by Harvey, JM
Jasper pursed his lips and shook his head, but he didn’t look scared. “I believe I’ll take me a rain check on that.”
Val didn’t reply. He could barely restrain himself from crossing the room to kick Smith’s ribs in. But he knew a simple beating wouldn’t be enough for Jasper; he would have to kill the man. And that would put everything that Val loved in jeopardy; his wife, his children, even his freedom. He turned and stepped over Ansel and through the door.
“Bye now, Vicious,” Jasper Smith called after him, “I’ll be seeing you.”
11
Victoria raced down the left hand lane of IH 30 toward Oak Cliff, weaving onto the shoulder when necessary, flying by big rigs and minivans, blasting her horn and pushing the tachometer to its redline limit. She wanted to be on the scene before SWAT made their move. If there was a chance of taking Axel alive she wanted to be there to ensure that he was.
In Texas the police didn’t often seek extrajudicial revenge for fallen officers - cop killers were automatically on the fast track for lethal injection - but ‘accidents’ had been known to happen and she wanted to talk to Axel.
She jumped off the freeway at Marsalis Avenue, opposite the Dallas Zoo where a sculpture of a giraffe peeked over the northbound lanes. She flew up the off-ramp, gunned the Jeep through a tire-squealing right turn onto Marsalis, then took an even harder left onto 12th Street only to find the street blocked by a trio of DPD blue-and-whites.
She stood on the brake, driving it into the floorboard, and skidded to a stop just inches from the nearest patrol car, the Jeep’s rear end still blocking the inside lane of Marsalis, her heart lodged in her windpipe.
A pair of uniformed cops were up and running toward her before the Jeep had come a stop, guns drawn, expressions hostile. They were both yelling, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying, though the guns made their point clear enough.
Beyond the two oncoming officers, 12th street was swarming with cops, most of them crouched behind a haphazardly parked collection of patrol cars and DPD SUVs, their shotguns, rifles and pistols aimed at a faded prairie style home with a sagging front porch. At the center of the activity, Jack Birch was standing at the rear of the SWAT teams’ Lanco BearCat armored vehicle, surrounded by a half-dozen SWAT officers dressed in dark blue jumpsuits.
Jack yelled something at the officers advancing on Victoria that stopped them in mid-stride, but they didn’t look happy about it. They grudgingly lowered their weapons, turned, trotted back to their patrol car, and dropped to their knees behind the front fender,
Victoria exited the Jeep. Technically, though she was an officer of the court, she wasn’t allowed at the scene of a crime in progress, but her years of working closely with the police, and her reputation for getting max-time, had bought her passage beyond the police tape dozens of times in the past.
But this day was different.
“Stop right there. Counselor.” Birch barked as he broke away from the SWAT officers and quickly walked her way, ducking low to keep the cluster of cop cars between himself and the dilapidated house.
The house was almost paintless, slump-shouldered and weary looking, its windows and doors covered in rusty burglar bars. A slot with a metal hatch had been cut into the center of the front door to allow drug transactions without face to face contact. Your standard issue dope house. But it wasn’t the house that drew her eyes, it was the bullet-riddled DPD squad car parked directly in front of it. The car was smoke blackened and buckled like a Coke can that had been stuffed full of firecrackers.
Birch came to a stop beside her then turned his eyes back on the house. As he spoke the cigarette dangling from his lips bobbed up and down, sending up twisting curls of smoke that obscured the left side of his face.
“Stay back here, out of the line of fire,” he warned. “They’re still shooting from the upper windows. Blasted the hell out of the first car on the scene.” He jerked his chin at the ruined squad car. “I tried to flag him down, but he flew right past me. He was barely out of the car before the guys upstairs started blazing away. Hit the gas tank. Damn thing blew sky-high.”
“What about the officer?” Victoria asked, dreading the answer.
“He’s fine. Couple of nicks from broken glass, some nasty burns.”
Victoria nodded in relief then got down to business.
“So, what’s the plan?”
