by Don Winslow
“Anyone see you?” Jimmy asks.
“The cameras.”
“Gustafson went into a building and came out again.”
“Just in and out?” Landreau asks.
“He was in there maybe fifteen minutes.”
What the hell, Landreau thinks. “Stay on them.”
They toss the baseball around.
Call it tradition, call it superstition, it’s what they do.
Toss it around like an all-star infield.
“They’re playing ball.”
“What?” Landreau asks.
“They’re playing catch.”
Landreau knows that means they’re going in.
Jimmy drops the fuckin’ ball.
Everything stops. They stand stock-still.
Jimmy picks up the ball, jams it into his glove, and then shoves his glove under his arm. “Fuck it. Laissez les bon temps rouler.”
They head for the high-rise.
Oscar Diaz is sweating like a motherfucker.
“What happened to the pinche AC?!” he yells.
“I called down,” Jorge says.
Jorge is Rico’s replacement. Not as tough, but a lot more tech-savvy, which Oscar considers an asset.
“Call down again!” Oscar yells. It’s not just being uncomfortable—the air in the room could stress out his fish. They’re very sensitive to any change in their environment.
“No, they’re here,” Jorge says, looking at the monitors. “Three Joe Lunchbuckets in overalls.”
“McNabb, Suazo, and Gustafson went in. Carter’s on the outside. They’re dressed like HVAC repairmen.”
Landreau takes this in.
“Boss, you want us to grab them?”
Landreau doesn’t answer right away. Jimmy McNabb is about to commit real or career suicide, he thinks, and take me with him. I let this guy do what I think he’s about to do, I’ll be lucky to be a mall cop in Dogshit, Alabama. “Hold off.”
He gets on the horn to the division commander in the 4th over in Algiers.
“I want a cordon thrown around that building,” Landreau says. “Nothing goes in, nothing comes out. And no sirens.”
“What—”
“McNabb’s going after his brother’s killer.”
Eva watches the blips move toward Algiers Point.
Looks like every radio car in the 4th.
She locks in on the calls. Cordon around that building. Nothing goes in or out. . . . The guy who did Danny . . . Roxanne . . .
Her chest tightens, she feels like she can’t breathe.
Jimmy McNabb . . .
Hendricks bursts into Landreau’s office. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?!”
“Stay out of this.”
“You’re making yourself an accessory to homicide!”
“Arrest me.”
“I’m sending my people in,” Hendricks says.
“The guys in the Fourth won’t let them through,” says Landreau.
“You’ve lost your goddamn mind,” Hendricks says. “I’m taking this up to the chief.”
He doesn’t have to.
The chief appears in the doorway. “Someone want to tell me what’s going on here?”
Hendricks tells him.
The chief listens, nods, then says, “The man in that building killed one of my female officers and tortured another one of our officers to death. So here’s what we’re going to do—the cordon stays around that building. Our radios are going to go on the fritz. And you’re going to go home, have a beer, and watch a ball game.”
“You’re just going to wash your hands of this?!”
“Don’t make me wash yours,” the chief says. “Because if I do, I’m going to use some very harsh soap. I hope we have an understanding here.”
The chief walks out.
The lookout on the roof can’t believe what he’s seeing.
But it looks like every cop car in the city is headed toward the building. Then the stream of cars parts like water hitting a rock and swirls around it.
We’re surrounded, he thinks.
He gets on the phone and calls down.
“The fuck you mean we can’t get out!” Oscar yells.
Jorge has fucking had it. He screams, “Which word didn’t you understand?! We’re fucking surrounded! Every cop in the city is going to be in here in about five fucking minutes!!!”
The bladefin basslet, acutely sensitive to noise, starts to dash around the tank. The blue queen angelfish scoots into her little cave.
“I ain’t going to no prison,” Oscar says. He’d been to prison already, in Honduras. It was not a good experience. “Alert all the guys. We’re going to slug it out. You seen Scarface?”
