Snake Eyes

by Max Allan Collins

  Lopez quickly scanned the sheet. “Yeah, I know all these guys—Buck Finch is the Spokes leader…he’ll be the tricky one. We can get the other three without a lot of trouble; but collaring Finch—the Spokes won’t love that.”

  They huddled with the Highway Patrolmen and, when they broke to get back in the game, the uniforms went straight for the other three Spokes and hustled them out of the hotel. Another larger group of bikers began to gather around Catherine, Grissom, and Lopez. Only two uniformed Patrolmen were left to back them up, but Lopez had already made sure that help was on the way.

  But right now the reality was this: the Spokes were closing around them, outnumbering the law thirty or maybe even forty to five, and for the second time in twelve hours, Gil Grissom found himself staring down a massive group that seemed only a heartbeat away from tearing him and his compatriots apart.

  With the group growing restless, the Red Sea of Rusty Spokes suddenly parted and a tall, leanly muscular man of forty or so strolled up and took a position in front of Lopez.

  Wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans, his blond hair receding slightly, worn just long enough to curl up at the collar, Buck Finch might have been a successful businessman on a weekend getaway.

  The only giveaway that something more dangerous might lurk within this rugged, handsome figure was a thick, darker-blond Fu Manchu mustache, large white teeth that appeared and disappeared like those of a growling dog, and cold, hard, dark eyes carrying not the faintest flicker of sympathetic human emotion.

  The rival gang might be called the Predators, Grissom thought, but standing in front of him now was the real thing….

  Lopez didn’t beat around the bush. “Why, Buck? Why fire off the first round of a war in a casino filled with civilians?”

  Finch merely stared at Lopez.

  “You may have gotten the metal detectors shut off,” the chief said, “but you didn’t stop the video. It’s all there—reality TV starring you, Buck.”

  A tiny, mirthless smile flicked across Finch’s face. “Since you haven’t read me my rights, Chief, I’ll just say—strictly for your benefit—that if we were the ones who started the fight, it just might be because those so-called Predators disrespected us for too long, too many times.”

  Grissom asked, “What did the other casino patrons do to you, Mr. Finch?”

  Finch ignored the CSI, keeping his dead eyes on the chief. “Those hot-shit Predators think just because some of us choose to live a straight life, when we’re not on the road, that we’re only weekend warriors—wannabes.”

  “So,” Lopez said. “You were just making a point.”

  The biker’s eyebrows rose, his eyes widening till the whites showed all around. “They don’t think we’re wannabes now, do they?…But that’s just the opinion, the insight of one concerned citizen, you might say. The Predators could just as easily be the ones that started shooting. You say you have evidence, but this is a casino—lots of bluffing goes on in this place.” He grinned, the huge white animal teeth gleaming. “Besides, Chief—to arrest me, you’d still have to get me the hell out of here. And how do you propose doing that?”

  Catherine stepped up and said, “The Predators weren’t the ones who fired first—you were. You personally, Mr. Finch. Not the, uh, ‘weekend warriors’ surrounding you…who may not be anxious to back you up and trade in their ‘straight’ lives so they can become accessories after the fact—to murder.”

  The smile remained, turning slightly glazed. But Finch said, “You know, Chiefie—I like her. She’s got balls.”

  “She’s from Vegas,” Lopez said. “Crime lab—people who are gonna put your ass away for a long, long time.”

  “This fine little lady?” Finch asked, his eyes wandering over her, inspecting her lasciviously.

  She held out her hand and gave him her sexiest smile.

  “Catherine Willows,” she said.

  He laughed and took her hand to shake it, but before he could, she twisted his wrist, spun under his arm, and came up behind him, his right arm in a hammerlock, and snapped on a cuff.

  Finch reached for her with his left hand and she got his thumb and bent it back until he howled, and she had control of him. This convinced him to put the other hand behind him, and she put on the second cuff.

  The crowd surged but didn’t do anything about it, possibly taking Catherine’s accessory speech to heart; and anyway, Lopez and the two uniforms had their guns out now.

