The First Law dh-8

by John Lescroart

  Holiday squeezed off a first shot.

  "Now! Now! Now!" McGuire yelled.

  More shots from the pier, but there was no time to analyze or even look at what was happening farther down there. Now it was all movement with a focus on Sephia and Rez, as McGuire, using Holiday's break as a distraction, cleared the back end of the truck. "Comin' in, Abe!" Hardy yelled and sprinted out of the truck's protection, two steps behind McGuire, both of them running full out, low to the ground.

  "Go right right right!" McGuire screamed as he brought the shotgun up.

  Moving out onto the pier itself now, still running, Hardy got a glimpse of Sephia hunkered down against a kind of covered doorway on the left. Moses was going to take him.

  Rez was his target. He stood six feet closer toward the mouth of the pier, to Hardy's right. He raised his gun with his left hand, tried to draw a quick bead, and fired, but he hadn't reckoned on the broken bone in his hand, the immense kick of his weapon. His grip didn't have the strength it needed. The recoil knocked the gun from his grasp, sent it clattering onto the asphalt.

  A deafening explosion to his left as first Sephia opened fire with everything he had, emptying his gun, while McGuire straightened up and fired first one load, then almost immediately the second. Out of the corner of his eye, Hardy saw Sephia thrown backward, glass breaking down over him as he fell slumped to the ground.

  But Rez had an automatic in each hand now, both of his arms pointing straight out in front of him. He seemed to be laughing, taking aim at Hardy from no more than fifteen feet. Starting a desperate dive for his gun, Hardy was in the air when something hit him in the chest and he went down at first sideways, then over flat on his back.

  John Holiday was down. He lay in a hump out in the fairway of the pier.

  McGuire and Hardy were charging up from the truck.

  It was Glitsky's only chance to move and he took it, pushing off from the building, turning to get a gauge of where Gerson had gotten to. Glitsky's own position, caught between Gerson and the Panos crowd, had been completely untenable, but Holiday's intervention and then the truck's arrival had given him a few seconds.

  Off to his right, by the mouth of the pier, Glitsky heard the blast of a shotgun, then another, intermingled with several explosions of pistol shot in rapid succession-someone was firing an automatic with both hands. A quick glance caught Hardy going down.

  Zigzagging, Glitsky broke for the cover of the barn.

  McGuire, the lone man standing now out on the pier, had fired his two loads at Nick Sephia. If the man wasn't dead, McGuire figured his dancing career was over at least. McGuire had ejected his shells, had two more in his knuckles ready to insert. But it all took time. Not a lot of time, but enough for Rez, who jumped out of his doorway now and ran toward McGuire, one of his gun hands extended with the automatic in it, screaming a long wild note. He closed to three or four feet, pointed the gun at McGuire's head and pulled the trigger.

  But there was no report. The automatic had misfired. Staring at it in fury for the briefest of seconds, Rez swore and threw it down onto the asphalt. Glitsky, less than twenty feet away in the door of the barn, could almost see the moment when Rez realized he still had his other gun in his other hand. McGuire was finished with his reload, though, snapping the barrel back up into place as Rez extended his other arm.

  Glitsky, braced against the barn door, aimed carefully and, holding his gun with both hands, fired twice, the first bullet taking Rez under the right arm, passing through both his lungs and his heart, the second missing entirely. But the second shot wasn't needed. Firing squads had killed people more slowly-Rez was dead before he hit the ground.

  But the reverberation from that shot hadn't died when another two rang simultaneously, one to Glitsky's left from the front of the pier, and the other behind him. Spinning around, his own gun in his two-handed grip, Glitsky saw Gerson not ten feet behind him slide slowly down the front of the stucco of the warehouse next door, leaving a trail of blood on the faded wall. He turned back to see that Hardy was now slowly getting up, his gun in his hand, and Moses crossing over to him.

  Glitsky suddenly wasn't sure that he could move at all. In the sudden and deafening silence, he let his hands go to his sides and leaned heavily against the barn door. But there was Holiday, whose early volley had certainly saved Glitsky's life, lying without any movement on the asphalt. If he was alive, if any of them were alive, they would need to call an ambulance. And seconds could matter. Glitsky had to check.

