Will said, “That would explain the five hundred dollars. You overpay to keep the questions down and buy an easy yes.” He went back to the timing. “Bad guys don’t play the long game. This was something recent. The hit was put out in the last two weeks, maximum. So, we figure out what happened in the last two weeks.”
“Macon is in Bibb County now.” Amanda tapped some keys on her computer. “That’s region …?”
“Twelve,” Will supplied.
Amanda raised her voice again. “Caroline, get me Nick Shelton on the phone.”
Will said, “I’ve been reading the Macon paper every day.” He ignored the surprised looks they gave him. “About a week ago, two cops were hurt raiding a shooting gallery that was selling mostly meth and pills. The details were sketchy. One’s still in the hospital. The other’s taking disability.”
“Anything else?” Amanda asked.
“They netted some cash under the drug seizure rule. Paper didn’t give an exact number, but Macon PD was talking about using it to buy new cruisers, some AKs for SWAT.” Will shrugged again. “The rest was just the usual blotter stuff—missing teenage girls, pot bust at the school, a guy died on the toilet.”
Amanda clasped her hands together on the desk. She was obviously done with talking. “All right. We have a plan?”
“My hospital shift starts at eleven.” Will told Faith, “You’ll have to figure out a way to get me and Lena in the same room without blowing my cover.”
“I’m sure she’ll cooperate.” Faith sounded skeptical. She asked Amanda, “Do you think it’s worth me going to the trailer park where Zachary and Lawrence lived?”
Amanda shook her head. “Branson’s probably flipped the place upside down by now. Give it a day or two. Go in soft so there’s a nice contrast.”
“All right,” Faith agreed. “Speaking of Branson, I’ll double-check the information she gave us, run down the records on Zachary and Lawrence, make sure there’s nothing she’s leaving out. Might as well run Adams and Long while I’m at it. I’ll send everything to data analysis so they can track down bank accounts, mortgages, known associates, family members, whatever else pops up.”
Amanda said, “That’s going to be a lot of information to sort through. Pull some help from the field office. Make them do the bulk of the work on Jared Long so we have a long paper trail if this goes to trial. We don’t want to be accused of prejudicial thinking.”
“You mean again?” Faith pushed herself up from her chair. “I’ll call the cell phone company and get a list off the towers near Adams’s house. Midnight in a rural area, there can’t be that many active calls.”
“Let me know if they give you any push-back,” Amanda said. Cellular providers were getting stingy about data mining lately. “If we need a warrant, it’ll take a few days.”
“Amanda?” Caroline yelled. “Nick Shelton’s on line two.”
Amanda picked up the receiver, but she put it to her shoulder instead of her ear. “Will, be careful. Keep your phone on you at all times so we know exactly where you are.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He followed Faith toward the door.
“Also—” Amanda waited for them to turn back around. “Will’s right about the timing. Whatever set this off had to be recent. Faith, put together a timeline. Start with last night, then go backward day by day, minute by minute if you have to. Find out whatever the hell it is Lena Adams did to put all of this into motion.”
4.
MACON, GEORGIA
SEVEN DAYS AGO—THE DAY OF THE RAID
Dawn turned the morning light a cobalt blue as the raid van roared down a gravel road. There were ten cops in back, five on one side, five on the other, all jammed shoulder-to-shoulder so that every bump of the tires made them jerk in unison. The radio speakers were blaring Ice-T’s “Cop Killer.” The air inside the van vibrated with the raging beat.
Cop killer. Better you than me.
Lena Adams steadied her shotgun as they hit another rut in the road. She checked the Glock strapped to her thigh, made sure the Velcro held the gun tightly in place. The voice in her head screamed along with Ice-T’s as they got closer to the target. She took a few quick breaths, not to clear her mind but to make it spin, to amp up the adrenaline and the absolute high that came from knowing she was a few moments away from the biggest bust of her career.
And then everything stopped.
The music snapped off. The red light came on over their heads.
Silence.
Two minutes until arrival.