“They’re doing too much shooting to wait them out.” Birch replied. “Especially with the zoo right across the highway. SWAT Team Two’s going to take the back door and we got snipers in the old storefront,” he tilted his head at the opposite side of the street, indicating a three-story brick building that had been boarded over and abandoned to the junkies long ago. “Team One and I are going to run the Armadillo right up to the porch,” he added, nodding at the BearCat armored vehicle, “blow the front door and gas ‘em. We’ll make entry and head upstairs. Team Two will blow the back door and come in behind us to secure the first floor.”
Victoria put her hand on Jack’s forearm. “We need Axel alive, Jack,” she reminded him.
Birch nodded. Smoke trickled from his nostrils. “Gonna do my best,” he said.
Considering the situation, it was all she could hope to hear.
“Birch!” the SWAT Teams’ Lieutenant, Felix Aransas, shouted then pumped his fist twice in the air. Time to go.
“Move back a few blocks, counselor,” Jack said then trotted away without another word.
“Be careful, Jack!” Victoria shouted at his back. But she didn’t turn to leave, she moved forward, dropping to the asphalt beside the two officers who had tried to chase her off. They glanced up when she hunkered down beside them, putting their patrol car between herself and the house, but neither said anything. It wouldn’t have mattered if they had. She wasn’t going anywhere until they had Axel Rankin in custody.
Victoria watched as SWAT Team One and Detective Birch coolly went through a last minute weapons check. She was anything but cool. Her heart rate was ratcheted up to ninety beats a minute and her fingernails were carving up her palms. She knew people were going to die today, that was the ugly reality of police work; she just prayed that none of them would be cops.
Compared to the SWAT team, dressed in full body armor and equipped with automatic weapons, Birch looked almost defenseless with his standard-issue bulletproof vest and 9mm pistol. Victoria was surprised that Felix was even allowing Birch to join the breach team. That went against procedure, but Jack probably hadn’t given the lieutenant much choice. With Bastrop dead, Jack would have charged through the door with or without the SWAT team.
After a round of handshakes with his men, Felix climbed through the armored vehicle’s rear hatch and banged the doors closed. The rest of the team, with Birch in the lead, hunkered down behind the Armadillo, weapons up, flak helmets and face shields on. Seconds later, the vehicle’s engine roared and it lunged forward. It lumbered down the street, gathering speed quickly.
Fully automatic gunfire erupted from the upstairs windows and a blizzard of bullets pinged and zinged off the roof of the Armadillo, ricocheting into the surrounding patrol cars, puncturing sheet metal, shattering windows and sending the cops in the street diving for the pavement. None of the rounds reached the SWAT team concealed behind the bulk of the Armadillo.
Twenty feet from the dope house, the Armadillo jumped the curb and crossed the sidewalk, charging at the dope house’s front steps with the SWAT team right behind it, running to keep up. The armored vehicle smashed through the steps and slammed into the porch. Rotten floorboards buckled and caved, sending broken planks flying in every direction, but it didn’t slow down the Armadillo. Its armored front end rammed straight through the porch and crashed into the house. The entire structure shivered and a ten-foot section of the porch roof collapsed, dropping an avalanche of plywood and 2x4s onto the Armadillo’s steel roof.
And then the SWAT team was moving, Jack Birch in the lead. They raced out from behind the Armadillo,
protected from gunfire by the remains of the porch roof, clambered up onto what was left of the porch, and charged the front door. The lead cop slapped a hook and chain onto the door’s burglar bars while the rest of the team crouched low, pressing themselves tight against the exterior wall.
The Armadillo’s engine roared again and the vehicle lurched backward, jerking the bars straight out of their frame and dragging them clattering across the sidewalk and out into the street. Almost before the bars were fully out of the way, two of the team attacked the wooden door with a battering ram, knocking it off its hinges with their second swing. A burst of automatic fire chewed at the doorframe as they dropped back to cover and a third officer moved forward in a crouch. He hooked a pair of gas canisters through the gap, tossing them deep into the house, before the gunfire drove him back.
The teargas canisters went off with a double ‘pop,’ instantly flooding the lower floor with a choking white fog that billowed out onto the porch through the battered down door, almost hiding the SWAT team from Victoria’s view. But the gas didn’t stop the bikers. They opened up full throttle, blazing off a barrage of automatic fire from the home’s upper floor, trashing patrol cars and scaring the hell out of the officers hidden behind them. Light-bars and windows exploded, doors and hoods were shredded. A few officers risked their lives to return fire, peppering the second story windows with shotgun and pistol rounds. That fire distracted the bikers upstairs just long enough for the SWAT team to rush through the front door, weapons up. Birch was the last one inside.
Victoria was thankful that Birch had been smart enough to let the better armed and armored men take the lead, but her thankfulness was cut short by the sounds of more gunfire from inside the house. Long, ragged blasts of automatic fire that was immediately answered by a series of controlled three-round bursts as the SWAT team went to work. Someone screamed, full throated and awful, and the gunfire rose to a thunderous roar, as if every person in the house were firing as fast as their fingers could work the trigger.
Suddenly, the gunfire cut off, like clicking off a TV. Someone moaned, another person sobbed a curse and then the street went as silent as a morgue.
Cautiously, Victoria stood and leaned across the cruiser’s rear deck, trying to get a better view of the house, but she couldn’t see much of anything. Teargas oozed from the broken windows and through the bullet-riddled walls. She was inching up the side of the car for a better angle when the uniformed officer closest to her grabbed her shoulder in a vice-like grip and jerked her back down.
His brown eyes blazed out of a bloodless face. “Keep your ass down or fall back to the other side of Marsalis,” he said, his lips skinned back over clenched teeth. “This isn’t a place for tourists.”
Victoria flushed at the insult, but she bit off any reply. It wasn’t the time or place for a petty squabble; people were dying fifty yards away, but one thing was damned certain, she wasn’t falling back to the other side of the street no matter how dangerous it got. She stayed where she was, crouched behind the patrol car on the hot asphalt, and waited through the interminable silence, staring blankly into the dark slot of a drainage inlet cut into the face of the curb ten feet away. Trash had piled up in front of the inlet almost blocking it completely, but something glittered in the pile; a jagged, circular piece of metal, its edges shiny new, half-hidden under a crumpled Frito’s bag.
Victoria’s lungs skipped a breath. She had a good idea what she was looking at, but she had to be sure. She crawled forward on her knees, mindless of the fact that she was ruining a two hundred dollar skirt, and brushed the Frito’s bag aside. What lay underneath it was a half-moon shaped piece of metal with ragged edges that looked like the bottom of a broken metal cup.
“Oh, shit,” she breathed as she ducked down for a closer look, already knowing what she would find. The inside of the metal cup was threaded, a piece of white plumber’s tape still embedded in the grooves. She recognized it immediately for what it was: the end cap of a pipe bomb.
Victoria had been put through a crash course in homemade bomb making during the Park Cities Bomber case, two years before. The bomber had started out by booby-trapping dumpsters with small charges that did little more than scare the hell out of whoever happened to dump a load of trash atop them. Then a homeless woman had climbed into a one of the bomber’s dumpsters to pick out aluminum cans and ended up missing a foot. The crippling of the woman had enflamed the bomber. His next two bombs were much larger, and placed in public trashcans on the streets of downtown Dallas, rigged to take out the first person who used them. Two months into the spree he was caught wiring a trash barrel on Commerce Street, but by then six more people had been disfigured or maimed.
“Shit!” she barked again, loud enough that the cops behind her looked over. The Confederate Syndicate hadn’t hit the gas tank of the patrol car; they had blown it up with a pipe bomb! And where there was one bomb, there would be more.
And Jack Birch was inside the house with only a crummy vest for protection!
As Victoria snatched up the end cap she heard someone inside the house yell, “Team One going up!” and knew that SWAT Team Two would be busting down the back door any second. There wasn’t time to explain what she had found to the two officers crouched behind her; she had to get the information to the SWAT teams’ commander!
Victoria jumped to her feet, kicked off her heels, hiked up her skirt, and ran straight past the two cops, ignoring their startled yells to “Stop!” She rounded the rear of the car and sprinted for the Armadillo where Felix Aransas was crouched, a walkie-talkie glued to his ear.
That’s when all hell broke loose.
