October's Ghost

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  Art nearly choked on his dog at the remark that bordered on heresy. “At Pink’s? Didn’t Aguirre ever bring you here?” He got a smiling head shake in response. “Frankie!”

  “I don’t believe in killing my own partners,” she answered, deadpan. “If they want to do it themselves, well...”

  Danbrook laughed fully at that. Frankie was a wiseass if ever there was one, and the number-one wiseass to have on your side when the heat was on. He had learned well from her. “Is there someplace around here I can get something to eat that doesn’t have pig snouts as a main ingredient?”

  This time Frankie was the one to laugh, while Art gave Thom a purely devilish look.

  “Out the back, across the alley,” Frankie directed. “Clampett’s has what you want.”

  “Thanks. Back in a minute.” Danbrook walked through Pink’s and out the back door.

  Frankie saw another third of the artery torpedo disappear into Art’s mouth and a look of pure ecstasy come to his face. “Live it up, Arthur.”

  “Sure will, Francine.”

  * * *

  He was a reporter, and that meant he had to do things like wear bad blazers, drive a never-new, American-made car of some sort, and, of course, buy lunch for people who had a story to tell. It was all part of the persona, and George Sullivan fit into it with no effort at all.

  The three-year veteran of the Los Angeles Times turned his eight-year-old Chrysler left onto Melrose, sneaking a sip from the flask in his coat pocket, a necessity, he believed, to survive the streets of L.A. He was a transplant from New York, a former Gray Lady staffer who had gotten tired of the cold and the crowds and traded them for the smog and the crowds, and he still hadn’t figured just who had taught Californians to drive. Not that they were nuts, but they all drove like old women. They even used turn signals! Hell, he had learned to drive in the city—Manhattan—where you changed lanes if you wanted, and if someone was already there, they would hit the horn, or maybe scream something. It worked, and it was a lot more interesting.

  This fine autumn day, when the parts per million of some airborne carcinogen or something equally as horrid had reached the magical level where the weathermen colored the Los Angeles basin orange on their air-quality maps, George was off to meet what was supposed to be a story: some Cuban exile who had a juicy bit of nostalgia to share, it had been alluded to by his boss when he assigned it to him a week earlier. At least Bill had checked the guy out and verified that he might be someone who knew something. But, then, who wasn’t someone? Everybody had something to tell. Or something to sell, he added cynically.

  His own conversations with the guy, all over the phone, had been pretty uneventful, a bad signal for a reporter. News, generally, meant something of interest, and to this point there had been no indication of such. But today was supposed to be the day when the guy gave up his secret, the terrible secret he kept referring to in their conversations. The guy had actually been testing him, making sure that he wasn’t a cop or some foreign agent out to steal the wondrous knowledge he possessed. Give me a break, George thought. Just give me the straight poop, and I’ll decide if it’s earth-shattering.

  There it was. Clampett’s. Another trendy L.A. eatery that had degenerated into something—surprise!—quite ordinary. They served food there, George thought, not fucking Picassos. Angelenos had a tendency to think themselves somewhat superior in just about anything they attempted, even the mundane. It was amusing, at least, and made for good stories every now and then.

  That must be him, George thought, as he waited behind a row of cars to turn left into the alley alongside the restaurant. He could see him sitting in the corner, fiddling with something on the table, his features darkened by the tinting on the restaurant’s large front windows. The description the guy had given of himself was pretty good. Sixtyish, balding, a bit of a gut, though the guy hadn’t put it that way. Sullivan could see his bulk widen at the waist.

  The light ahead was red, creating a backup of cars trying to turn left onto La Brea. Sullivan was stuck in it, not yet close enough to the alley to turn. He kept looking back and forth between the light and the man. Then their eyes met. Only about forty feet separated them. George smiled, but the man did not return it. He checked the light again. Green. Good, he thought, and looked back to the... Who are those... Oh, shit!