The van slowed. Gravel crunched under the tires. Guns were drawn, magazines checked. Helmets and protective glasses were adjusted. The smell of testosterone got thicker. Nine men and one woman. All of them suited in Kevlar vests and black fatigues, loaded up with enough ammo to take down a small army.
Lena breathed through her mouth, tasting the fear and excitement circling inside the van. She took in her team. Eyes wide. Pupils the size of dimes. The anticipation was almost sexual. She could feel the exhilaration building around her, the way everyone shifted in their seats, gripped their guns tighter in their hands. They’d been staking out the house for the last two weeks, had planned their attack even as the junkies and whores streamed in and out like ants on a mound. There would be piles of money. Percocet. Vicodin. Hillbilly heroin. Coke. Guns.
Lots of guns.
Overnight surveillance told them that four men were inside the house. One was a low-level thug on parole off assault charges. The second was a junkie scumbag who would suck off a dog to feed his Oxy habit. The third was Diego Nuñez, an old-school enforcer who enjoyed getting his hands dirty. The fourth was their leader, a bastard named Sid Waller who’d been questioned on a rape and two different murders but somehow managed to skate on all of them.
Waller was their main target. Lena had been tracking him for eight months, doing a masochistic hokeypokey—locking him up, letting him go, locking him up, letting him go.
Not this time.
The drugs and guns would put Sid away for twenty years, minimum, but Lena wanted more than that. She wanted him to know for the rest of his miserable life that a woman had cuffed him, jailed him, convicted him. Not that he would have a long life once Lena was finished. She wanted Sid Waller on death row. She wanted to watch them jam the needle in his arm. See that last flicker of life drain out of him. And she was betting her career on making that happen.
For two weeks, she’d been fighting the brass, pushing them to keep the operation going, pleading with them to extend the overtime, authorize the manpower, spend the money, and pull in the favors for the snitch who’d brought them all to this house in the middle of the woods.
Sid’s crew wouldn’t last long behind bars. Diego Nuñez would hold out, but the other two were junkies, and with Sid Waller out of the way, getting high would trump being loyal. In less than twenty-four hours, they’d both be scrambling to make deals, and Lena had a DA who was ready to hand them out. Sid Waller had killed a nineteen-year-old kid. He’d raped his own niece and slit his sister’s throat when she’d called 911. Every cop in this van wanted to be the one to take him down.
Lena didn’t bother with wanting it. She was actually going to do it.
She looked up at the ceiling, staring at the red light until it flickered off and then on again.
One minute.
Lena closed her eyes, going over the plan. They had pulled the records on the house. It was a foreclosure, one of many on the outskirts of town. Brick, which was good because it would stop bullets. The single-story structure was in the middle of two point-five acres bordered by a national forest on one side and a rural route on the other that bisected Macon and fed into Interstate 75, heading north into Atlanta. Searching the tax commissioner’s office had netted them a builder’s diagram: den, bathroom, and two bedrooms in the back. Dining room and kitchen in the front, with a set of stairs opposite the sink that led down into the basement.
They’d rehearsed the raid so many times that Lena saw it like a tig
htly choreographed dance. DeShawn Franklin and Mitch Cabello would breach the side door with a Monoshock Ram. Lena would take the front of the house with Paul Vickery, her partner for the last year. Eric Haigh and Keith McVale would clear the bathroom and two bedrooms in the back. DeShawn and Mitch would secure any prisoners. The remaining men would guard the perimeter of the house and make sure no one slipped out through a window or door. Lena had wanted at least eight more bodies on the team, but the operation was already pushing the million-dollar mark and Lena knew better than to ask the brass for more.
They always worked in twos; no one entered a room alone. The layout of the house was choppy, each room walled off with nothing but a door in and out. Back at the station, they’d taped off the garage, mapping the rooms to scale. Lena and Paul had two doorways to contend with before they reached the basement: den to dining room, dining room to kitchen. Each opening represented a new opportunity to get shot.
