Saturday, October 18, 2014, Seattle, Washington
Angie’s phone went dead mid-sentence. She looked puzzled. “I still have battery,” she said blankly. “Why would it cut off?”
Stan Warren looked around outside of the car. Nothing moving, but still. “Out of the car and into the house,” Stan ordered. “Now!” he added, when the two women didn’t move fast enough to suit him.
He had his gun up and was backing toward the house, surveying their back trail. Someone had been watching. Someone who could cut off their phones. He kept backing up. He could hear Janet explaining to someone who they were and why they needed to come in.
“Stan?” Janet said. “She wants to see your badge.”
He couldn’t fault her for that, but it did make it difficult. “Back of jacket?” he said tersely.
Janet said something. “Badge,” she called softly.
“I’m coming to get it,” Angie said, and then she was there. He pulled it out of its pocket inside the jacket and handed it to her one-handed, his eyes and his weapon never left the area he was surveilling.
He was almost to the porch. He felt the cement under his feet, stepped up on the step, then looked about. Stepped back and up onto the porch.
A rifle shot pinged past him into the siding of the house. He ducked instinctively — too late to do any good, but it was impossible not to flinch when you heard the sound. “In the house!” he ordered, “Sharpshooter.”
And then he was in, and he slammed the door. For a moment he just stood there, facing the door, letting go of the adrenaline. Letting his heartbeat slow down to levels that didn’t threaten a heart attack. Letting the sweat that covered his body cool. Then he holstered the gun in his shoulder harness — he wasn’t going to have it loose in his pocket around kids — and fastened the flap. He turned to see three women looking at him. Janet was calm; she didn’t even look like she’d broken a sweat. Well, after all she went through a year ago, it probably took a bit to scare her, he acknowledged. Angie was all big eyes, but she had a firm grasp on her camera, and another hand on the arm of a Latina — Paulina Moore, he assumed.
Paulina was in her early 30s, he thought, pretty probably, when she wasn’t scared to death. He glanced at the arm Angie had a grasp of — Paulina held a butcher knife. She wasn’t going to go easy, he thought with admiration.
“The children?” he asked. “In the study,” Paulina said with only a bare hint of Spanish accent. “It has no exterior walls.”
Smart woman, he thought. He studied her, wondering how she knew to do that?
“Can anyone call out?” he asked.
All three shook their heads no.
He heard a pickup truck coming up the street. “Where’s that study?” he asked, shepherding the women back away from that front door.
Paulina pulled on Angie, urging her to move faster. Stan Warren put his arm around Janet and moved her along, following Paulina. He heard the first rounds from the guns outside, and he slammed the door of the small study, made even smaller by the number of people and by the fear.
Anna had been right, he thought dispassionately as he listened to the sounds of the attack out front. An AR-15 rendered automatic with a bump stock. But then, Anna knew her weapons.
He glanced at the children in the room. They were seated on the floor. Carolina, the oldest of the Rodriguez children, had a toddler asleep in her lap, two other young children were leaning against her, one was sucking her — he thought the child was a her — thumb. There were three other children also on the floor. One was the 10-year-old who played soccer, and Nick’s pride and joy. OK, Nick was proud of them all, but he was coaching soccer so that there were enough coaches for all of the kids who wanted to play. The other two must be the Moore children. One had her arms wrapped around her knees and her head buried against them. The other was watching his mother — his eyes didn’t leave her.
“Hi,” Angie said, smiling at them all. She sat down on the floor next to them, cross-legged, and started talking about her camera. The kids started looking interested, and she asked if they wanted their picture taken? They did.
Janet murmured to Paulina, “We won’t use them without your permission, and no faces.”
Paulina nodded jerkily. “She’s good with them,” she said. “I’m a mess. And they can tell. Kids do, you know?”
“Understandable,” Janet assured her. “Why don’t you sit down, too? Maybe in that rocker?”
She did, and one of the littles, as Stan’s mother would have called them, crawled up in her lap. She hugged the child, and it seemed to steady her to have someone who needed her comfort.
Stan looked at Janet, motioned toward the door with just his eyes. She nodded, and moved in that direction.
“You barely know what end of a gun to point,” he said, “But I have a backup weapon in my ankle holster. I want you to stay here with it. I need to go out there and take a look around. We’re trapped in here.”
“I thought of that, too,” she said, her lips barely moving. “Good place for the kids. But....”
He nodded. Then bent over and pulled a Sig P365 out of its ankle holster and handed it to her. “It’s ready,” he warned her. “Just point and pull the trigger. And for God’s sake, don’t shoot me when I come back!”
She laughed at him, and he grinned. He kissed her. A long, hard kiss, because he still had an adrenaline load riding him, but she met it with equal passion. She might have some adrenaline going too, more than she showed, he thought with amusement.
“Take care,” she whispered. He nodded, pulled his Glock 9mm back out of its shoulder holster and held it at ready. She opened the door just wide enough for him to slide through. He heard it click behind him, then paused and listened.
Nothing. He had been afraid that whoever had fired would come in after them — that some people might be in here now. But he didn’t hear anyone. Didn’t hear any of the soft sounds of someone breathing while they waited to ambush him. No murmurs between people — and he was sure more than one shooter was involved. He thought the house was empty. But he did it by the book, clearing a room, moving through the space so no one could be behind him, moving toward the front room.
