“And for now?” Will said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Go back to her apartment and see what you can see. Work with the crime-scene team. If I can borrow your car for the rest of the day, I’m going back out to the base and see what I can learn about Kendra from her co-workers and such.”
Twenty-two
Chelmin slid behind the wheel of Spaulding’s 2014 Camaro, adjusted the seat, and started the engine. As he put the car in gear, the fuel gauge icon glowed red.
Chelmin looked up, swiveled his head, and saw the big Chevron station five blocks away.
He drove slowly, hoping that he wouldn’t run out of gas before he reached a pump, and allowed himself a moment of triumph as he turned left across Main Street and stopped at the nearest pump island. He got out, pulled out his wallet and used his Chevron credit card to pay, then put the hose in the nozzle receptacle and started fueling.
Chelmin left the pump running and ignored the rain as he headed for the station’s store. He stepped inside, dug out a five-dollar bill, and asked the cashier for a pack of Marlboros.
The cashier, a petite Latina with a face full of wrinkles and dyed red hair, turned to her right and came up with the cigarettes. “$6.50,” she said.
Digging in his pocket for more cash, Chelmin heard a loud bang, followed by an unmistakable sound, a chilling roar that took him back to Kuwait. A sound that chilled his blood.
“Get out!” he yelled to the clerk, just as the rocket-propelled grenade smashed into a gas pump near the Camaro. The clerk stood frozen until Chelmin reached over the counter, grabbed her under the shoulders and jerked her back over the counter, then pushed her out the door, following her and moving as fast as he could. As they rounded the corner behind the cinderblock building, the underground tanks caught fire. Chelmin knew that the rain wouldn’t help and that, when enough fuel had burned to leave space in a tank for vapor to collect, it would explode. Pushing the clerk ahead of him, he ran up the alley behind the station.
Twenty-three
Will watched Chelmin drive away as he buckled himself into the black-and-white and then headed across town for Kendra’s apartment. Passing the Chevron station, he saw his Camaro at a pump.
“What the hell?” he mumbled to himself.
Will braked for the red light, meanwhile craning his head to watch Chelmin enter the store. The light went to green, and an impatient, impertinent, and incautious motorist behind him tapped his horn. Will turned his head forward and took his foot off the brake. Something in his right outside mirror caught his eye, something streaking across the road behind him, and with a loud bang, hit the pump next to a candy-apple red Camaro.
His candy-apple red Camaro.
Will turned on the siren and lights, glanced around, then pulled a U-turn across Main, dodged two cars and headed back toward the gas station.
In the seconds before he got there, his car went up in flames. He jammed on the brakes and made another U-turn across the street into a mini-mall parking lot. By this time, the station was a lake of fire, and the heat of burning gasoline drove him a hundred yards farther west, where he stopped, got on the radio and called for fire trucks, ambulances and traffic officers.
Nothing could live in that raging fire, Will thought, staring at the boiling gasoline.
Then it exploded.
Burning debris landed on his car roof, and he gunned the engine, then stopped abruptly and watched a mangled piece of steel jump across his hood and fall to the ground.
He backed up and waited.
After several seconds, something blocked the light entering his window, and he turned to his left to see what it was.
“Got a light?” Chelmin said, holding up a Marlboro. His face, clothes, and hands were covered with soot, but rainwater falling on his head had washed most of his face, leaving dark rivulets with deposits under his eyes, nose, lower lip, and chin. his hair was singed and there was a strange look in his eyes, but his hand was steady as he extended a small white tube of tobacco.
“What the hell just happened?” Will said.
Chelmin cocked his head. “I’ll tell you, but first I need a light,” he replied.
“Sorry. No lighter in the car, and no matches.”
Chelmin sighed, shook his head, then pulled the pack from his pocket, slipped the cigarette inside, and threw it away. Then he walked around to the passenger side and got in.
“That was an RPG,” Chelmin said. “Probably stolen from the Marine Corps museum last night.”
Twenty-four
“You look like shit,” Will said. “Like a movie monster.”