  * * *

  “Yeah, can I get a burger, plain, to go?” Thom asked the hostess. She smiled almost seductively at the request He was a good-looking guy, attractive to women, something he had been told on numerous occasions, and almost monthly by his mother. Oh, well. At least she accepted it now.

  “One burger plain to go.” The hostess walked back toward the kitchen, her day starting to brighten up. Hey. Who were those guys? They didn’t wait to be seat—

  “Portero,” Jorge said in a normal voice, waiting for the man to react and turn. His hand unbuttoned his coat and reached behind his back. To his left Tomás was making much the same move.

  Francisco Portero turned his head toward the voice, knowing as soon as the word was spoken that something was wrong. His eyes confirmed that fear a second later.

  Both Jorge and Tomás pulled their revolvers at the same time and leveled them at their target from a distance of five feet. The caliber meant little at this range. Both men squeezed the triggers twice in even, steady pulls, Jorge using one and Tomás two hands. The four rounds impacted above Portero’s waist, half in his head. Tomás’s doing. He preferred the head shot.

  The body, unlike the result of movie murders, fell easily against the chair back and slumped left, the head coming to rest with a thump against the glass.

  The first shot surprised Thom more than alarmed him, and he looked up from the menu at Clampett’s front counter to see what was happening. That was when the warning was flashed from his visual sensors to the brain, starting a trained response that was automatic, developed from patterned repetition. His left hand slid his jacket back as he twisted slightly right, the Bureau semi-auto he had been issued a few years before coming out of its hip holster and to his front.

  “Federal agent!” he yelled, both hands now on the Smith & Wesson, the right hand wrapped around and on top of the left, his gun hand. It was the grip ingrained in his mind from the endless hours of firearm instruction at Quantico, where he had been trained using the Bureau’s former standard-issue weapon (the Colt .357 revolver), and it was a mistake. A grave mistake.

  Tomás began spinning when the first word of the shout from behind reached his ears. He also dropped low, bringing his gun around to find the...there! Jorge had also turned and was aiming at the same target.

  Thom knew they were turning to fire, but there were people scrambling all over the place, running in front of him toward the door and toward a window someone had smashed out. He shifted his aim a little to the left, drawing a bead on the one who was closest to firing, and squeezed the trigger. The power of the 10mm kicked his hands back, causing a fiery pain on his right hand that had never happened before. But that was inconsequential. He was in a fight for his life, in a test of speed. His mind directed his finger to squeeze the trigger again....

  But nothing happened. It was strange. He could feel his eyes widen at the surprise. He looked at his weapon, still held at eye level. The slide was forward, no obvious jam, but what was that on his thumb? Blood? What was—

  The first shot entered Thom Danbrook’s torso just below the sternum and continued through his lean body, exiting out the back with a vital portion of his spine. The muscles below his chest immediately registered the cessation of controlling signals from the brain and began to relax. But before that effect could be manifested, seven more shots were fired, three of them connecting. One shattered his right elbow. A second hit low, doing massive damage to his left hip. The third was a gut shot that punctured intestines and fragmented into several pieces, peppering the liver four times.

  Thom fell backward, his weapon still in his gun hand, and crumpled like a rag doll ag
ainst the counter, his mouth open in surprise and his eyes staring at the floor.

  “Get it,” Jorge ordered as he pulled the Browning and stuffed the empty Ruger in his waistband. He centered the pistol on the fallen cop—What did the guy yell? “Something” agent?—to make sure that Tomás could get what they had come for.

  Tomás turned back to Portero and spread his coat, checking the inside pockets. Nothing. It had to be...the shirt pocket. There was a rectangular bulge, which he reached in and retrieved. “Got it.”

  “Come on.”

  * * *

  Sullivan’s eyes were locked on the scene, his hands holding the Chrysler’s wheel with a death grip. Oh, shit! Oh, shit! I was supposed to be there!

  The two men were moving outside, a crowd of terrified lunchtime eaters preceding them. Were they coming for him? He was not about to wait and find out. Traffic ahead was not moving, so he cranked the wheel all the way to the left and floored it, heading across traffic for the alley.