Yeah, I seen that shitty movie, Jorge thinks. “It’s a fucking movie, Oscar!”
“Make the call! DefCon 4!”
Jorge makes the call. Or calls, plural—they have guys on the fourth floor, the sixth, and a fucking squad on nine.
Oscar rips the cushions off the gray Henredon sofa and pulls out an AK-47. He ain’t going out easy.
Then the lookout calls down.
“What?!” Jorge yells.
“They ain’t coming in.”
“The fuck you mean?!”
“They ain’t coming in,” the lookout says. “They’re just standing around their cars, facing the other way.”
Oscar runs out to the terrace.
Sees the necklace of cop cars around the building.
What the fuck are they doing? he wonders.
Why aren’t they coming?
Jimmy steps into the service elevator.
Harold removes a battery-powered drill out of his toolbox and opens the panel. Takes a quick look, cuts one wire, and then touches another like he’s boosting a car.
Jimmy hits the P button, and the elevator starts up.
Jorge remembers the Joe Lunchbuckets coming up here to fix the AC. He goes to the monitor, clicks to the service elevator, and sees two repairmen and the ripped-out panel.
“Oscar, come look at this.”
Oscar comes and looks.
Sees a guy who very much resembles the cop they made hop.
Jimmy McNabb.
Oscar gets it now.
Jorge is already on the phone.
The elevator doors slide open on the fourth floor.
Harold’s shotgun is at his hip.
It blasts the would-be shooter into the wall.
The doors close.
“Going up,” Jimmy says.
Wilmer starts up the stairs.
The Steyr held in front of him.
The first three flights are quiet, but Wilmer hears a door open above him on the fourth floor.
Footsteps on the landing.
He takes another couple of steps then says, “¿Está bien Oscar?” Is Oscar okay?
A guy steps onto the landing, a 9mm Glock in his hand.
Wilmer shoots first.
And last.
Angelo is on the fire escape.
Hears the Steyr burst from inside and knows the show has started.
The scene outside is pretty amazing. When he saw the cordon of radio units, he thought the show had been preempted, but then the officers just sat or stood outside the cars. Some civilians in the building have figured out that something is wrong and are emerging, the cops walking them through the cordon.
But no one’s coming in.
They’re going to let Jimmy do his thing.
Angelo keeps heading up.
He’s on the sixth floor when he gets shot.
The elevator doors slide open again on six.
Oscar’s guy doesn’t see anyone in it, so he sticks his head in.
Jimmy blows it off.
The doors bang against his body.
Jimmy kicks it out, and the doors slide shut.
The noise is unreal.
Gunshots boom in the staircase from the sixth floor down. Wilmer on his stomach, wriggling up like a Slinky.
Has nowhere to go but up.
Fires, crawls, fires. Shoots at the walls so the rounds ricochet around the corner.
Seems to be a good idea, because the shooting stops.
Angelo lies fetal, crumpled up against the fire-escape railing.
The narco comes out the window to give him the head shot.
Angelo fires from underneath his arm and gives him one instead.
Then he gets up and keeps climbing, thanking God and Jimmy that they both made him wear that vest.
Elevator door doesn’t open on seven.
Jimmy and Harold get out on eight.
Decide that the elevator car is a moving, vertical coffin for two.
So when the doors start opening on nine and Oscar’s guys blast it with AK and MAC fire, they don’t see any bodies.
What they do see is an M16 “bounding” mine that goes off and releases a few thousand shards of shrapnel into them.
Wilmer is pinned down between eight and nine.
He’s been hit twice in the vest and once in the left hand, and it’s only a matter of time, and not much, before he takes one in the head. The fuckers are yelling at him, too, taunting him.
¡Vamos, sube, cabrón! ¿Porqué no subes?! Come on up, asshole! Why don’t you come up?!
Then he hears a different voice. Jimmy’s. “Wilmer, you down there!? Move down a floor! Now!”
