by Dan O'Shea
“Jones, you take the corner here,” Hernandez said as they got to the side of the condo building. “Watch the garage, watch the side door. You see that fuck coming out, you put him down and call me. You got it?”
Jones nodded, a little relief on his face, the kid not ready for combat. Hernandez knew he’d made the right call.
The condo was on the second floor. Guns out now, Hernandez and Miko took the elevator; Gomez and Roberto took the stairs, just in case. Middle of the day, the building was quiet.
Husam al Din was sitting in the easy chair in the living room of the woman’s condo. He had been there for almost twenty minutes. When he arrived, he had knocked on the door, double-checked the paper he had taken from Lee.2B. He had the right door. The hallway was empty, so he stood and listened for a few minutes. He knew what an empty room sounded like. The woman was a member of the American drug police, so she would be concerned with security. It took a few minutes with the picks. He took the .22 from under his jacket and eased the door open, waiting another moment for any reaction. None. He stepped in and looked at the back of the door. There was a thumb lock she could throw when she was inside, one no one could access from the hall. That’s when he knew for sure no one was home. She would lock that if she were here. He shut the door. He searched the rooms briefly to see if there was anything to learn. Then he sat to wait for the woman to return. Perhaps more to learn that way. He had the shears and the duct tape in the messenger bag on the floor next to him.
Roberto and Gomez went up the stairs quickly, Gomez moving into the hall first, then motioning for Roberto. The stairs came out one door away from 2B.The elevator was at the far end of the hall. They would have to wait a moment.
Hardin and Wilson watched from a table in the window of the coffee shop, saw Hernandez’s group come up Warren. Hernandez left the scrawny kid in the red polo shirt at the corner – the same kid Hardin had seen hanging around the last few hours, eyeballing the condo.
“Looks like you were right,” said Wilson.
“Paranoia pays,” said Hardin. “You see the Escalade anywhere?” He’d watched the black SUV turn off of Main, the kid following it down to the alley.
Wilson shook her head.
“So there could be another guy or two we can’t see,” Hardin said.
“Yeah,” said Wilson
“Sorry,” he said.
“For what?” she asked.
“I shouldn’t have been on the balcony. Dumb move.”
“Fuck that,” she said. “Water under the bridge.”
Hernandez’s cell buzzed again, then the ping that told him he had a text. It had buzzed a couple times as he walked up the street, but he wasn’t taking calls right now. Only a few people would text him, though. It would be a second before the elevator got there. He checked his screen.
OWNER OF 2B IS A DEA AGENT
Shit. A trap? They bring this Hardin in to set him up? He hit the speed dial for Gomez. No answer. He was about to call Roberto when he heard the gunfire upstairs. He called Julio instead, yanked Miko out of the elevator, and headed for the door.
Husam al Din had waited long enough. There were very few papers in the apartment, nothing that told him anything. A few pictures, the same attractive woman in several of them, must be the drug agent. The woman would probably not be home until the end of the workday, and the building would be more crowded then. Probably not the time to have the kind of discussion he would need. He would come back later, pick up her trail, and find an opportunity. He opened the door to leave.
Roberto was looking down the hall toward the elevator when he heard the door to 2B open behind him. He and Gomez both brought up their 9mms.But it wasn’t Hardin, and it wasn’t the woman. It was a slight man, a bag slung across his back. They paused.
The man did not. He dove to the floor in almost a somersault, right between Roberto and Gomez.
Gomez snapped off a shot, missing the rolling man, hitting Roberto in the foot.
The man had a gun out now from inside his coat.
Roberto couldn’t stand on the damaged foot, but he knew if he went down he died. He leaned back against the wall, weight on his good foot, and fired at the rolling man. But the man never stopped to aim his weapon. He just bounced off the far wall and rolled again, back across the hall.
Roberto’s shot punched into the drywall while the man snapped a couple of rounds into Gomez’s abdomen. Gomez stopped, looking down at himself like he was surprised he wasn’t dead. Then he started to swing his gun back toward the rolling man.