Holy shit, he thought. At the Rodriguez house, they’d been aiming for the SUV and sprayed the garage and the house, damaging the wood and brick facade. He hadn’t gone inside there, hadn’t really inspected the damage. He’d been on sentinel duty, really. But this? They’d been aiming at the house. The plate glass windows were shattered. The door was cocked open a bit — by the force of the shots, not because someone had come in, he decided.
None of this made sense, he acknowledged. But that wasn’t his job right now. That would come later. Right now? He had to keep these women and children safe. He swallowed hard. If those assholes hadn’t cut the call, they would all be dead. That had been enough of a warning, and they’d made it to safety. If Paulina wasn’t a savvy — and frightened — woman who already had the children in safe spot? Not all of them would have made it.
He dropped his gun back to his side and moved to where he could look out through the window where there used to be glass, stepping lightly. He saw headlights coming toward them. He tensed, but it wasn’t a pickup — some kind of luxury car. He frowned. Had Shorty driven over when the call ended abruptly? He watched. The driver pulled into the tarmac in front of the garage and blinked his lights twice. He turned them off and sat there, waiting.
Another careful man, Stan approved. He found the porch light switch and blinked it twice back. The driver got out. No light showed when he did. Well, if it was Shorty, he’d grown up with Mac and his cousin. He might drive a fancy car and teach high school math, but he’d proven his mettle a couple of times in the last two years.
Shorty Guillermo was a slightly built man of Filipino-Mexican descent. He must be about 30, too, Stan thought, although he seemed younger than Mac. Might be because Shorty hadn’t gone into the Marines.
Might be because Shorty wasn’t a sociopath. The Marines had found that diagnosis inconclusive, but there was no doubt in his mind. Mac Davis was a sociopath. He had a very short list of people who mattered to him. And most of them were in this house right now.
Shorty stopped on the porch, away from the door itself. He let Warren take a good look at him. “Permission to enter?” he said softly.
“Door’s open,” Stan said with amusement. He saw Shorty grin, and then he pushed the door farther open, stepped through and shut it. It was only then Stan saw that Shorty had a revolver in his hand.
“Thought you weren’t going to carry a gun again,” he observed.
“I don’t carry one,” he said. “But I do have one in a locked box under the driver’s seat. Because Mac is going to pull me into his vortex sooner or later, and when he does? I want a weapon. Everyone OK? Freaked me out when the call dropped.”
“We’re good,” Stan said. “That dropped call saved us. It was just enough warning for us to get inside.”
“Good thing,” Shorty muttered. “If you’d been in that car out there? It’d be Spam in a can.”
“God, Shorty,” Angie said from the hallway. “Don’t use that phrase again, OK?”
“You were supposed to stay inside the study,” Warren said. He was still watching out the window. He’d heard the door click, and he would have given even money on which woman ventured out first.
“Forever?” Angie asked. “I’m the dove Noah sent off the ark to see if there was safe land out here yet.”
Stan glanced back at her and grinned. Stan’s mother had made him suffer through 18 years of Baptist Sunday School, and he suspected Shorty’s Mexican American mother had instilled Catholicism equally well, because he was smiling too.
“My phone started accepting messages, at least,” Angie said. “Haven’t tried to call out. Mac is on his way. He’s got Juan Moore with him.”
Shorty nodded. “I finally reached him about 15 minutes ago,” he said. “No reception where he was in the hospital.”
“Any news about Nick?” Stan asked, still watching the street. He couldn’t look away somehow.
“Still in surgery which means still alive,” Angie answered. She was standing back, barely in the room. Stan heard her bring up her camera and take some shots. No flash. Seemed like it would be too dark without one, but he didn’t pretend to be the expert. She was. And it could be that was how she calmed herself down, just as he did, standing here, watching.
He heard another vehicle moving slowly toward them. It wasn’t the same pickup that had shot up the place. Might be Mac, might be someone else. He waited. He wasn’t sure he could move from the window, actually, where he waited and watched. Not that he could do much against someone who could bring that kind of firepower to terrify a suburban cul-de-sac. He’d be dead if they came back.
Why had they returned a second time? Another message? Don’t help or you’re next? He didn’t know. He would, he promised himself. He would figure it out, and people would pay.
It was Mac’s 4-Runner. He watched, wondering how a paranoid sociopath approached a situation like this. The amusement helped to relax the muscles in his back. He could breathe.
Mac went by the house, slowly, as if he were just a neighbor gawking, Stan thought. He went to the end of the cul-de-sac, looping around, and parked, facing the exit. And then Stan watched Mac watch. Even so, he was startled when there was a tap on the door, and the two men slid inside. He’d never even seen Mac — or Juan Moore — exit the vehicle. He considered that, and decided Juan had probably slid out before Mac made the loop. How Mac did it, he had no clue.
He turned from the window. Juan was already disappearing into the back where his wife and kids were. He had a gun in his hand, forgotten, Stan suspected. One of Mac’s, no doubt. The man had an arsenal in that vehicle of his. Oh, it was safe enough — essentially a military-grade gun safe built into the back of the 4-Runner. But he still had no desire to get hit in that vehicle.
“Hell of a mess to clean up,” Mac observed. His gray eyes were cold. Stan didn’t think for one moment he was talking about the shattered glass.