The basement was going to be the trickiest part. The builder’s diagram showed a wide-open space, but that had been drawn in the fifties, when the house was built. Sometime in the last sixty years, the basement had been finished. There would be walls they didn’t know about. Closed doors and closets. There was no door to the outside, only two narrow, boarded-up windows that a grown man couldn’t fit through. The basement was a deathtrap.
Back at the station, they had drawn straws to see who would go down first. Lena’s team had won, but that was only because she had been holding the straws.
The van downshifted to a crawl. There were no windows in the back, but Lena could see past the driver’s head. The sun winked underneath the visor. A thick stand of pine trees arced around the side of the house. Aerial photos showed a straight shot to the rural route less than two hundred yards through the forest. If the bad guys decided to run, that was the direction they’d take, which was why two cruisers were assigned to patrolling that stretch of road.
The van stopped. Overhead, the red light flickered again, this time staying off.
Lena pumped her shotgun, loading a cartridge into the chamber. She checked the Glock again. Her team followed suit, checking their weapons. The driver, an old-timer named Kirk Davis, whispered into the radio, letting the brass know they’d arrived. The mobile command center was parked a mile away in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. If history was any indication, Denise Branson would wait until Lena’s team had secured the house, then roll in and take credit for everything.
So be it.
Lena’s credit would come when she had Sid Waller on the ground, her foot on his neck, thick plastic zip ties cutting into his fat wrists. It was the only thing left in her life that she wanted to do—could do. It got her up in the morning and it went to her empty bed with her every night.
Lena grabbed the door handle, then looked back at the group, stared each man in the eye to make sure they were ready. There were nods all around. She pulled open the door.
And the dance began.
Lena jumped out first, heading toward the house at a fast trot. She heard footsteps pounding behind her—nine guys armed to the teeth and ready to break some heads. She kept her shotgun tight to her chest as she ran toward the carport. Her Glock tapped against her thigh. She scanned the woods around the house, took in the trash littering the ground, the broken bottles and cigarette butts.
The perimeter team swarmed into position. Lena led the rest of her men into the carport. They lined up two on each side. Paul Vickery jammed his shoulder against Lena’s. He winked at her, like this was nothing, though she could see his chest heaving up and down underneath his vest. Inside the house, they heard the laugh track from a TV show, then music. The Jeffersons. “Movin’ On Up.”
Lena started the timer on her watch. She gave the nod to DeShawn and Mitch, who were holding the Monoshock, waiting for her signal.
They swung back the ram twice to build up momentum, then slammed the sixty-pound metal cylinder straight into the door. The wood splintered like glass.
Lena yelled, “Police!” as they rushed in—guns drawn, ready to light up the place.
But they were late to the party.
Two men sat on a yellow corduroy couch opposite the television. Their shirts were off. Jeans slung low. One had his hand tucked into his front pocket. The other guy held a can of beer. Both had their eyes open. Parted lips showed missing teeth. An array of handguns covered the battered coffee table in front of them.
Neither moved, or ever would again until the coroner came to pronounce them.
Their throats had been cut. The skin gaped open, showing white tips of vertebrae among the dark red sinew inside their necks.
Paul checked for pulses, though even from ten feet away, Lena could tell both men had been dead for hours. Waxy skin. The odor of decay. The junkie was one of the deceased—Elian Ramirez. His bare chest was concave, the ribs standing out like toothpicks. His murderer had saved him the cost of killing himself with Oxy.
Paul checked the second man, turning the head to get a better look at him. “Shit,” he cursed. His disappointment spread around the room.
Diego Nuñez, Sid Waller’s right-hand man. Lena watched a fly crawl across his eyeball. Nuñez’s purple-black tongue lolled out of his mouth like a chow’s. According to statements, Diego had taken his turn with Sid Waller’s niece once his boss had finished with her. He’d been behind the wheel during the drive-by that killed a nineteen-year-old kid who’d been stupid enough to mouth off to Waller. Lena’s guess was that, as a reward for good service, Diego had joined in on the fun with Waller’s sister. The woman had been brutally raped and beaten before her throat was sliced open.