The man kicked into Roberto’s bad foot, the pain fogging Roberto’s vision as he fired again. The round punched through the carpet, hit the concrete, and whined down the hallway, Roberto tottering away from the wall, between the man and Gomez. The man fired again, one, two, three shots, firing from the floor almost vertically up into Roberto – one of the rounds tearing into his groin, two into his stomach, burning upward.
Roberto went down, and the man shot Gomez twice in the forehead.
Down the hall, an old lady opened her door, stuck her head out. Al Din’s gun flashed up…
Hardin and Wilson looked up simultaneously. Gunfire.
“Your place?” Hardin asked.
“Has to be,” she said.
Across the street, Red Shirt was looking up at the building, then looking down the street, then pulling out a cell.
“Not gonna be any good way for you to explain this,” Hardin said.
“I know,” said Wilson. “I think I just became a person of interest.”
“Guess we should go,” he said.
Hardin had left the black Honda he bought in Aurora a couple blocks north of the tracks. They headed for that.
As they turned up the sidewalk, tires squealed behind them. The black Escalade spun off Warren and up Main, the driver looking over and seeing Hardin, veering toward them. Hardin shoved Wilson up the street, behind a parked car, and pulled one of the 9mms he’d taken from the Italians. He braced his feet, sighted carefully down the barrel, and put six shots in a cluster just above the steering wheel. The engine stopped racing as the driver’s foot left the gas, and the car straightened out a little, slowing, crunching into the corner of the parked car next to Wilson.
Red Shirt was sprinting across the street, pistol out, ducking down. As the kid cleared a parked car onto the walk he brought his gun up, snapping off shots. Hardin heard Wilson fire from just behind him and to his left, saw some spray fly off the kid’s hip. The kid went down, his gun rattling on the walk. Hardin turned to see Wilson coming out of her crouch, her S&W in hand.
All up and down the street, people where scrambling into stores, ducking behind cars, lots of cell phones coming out.
“Let’s take the SUV,” Hardin said. “Get a little distance, walk back for the car later.”
Wilson nodded. Hardin opened the driver’s side door, the Hispanic behind the wheel slumping out. Two in his head, at least two in his chest. He was gone. Hardin dumped him in the street.
He looked up. Wilson was standing over the kid on the walk. The kid was squirming on his back, holding his hands out in front of him. The kid’s 9mm was just off to his right.
“I got nothing ’gainst you, lady. I was after that other guy.”
“He’s my guy,” she said.
The kid’s hand moved toward his gun. Wilson gave him a double-tap to the head, put the S&W back on her hip, turned and climbed into the SUV.
“Don’t ever shove me like that again,” she hissed. “You have to trust me to cover your six, not go all Sir Galahad on me.”
“Sorry.”
Her head swiveled, checking Main as they pulled out. “You see Hernandez?”
“No.”
She slammed a fist on top of the dash. “Fuck. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!”
Hernandez and Miko heard the shots from the far side of the building and jogged toward the corner. They got a view just in time to see the SUV blow north up Main, Julio down in the street, t
he kid down on the walk. They instantly turned and started walking west.
“Walk up a bit, call the LK crew out in Aurora, have somebody pick our asses up,” Hernandez said.
Miko nodded.
“No uniforms, nobody in raid jackets closing the ring. This wasn’t any DEA sting.”
Miko nodded again.
“Gonna have to think on this.”
Miko nodded again. Nothing to say.
CHAPTER 48
Hardin punched it, shooting up a block, turning in, winding through a neighborhood, creating some distance before the cops got to the scene. Wilson had gone quiet.
“That was a little cold,” he said. “The kid.”
A pause. “Yeah,” she said. Strange look on her face, lip quivering a bit.
He waited.
