The Buffalo team had used a standard eight-camera system, recording the last minutes of their lives. One camera focused on the desolate parking lot in a mostly abandoned industrial park, carefully set to pick up license plates and faces of people sitting inside the cars. Four others covered different angles of the staged "office" area, well lit and painted a sharp white for better contrast. The last three cameras had been scattered through the shadowy warehouse with motion sensors and silent alarm systems attached.
Sumpter started the video with the team waiting for the buyers as caught by camera four.
The kid, Jason German, juggled while telling a joke; he arced four small cloth sacks through a continuous graceful loop. Tracy Scroggins sat on a battered desk, still and patient, quirking his mouth into a smile at Jason's nervous antics. Walt Boyes, the backup, wasn't visible, most likely stationed at the monitors in the concealed room, judging by how the camera zoomed in and out on the kid. The time stamp ticked off the seconds until they died.
". . . and she says, 'Whatever you gave me, Doctor, didn't work.'" Jason was midjoke as the video started. "'While my farts are still perfectly silent, they now smell awful. Thank goodness that no one can tell it's me farting, because they could peel the paint off walls!' 'Good,' shouts the doctor, 'now that we cleared up your sinuses, we can start to work on your hearing!'"
There was an odd noise from off camera.
"I think you just killed Walt," Scroggins said. "You okay back there, Walt?" A muffled laugh was the only answer. "You've heard that one before, haven't you?"
"It's funnier this time," Walt Boyes called from his concealed room.
"I don't know whether to be complimented or insulted." Jason sent one of the balls looping over his shoulder and deftly caught it.
"Heads up!" Boyes announced the buyers' arrival.
Jason caught the cloth bags he'd been juggling and put them aside, saying, "It's about time."
Tracy nervously checked the draw on his pistol.
The door opened. Four men entered dripping slightly from rain, just as the Iron Horses had claimed. Atticus had seen the bodies of the other three bikers, so he focused on the missing man. He was a big black man with a sleepy look to him. He leaned against the back wall, tucked between two support columns. Nothing about him suggested that he knew what was coming. While Jason and the lead biker exchanged presale banter about the heavy rain outside, Toback literally picked his nose out of boredom.
"Who gives a fuck about the rain?" Scroggins gave the banter a shove toward real business. "Are we going to do this, or talk ourselves to death?"
"Tracy! Jason! Incoming!" Boyes shouted. "Incoming!"
Sumpter reached down and slowed the playback, murmuring, "This goes too fast to see otherwise."
The door flew open and a man walked in, shotgun at his shoulder. He fired as he walked, shooting the bikers even as they turned. Others filed in after him, six in all, faces set and emotionless as they fired. The bullets slammed the bikers' bodies around like puppets with their strings randomly jerked. In the slowed replay, the blood splattered gruesomely. Scroggins and German had flung themselves behind the steel desk. The camera showed only the tops of their heads as they returned fire, pinned behind the desk. Two of the shooters went down, but the other four rounded the sides of the desk and fired point-blank. The police would find later that Scroggins had tried to shield German with his own body.
The time stamp had ticked through twelve seconds.
But the shooters had missed Toback, who had cowered between the support columns. While they started to reload, he charged, a long steel pipe in hand. The foursome glanced up, and one, handing his gun to another, stepped forward to engage Toback hand-to-hand.
The shooter ducked the steel pipe casually, and then caught hold of it. There was a momentary contest of strength that the big man should have won, but the shooter wrestled the pipe away and struck Toback down with it.
The other three stepped forward, guns now loaded, and aimed down at the prone biker. They checked, apparently reconsidered killing Toback, and turned away. They turned toward Boyes's hole instead, leveled their guns, and opened fire. They systematically shifted their fire, visibly working left to right. Atticus recalled the line of bullet holes, how they ran with machine precision across the back wall; he thought that only one marksman had made them. He watched now, stunned with the knowledge that three men had acted in unison. How were they coordinating their shots? He realized then that so far they hadn't uttered a single word.
Behind them, the impossible happened. The two dead shooters scrambled to their feet. One picked up the bags containing the money and the drugs. The other stooped down to grab Toback by the ankles and dragged him outside, leaving the swath of clean floor that would later puzzle Atticus. The shooters' clothes showed bloody bullet holes and gaping wounds, entrances and exits indicating paths through vital organs, but they seemed unhampered and unperturbed by the massive damage done to them.
Walt Boyes started to scream, a wordless howl of anger and pain, like a wounded animal. The guns thundered, and the screaming stopped, and then the video ended.
Sumpter took the DVD out, put it in a jewel case, and held it out to Atticus. "That was the best angle to view the shooters. You'll want to study all the angles."
Atticus took it numbly. Two images chased through his mind: the shooters standing up, ignoring their wounds, and Ukiah coming back to life. His brother had known about the drug, known the bikers, and they found him on I-90, a straight shot from Buffalo. It was the cultists who manufactured the drug and killed Ukiah. Who were the bad guys here? Was it the cult who hit his brother with a car and then shot him? Or was it the Pack, who might have staged the shooting in Buffalo? He was going to get answers from his brother, even if he had to beat them out of him.
***
Ru talked them out of Sumpter's room. There was an older couple waiting for the elevator, so they rode in silence, watching the floor numbers count downward. They found Kyle in the business center, downloading information to his laptop.
"That was not twenty minutes," he grumbled, typing furiously on the keyboard.
"Change of plans," Atticus said. "You and Ru are staying here."
"What?" Ru gave him an angry look.
Kyle glanced up to eye them standing over him and then bowed his head back over his keyboard. "So the video was that bad? I, for one, would rather not see it, but I know I'm going to have to digitally enhance it until my eyes bleed."
"There's no reason for all three of us to go," Atticus stated, answering Ru and ignoring Kyle because he was completely right.
"And we'll be safer here?" Ru added, as if he were finishing Atticus's statement.
Yes.He knew what Ru would say to that, so he didn't say it aloud, not that it mattered. Ru knew him well enough to guess what he was thinking.
"I'm going with you," Ru said.
"I'm just going to pick up Ukiah and come back," Atticus said.
"Don't get stupid because of what happened to the Buffalo team," Ru said.
"The Jag only seats two comfortably," Atticus said.
"We can take the Explorer," Ru countered.