Wilmer rolls down the stairs, leaving a smear of blood behind him. He hears Jimmy yell, “Cover up!”
Wilmer throws his arms over his head.
Harold stands in the ninth-floor doorway and shoulders the rocket launcher. He aims the barrel down the stairs and pulls the trigger.
The explosion is horrific.
But the shouting stops.
A few moans, no shouting.
“Wilmer, you good?!” Jimmy yells.
Wilmer can’t hear a thing.
Just loud ringing in his ears.
He gets up climbs over a stack of bodies on his way to the ninth floor. The stairs are slick with blood and other stuff.
Jimmy and Harold pull him in through the doorway.
“You’re hit,” Jimmy says.
“Stairs or elevator?” Wilmer asks.
“I don’t think the elevator’s going to work anymore,” Jimmy says. “And you stay in the stairs, get anyone coming down.”
“I want to—”
“I know you do,” Jimmy says. “Stay in the stairwell.”
He and Harold start up to the penthouse.
The police radios are silent, but Eva’s board is lighting up like a Christmas tree on crack. Concerned citizens calling: gunshots . . . explosions . . . screams. What’s going on? . . . another explosion . . .
And she wishes, profoundly, she hadn’t sent him on this mission, this crusade.
You lost one son, she tells herself, so you go ahead, send the other to his death? Her mother was a gambler, taught her since she was a little girl that you don’t chase bad money with good. You never catch it, you never get it back.
Now she doesn’t take the calls but prays instead.
Please God, please Mother Mary, please St. Jude, the patron of lost causes, please send me my son back.
The explosions have rattled Oscar.
Literally.
The walls shook, a miniature tidal wave roiled the fish tank, and the grouper is going batshit crazy.
Jorge’s not far behind.
He sees the images on the monitor—his boys splattered over walls, pieces of them like a box of spare human parts falling out of the ceiling—and says, “I’m turning myself in.”
“The fuck you are,” Oscar says.
“The fuck I’m not.” He heads for the door.
Oscar puts half a clip in his back. Then he looks at the other eight guys who have assembled in the penthouse for a last stand. “Anyone else want to turn himself in?”
No one does.
“There’s nine of us and four of them,” Oscar says. “Only three ways in here. We take care of these pendejos up here, we go down to the basement, then make a break for it. We still have a chance. Split up, cover the lobby door, the back door, and the terrace.”
He moves to the center of the living room.
If Jimmy McNabb wants me, he has to go through the others.
Not two of them.
The two narcos covering the terrace decide to go down the fire escape, wait until they’re out of Oscar’s sight, throw their hands up, and take their chances with the police.
They meet Angelo coming up on eight.
Everyone fires at once.
Harold stands to the side of the back door, points the shotgun at a forty-five-degree angle toward the lock.
Jimmy presses himself against the wall on the lock side of the door, ready to go in.
Always the first one through the door, right?
Harold blasts the lock and jumps back.
The door swings open.
A wall of bullets blasts out.
Jimmy doesn’t go in first this time.
He sends grenades instead.
Sidearm pitches through the doorway.
First a flashbang to blind.
Followed by a fragmentation to kill.
Then he goes in.
Eva used to say, when the boys made a mess in the kitchen, that it looked like a hurricane hit it.
This kitchen looks like a hurricane punched it in the face.
Backsplashes splashed with blood.
Stainless-steel refrigerator stained.
Oven door hanging open, crooked on one hinge, like a broken jaw.
Three dead, or getting that way. Two on the floor, one leaning over the counter. A survivor crouches behind a butcher block in the middle of the floor. Rises up to shoot Jimmy, misses, hits Harold instead.
Straight in the forehead.
The big man’s knees buckle, and then he topples onto the butcher block, then slides off, dying on the way down.
Vengeance always has a cost.
Jimmy swings the HK butt, crushes the shooter’s skull, and moves through the kitchen. Harold is dead, and there ain’t nothing Jimmy can do for him except grieve, and that will come later.