  * * *

  The last of Art’s bacon-chili cheese dog was on its way to his stomach when the distinctive sound of gunfire echoed through from the back of Pink’s. “What the hell?”

  Frankie drew her weapon first, followed quickly by Art. “Call nine-one-one,” she said calmly to the cook, her eyes looking through the back windows. Where’s Thom?

  “Let’s check it out,” Art said. He led off through the inside of the hot dog stand’s small interior dining room, which opened to a parking lot on the alley at the rear. He stopped at the building’s corner and listened. Screams told him where to go. “Clampett’s.” Oh, my God.

  They moved quickly through the lot toward the back of the restaurant across the alley, Art in the lead as he and Frankie—

  “Jesus!” Art swore, the right-side tires of a beat-up car almost taking his toes off. “You get the plate?”

  “Partial,” Frankie said, her eyes watching the gold sedan speed away from them. It could be whoever did the shooting, or just someone trying to get out of the line of fire.

  Art walked quickly along the windowless wall at the building’s east side, his gun to the front. Frankie was behind him, her attention focused to the rear. A good number of people were running east on Melrose, passing the alley entrance in front of Art. That was a sure sign that trouble was to the west. “Where the hell is Danbrook?”

  He reached the corner just in time to see two men jogging across Melrose toward a van on the opposite side. One went around the back, out of Art’s view, and the other went for the driver’s door, his free hand holding a...

  “FREEZE!” It was an automatic response cops have when a weapon is sighted. Art brought his 10mm up to eye level in a two-handed grip, his knees bending slightly, centering it on the—Damn! Another wave of frenzied pedestrians rushed past, just feet from the barrel of his Smith. He instinctively cleared them, lifting the barrel skyward, waiting for them to—

  “COVER!” he screamed at the sight of the gun pointing directly at him from across the street. His body started down as the first shot rang out, sending the world into a weird kind of slow motion that blocks out all things not directly related to one’s survival. Art heard another shot, and he rolled to the right, trying to get closer to the stuccoed wall of the restaurant. And another shot, which he heard impact just above his head.

  Then the sound of tires grabbing at asphalt broke the trancelike state, and his head came up. He saw the van, a white windowless model, cross to his front, going east on Melrose. His weapon was pointed at it, but he knew he couldn’t fire at it as it sped away. There were just too many people around, and the thought of sending a two ton vehicle crashing into a crowd was not his idea of a successful felony stop.

  “Goddammit!” Art swore, jumping up from prone using his free hand for a push-off of the alley’s rough surface.

  “You okay?” Frankie asked from behind.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Close one,” she commented, her breath coming in mild heaves. Getting shot at had the tendency to do that to a person.

  “I got a good look at it,” Art said as he moved around the corner to Clampett’s front. It was all glass. He looked inside carefully and saw, not two feet through the glass, the recipient of the gunfire. His eyes swept left across the dining room toward the entrance, looking for... No. NO! “Thom’s down!”

  They raced to the entrance, keeping their weapons out as they entered the almost-empty restaurant. The only obviously live person they saw was a young blond woman standing less than ten feet from the man slumped against the window, her eyes locked on the body, both hands covering her mouth.

  “Thom!” Frankie holstered her weapon and dropped to her knees, easing her former partner’s weapon from his fingers and laying it on the counter above. “Thom. Thom. Can you hear me?” She could see his chest moving, and his eyes didn’t have the far-off look of someone on the edge of death. She had seen that before. Thom didn’t have that. She was sure of it. He couldn’t look that way. She wouldn’t let him. Would not let him!

  Art swept the room as his partner did what she could for Thom. He walked to the other victim, passing the obviously catatonic woman standing among the upended tables and chairs. This guy was dead. No question about it. The brain matter that hadn’t been blasted through the back of his head to the wall behind was dropping in tiny, bloody clumps from the exit wound.

