charts. It takes an enormous amount of raw product--the output of hundreds of acres of poppy field--to yield a liter of this stuff. The chem jockeys worked out the production technology so that even saline-diluted to twentieth strength, a milliliter'll put you on the nod for six hours. It's highly addictive, makes black-tar withdrawal look like giving up ice cream for Lent. Easier to smuggle, too--requires minimal storage space. You mule in a fist-size shipment, dilute it, dole out drops in vials, and it'll go like wildfire."

Rich took up his hair in a fist, forming a makeshift ponytail. "Think the crack epidemic Supersized."

"But this product's even easier to move. Crack's appeal is that it's cheap to the consumer. This is economical for the distributor. And now AT's ready for a test run. L.A.'s the target market." Smiles traced his glistening, well-manicured mustache with a thumb and forefinger. "That's the good news."