No time for sorrow now, or regret.
Later, later.
He shoulders the HK and fires in front of him until the clip is empty.
Angelo wipes the blood from his eyes.
Head wounds bleed like crazy.
A “grazing” bullet plows a deep furrow, and he’s going to have an ugly scar, but he’s alive, unlike the guy who shot him and his buddy, both draped over the fire-escape railing like ghetto laundry.
Dizzy, sick from a concussion, Angelo climbs.
Stay in the stairwell?
Wilmer ain’t staying in no fucking staircase.
Qué carajo.
Jimmy or no Jimmy.
White dog, black dog, it’s a dog.
Clutching his nine in his one good (right) hand, he goes up the stairs into the penthouse lobby.
Sees the open door.
Hears the firing and steps in.
Jimmy whirls.
Ain’t no one supposed to be behind him.
Fires.
Misses Wilmer’s head by an inch.
Wilmer smiles with relief.
Then a bullet hits him in the throat, another one in the mouth, a third between the eyes, and just like that, Wilmer is gone from this world.
Jimmy turns and fires.
The shooter rattles and falls.
No time for regret, or sorrow.
Later later later later.
Jimmy steps into the living room.
Firing from the hip, sweeping from right to left, just laces it with fire, shoots up chairs, sofas, tables, windows, fish tank. Ninety gallons of water spill out, fish flop on the carpet.
Jimmy drops the HK, pulls his 9mm Glock, and scans the room.
Where is Oscar?
Lying flat behind the sofa, Oscar sees his precious blue queen angel g
asp for air, its mouth sucking, its beautiful azure scales shimmering.
He’s outraged.
What he wants to do is stand up and blast the man who killed his fish and destroyed his life. That’s what he wants to do, but Oscar Diaz is a coward, so what he does is crawl on his belly toward the terrace.
Jimmy sees him, just as he’s slithering through the shattered slider.
He walks over and steps on the small of his back.
“Where you goin’, Oscar?” Jimmy McNabb is a big man, his foot is heavy. He raises it and brings it down on Oscar’s spine again and again, like to break it. “No, you and me got a date, man. We got us an appointment.”
He stomps his back, his legs, his ankles, his feet. “This is for Danny. This is for my brother. My mother. My old man.”
Eva’s voice:
I want you to embrace everything I tried to love out of you. I want you to embrace your hate. I want you to avenge your brother.
Oscar grunts in pain. His hands still grip the AK, but Jimmy stomps on his fingers, breaking some, twisting some, bruising others. Keeping one foot on Oscar’s hand, he kicks him in the face with the other.
You do that for me? You do that for me. You think of Danny. You think of your baby brother.
Jimmy kicks him in the mouth, shattering his teeth.
And you kill them all. You kill all the men who killed my Danny.
Stomps on the back of his head.
I will.
Kicks him in the temple.
And you make it hurt.
Jimmy stops kicking him. “I ain’t done with you, Oscar. You gonna stay conscious, you gonna stay awake. I’m going to set you on fire and throw you over the side like the garbage you are. You’re gonna burn like you made—”
The blow hits him in the back of the neck and drives him forward, off Oscar. Then a forearm wraps around his throat, another locks it from behind, and he’s in a choke hold.
The guy that was bent over the kitchen counter.
Jimmy can’t breathe.
About to black out.
He drops his gun, stabs backward with his fingers and hits the man’s eyes. It loosens the grip just enough for Jimmy to get a breath, get one hand inside the choke, and get it off his carotid artery, and as he does, he staggers onto the terrace, toward the edge.
The guy leans back with all his strength, trying to snap Jimmy’s neck, but Jimmy’s left hand grabs a finger and snaps it. The man screams, Jimmy turns in his grasp, facing him, and then lifts him. Hefts him over the side, and the man is in the air, legs kicking, arms swimming, screaming for ten long stories down.