  The door to the kitchen, on Art’s left, opened slightly. He trained his weapon on it, but only a frightened, weeping busboy was behind it.

  “I call... I call the policia.” He buried his head in his hands and stood against the wall.

  “Anyone else in the kitchen?”

  The young man took several deep, heaving breaths. “No. The men who do this, they run.” He pointed to the front door. “They do this. Why?”

  Art patted the young guy’s shoulder and put his weapon away. The kid had probably left his home to get away from stuff like this. “Dammit!”

  Frankie had Thom’s head in her arms, his body braced against her legs. He was still alive. “Talk to me, Tommy. Come on.” The tears were streaming down her face. “Talk to me.”

  Art stood over the scene, the memory of what had happened a year before to his previous partner bringing past and present together in a collision of emotions that left him numb.

  Frankie looked up, her face asking what to do. Art knew the truthful answer would only add to the anguished feeling of helplessness. “Ambulance is coming. Keep talking to him.”

  She did just that, encouraging, almost willing, him to answer, but there was no response. The sirens a minute later announced the arrival of the first Los Angeles Police Department officers. The rescue ambulance of the L.A. City Fire Department rolled up right after them, and, after a quick look at the wounded FBI agent that convinced them there was no time to waste trying to stabilize him on scene, loaded him into the R.A. and, with Frankie in the back, headed straight for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center behind a caravan of police cars clearing the way.

  Looking down at the carnage remaining where Thom Danbrook had fallen, Art knew that the heroics surely to be attempted once they reached Cedars would be for naught. It was the most painful admission a cop had to make. One of his own was going to die. Art would never say that, just as he hadn’t to Frankie. The living often needed hope more than the dying. He stared down at the blood until the rhythmic wail of the ambulance faded to nothing.

  Nothing. It was all that could be done for Special Agent Thom Danbrook. It was all Art had been able to do for his first partner, more of a mentor, right out of the Academy. You couldn’t bring back the dead.

  But you could bring those responsible to justice. That was something, despite the hollowness that the concept of ‘justice’ held when compared to the fate just dealt his brother agent. And to the other victim. Art looked to the body of that man. It was the starting point in a very familiar, and a very distasteful, process. Art Jefferson knew that the investigation of a murder had just begun.
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  He could not imagine where it would lead.

  * * *

  The gleaming white Gulfstream descended from the blue Colorado sky and touched down on runway one-seven at Falcon Air Force Base, a relatively small site that served primarily as a support facility for the North American Aerospace Defense Command located deep inside Cheyenne Mountain. It slowed and swung right onto the last taxiway, heading north toward the group of men who had awaited its arrival—some eagerly, some otherwise.

  “The Devil is strapping on those ice skates about now, the way I see it,” General Henry Granger, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, theorized, capturing the realized likelihood of the historic event. He looked to the man just behind. “What do you think, Paul?”

  “Hmmm,” General Paul Walker, commander in chief, NORAD, grunted, eyeing the approaching jet, which bore the marking of his beloved United States Air Force. He felt no such endearment for the human cargo just delivered to Falcon, and only slightly more for the man who had made this all happen.

  “Still not on board, General?” National Security Adviser Bud DiContino asked, looking over his shoulder at CINCNORAD.

  “I was never invited.”

  “Oh, hell, Paul!” Granger protested. He and Walker went all the way back to the class of sixty at Colorado Springs, a lineage also shared by the NSA, who had paraded past the spires of the United States Air Force Academy Chapel that last time two years later. “This is going to make your job easier in the long run.”

  “I suppose.” CINCNORAD really didn’t. He was part of this because he had to be.

  “You promised to make nice with our Russian friends, remember,” Granger pointed out for good measure, though he knew Walker would not let his personal feelings mingle with his duty.

  “I’ll take them home for dinner to meet the Mrs., if it’s necessary,” CINCNORAD assured his boss and friend. “Sufficient, Mr. DiContino?”