  Everyone froze, Lopez and the Patrolmen each aiming at the nearest of the Spokes, none of whom went for their guns, assuming they had any.

  “Just because you’ve got me cuffed, bitch,” Finch snarled, something childish and pathetic about it, “doesn’t mean you’re gettin’ me out of here!”

  Catherine had her pistol out now, and spun Finch so he was looking her in the eyes again, his arms locked behind him.

  She smiled again—not that sexy this time.

  “You might be right, Buck,” she said. “But here’s the game, and the odds: we don’t get out of here, you don’t either. You are first in line. Look in my eyes, and tell me you get my drift.”

  He grinned insolently.

  Her voice cold, calm, and low, she said, “Look in my eyes, Buck…and tell me.”

  Finch’s grin immediately disappeared. He swallowed. “Back off, boys…I’m goin’ to jail with my new girlfriend here.”

  But before they hauled Finch out, Grissom saw the man exchange a very meaningful look with one of his cronies.

  As if to say You know what to do….

  9

  Saturday, April 2, 2005, 9:45 A.M.

  WARRICK BROWN HAD JOINED Dr. Albert Robbins in the autopsy room when Greg Sanders hurried in. Neither CSI was in scrubs, though Robbins was. The body of their lion-roadkill John Doe lay naked on the metal table, a sheet drawn up to his waist. Under the harsh fluorescent lighting, the corpse looked even younger.

  As he crossed the room, Greg announced, “That’s not John Doe, gentlemen….”

  The young CSI took a position beside Warrick, with Dr. Robbins gazing patiently at them from the other side of the table.

  “What is his name?” Warrick asked.

  “DeMarcus Hankins,” Greg said, without reading from the piece of paper he held. “Snagged him in AFIS, despite his youth.”

  “Nice,” Warrick said.

  Greg beamed. “I ran the vic’s prints while you and Brass were making that fast-food run—and thanks for the burrito, by the way. Not exactly delicious, but without it I mighta passed out.”

  “Two-seventy-five you owe me,” Warrick said.

  Some of the air went out of Greg, and he started scrounging in his pockets.

  With a grin, Warrick said, “You can catch mine next time. Eyes back on the ball.”

  Greg’s smile couldn’t have looked more relieved had he just received a presidential pardon.

  “Oh-kaay,” Warrick said to Greg, then nodded at the corpse. “What do we know about our new best friend DeMarcus Hankins?”

  “Member of the Mechas.” Greg’s eyebrows lifted. “Former member, now….”

  The Mechas or Mecha Boys or Mecha Street Boys—sometimes even MSB—was a gang that started (not surprisingly) on Mecha Street in a neighborhood that might best be described as low income, the residents “financially struggling,” to quote bureaucrat-speak. Not a happy place for a kid to grow up, with role models including crack dealers, crack whores…and members of MSB.

  “If he’s in AFIS,” Warrick said, “he earned his listing.”

  Greg shrugged. “Only seventeen, so this stuff is all juvie—assault, possession. Even implicated in a couple of B & E’s, but never charged.”

  “Not on his way to becoming a model citizen,” Dr. Robbins said evenly. “But you never know—he might’ve straightened out; certainly didn’t have to die like this.”

  “He’d probably still be alive,” Warrick said, “if it hadn’t been for that lion on the loose. My take is, he was just bei
ng taken out for a dressing down.”

  “If you define ‘dressing down,’” Greg said, “as having your trousers around your ankles.”

  Robbins said, “By the way, I spoke to Animal Control. I’ll know more later, but the king of beasts seems to’ve been somewhat malnourished.”

  Warrick said, “Who knows how long it was surviving out in those scrubby hills.”

  “We could have him brought in for an autopsy,” Robbins said, a tightness around his eyes betraying a desire to do anything but a procedure on a dead lion. “If you suspect he was drugged and purposely sent out into the highway to spook some motorist as a practical joke, or—”

  “I don’t see it,” Warrick said. “That cat is strictly roadkill—unusual roadkill. That former heavyweight champ did lose track of some of his exotic pets.”

  “If you change your mind,” Robbins said, quietly relieved, “let me know.”