“I got called out on a domestic my third week on the force down in Wichita, some beat-to-shit rental house.” Wilson was talking, looking straight out the windshield, perfectly still, nothing moving but her mouth. “We get inside, in the kitchen, this guy’s got his wife in a half nelson, got a butcher’s knife to her neck. The kids are screaming, the wife’s eyes are rolling around, and the guy’s yelling about how nobody leaves him. My training officer stays in front of him, holding his attention, and I work around to the side. At one point the guy starts gesturing with the knife, waving it at my partner, trying to make some point, and my partner gives me this look telling me to take the shot. I mean, it’s like three feet – no way can I miss. And instead I start talking to the guy, trying to calm him down. I get him to drop the knife, to let the woman go, he lets us cuff him, and everybody tells me what hot fucking shit I am.
“So by the time the whole thing goes through the wash with the DA, the thing’s been pled down from attempted murder to some domestic violence deal. The guy does two-and-a-half years on a five-year jolt. Two-and-a-half years and two days later, I get 911’d back to the same address. The woman is duct-taped to a kitchen chair, both the kids lying on the floor with their throats cut all the way to the spine. The woman’s gutted like a fish.ME tells me he did the kids first, made her watch. The guy called it in himself. He’s sitting in the recliner in the living room when I get there, six empty Bud cans on the floor. And he tells me, ‘I told you nobody leaves me.’”
Wilson stared straight ahead, her face frozen. Hardin silent for a moment, looking for the right words.
“That’s on him,” Hardin said finally. “That’s not on you.”
She shook her head. “The first time? When I was a rookie? I knew. I looked into his eyes, and I knew. I knew, and I didn’t take the shot. I didn’t take the shot because I wanted to sleep nights. I guess I thought I could get through without ever having to kill anybody. I didn’t take the shot for me. So yeah, the woman and those two kids? They’re on me. They’re on me for not having the balls to step all the way up.”
They drove for a while. Out of the corner of his eye, Hardin could see her jaw clench and unclench, could see her lip quivering.
“All I know is this,” she said. “People get a choice to be on the right side or not. You come up on somebody who’s made the wrong choice, then you have to step up, every time. You step all the way up.”
She still had that look on her face, like she wasn’t done. Hardin didn’t know what to say.
“That black kid?” she said. “His mother should have told him not to play with guns. And whoever told him he could, they should have told him not to play with me.”
Her voice was thin and brittle, and he knew she was locking that kid away somewhere inside. She was tying another knot into a cord, a knot for the black kid on the same cord where she had tied a knot for the woman and her kids and for her brother. A cord she would whip herself with every time she failed to perfect an imperfectible world.
He thought of Africa, of the Legion, of maybe a dozen times they’d been called out for some piss-ant action because some thug somewhere had tweaked some tribal bullshit for his own venial ends. It usually ended with a mess of kids, most of them younger than the one Jeanette had shot today, stinking in the heat with their guts blown out, some of them blown out by Hardin. He’d always told himself that even a postcolonial anachronism like the Legion was on the side of the angels when it came to dealing with the Idi Amins of the world. Except it was never the Amins that ended up showing their guts to the sun.
He took her hand, and she squeezed it like she could force some kind of hope out of his pores.
And then it was over. She pulled her hand away, her face solid and unmoving now, like quick-drying cement. Her foot nudged the backpack on the floor of the passenger side. She picked it up, unzipped it.
“You want to know the bright side?” she said.
“Could use one,” answered Hardin.
She pulled the shrink-wrapped brick out of the backpack. “Now we’ve got the diamonds and at least a couple million worth of coke.”
CHAPTER 49
Gonna end up in Iowa, way the day’s going, thought Lynch. He was stuck in traffic on 88 coming up on the Route 59 exit, trying to get out to meet Perez and the Aurora PD at a scene out there.
The Downers Grove thing broke loose right after lunch. Jablonski had called Lynch and Bernstein out pretty much as soon as he got a look at it. Three Hispanics down. Based on the tattoos, looked like all three of them were mainline members of the Hernandez crew out of Juárez. And Jablonski knew the guy they found in the street – Julio Ruiz, trigger man, wheel man, guy that usually traveled with Hernandez himself. They also had a black kid who turned out to be a low-level member of one of the West Side gangs that the DEA was pretty sure was tied into the Hernandez network.