  Hardy and McGuire had something of the same thought, and the three men converged on their fallen ally. Holiday wasn't moving at all. They had gathered in a knot around him, Glitsky going down on one knee, a hand to where the pulse should be on Holiday's neck, when suddenly the silence was again defiled.

  A woman's voice, harshly commanding, "Put it down! Guys, look out!" They all turned, scattering with their weapons pointed, but then immediately came one last and again nearly simultaneous round of gunfire.

  Gina Roake walked slowly, ignoring them, warily approaching the body of the man who'd turned and squeezed off a shot at her when she'd called out.

  Glitsky, Hardy and McGuire had all seen it, Roy Panos lying flat on his stomach, his gun extended where he'd been aiming, directly at Gina. Before she'd called out, he was obviously intending to take out at least one and maybe all of the men before they could finish him.

  Gina stopped at his body and kicked at it as she might have some dead vermin, her pistol pointed the whole time at his head. Then she looked up at the three other gunmen, her shoulders fell and she walked toward them.

  None of the principals could have guessed the length of the battle, although none of them would have believed it lasted less than ten minutes. But from the first shot to the last, the total time of the engagement was one minute, twenty-two seconds.

  31

  Len Faro stood outside the lit perimeter of the./crime scene for a moment before wading in, thinking that this had been about the deadliest two weeks since he'd come on with the force. By the time he arrived at Pier 70, dusk was well advanced and the place was a madhouse of activity with three TV and a couple of local radio crews, six or seven black-and-whites, several unmarked cars, two ambulances, the coroner's van, and a limousine that he guessed would belong to one of the higher brass.

  Which, now that he thought of it, made little sense if this was a gang shooting. And that's what he would normally have expected in this location. So, wondering now, making his way through the phalanx of vehicles, he showed his badge to the officer at the tape and stepped over it. The scene was lit by the television lights as well as headlights from the cars, but even without the illumination, Faro could see at a glance that there'd been significant carnage.

  He passed the first body only a few feet onto the pier itself and paused by the knot of daytime CSI people attending it. "Gangbangers?" he asked Gretchen, tonight's photographer. After all, four bodies were lying in plain sight-there might be more inside any of these buildings- and Faro had up until now only seen this kind of slaughter in a drive-by or other organized retaliation environment.

  But Gretchen looked shell-shocked herself, and in a woman to whom violence was literally a daily event, this was surprising. "Gerson," she said. And at first he thought she was asking him if the lieutenant had been notified to come to the scene.

  "I assume," he began, then stopped. "What about him?"

  She motioned with a toss of her head back down the pier another forty feet or so, where another group of men were standing around another body, propped under a thick streak of brown on a stucco wall. Was that Frank Batiste down there? The deputy chief did not come to homicide scenes unless something was radically unusual. Faro broke into a trot, was with them all in five seconds-Cuneo and Russell from homicide, John Strout the chief medical examiner, two daytime CSI people. Everybody with hands in their pockets against the biting wind. To get to them, Faro had to pass a third corpse on the pier on his way down, and a f
ourth buried in a hail of broken glass in one of the doorways. Other homicide inspectors, half the lot of them- Barrel Bracco, Sarah Evans, Marcel Lanier-appeared as recognizable suddenly in the glut of faces.

  Still, getting up to this victim, Faro slowed before he'd quite reached it, took a last step or two, stopped dead in his tracks. Jesus Christ, he thought.

  Barry Gerson's eyes were open. He hadn't yet been moved, and so sat with his legs almost straight out, tipped a little to his right side, at the bottom of the brown line, which disappeared into his back. Faro leaned down closer, made out two small holes in the front of his jacket. He straightened up and turned to the knot of men. "How did this happen?"

  "We're in the process of trying to piece that together right now, Sergeant." Batiste had come up through homicide-he'd been lieutenant before Glitsky-and so he knew the drill. "I'm hearing from these inspectors"-he indicated Cuneo and Russell-"that there's been some history among these men."

