chapter forty

I put the car on autopilot for the ride home. Lee’s digitized voice was the refrain I couldn’t get out of my head. Piedmont—it will end as it began. But if I was the Piedmont in Lee’s vlog, that meant not only was I in the crosshairs, the connection between the deaths of Britney Devonshire and Lee ran through me. How?

Every cop has a mental list of perps most likely to carry a beef. I ran through mine, but none of them seemed likely to be tangled up in this. So how? Had I set the dominoes tumbling simply by refusing to write off the Devonshire girl’s death as an accident? Had my stubbornness been enough to trigger Lee’s murder? And ensure Frank’s death as well? Each green and white exit sign flashing past my window felt like a slap. That sick empty feeling in my gut grew denser, pulling everything into it like a black hole.

Jo was asleep when I got back around 3 a.m. Still stretched out on the couch, she wore a shirt of dark blue silk, but her long legs were bare. All About Eve was playing on the wall screen. Without makeup in that light, Jo’s face looked like a teenager’s. I waited for Bette Davis to buckle her seat belt for a bumpy ride and turned off the movie. The sudden silence woke Jo. She yawned and stretched.

“What’s the news?” That concerned face again.

“Nothing good.” I leaned down to kiss her, then gave Jo the brief rundown of my visit to the hospital, editing out the ugly bits.

She nodded and squeezed my shoulder. Wordlessly, Jo sat up, pulling her knees in toward her body as she patted the soft cushions of the couch in front of her. I sat down, leaning my back against her smooth legs, feeling the cool silk of her shirt brush against my skin as she started to knead the knots out of my shoulders and neck.

“I did something bad,” I said. “Can you forgive me?”

Her fingers barely skipped a beat before continuing their rhythmic kneading. “What’s the offense, and how do you plead?”

“Guilty. By reason of insanity. I just invited my mother to come live with us.”

Her fingers stopped altogether.

“Even though, your mother, being your mother, turned you down.” She paused. “Right?”

“Naw, she’s moving in next Tuesday.”

Jo landed a playful punch to my shoulder.

“Ouch.”

“That’s what I love about you, Eddie.” She continued her massage. “One of the things. Underneath all the macho bluster? You’re kind. That’s rarer than you know.”

One of the things I love about Jo is she thinks I’m better than I am. But that scared me too. Screw my father and everything he’d said in the hospital. I pulled one of Jo’s hands away from my shoulder and kissed the palm.

“Hmm.” She kissed my neck. Jo playfully pushed me away with her feet and turned around, leaning against me this time. She placed my hands on her thighs, under the long silk shirt. “Maybe we should do something bad together.”

And all the thoughts of Lee and Fuentes and my part in this tangled up mess were put on hold as Jo pulled me upstairs to the bedroom.

***

When I woke with a start, the clank of the garbage truck moving down the street rattled away. For a second it was just another day. The sun was rising, working its ancient magic, light once again turning the flat black silhouettes of dawn into the three-dimensional world.

But the skin on the backs of my forearms prickled. Neither the sun nor the clanking garbage trucks had ripped me from sleep. The silent flashing red of my phone confirmed my internal alarm.

So did the home security system. Its silent alarm had triggered. Someone without clearance was trying to gain entry. I listened on high alert. But the house was quiet. My phone vibrated. The security company—asking for authorization to send a car or stand down.

“What is it?” Jo’s voice was still sleepy.

“Probably nothing.” I zipped my fly and pulled up all the security cameras. They flashed onto the wall screen opposite the bed.

We had cameras on every door and window, plus the driveway behind the house. Houses on the canals are tightly squeezed together. Anyone approaching from the sidewalks out front is highly visible. There was nobody at the front door.

But the screen covering the back was black. Pitch black. A short of some kind? No. The kitchen camera went dark next. I activated the stealth alert to the security company.

When I holstered my Glock, all sleepiness left Jo’s face.

The door to the bedroom was steel reinforced. “Stay here,” I said, locking it behind me.

Glock out, I headed downstairs.

The back door gaped open. The entry code panel was smashed. The blow that smashed it had to be what had woken me. Black spray paint dripped down over the lens of the retina scanner. The empty can lay just inside the door.

The sharp acetone smell of the spray paint lingered near the dripping mess that blocked out both retina and thumbprint scanners. Paint still wet. The perp Picasso could still be inside.

Back-up was on route. But a squad car would take ten minutes to get here. Minimum. This was Jo’s home. My home. Jo was upstairs. I clicked the laser function on my Glock to hot.

There’s a reason cops call doors vertical coffins. Even with back up, there’s always a blind spot as you move through. My back-up was ten minutes out. Glock out, I went back through the house the way I’d come. Pivoting the gun in an arc in front of me, I cleared the room. Nobody. The next doorway—the same procedure—the same result.

Crack! Smashing glass and metal sounded from the next room.

As I rounded the corner into the living room, the pungent odor of aftershave mingled with adrenaline and stale sweat hit my nose.

“Police,” I yelled, “Freeze!” Wheeling around, I aimed at the blur of black and white streaking past.