Thing was a cluster fuck. Two cartel gunmen and a civilian dead in a second-floor hallway, two outside on the street. The inside stiffs all looked like.22s. The outside guys were larger caliber – 9mms it looked like, at least until they heard different. Witness statements were all over the place as usual. Best they could piece together, the shooting was in the building first, then outside. Couple of people said it looked like a black SUV (got everything from a Navigator to an Escalade to a Suburban on the model) tried to run down a couple on the sidewalk. The man shot the driver. The black kid ran across the street, shooting at the couple, and the woman shot him. Ruiz was driving the SUV, and whoever shot him knew what he was doing, because Ruiz took three in the face and two in the chest, which ain’t bad through a windshield when you’ve got three or four tons of Detroit’s finest bearing down on you. Then, while the guy was dumping Ruiz out of the SUV, the woman walked over, capped the kid in the head. Then her and the man hopped in the SUV and took off. They found the SUV dumped about a mile north.
So a couple of interesting things. The shootings inside? It looked like Mr .22 was in play again, although this wasn’t his usual triple tap to the head. Stand up fight. The two guys were armed, both got shots off, and he took them both out.
But the real interesting thing was this. The guy who shot Ruiz? Based on descriptions, it sounded a lot like Hardin. And the women he was with? Well, the dead guys were right outside a condo with the door still open. Jeanette Wilson’s condo. And things were calming down just a touch by the time this woman strolled down the walk and parked one in the black kid’s braincase. Jablonski had shown Wilson’s picture around. Consensus was, the woman was Wilson.
That’s when Perez had called. They had another stiff, a black guy in the basement of a town house in the DuPage County part of the Aurora, just west of 59.Guy had a deal with one of those Merry Maids crews where they had the keys to get in if he wasn’t around. When they let themselves into his place, they found a bigger mess than they had contracted for. Looked like a .22 again. So Lynch left Bernstein to finish up in Downers Grove and headed west.
Aurora was a city of almost 200,000 straddling the Fox River about forty miles west of Chicago. Lynch didn’t work with suburban cops too much, but Aurora had its own gang problems, and most of their gangs were tied in to the Chicago gangs. S
o guys from Aurora would turn up dead in the city, guys from Chicago would turn up dead in Aurora, and guys like Lynch and Perez, they’d sort it out.
Every time Lynch had been out to Aurora before, though, it had been on the east side, usually right in by the river. This was some high-end subdivision just across 59 from Naperville. Goofy-looking McMansions were shoe-horned into tiny lots as he followed the winding street in past the White Eagle sign. He was beginning to think Perez was fucking with him until he saw the black and whites and the crime scene tape in front of an upscale townhouse. Behind the house, a couple of yuppies in ill-advised pants pretended to take practice swings, standing in the fairway while they watched the cops moving around the house. Somebody on the tee must have said something – one of the guys looked back flipped the bird, then topped his ball another thirty yards toward the green. Gapers’ block on the fairways.
Lynch parked, badged the uniform at the end of the drive. Guy told him Perez was in the basement.
Lynch could smell the blood before he got to the bottom of the stairs. When he got down, he saw Perez over near an L-shaped office setup. Lots of computer equipment, three different monitors, a rack of boxes and wires – routers and servers, Lynch figured. And a black guy in his boxers, his legs duct-taped to one of those fancy office chairs with that hi-tech mesh for a seat. Some duct tape also hung from the arm of the chair. The guy’s head was down on the desk – or most of his head. Looked like some of it was splattered on the monitor in front of him.
Perez saw Lynch, walked over.
Lynch nodded toward the body. “So what have you got here?”
“Stiff’s name is Robert E. Lee,” Perez said.
“Ironic,” said Lynch.
Perez shrugged. “My people are just Mexicans who got stuck on the wrong side of the Rio Grande when you guys stole Texas. I got no dog in that fight.”