  Faro, out of the loop, glanced at his dead lieutenant, came back to Batiste. But Cuneo, pointing up the pier, was the one to speak. "The first stiff back there is John Holiday, Len. Beyond him is Roy Panos. That speak to you at all?"

  "John Holiday, I know," Faro said. A nod. "The name only." He paused, knowing that his next words would be a bomb, decided he had to say them. "I was at his house a couple of nights ago. With Paul Thieu."

  All heads snapped toward him. Russell and Cuneo exchanged a meaningful look. "What was he doing there?" Cuneo asked. "What were you doing there? "

  "Holiday was our suspect." Russell, bitching about turf.

  But Batiste cut them both off. "I don't give a damn about any of that. Sergeant, you're telling me Paul Thieu was in this, too?"

  "It seems like he would have had to be somehow, sir. Doesn't it?"

  "And killed himself over it?"

  "That might not have been over this," Cuneo said. "It might have been something else."

  "Or maybe he didn't even kill himself at all," Faro said. "Maybe somebody killed him."

  "What for?" Russell snapped.

  "I don't know. Shut him up?"

  "About what?" Cuneo.

  Faro shrugged. He didn't know. He motioned back toward the other bodies. "So who are the other two?"

  Batiste provided the identifications. When he heard the names, Faro nodded. "Just yesterday, sir, Inspector Thieu had me check fingerprints we found at Holiday's house against these guys. They'd been there."

  "Which means what?"

  "I don't know, sir." He looked around. "Holiday and these men must have been into something together, though."

  The deputy chief didn't like this turn of events at all, and it showed all over him. His eyes strafed the men knotted around him, went back to Gerson, over to Holiday's body, took in the whole scene. "What the hell's going on? Anybody got any idea?"

  "Y'all hold the fort here," John Strout said. "I'm going to take a walk, see some other clients. Jimmy." The medical examiner moved back up the pier with one of the other crime scene inspectors.

  After he'd gone, Cuneo and Russell shared another look, and Batiste caught it. "Let's hear it, boys. You even think you got anything at all, now'd be a good time to share."

  Cuneo cleared his throat, took the lead. "Lincoln and I, we've been working a little with Roy Panos." He jerked a thumb. "The first body up there."

  "What do you mean, working with him?" Batiste asked.

  "He was an assistant patrol special…"

  "Related to Wade?"

  "Yes, sir. His brother. He became a source."

  "For what?"

  "First the Silverman murder. Then Matt Creed, the other Patrol Special…" The admission was costing Cuneo. He cleared his throat again. "… and the Tenderloin multiple."

  Batiste crossed his arms. "You're telling me this man Panos was a source for what, four homicide investigations?"

  Russell jumped to his partner's defense. "They were all related, sir."

  "I would hope to smile. Okay, so where does Paul Thieu come in?"

  Again, the glance between the homicide guys, but there was no hiding it, and Cuneo took it again. "He originally drew both Creed and the Tenderloin guys."

  Batiste, trying to get it clear. "But you wound up with both of them."

  "That's right." Cuneo nodded. "The lieutenant handed them off to us. There was a connection with both of them to Silverman, which was ours already. He thought it would be more efficient."

  "But Thieu stuck with it anyway? Why would he do that?" Blank stares all around, and Batiste turned back to Faro. "Sergeant, I'd be interested in anything you'd like to contribute."

  Faro tugged at his bug, the tuft of hair under his lower lip. "He had some questions, I guess."

  "What kind of questions?"

  "With the evidence at the Tenderloin scene."

  "He told you that?"

  "In vague terms only."

  "But nothing specific?"

  "Not really, sir, or if there was, he didn't share that information with me."

  "So what did he tell you when you were going out to Holiday's? What was that about?"

  "I told you. To lift prints." Faro turned to the inspectors. "He told me it was a favor for you guys."

  "That's bullshit," Cuneo said. "We never sent anybody out there." He was angry and was making very little effort to hide it. If Batiste hadn't been there, he might have swung at Faro. "We would have made any request like that directly to CSI, Len, like we always do, and you know it. This really pisses me off," he added to no one in particular.

