Automatic gunfire blasted down from the second-floor windows, spraying the vehicles. Agents wearing body armor and DEA vests crouched behind them, pinned down.
Maven watched the action from behind a skinny, city-planted tree. The feds were taking heavy heat, outflanked and overmatched. Then he saw a long-limbed DEA agent ducking behind a vehicle’s front end, yelling into a mobile phone.
Agent Lash. Calling in more backup. He evidently couldn’t hear anything from his phone and took a chance, ducking and running behind a pickup truck.
It was a raid. It had gone wrong, and fast. This was an ambush.
Lash pulled a sidearm and peeked over the bed of the pickup, squeezing off shots at the building — ducking back when retaliatory rounds plunked the vehicle.
Maven dug into his backpack. He carried an all-black Beretta 92, an instrument of his paranoia. He slipped it out of its nylon bag and slid off the safety, holding it low against his leg, starting down the far side of the road, moving from car to car as more people fled past him.
One of the SUV’s gas tanks exploded. Not a spectacular ball of flame, but a concussive burst that lifted the back of the vehicle and threw back the men behind it. No one was on fire, but they were hurt, rolling from side to side in the road.
Maven came up beside a black guy sitting with his back against a blue Honda, biting the neck of his navy blue Champion hoodie and saying over and over, “Shit, shit, shit.”
Maven peeked through the cracked window glass and saw Lash reloading, the pickup not thirty yards away. He moved up one more car, not wanting to be seen.
In the second-floor window above, Maven saw a shirtless blond guy wearing a gun strap across his bare chest. The shooter aimed down at Lash. Maven straightened and fired over the Honda’s roof — too far away to be accurate, but enough to break the glass and send the shooter ducking for cover.
Maven spun back down and wondered what sort of insanity had caused him to do that. His lack of judgment turned him ice-cold, and he ducked away to the previous car as a hail of rounds came whistling near.
Lash flattened out and slid underneath the pickup. They were surrounded. Lash heard fire behind him.
He looked up at the undercarriage of the truck and remembered the exploding SUV, and that made him slide partly out, enough to see the shirtless shooter in the window firing down into the street.
Lash’s first round cracked the rifle’s stock. The second burst red over the shooter’s neck. Shots three, four, and five struck the chest of the howling shooter, who was too dumb to fall.
Lash scrambled out from beneath the truck. Sirens in the distance, all the sounds combining in his head to form a machinelike roar.
The raid was a disaster. The bad guys had been waiting for them inside. Lash wondered if, in hoping to draw out the Sugar Bandits, maybe he had waited too long.
He remembered the gunfire behind him and looked across the street. He saw a body behind a car. Maybe the shooting from that side of the street was friendly fire, saving him from the assassin above.
Lash raced back there, one round chipping the tar at his feet. He dove over the trunk of the Honda, falling to the sidewalk near the man’s boots.
The man lay on his side. No armor, nothing identifying him as law. Lash crawled up on him, seeing broken glass from the car windows on his sweatshirt, blood soaking the neck of his hoodie.
Lash rolled him faceup. It was Tricky. His head was ringed as usual in a drawstring hood, and Lash reached inside, putting his bare hand over the neck wound, just as he had all those years before.
This gash was worse, obliterating his former scar.
“The fuck are you doing here, man?” said Lash.
Tricky tried to swallow, couldn’t. His hand gripped Lash’s wrist, holding him tight. “Protecting my investment,” he coughed out, gritting his teeth.
“What are you talking about, Trick?”
“You. Something happened to you, I’m fucked.”
“You goddamn fool,” said Lash, which was not what he meant to say. Lash looked around for the gun. “Where’s the piece?”
“Gotta save me again, man.”
Lash looked up the road for ambulances, a cruiser, anything. “Shit, Tricky, hold on. Hold the fuck on.”
Tricky stared, but no longer at Lash’s face. His grip slackened, and the pressure of the blood pushing through Lash’s fingers ebbed.
“Hold on!” said Lash.
One More
They were waiting for us,” Suarez said. “that whole thing. a trap. what else could it have been?”
Their placement around the pool table told the story: Glade and Suarez together on one long side, facing Royce; Termino on one short side, Maven across from him.
Glade said, “They were waiting to drop the hammer on us. We’d gone in there? Wipeout. Fucking massacre. Game over.”
“The DEA,” said Suarez. “Right there with us — Jesus.”
Royce waited like a man paid to listen to complaints, letting them air their frustrations. “Point taken.”
Glade said, “We’re on borrowed time now. This thing has been beautiful, man. It’s been beautiful.”
Royce said, “Calm down.”
“I will,” said Glade. “In about a year. When I’m far away from here.”
Royce was looked at Maven. This mutiny was his fault.
“Look,” said Suarez. “Nobody wants to do this. At least this way, we end it on our own terms.”
Royce’s smile was tight like a seam about to burst. “Don’t fucking let me down gently like I’m your girlfriend. Surveillance would have shown that this last one was a bad bet, and we would have pulled back, we would have walked away. Okay? It’s our usual caution that kept us out of trouble. This isn’t so fucking dire that we can’t pull our pants back up and walk on.”
The other two wouldn’t look at him. Glade finally said, “If it’s a vote, then it’s three to—”
“It’s not a vote.” Royce pressed his knuckle into the cloth covering the rail. “It’s not a vote. It’s a decision we all make.”
He walked to the table against the wall and brought over a thick mailing envelope. A new job.
“This one’s back to basics.” He tore it open and dumped the contents onto the table. Oversize index cards containing the marks’ vitals, clipped to photographs. Prelabeled mobile phones, for work and snooping. “A civilian, a dermatologist piped in to pharmaceutical supplies. Opioids.”
Termino said, “What the hell’s that? Geometry?”
“OxyContin, morphine, fentanyl, methadone. Also some steroids and human growth hormones.”
Termino studied a photograph. “Dude could use a cycle or two himself. He doesn’t look like much.”
Maven saw through Termino’s role as Royce’s straight man. It was about as subtle as the propaganda posters on the walls. He checked the other two, Glade and Suarez, who were listening.
Royce said, “Typical too-smart-for-himself frat boy with a taste for the dirty.”
Termino passed the photograph and the index card to Suarez, who shared it with Glade.
Royce said, “I’m asking for one more. You owe me at least that. Let’s not leave this job on the table.”
Glade passed the photograph on to Maven. The standard sur veillance shot was snapped from the same Bushnell binoculars they used, with a built-in camera. Maven glanced at the man in the picture — then stared at it. A long moment passed when everything else in the room disappeared.
It was Dr. Who. The guy with the long scarf, whom Danielle had met on the Green Line train.
Maven was bewildered a moment. Only a moment.
In a sickening moment of lucidity, everything became clear.
How Royce got so close to the marks.
How he got mobile phone access and personal information, setting the table for the bandits’ takedown.