Then he heard a metallic click in his door. It sounded like a tumbler in his lock being turned over. Lockwood quickly rolled, and his hand went for the.45, which he had put on the bedside table. He just got the gun in his hand when the door was kicked open, and three men in black jumpsuits were instantly in the room.
"You're dead, motherfucker!" MacLamore yelled, aiming his weapon.
Lockwood was already squeezing off a shot. The.45 bucked in his hand as he rolled backwards. His shot hit one of the three SWAT team members. The man screamed and went down. Lockwood completed his somersault and landed on the far side of the bed as two 9-millimeter rounds thunked into the mattress where he'd been. A third round went whizzing over his head.
"Police! Drop it, police!" MacLamore found cover as he yelled at Lockwood, curled low behind the bed.
"Prove it," Lockwood yelled back.
MacLamore threw his badge case over the bed. It landed next to Lockwood. He looked at it. "I'm coming up. Nobody shoot. Here's the gun."
He flipped the.45 onto the mattress and started to rise. He got halfway up when he was high-lowed. His chin took a flying head butt from Lieutenant MacLamore; Smith hit him with a shoulder tackle from the far side. They drove him backwards into the wall. The three of them went to the floor in a tangle. Then MacLamore and Smith pinned him. They slammed Lockwood's head into the floor several times to get rid of unburned adrenaline. They put handcuffs on, ratcheting them as tight as possible, cutting off his circulation, then yanked him to his feet. MacLamore checked Delgado, who was bleeding from a through-hole in his hip, then triggered his walkie-talkie. "Blue Team. We're clear in Thirty-seven. One down. Delgado needs a dust-off. It's through and through, but he's spilling blood like a son of a bitch."
Procopio's voice answered immediately. "Red Team is also secure," he said. "No injuries. I'll notify the parameds."
They sent Delgado off in a wailing ambulance. Lockwood and Karen were lated in separate rooms as MacLamore began a preliminary interrogation.
"Shut the fuck up," MacLamore yelled when Lockwood started to say something.
"I'm a Customs officer on leave of duty."
"You're wanted for a double police murder in Illinois and you put a round in one of my men."
"You came through the door waving a machine gun. You never identified yourself as a cop! Who taught you your hard-entry tactics? You fucked up!" Lockwood shouted back.
Both of them were still yelling as the Watch Commander hit the scene. He was a bull-necked sixty-year-old captain named Fred T. Fredrickson. In Miami police circles, he was known as Fred T. Fred. He had thirty years on the force, a command persona, and a no-nonsense, take-charge presence in a crisis. The minute he arrived, everybody settled down.
As the sun came up over Miami, Lockwood and Karen were transported to the Dade County Sheriff's Office in the backs of two separate squad cars. They drove past The Rat, who watched from his rental car across the street. He had heard the gunfire and been sure they would be killed. His nipples were on fire. They had been burning all afternoon; his skin was tender and growing red. A sign that The Wind Minstrel was coming. As he watched Lockwood and Dawson being taken away, he wondered if they were archangels, sent from heaven. How else could they have managed to survive?
Chapter 29
Vic Kulack arrived in Miami with Lockwood's Federal arrest warrant in his pocket. The last time Kulack had been in South Florida had been a disaster for him. He had left in defeat with an official reprimand because of the cluster-fuck during the take-down on Operation Girlfriend. All of his troubles after that had been courtesy of John Lockwood. It was one thing to have Lockwood go stress-related and have him run through a head check in Washington… but this was too good to be true. This was the all-time, outta-the-park, bounce-it-in-the-parkinglot home run.
He was picked up by an IA-ASAC from the Miami office named "Pecos Bill" Broder. Broder had been raised in Texas and had an accent you could hang a Stetson on. He had been Kulack's second-incommand on the IA investigation on Operation Girlfriend and shared Kulack's hearty dislike for Lockwood. As they rode across town to the Dade County Sheriff's Office, Broder filled Kulack in.
"They got our boy strung up t'the barn door," Broder drawled. "The list a'shit he's pulled this time is impressive, even by his standards. In descending order: He put a hole in a SWAT commando, hit a cop at Jackson Memorial, and ditched a police escort at a crime scene. He also moved evidence, the suspect's truck, I think. Dade Sheriff's recovered it last night, but as evidence, it's vomit. Got Malavida's blood and everybody's prints, including Karen Dawson's, all over it."
"Ah, yes," Kulack growled, "Awesome Dawson…" Kulack knew that since she was a civilian, there wasn't much he could get her for. Aiding and abetting, or maybe some after-the-fact bullshit. He'd elected to leave her off the warrant because she had juice at DOJ.
They arrived at the Dade County Sheriff's Office, and, once Kulack had checked in with the Extradite Transfer Office, he left Broder downstairs and was taken to a tobacco-colored room on the third floor. The Sheriff's main building was in downtown Miami, and Kulack thought the place looked like it had been designed by Plains Indians. It was a bunch of big, square structures with flat roofs that looked like a series of huge shoe boxes, which were called annexes because they'd been added over the years as the department grew to accommodate the ever-increasing need for South Florida law enforcement.
Kulack sat impatiently in a wood-backed chair in the windowless, badly ventilated interrogation room and waited.
His prner was finally led in by a detective. Kulack noted with displeasure that Lockwood wasn't in restraints, even though he had been arrested for a handful of Class A felonies.
"Shouldn't this piece of shit be handcuffed?" he said without waiting for an introduction.
The last to enter the room was the Watch Commander, Fredrickson. He closed the door behind him.
"I'm Captain Fred T. Fredrickson," he said, extending his hand. Kulack made no move to accept it.
"This douchebag walked a Federal convict out of Lompoc Prn using bad paper," Kulack said. "Then he gets him critically injured. He's not an active Customs Officer anymore, but he's down here pretending he's on the job, which is a violation of Title Eighteen of the U. S. Penal Code, Section Nine-Twelve: Impersonation of a Federal Officer. That's before he even gets around to plugging one of your guys and swinging on some poor schmuck working a folding chair at the hospital."
"Why don't you slow down," Fred T. Fred said as he found an empty seat and plopped down in it. "You're filling this little room up with exhaust."
"I got the paperwork here. I wanna get moving. I got a plane t'catch." Kulack pulled the warrant out of his pocket and smiled over at Lockwood. "If you're hoping that the DOAO is gonna pull your flaming gonads outta the campfire again, you're in for a big shock."
Lockwood let it all fly past. He saw no need to start up with Kulack. The game was over.
"You're a little rigid, friend," Fred T. Fred said, looking with disgust at Kulack's bulging, throbbing neck veins. "What happened down here was a mistake. Our SWAT team had bad information. Looks like this Leonard Land character hacked into the Customs computer, stole Lock-wood's picture and prints, then put it all in the NCIC database, along with a phony Illinois police report saying he killed two cops… Didn't happen. I think we should-"