Murderer. Rapist. Thug. He’d died with a beer in his hand and his eyes glued to the TV.
“Shit,” Paul repeated. He had found another body behind the couch. This one had been spared the slit throat, but part of his head was missing. It was a clean cut straight across. Lena guessed the ax leaning against the wall was the reason why. Long strands of hair and chunks of scalp and white bone were caked onto the edge of the blade.
Eric Haigh’s hand clamped to his mouth. Vomit spewed between his fingers as he ran out the door. As far as Lena was concerned, he could keep running. She had little tolerance for weakness. And she sure as shit wasn’t going to let her team get ambushed while they stood around with their thumbs up their asses.
She snapped her fingers for attention, the crisp sound cutting through the chorus booming from the TV. Lena pointed to the three corpses, then held up her hand, showing four fingers. Surveillance had four guys in the house. Sid Waller was yet to be found.
They didn’t need further prompting. DeShawn guarded the door so there wouldn’t be any surprises from the rear. Mitch took Eric’s place and followed Keith into the back hallway. Lena headed for the dining room, Paul behind her.
They kept at a low crouch as they walked. Trash was scattered across the floor—mostly beer cans and empty fast food bags. The carpet underneath was thick with grime. It stuck to the soles of Lena’s boots as she moved toward the open doorway to the dining room. She kept her tread light, mindful of the basement. She imagined Sid Waller down there, gun pointed up, listening for a sound he could shoot at.
The Jeffersons theme wound down with a gospel flourish. Lena could barely hear it over the sound of blood pumping in her ears as she stood to the side of the open dining room doorway. Her shoulder was against the wall. Plaster, lath, a few studs. Easily punctured by a nine-millimeter Parabellum, which Lena knew for a fact was Sid Waller’s ammo of choice.
Paul tapped her leg twice, giving her the go signal. She spun around the doorframe in a low stance and pointed her shotgun into the room. There was no dining room table, just a bloodstained mattress on the floor with the usual detritus found in a shooting gallery. Crack pipes. Scorched aluminum foil. Spent hypodermics. The sharp vinegar smell of heroin burned Lena’s nostrils. Water damage from a recent rain had caused the ceiling to collapse. There were chunks of plaster on the floor. The hardw
ood was warped, cupping like the hull of a canoe. Lena scanned upward, making sure no one was hiding in the rafters.
The room was empty. Through the broken window, Lena saw one of the other detectives in the front yard. He held his Colt AR-15 at chest level as he scanned back and forth like a pendulum. He stopped to shake his head at Lena, indicating no one had come out of the house.
She glanced back at Paul, then pointed toward the next doorway. This one was closed. The kitchen was beyond, then the basement door.
As rehearsed, Paul took the lead. Lena kept her shotgun braced against her shoulder as she walked backward, guarding the rear.
From the bedrooms, Mitch yelled, “Clear!”
Lena tapped Paul’s leg, indicating he should go. His movements mirrored her earlier ones as he kicked open the door and pointed his Glock into the kitchen. Lena swiveled with her shotgun.
Empty.
None of the cabinets had doors. Half the ceiling had fallen down. The other half was stained dark brown. The sink had been pulled out. Plaster was missing where copper pipes and electrical wire had been ripped out of the walls and sold for scrap. The stench from the open drain was nauseating. Paul pointed his Glock into the ceiling as he checked for hiding places, then shook his head, indicating it was clear.
They both looked at the basement door.
This was unexpected.
There was a wooden brace like you’d find across a barn door. A two-by-four rested on two metal U-channels that were bolted to each side of the doorframe.
Paul gave Lena an inquisitive look. She could practically hear his thoughts. They’d talked a great deal about the basement door. In all the scenarios, they had assumed two things: the door would be locked and a bad guy would be standing on the other side with a loaded gun. The plan called for them to work with their backs to the wall—use the butt of the shotgun to break off the knob, the lock, or whatever was in their way, then yank open the door and rush into the hell that was waiting for them.
The bracing changed things, but maybe not too much.
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