The black and white blur coalesced into a lanky guy in baggy jeans and oversized white T-shirt. He held a metal baseball bat over his head—frozen before he could deliver the second blow to one of the cameras he’d smashed moments before. There was a spiderweb of cracks through the floating glass tabletop too. My home computer was toast.

He slowly turned around to gawk at me. The face, excepting his dark eyes, was entirely concealed by a black balaclava.

A drawing of the wings of a headless angel covered the front of the oversized Ed Hardy T-shirt he wore. The brand was a favorite of both the AzteKas and the Zetas. But they usually accessorize with a nine-millimeter—or an AK.

“Put the weapon down on the ground,” I said. “Slowly. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

His baggy black jeans puddled on the floor as he knelt in slow motion, setting the metal baseball bat down on the ground. No telltale bulge of a concealed firearm in the pockets.

I walked over and kicked the bat out of his range. And ripped the ski mask off his face.

A twenty-something Hispanic face.A stranger’s face.

He had a goatee and wore a green bandana with the number 7 tucked over his dark hair. The green, the number 7 and the headless angel T-shirt told me his life story. All I needed to know anyway. He was from the Loco 7’s—a Venice chapter of the AzteKas tied into the Juarez Cartel down south. But not a shooter. He was missing those distinctive gang tats.

From far off in the distance sirens wailed. Back-up.

The sound startled Headless Angel. His eyes darted around the room, ricocheting between the barrel of my Glock and the back door. He went for it, sprinting past me for the door.

I could have shot him. But he wasn’t armed, and I didn’t want another hearing. So, I sprang after him. Grabbing the tail of his shirt, I yanked hard.

The banger spun around and threw a right at me, wide, and missed. I slugged him hard, once to the gut, followed by a sharp righ jab to the nose with my Glock.

His head snapped back. Blood gushed. He fell backwards to the ground and lay panting. I reached for my cuffs with my left hand. And remembered I didn’t wear them at home. I pushed my right foot on his chest. Pinning him to the ground, I reached for his belt.

Headless Angel froze as I lifted and started to turn him round. He looked up, but not at me. At something over my shoulder. Not something. Someone. He smiled.

I pivoted right. Fast—but not fast enough.

The bullet skimmed my side, shredding its bloody wake in red.

Headless Angel seized the moment. He grabbed his bat and slugged me. I heard my ribs crack. The impact slammed me back a couple steps, lifting me onto my heels.

Shooter stepped in and hammered me with the butt of his gun.

I fell backwards, dropping my Glock, the wind and sense knocked out of me. With each breath a searing pain shot through my chest.

“Cameras.” Shooter’s voice was calm as he delivered orders to the junior banger. “Ahora.”

I struggled to pull air into my lungs. My sides screamed. My gun. I forced myself up onto my elbows.

This second guy, the guy with the gun now pointed at my heart, slowly shook his head as he kicked me back down. The flat black eyes of a practiced killer stared through his balaclava as he stood over me. Sleeve-tats blanketed the arms under his T-shirt. A gun, the barrel pointed out, was inked on his forearm—mirroring the real steel pointed at my head now.

Headless Angel raced around the room like a squirrel on speed, pulverizing every visible camera, plus smart-home control panel, family pictures, and anything else he could smash. He wrenched the large contemporary painting off the wall and dropped it onto the floor.

Once the cameras were smashed, Shooter calmly peeled off his own ski mask. A black tear was tattooed by his right eye. He wanted me to see him. He wasn’t planning on leaving any witnesses. He moved the gun closer to my head.

But Headless Angel had missed the auxillary cameras, concealed and protected behind bendable metal glass barriers.

“Facial recognition match.” Close-ups of all our faces floated free in the room. “Carlos Salazar,” boomed the mechanical voice. “Age 22.” Under the mug shot of the little guy with the bat, his priors scrolled: B&E, vandalism.

Headless Angel saw his own face before him. He squealed again and raced around the room. Trying to avoid the cameras, he scrambled to find his mask. Fingers fumbling to yank it back on. Futile.

Shooter slipped his own balaclava back down over his face. Too late.

“Enrique Ramirez. Age 31,” droned the mechanical voice as the floating close-up of Shooter’s image froze. Two priors for armed robbery and GBH. One arrest for manslaughter. My murder could earn him another tattooed tear, but he wouldn’t be mourning.

Ramirez shrugged and took slow aim at my head. “Por Paco.”

Ramirez. Enrique Ramirez. For Paco. Paco Ramirez. I was looking at a relative of the baby banger I’d shot three weeks ago.

A shot rang out. Blood and brains splattered me. But not mine. I rolled.

Jo stood in the doorway, arms out the way I’d taught her, both hands on the Glock I’d given her last summer.

And Enrique Ramirez’ faceless, lifeless body fell where I’d been seconds before.

Salazar screamed and rushed Jo. I tackled him first and heard his knee pop as his fell. I grabbed the bat. His hands reached for his ankle. The knife was just a blur as I smashed the bat down on his head.

His head hit the floor, out cold.

“Eddie!” Jo ran towards me. Her hands were shaking. Our eyes met for a split second. Then I saw the knife sticking out of my upper thigh. Blood gushed. And the world went dark.