  Batiste ignored him. "All right." He pointed at Cuneo and Russell. "Put that on your list, way up there, maybe first." Again, he surveyed the area all around. "So what the hell happened here? What got Barry out here? It had to be something with these Patrol Specials, wouldn't you think? How many of them are dead now? "

  "Two," Russell said. "Roy Panos and Matt Creed."

  But Cuneo couldn't let that go. "You might as well include Nick Sephia. He used to work for Panos, too. He's his nephew." He indicated the spot. "That's him in the doorway up there."

  "Shit." Batiste blew out heavily. "Anybody call Wade yet? Where's Lanier?" He turned and called out. "Marcel!"

  Lanier came trotting up from where Sephia had fallen. "Yes, sir?"

  "You'd better get ahold of Wade Panos and get him over here ASAP. That's his brother Roy, and his nephew Nick. This has got to have something to do with him. We've got to find out what he knows."

  "What are you thinking?" Lanier asked.

  "I'm thinking somebody with Panos tried to broker some kind of a deal."

  "Not with Holiday," Cuneo put in. "Panos and him don't get along."

  "That's interesting," Batiste said. "I wonder where he was when this was going on. Well, we'll get to that. Meanwhile, Marcel, did I read somewhere you finally passed for lieutenant?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "All right, then congratulations, you're the point man on this." He gestured around. "All of it. The detail reports to you, you come to me. I know you'll thank me some day. Guys"-the deputy chief turned to Cuneo and Russell- "everything through Marcel, clear?" Batiste then turned around and looked down at the body of Barry Gerson. He went to a knee, shook his head with great sadness. "What the hell were you thinking, coming down here with no backup?"

  Marcel Lanier had been a homicide inspector for twenty years, and during that time had formed some of the same conclusions about Wade Panos that Glitsky had reached. The last time Lanier had done anything even tangentially connected to the Patrol Special, he'd been trying to do a favor for both his new and old lieutenant, bridging the gap between them. That had backfired awkwardly.

  Now he was coming to his interrogation of Wade Panos with a different, and mostly negative, set of preconceptions. Before he'd sent Cuneo and Russell off to the lab to check on Thieu's fingerprint question, Lanier had pressed the two inspectors for a brief recap of the events, and their interpretations of them, since Sam Silverman's death. The r
oles of both Roy and Wade Panos struck him as unusual, to say the least.

  Lanier had been at Pier 70 for over three hours and hadn't been in a good mood when he'd arrived. By now, he was frozen to the bone, overwhelmed with his new and sudden responsibilities, sickened by all he'd seen. The media had, if anything, multiplied. They had set up camps at the pier, fighting for exclusive quotes and breaking bulletins. In the pools of artificial light from the department's portable lamps, all five bodies had been tagged, bagged and transported, but several teams of crime scene specialists were still doing their painstaking work up and down the pier.

  Panos had arrived with his lawyer-his lawyer?-in time to see his brother and nephew packed into the coroner's van, and Lanier had asked them both, as a courtesy, if they could wait for a few minutes and have Wade answer a few questions, try to clear up some of the mystery here. He had managed to keep himself looking busy with the various teams-it wasn't terribly difficult-so that the few minutes could grow to a half hour.

  Now Lanier knocked at the window to Panos's car, opened the back door and slid in. Reaching a hand over the seat, he shook hands all around, offered condolences, everybody's pal. He then took out his pocket recorder, and, getting their permission, placed it on the seatback between them. He got right to it. "So, do you have any idea what this is about?"

  "Damn straight I do, and a pretty good one."

  "Tell me."

  *****

  "He didn't really say that, that he thought I was actually there ?"Glitsky shook his head in disbelief. "That man's a piece of work. Was there any physical indication that I was?"

  "You didn't carve your initials into anything, did you, Abe?" Treya, calm and relaxed, making a joke. "It's an old habit he's trying to break, Marcel. Everywhere he goes, if there's a tree… He's worse than a dog."