Once again, the Confederate Syndicate bikers on the second floor opened fire on the street below. Bullets chewed at the Armadillo, the police cars and the houses across the street. Victoria saw a female officer go down, clutching her chest, trying to stop the blood spilling across her crisp blue uniform. A portly undercover officer with long hair and a greasy beard was up and running before the woman had even hit the ground. He dragged her toward the cover of a bullet-riddled blue-and-white, glancing up at Victoria as she raced past, his eyes bright and round with fear.
Victoria did a poor job of keeping low as she zigzagged through the maze of cars, forgoing cover for the sake of speed. Bullets ripped up the asphalt around her and broken pavement peppered her legs like shrapnel, drawing quick blood. A bullet whizzed past her cheek so close that she felt it tug through her hair, but she didn’t slow down. With ten feet left to go she dove for the back of the Armadillo.
She hit the ground hard, tucked and rolled, the asphalt tearing at her knees and elbows, ripping her jacket and skirt to shreds. She came to a jittering halt, skidding on her butt, right at the feet of Lieutenant Felix Aransas.
Victoria didn’t waste time. “Pipe-bomb!” she panted, thrusting up the half-destroyed end cap. “They blew up the patrol car with a pipe bomb!”
Aransas got the implication just as quickly as Victoria had. His jaw sagged and his eyes went scared.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said as he brought the radio to his lips. “Fall back! Fall back! IED!” he roared into the radio. “They’ve got IED’s! Fall ba—”
Aransas was cut off by an explosion inside the house that ripped one of the second story windows out of its frame and sent the burglar bars crashing down on top of a patrol car, smashing the light bar flat and sending the two uniformed officers behind it scrambling for fresh cover. The pair bolted for a plain-white SUV parked ten feet behind them, but they didn’t make it. Victoria watched in horror as the lead officer went down, blood erupting from his forehead. He hit the pavement like a side of beef, half his head blasted away. But dead or not his partner wasn’t leaving him behind. He skidded to a stop, ignoring the bullets clawing up the pavement, grabbed his buddy by the collar and dragged him behind the SUV.
Aransas edged out to take a quick look around the side of the Armadillo. Victoria stood and followed behind him. Both of them saw an object co
me flying out of the smoldering hole in the upper story of the house. It arced toward the ground trailing a ribbon of smoke, hit the pavement beside the Armadillo with a dull ‘clank!’ and rolled toward them, a burning fuse sputtering at one end.
“Oh, Jesus,” Aransas whispered as the pipe bomb rolled to a stop at his feet.
12
Valentine climbed into the tow truck, cranked the engine, then sat there staring into the rearview mirror, looking back at the clubhouse door, replaying the last ten minutes.
He had just kicked a hornets’ nest.
As a cop, Val had been afforded a certain level of protection that went beyond the gun strapped to his hip. He had been part of a blue brotherhood that was as fraternal and violent as any street gang. Setting out to kill a cop or harm his family was almost unheard of in Texas. The state was too efficient at executing cop killers and the crooks knew it. But he didn’t have that protection anymore. No gold shield and no backup. And Jasper Smith wasn’t going to let this go. Garland was a problem too, but one Val felt sure he could handle. The old man had a role to play, the convict-turned-preacher, and Garland was too old to want a return visit to Huntsville. But Jasper probably liked prison. He probably felt more at home there than he did on the street. The guy was a sadistic peckerwood looking for someone to stomp.
And those burns…Jesus, anyone who would inflict that much pain on himself would not hesitate to inflict it on others.
Val’s thoughts went immediately to the twins, Max and Kyle, and the danger they were now in. Garland and Jasper would see the boys as a chink in Val’s armor. As a lever to extort money that didn’t exist. Jasper wouldn’t hesitate to use them against Val. To harm or even kill them if he had to.
Val’s reaction to that train of thought was sudden and instinctive; he had to kill Jasper Smith. Right now. He jerked the junky little .25 from his pocket and was reaching for the door handle when he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the rearview mirror. A glimpse that froze him in his seat. There was blood on his face. A lot of it. Ansel Haskell’s. But it wasn’t the blood that made him pause; it was the look in his eyes. Something dark, turbulent and gleefully predatory. It was a look he recognized all too well. The same look that had been on Lamar Sutton’s face right before Val had shot him down. It was the look of a coldblooded killer.
