"Listen. Gimme thirty-four hundred, I'll toss in four boxes of parabellum."
"Four what?"
"Four boxes of nine-mm. That's it. Thirty-four beans cash now."
"Awright. Fuck it." Pause.
"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten . . . . "
Spain had started to squeeze the trigger and the light popped on in the car as the door opened and his man got out. He had an M-31 loaded in the tube. He'd built it himself from a practice rifle grenade, one of the demilled jobs with the fuse and explosives out and with the copper cone where the shaped charge goes intact. Fins in real good shape. He squeezed as the man ducked back in the window and the man was leaning in and counting, "Eight, nine, ten, two thousand, and one, two, three, four," peeling off hundreds when the shaped charge exploded against the side of the car. He heard the coughing plop when the charge exploded out toward him, but by the time his mind had registered the sound and he'd paused long enough to look over toward the trees his head and upper torso had turned to red, disintegrating Alpo; the driver and the car and the sack of "Lugers" and the rest of him were all blown to scarlet shit in a flaming orange ball of fiery, explosive death.
Spain turned and began moving back through the trees, climbing back up through the tall grass toward the highway. He glanced back once at the inferno burning down on the road, the billowing, black, oily smoke a strong chemical smell. The Mercedes was still intact but the flame should ignite the tank soon, and he spat once and turned back breathing deeply of the fumes and the mixture of gasoline aromas wafting from the wake of the passing traffic. He got in and started the engine, listening for the blast as he pulled out onto the highway.
Bud Leech and Eichord were on their way to knock on a couple of late doors when Leech rogered a call on the two-way.
"Eighty-one-eleven," he told the dispatcher, which was the numerical designation for the Intel unit.
The radio voice gave him the word and they were on the way to the crime scene in a hail of static and incomprehensible copspeak. Eichord recognized "forty-three-oh-four," a number of the Homicide Bureau, and "Castle Road," and that was about it. They were northbound, moving fast in a marked scout unit, Eichord having to concentrate to follow the twists and turns and then giving up and relaxing as they sped through the nighttime traffic.
"I have no idea where we are."
"Know which district you're in?"
"I'm not even sure what state I'm in."
Leech smiled and said, "Just remember the high numbers are the districts north of St. Louis, north of town that is, and —" The radio interrupted. He exchanged another brief bit of cryptic copspeak and told Eichord, "It's a car bombing." Another homicide or two in the growing file that was called "Russo" after the hood whose murder had precipitated the gang war.
Bud Leech worked the field. He was technically an intelligence supervisor but he'd come from a smalltown background where you did it all; you secured a crime scene all by your lonesome, took the pictures, gathered the evidence, came back and wrote it up, investigated, you were a one-man team. Now he was a watcher. He watched the religious cultists, the dudes with the paramilitary club who got off on mere fantasies, all kinds of things beside what feel under the usual "organized crime" provinces of gambling, pros, extortion, loan-sharking, porn, and of course, the biggie narcotics.
"What is your procedure as to who rolls on a homicide call," Eichord asked as the scout car shot through the cars in the fast lane.
"How do you mean?"
"In terms of whether or not you hear about it?"
"Oh, I'm gonna hear about it all right. But you mean if the dispatcher calls us."
"Yeah."
"Anytime a call comes in to the dispatcher for homicide to respond — let's say to a fatal shooting — the first individual on the crime scene automatically calls for an ambulance, and if the victim appears to be dead four people automatically get the call. Five now with you. You got homicide, you got the medical examiner, you got the ET unit, and us."
"ET unit?"
"That's the mobile van. Evidence technician. So we've got a fairly well-preserved and -documented crime scene in many instances. The ET guys are right there with all the tools ready to have at it."
"Would there be exceptions in fatalities? Like where you'd never get called in?"
"Oh, sure. Like a traffic fatality. Something of that nature, sure."
"No. I mean, say they find some dude hanging from a rope in a fleabag hotel. Suicide note pinned to his chest and he's swinging from the light fixture. You gonna be there on the scene?"
"No. Probably not in that case. No."
"No."
The perpetrator or perps unknown had been very lucky, Leech and Eichord learned upon arriving at the crime scene. The lieutenant was already there and Springer told them, "At least two dead. Bodies absolutely blown to shit. May be a third one dead. One in that vehicle" — he points in the direction of some charred and smoking rubble, and then at the wreckage of a car on its side in the nearby field — "and there's some human remains over by that one." He glances at some notes. "Eighty-eight Mercedes registered to one Anthony Tripotra, a.k.a Tony Trip. Muscle in the Dagatina family. No way to tell on this other one."
"The guys that did this got lucky as hell. There's nobody home in any of the farmhouses and homes on down this way. And all the good citizens that heard the explosion goin' by up on the highway, all the smoke'n' shit, nobody called it in to us. We wouldn't be here if Fire hadn't caught a call on it."
"Hey! Lieutenant" — a uniformed officer and two detectives were over by the edge of the road poking around in the bushes and trees — "over here." One of the homicide cops, a detective named Richard Glass, was holding up a shell casing of some kind in an evidence bag. The smell was offensive beyond belief as the smoke wafted toward them.
"All the earmarks of a pro whack-out."
"Right." Eichord looked at the contents of the bag. A technician was walking down the road with a weapon he'd found somewhere. It looked like what was left of a Walther P-38.
After several minutes of poking around, Leech and Eichord looked at each other and shrugged simultaneously, heading back to the scout unit.
"You've seen enough?" Leech asked.
"Yep."
"You didn't say much back there," Leech said as they got in the car. " I figured we'd see some real criminology goin' down but you just kinda poked around and stuff. I was pretty disappointed." He was grinning.
"Yeah. Well, it was an off day." They drove back toward the city. "You didn't say much either there, by the way. Real quiet."
"That's my thing, Jack. I don't do much. I just lay back in the weeds real cool."
"Um hmm."
"Check it out."
"See who the bad players are."
"Gotcha." Traditionally cars that roll on a homicide call the findings back to a district supervisor who would arrive and take charge of securing the scene. He would be maybe a detective sergeant but he would remain in charge no matter what kind of rank showed up subsequently. If the criteria met the right guidelines, then Eichord would eventually get a call. He wanted to make sure it was going to happen.
"What are the rulebook criteria for who gets called on a firebombing or any homicide of this nature?"
"Well. First .... somebody's gotta be fairly dead."
"Good. I agree, of corpse."
"Jesus. All right, I quit. Okay. It would like depend on case saturation. The call depends on that day's work load more than anything. But you can stop worrying. It happens now. Everybody knows. Jack Eichord gets in on the act first thing."
Bud Leech was the first cop he'd met in St. Louis other than Springer who'd been willing to give him shit all about anything. He looked over at the man. He had a hypognathous jaw and a large, broken beak that gave him almost a Dick Tracy look. All it would take was a less towering physique, and Leech could put on a snap-brim and a yellow trench coat and pass for the Gould comic strip hero. Eichord said: