“I’m not,” Brandon said. “I just need time to think.”
“We need those DVDs. The time for thinking is over.”
“But Socorro will never say anything. Will you, Socorro? You won’t say anything?”
“No,” Socorro said. “Never. Just let me go. I have children.”
“See,” Brandon said, “you always have that threat. She can’t be there all the time to protect her kids. Now she knows you’re serious. And she needs medical attention.”
Gage reached out and grabbed Viz’s shoulder. Casey locked on his arm.
“Let’s not get her killed,” Gage said.
“It’s hard to think in here. It’s like a coffin.”
“The grow room is still there,” Gage said.
“A plywood coffin. It’s suffocating.”
“Viz, get us a satellite shot of the warehouse.”
Viz flipped open his laptop.
“Suffocating? Brandon, you look like you’re about to vomit. A little blood make you queasy?”
Viz’s hands shook as he typed the address into the SAT-View Web site. Seconds later he had the image.
Anston again: “It all looks a lot different down here in the trenches instead of up on the bench. It’s easy to be a tough guy in a black robe.”
“There are skylights up there,” Viz said. “I can climb up the fire escape of the building behind, then drop down.”
“You’ll sound like an explosion when you hit the roof of the inner structure.”
Viz glanced around the inside of the van. He reached for a fifty-foot coil of coaxial cable and held it up. “This is strong enough to hold me.”
Gage nodded. “You head for the roof. Keep an eye out for Boots. And be careful, he may have called in someone to back him up. I’ll take the front door.” He looked at Casey. “You take the office window.”
Gage slipped a handheld receiver onto his belt and pointed toward the rear of the van. Viz headed out first. After he called to say he’d gotten into position on the roof, Gage and Casey climbed out and walked down the sidewalk toward the warehouse.
“What’s going on. First we had a trip down memory lane on the way over here, practically a geography lesson. Then an architectural review of this place. Jesus Christ, you talk like a maniac when you’re panicked.”
“That’s not it.” It was a new voice. A Texas accent.
Footsteps and scuffling replaced the voice.
Brandon yelled. “Anston, let go of me.”
Gage heard the sound of Brandon’s shirt ripping.
“You traitor. Boots, help me. You… whatever your name is
… check the perimeter.”
Then a yelp and a crash, and silence.
Gage yelled into his cell phone:
“Viz. Go, go, go.”
He held his hand up toward Casey, who was poised with a garbage can raised above his head, ready to throw it through the office window and climb inside.
Gage pressed himself against the brick wall next to the warehouse door. He turned his head toward Casey and mouthed, Wait.
The metal door scraped opened an inch, then two inches, then three. The barrel of a 9mm semiautomatic appeared. Then a hand. Gage chopped down on it with the butt of his gun. The wrist cracked and the 9mm crashed to the sidewalk. Gage grabbed the arm, dragged the man through the door, and swung him headfirst into wall. Gage winced at the thunk of flesh and bone.
Casey set down the trash can and cuffed the man to a water pipe.
Gage ducked his head inside. Boots’s Lexus SUV was parked just inside the roll-up door, next to the plywood grow room occupying most of the warehouse. Gage’s angled view through the opening revealed a series of ten tables stretched across the room, each topped by an empty, full-length black plastic tub.
He slipped through the warehouse entrance, then edged toward the inner door. The smell of marijuana, long since seized by the DEA, but still infusing the plywood, filled the air. He peeked inside the grow room, then ducked back, everyone’s places fixed in his mind:
Brandon was slumped against the right wall, holding his chest where the tape was torn off.
Anston was crouched behind Socorro, who was tied to a wooden chair by the left wall, his gun to her head.
Boots was poised behind a four-foot-tall grow table, pointing his gun at the ceiling, trying to track Viz’s steps moving from north to south, waiting for the order to fire.
“Back off, Gage.” Anston’s voice was calm. Hard. He sounded like a thirty-year-old intelligence agent. Not a sixty-eight-year-old white-collar lawyer.
“I’m not coming in,” Gage said. “Let her go. There’s no point. We’ve recorded everything.”
“Then you’ll just have to give me the recording.”
“And we’ve got Brandon’s records from the hotel.”
“That’s Brandon’s problem.”
Gage heard Viz’s boots hit the cement outside the structure behind Anston, who then fired through the plywood. Gage ducked inside. He heard Casey’s footsteps behind him. He pointed to the right and dived left and rolled behind bags of potting soil stacked three feet high. He crawled farther toward the left as Casey took up his position in the right corner.
A four-by-eight-foot sheet of plywood exploded inward. Gage looked over and saw Anston falling into Socorro, whose chair toppled to the side. He then spotted the motion of Boot’s handgun and his arm stretching over the grow table to target Viz as he ducked through the opening in the wall. Gage and Casey opened fire together, the bullets cutting through the plastic shells of the tabletop tubs. Boots grunted, then collapsed.
Viz spun away as Anston fired, then collapsed to the floor, reaching for his sister.
Anston alerted to the motion of Gage rising from behind the bags, turned his head and raised his gun just in time to see the flash from Gage’s barrel.
Chapter 89
Casey slid along the right wall until he got close enough to see whether Boots was still alive, then reached down and took the gun from the dead man’s hand.
Gage didn’t give Anston a second look. He’d seen where the slug struck his forehead. He ran to where Viz lay shielding Socorro. Blood soaked through the upper right back of his shirt.
Viz rolled over and stared up at Gage. “Is she okay?”
Gage dropped to his knees between them. Socorro was lying on her right side, still bound to the chair, her face bruised and bloody. She nodded.
“She’ll be okay. Hang in there.”
Gage saw blood pooling by Viz’s shoulder. He ripped open Viz’s shirt, then reached around and pressed his palm against the open wound.
“Man, I never thought I’d die like this,” Viz said, looking up at Gage. “It’s too soon… I’ve got… I’ve got things…”
Gage locked his eyes on Viz’s.
“You’re gonna make it. You need to trust me. If you weren’t, I’d say so. I wouldn’t take that away from you.”
T his is Graham.”
“Let me turn it down,” Spike Pacheco said.
Gage heard television voices fade in the background.
“I guess you just saw Landon on TV, too,” Spike said.
Gage’s world mushroomed outward from the carnage lying before him.
“Graham,” Spike finally said, “you still there?”
“Yeah. I’m at Gilbert and Brannan. I just called 911 for an ambulance. You better get over here before your whole department shows up.”
S pike shook his head as he surveyed the bodies of Anston and Boots. It wasn’t the worst crime scene he’d been called to, but it was the only one that ever had a federal judge curled up in a corner, rocking back and forth like an infant.
“I’m not sure I can contain this,” Spike said. “The media listens to our 911 dispatcher.”
“Just try to keep things muffled,” Gage said, “at least until seven o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“Then what?”
“Speculate your ass off.”
“What about Viz and the bruises on Socorro? How are you going to explain all that at SF Medical?”