“Thanks very much,” Chelmin said. “I feel like a marshmallow that’s been toasted way too much.”
“Do you need a doctor?”
“No. But I’d like a long glass of ice water, a shower, and a change of clothes.”
The first of four fire trucks roared up, followed by every other black-and-white in the Barstow PD, and two ambulances.
Main Street was now jammed with emergency vehicles. Will put the squad car in gear, slowly made his way through the parking lot to a driveway that emptied into a side street and then drove around the block before returning to Main Street and heading west. As the Bunkhouse came into view, Chelmin glanced out the window and saw a black Buick station wagon double-parked in front of the Bank of the Desert, the largest of Barstow’s three banks.
Exhaust fumes came from the tailpipe. Both passenger doors were open. Nobody was behind the wheel.
Will saw it, too. He looked at Chelmin.
“Great time to rob a bank,” Chelmin opined.
“Hell, yes,” Will said and stopped the car by the bank.
“Let’s go,” Chelmin said, regretting again that he’d thrown his cigarettes away.
Both men got out and drew their sidearms.
Chelmin took the left side of the glass double doors, Will the right.
In half a minute, the doors swung open, and a man came out. Short and swarthy, he wore military-style body armor and carried a bulging sports duffel bag in his left hand and a sawed-off Remington 870 shotgun in his right.
“Policía! Manos arriba, Vato,” Chelmin shouted.
The man dropped the bag and spun toward Chelmin, leveling the shotgun.
Chelmin shot him in the chest. He staggered backward, then again raised the shotgun.
Meanwhile, a second, dark-skinned Latino in body armor came through the door bearing a S.A.W., a 5.56 mm machine gun. As he turned toward Chelmin, Spaulding called out, “Policía! Dejes caer su arma.”
Instead of dropping his weapon, he whirled on Spaulding, who put three .40 caliber bullets into the center of the bandit’s armored chest.
In the same interval, Chelmin got off a second shot, creating a third eye in the middle of the shotgun-toting robber’s forehead.
The machinegunner, very much alive, lay on his back, gasping for breath.
As Will rolled him over on his stomach and pulled out handcuffs, a third bandit came through the door, firing an M-4 carbine on full automatic.
Chelmin shot his right knee and snatched the gun away as he toppled forward.
Will stood up, hauled his captive to his feet, and frog-walked him to the squad car, where he shoved him into the back seat and locked the unit, taking the keys.
He returned with a pair of zip ties, with which he secured the wounded bandit.
Then he looked inside the bandits’ car, peered inside the trunk, shut the engine down and took the keys.
“You don’t look so good, Mr. Chelmin,” Will said.
“I could do with that drink of water. Or something.”
“Let’s leave the dead one. I’ll drag this one inside and come back for you, the money, and the weapons.”
§
FBI agents Blair and Hollingsworth arrived ten minutes later. On their heels were Barstow Detectives Avery and Lynch, both summoned by Will.
Will huddled with the detectives for a moment, told them what had
happened, and asked that they take the prisoner to the station for booking, then search and seize the robbers’ vehicle, take the wounded man to a hospital, and finally return to help take statements from the nine people who had been in the bank, including four bank employees.
Avery and Lynch nodded assent and left through the front door.
“A sniper, then a bombing, and now a bank robbery. This is turning into a cluster fuck,” Hollingsworth said. “Start at the beginning, one of you, and tell me what happened.”
Looking a bit more alive and sipping from a water bottle, Chelmin said, “I borrowed Agent Spaulding’s wheels to go out to the base. But it needed gas, so I stopped at the Chevron station on Main Street."
“Hold it there, Mr. Chelmin,” Will said. “I gassed up yesterday. There was almost a full tank when we got back from Kendra’s apartment.”
Chelmin nodded. “Then somebody emptied it. Probably this morning. The red light came on as soon as I cranked the engine.”
Blair said, “We’ll get tech services to look at where the car was parked, and we’ll look at the car. Or what’s left of it. Maybe somebody jiggered the sensor.”
Chelmin pulled a face. “Yesterday afternoon, out at the Marine base, the NCIS agent, Malone, got a call that someone had burgled the base museum and that some weapons might be missing, including an RPG.”
Will said, “So I was the intended victim? They fired an RPG at my Camaro because they thought I was in it?”
Hollingsworth said, “Let’s not jump to conclusions. We don’t even know that it was an RPG.”
“Yeah, we do,” Chelmin said. “I heard it fire, and nothing sounds quite like it.”
“We’ll wait for Crime Scene to confirm,” Hollingsworth said.
“Fine,” Chelmin said. “I pulled into the station, ran my credit card through the doohickey, and started pumping gas. It’s got an automatic shutoff, so I left it running and went into the office for cigarettes. A few seconds later, I heard the RPG fire, saw it hit the gasoline pump and realized that I had maybe twenty seconds to get out of there. I grabbed the clerk—a little Latina, maybe sixty years old, ninety pounds, red hair, lots of wrinkles—and took off.”
“Where is that woman?” Blair asked.
“I left her in the parking lot of the mini-mall across the street. That’s where I encountered Agent Spaulding. I got into his squad car, headed west to return to the motel. As we passed the bank, we observed a car double-parked in front, with the motor running and both passenger doors open. We stopped to investigate.
“The first two bandits came out, one at a time. There was a short gun battle. I killed one, wounded another. Spaulding knocked the third one down, cuffed him. He’s in the back of the PD unit now.”
“The hell he is,” said Detective Avery, who seemed to have appeared from nowhere, “Backdoor of your black-and-white is wide open, and the getaway car, the black Buick, which was there when we arrived five minutes ago, is gone, too.”
Twenty-five
“I’m sure I locked the unit,” Will said, holding the keys up to show Hollingsworth and Blair. “And I also took the keys from the bandits’ car.”
“He did,” Chelmin said. “I saw him do it, then he tried the door. It was locked.”
“So we know that there were at least four of them,” Blair said. “The dead one, the wounded one, the one you collared who got away, and someone to spring him and take the getaway car.”
“Maybe five, if the guy who took the getaway car arrived here in another vehicle,” Hollingsworth said.
“I don’t think he had time to walk here from the gas station ambush site and stick up the bank before we arrived,” Chelmin said.
Blair shook his head. “He could have hopped in that car and been here before Chelmin found Spaulding’s black-and-white in the shopping center."
“But there was no RPG in their car. I looked in the trunk,” Will said. “Maybe they only had the one rocket grenade, so they tossed the launcher up on a garage roof or stashed it in a garbage can.”
Blair said, “Can you call the PD and ask them to look for that RPG?”
Avery shook his head. “Nobody there but the property clerk, the desk sergeant, and the dispatcher. The chief and everyone else except us is on the fire scene.”
Will said, “What about the first shift? They were just going off duty when the RPG was fired.”
Avery pulled a face. “As I said, everyone’s at the fire.”
Chelmin said, “I’m beginning to think this is some sophisticated bunch we’re up against. They waited for the shift change, when things were a little disorganized, then hit the filling station.”
Will shook his head. “They couldn’t have known when I—you—would go for gasoline.”
Blair said, “Let’s find that RPG and then spin scenarios. See what fits.”
“I should go look for it,” Will said.
“I’ll go with you,” Avery said.
Hollingsworth nodded. “Go. Then get back here.”
§
The rain had strengthened but did little to stop the fire. The gas station was a ruin, its store a blackened mound of cinder blocks and broken glass, its pump islands reduced to rows of twisted black metal. Even the asphalt pavement burned as a thick column of fire boiled from the sunken tanks and rose more than 100 feet into the sky, turning raindrops into steam.
Firefighters played their hoses on the buildings behind and next to it, trying to save them, and so far, succeeding. The whole block had been evacuated.
Will parked next to his father’s vehicle and got out.
“That your car over there?” Arthur Spaulding asked.
“What’s left of it,” Will sighed.
“Were you in it when the bomb went off?”
