I HEAR GUNFIRE from outside and from through the walls, telling me that the shoot-out between the people on the second floor and the SWAT team has resumed. Suddenly, the building’s fire alarm starts to ring out. The sprinklers in the ceiling open up and rain down on the path ahead. I can’t be sure if the building is on fire or if this is just a distraction caused by the criminals inside. The more chaos they create, the better off their position will be.
Ordinarily, it’s a SWAT team that comes in full force—stunning and confusing and overwhelming adversaries—but in this case, it’s our team that’s been caught off guard.
I jog down a dark corridor, my Stetson keeping the falling water out of my eyes. The hallway is full of closed doors for what I assume would be offices if this building were used by any ordinary business. Under normal circumstances, Carlos and I would take the time to make sure each room is clear, but right now, my priority is getting to the gunmen on the second floor. I’ve got to make it easier for the SWAT team to get inside.
My flashlight makes me an easy target but I don’t let that stop me. At the end of the hallway, I burst out into a large garage bay, with a ceiling that must be thirty feet high. Carlos is right behind me. I sweep my flashlight through the raining water and see at least three dozen cots with women shackled to the beds. Some are crying and screaming. Some are hiding under their beds with hands over their heads. And some—I’m terrified to see—don’t even look awake. If the sprinkler system and all the shooting won’t wake them, they’re either dead or so high on drugs that they’re comatose.
The room seems unoccupied except for the women, but over by two large garage doors, a handful of cars are parked, including Llewellyn Carpenter’s blue panel van.
Suddenly, from the other side of the room, muzzle flashes explode out of the darkness. Bullets puncture the wall just to my left. I extinguish my light—no doubt it’s what the shooter is aiming for—and drop down onto the wet floor. Carlos hits the deck, too.
The shooter stops firing, and the room is enveloped in blackness. I raise my gun, aiming in the general direction of where he stood. I wait, hoping he’ll discharge a round, which will tell me right where he is.
But he doesn’t.
He’s waiting for me to show myself in the darkness.
Behind me, I hear the slightest sound of movement from Carlos. Then, far off to our left, the sound of something metal clangs against a corrugated panel. I know what it is immediately: Carlos threw something—a coin or maybe a round from his Colt—across the room as a distraction.
It works.
The gunman opens fire toward the opposite wall. The man’s face is illuminated by the strobe lighting of the muzzle flashes. I squeeze the trigger of my SIG Sauer, and his head whips back. The shooting stops and the gun clatters to the floor. I jump to my feet and turn the flashlight on to make sure he’s dead.
His body is lying in a puddle, the water turning crimson.
We can still hear gunfire outside and from somewhere within the building, but it’s muffled by the alarm and the spray of the sprinkler, which creates a white noise that almost drowns everything else out. I sweep the light over the imprisoned women. They are screaming and crying and scared to death—but none of them have been shot.
“How do we get upstairs?” Carlos shouts to the women.
A handful of the prisoners point to the corridor the man I just shot came out of. Carlos and I run across the room, our boots splashing in the water. Behind us, we hear a noise, and we both spin, guns raised. An armed man bursts into the room. I’m on the verge of pulling the trigger before he can get his gun raised.
I lift my gun instead, pointing it toward the ceiling.
It’s a member of the SWAT team who made it in behind us.
He raises his gun, aiming, no doubt, at my flashlight.
“Texas Rangers,” I yell, spinning the beam so it illuminates my face and—more importantly—my cowboy hat.
In the darkness, no shot comes.
Relieved that we didn’t just get killed by a member of our own team, I shout to the man, “Secure this room! We’re going after the shooters on the second floor.”
Carlos and I race past the body of the man I shot and into the next room, expecting a staircase. Instead, we find an even larger room, this one with a mezzanine running the perimeter of the second floor. We don’t need my flashlight to see because the windows on the upper level have been shot out, and for some reason the sprinkler system isn’t spraying in here. Several men—four on the left mezzanine and three on the right—fire automatic rifles from the windows down onto the SWAT officers outside. There had been a fourth gunman on the right, but a body lies at the other men’s feet—the person Carlos shot from the parking lot, I assume.
Carlos’s LaRue thunders next to me, and one of the shooters stumbles backward, tumbling over the railing and dropping to the floor with a thud.
Shooters on both sides of us cease firing outside the windows and swing their guns toward us.