  Warrick asked, “Anything we don’t know about our human subject?”

  Robbins shrugged. “He was fleeing when he got shot in the back. That alone would likely have killed him, given the proximity of decent medical care; but he didn’t have to wait to bleed out, did he?”

  “You’re saying either of the head shots would have been instantly fatal.”

  “I’m saying that, yes.”

  “Anything else?”

  Robbins held up Hankins’s left hand. “Note the index finger.”

  “Already did, Doc—noticed that when I scraped.”

  The coroner nodded, gestured to the digit. “Severity of this tear means the nail was torn off—violently. My guess is, while he was scratching an assailant.”

  Greg’s eyebrows rose. “You think he left a piece of himself in his attacker?”

  “Possible,” Robbins said.

  Their next stop was the DNA lab to see Mia, who was alternating between loading more specimens into the DNA analyzer and poring over reports.

  “Just can’t stay away, can you?” she asked as they entered, Warrick in the lead.

  He risked a grin. “Kinda hoping that you could tell us something about those straws and cigarette butts.”

  Her smile was wide, but her eyes were tight. “Once again, you assumed I would push Warrick Brown to the front of the line. You figured I’d rush it right through, just so I could see you again, I suppose? You thought that I would just drop everything else and—”

  “Actually, we’re just on kind of a fast track. No pressure, Mia, just checking….”

  “I don’t remember calling you.”

  “Well, you, uh, didn’t.”

  “Actually, if memory serves, I said I’d call you when I had something.”

  Warrick tasted his words as he said, “Your memory serves you just fine,” and didn’t much care for the flavor.

  Without looking at him, she pointed to the door like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showing Scrooge his gravestone. “Then get your bony butt out of my lab until I call you. Ask your friend, the newbie CSI, there, he’ll tell you—DNA analysis takes time. In the real world, this would take you a month; you’re lucky we’ve got this kick-ass lab.”

  “I was just telling Greg that,” Warrick said, and eased back into the hall, blowing out air as if narrowly ducking a dire fate.

  As they headed down the corridor, Greg glanced back at his old DNA haunts. Admiringly, he said, “Wow—now that’s attitude. I should’ve stood up to you like that, back when you used to ride me for results!”

  “If you had,” Warrick said, “you’d still be picking yourself up.”

  Greg nodded. “Good point.”

  They went back to their individual tasks, Greg working prints in AFIS, Warrick settling in to watch the Bob’s Round-Up Grill security-tape film festival.

  The first tape was the parking lot angle. After cruising to three minutes before the time on the receipt, Warrick began looking for the late-model Cadillac (which currently resided in the CSI garage). He didn’t spot it at first; then the Caddy rolled through the frame.

  Warrick stopped the tape, wound it back, then started the car into the frame again and froze it. Soon he was loading that section of video into his computer, digitizing the material to enable him to enhance it. Even after his best computer tricks, however, all he knew for sure was: A) the car was the correct Cadillac, and B) two men were inside…who might, or might not, be African-American.

  This did not improve his post-Mia mood.

  Back to the tape deck and video monitor, Warrick loaded the second security-cam vid, an angle courtesy of the underside of a beam that held up a small roof protecting drive-through customers from the dominant desert sun and occasional rain. High enough to avoid the glare of headlights, the camera gave Warrick a direct view down through the windshields of approaching customers. After sunset, though, car interiors were fairly dark, making those inside hard or impossible to make out.

  The CSI watched three cars glide through the frame. In two, he could tell a man was driving; third vehicle, he had no idea. In one he could tell the customer was white. In the other two, he couldn’t tell whether the customer was black, Latino, or simply a well-tanned Cauc. Fourth car in line was his Caddy, and he strained to see something, anything…but the car was too far away, dashboard light too faint. As the car inched closer to the camera…there!

  What was that?

  Warrick rewound the tape and played it again.

  A burst of light on the driver’s side, then it was gone. What had it been? He rewound the tape and watched again, this time slowing it way down.

  A cigarette lighter.