Will explained that Chelmin had driven it to the gas station and that some kind of device, probably an RPG, had been fired from across the street.
“Can I get a couple of guys to help me and Avery look for it?” he asked.
“Why do you think it’s still here?”
“Because three vatos, probably Salvadorans, hit the Bank of the Desert after the station went up. we broke that up, Chelmin and me, and didn’t find an RPG.”
Arthur Spaulding, usually unflappable, couldn’t find his tongue.
Until he did. “What in the name of heaven is going on?”
Will shrugged. “Got a couple of theories, but that’s it.”
“The Bank of The Desert—that’s owned by the Prinzes,” Arthur said.
Will nodded. “So, if the guys who tried to kill me with the RPG were working for Taylor Prinze, they probably wouldn’t have gone after that bank.”
“Unless they were trying to pull a fast one.”
Will stared at his father. “Like what?”
“Bank gets robbed on a day when it has lots of cash on hand, and the robbers get away with, what—a hundred thousand?”
“Maybe less.”
“But then the bank manager says they stole half a million, and insurance covers that.”
“You know, Dad, this is making my head hurt. I’m going to go look for the RPG. Can you spare a couple of guys to help me and Avery?”
§
Will led his little group to a spot in an alley just south of Main Street, from where he thought the RPG had been fired. Then he sent one of the uniformed cops with Avery to search west of the location, and he and the other man slowly made their way east along the alley paralleling Main. Halfway down the alley behind the mini-mall, a short, middle-aged Latino under a big umbrella appeared. “Hola, Señor Detective!” he hailed Will, then handed him an umbrella.
It took a moment before Will recognized Señor Huerta, owner of Cafè Jalisco. Behind him, under her own umbrella, was a woman that he recognized as the counter clerk from the Chevron station. A short distance away were half a dozen younger Latino men.
Huerta said, “Permit me, Senor Detective, to introduce Abuela Guadalupe.”
The woman timidl
y took Will’s hand.
“The policia with the bad leg, he is your friend?” she asked.
Will nodded. “He’s my boss. El Jefe.”
Guadalupe smiled, revealing two rows of gleaming white teeth that belied her age. “I wish to speak with this policia,” she said.
“If you will give me a phone number that he can reach you, I will ask him to call you. But may I ask why?”
“He saved her life,” Huerta said. “He pulled her from behind the counter and made sure that she escaped the fire. She wants to give him a blessing.”
Will nodded. “I’ll make sure that he calls.”
“Abuela Guadalupe is my grandmother’s sister,” Huerta explained. “She lives with me and my family. You can reach her at the Cafè Jalisco."
Will nodded. “Thanks for the umbrella.”
“What are you looking for?” Huerta asked.
“Someone fired a rocket at the gas station. That’s what caused the fire. They used, we think, something called an RPG. The launcher looks like a long pipe. We think the same men robbed the bank downtown. So we’re trying to find the RPG. A rocket launcher.”
“Momentito,” Huerta replied and beckoned to the small crowd of young men. When they came over, he spoke to them in Spanish for a few minutes, and two men, one at a time, spoke up. Will’s Spanish wasn’t good enough to follow, but it sounded like they were talking about the RPG.
Huerta turned back to Will. “These men say they saw two men shoot a rocket at the gasoline station. They think one was from El Salvador. The other man was an Anglo, but his Spanish was like the Salvadoran.”
Will took a moment to digest this. “Muchas gracias,” he said. “Where were these two men when they fired the rocket, that they could hear them speaking?
Huerta conferred with the two men.
“They say the rocket was fired from the back of a white pickup truck, maybe a Toyota. The truck was in the alley south of Main Street. They were parked in that alley, and the truck stopped next to them. They saw two men get out of the truck and go up into the back of it. The Anglo showed the Salvadoran how to use the launcher. How to fire it. Then the Anglo went back inside the truck. The Salvadoran stayed in the back. After a few minutes, the truck moved a little way into the street at the end of the alley. The Salvadoran fired the rocket, and the truck left.”
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