  The driver sparked a lighter, then put his hand over the smoke to light up. Could he see the guy’s face? Certainly not after the driver’s hand came up and obliterated the light source; but in that split second before, could Warrick make him?

  The CSI returned to his computer, digitized about ninety seconds of key video, and returned to the frame where the lighter sparked to life. He thought maybe he could distinguish a face, but the distance was so great.

  He enhanced the picture, zoomed in, and enhanced some more.

  Illuminated for a frozen split second sat one of the kidnappers, lighting a cig. Didn’t the guy know smoking was bad for you? Whoever the smoker was, Warrick didn’t recognize him, and Warrick had a pretty good handle on the gang scene, for a CSI, having worked dozens of gang-related cases.

  Greg rushed in. “AFIS coughed up another name.”

  “You need to buy a lottery ticket on the way home.”

  “No, I won’t get luckier than this,” he said, waving a sheet of paper. “The passenger-side fingerprints belong to Jalon Winsor, a member of the Hoods.”

  “Where’s their territory?”

  “Between Lake Mead Boulevard on the north,” Greg said, referring to his notes, “and Vegas Drive on the south…from MLK west to maybe Simmons Street.”

  “If they have so much territory,” Warrick said, eyes slitting, “why the hell haven’t I heard of them?”

  “Guess they’ve been flying under the radar, mostly. Haven’t been caught up in anything big…”

  “Until a lion ran out in front of their stolen car,” Warrick said.

  “Until then,” Greg agreed. The young CSI’s eyes locked with his mentor’s. “Grissom and I had a crime scene on Beatty a couple weeks ago, ’Rick—right in the middle of Hoods territory. Which is how they got on my radar. I even met a couple, watching us work. Lookouts, probably.”

  “You know this guy?” Warrick asked, pointing to the monitor.

  Greg glanced at the screen. “Whoa—maybe I will buy a lottery ticket. That’s one of the guys Grissom and I talked to! Is he involved in this?”

  “Seems to be. What’s his name?”

  “His buddy called him Fleety. Yeah, that’s him, lighting the cigarette. I remember that kid smoking like a house on fire.”

  “Run the nickname,” Warrick said, “and see if anything comes up.”

  “You got it.”

  �
��Then we’ll call Brass and see if he can get someone to sit on the kid’s lookout spot, case he turns up.”

  “Right away.”

  “And, Greg?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nice memory.”

  “Thanks.”

  Twenty minutes later, Warrick found Greg hunkered down at a computer monitor, nose practically pressed to the screen. Warrick pulled up a chair and sat to Greg’s right. He ran a hand over his face and wondered when, or if, this shift would ever end.

  Not only were Grissom, Catherine, and the others still dealing with the battle aftermath in Boot Hill, day shift had troubles of their own—two CSIs in court and three more working a massive Desert Shores drug bust on the far northwest side. This was one day nobody upstairs would be bitching about overtime.

  “Talked to Brass,” Warrick told Greg.

  “Yeah?” Greg answered, only half interested as he examined the screen.

  “No extra anything today. If we wanna find a way to track down Fleety, we’re on our own.”

  Greg frowned doubtfully. “Well, is that a CSI’s job, really? Is it…evidence?”

  “It’s the best lead, and we’re still in the early hours of this murder investigation. And there’s nobody else available.”

  “Okay, then—how about we start with that name you wanted?” Greg said, obviously a little pleased with himself.

  Warrick perked. “Got something?”

  “Isaiah A. Fleetwood, a.k.a. ‘Fleety’—seventeen, Hoods member, small-time brushes with the system…but nothing serious enough to ever get him printed. Not violent like some of the other members, at least nothing violent turns up.”

  “Strictly a lookout, you think?” Warrick asked.

  “Could well be…but a mouthy one.”

  “Oh?”

  Greg nodded. “Three uniformed officers’ve had run-ins with him—big talk, but the kid always backed down. Least, that’s how the reports are written.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah—lives with his grandmother. Apparently a pretty good kid till his mom died two years ago. Since then, he’s a ticking bomb, looking for a place to go off.”

  “Address on the grandmother?”