It was nearly six in the evening when Conklin and I arrived at Silver Terrace.
A uniform standing beside his cruiser at the top of Apollo told us to park in front of the green house, one of dozens just like it, stairstepped down both sides of the sloping avenue.
Conklin drove us down the hill, passing the herd of black armored SWAT and FBI vehicles banked at the curb in front of a brown stucco house that Stempien had identified as belonging to Barkley’s Moving Targets comrade Marty Floyd.
We slowed in front of the green house with an overgrown front yard and a stubby, empty driveway and parked as directed. This was the house between the Barkley and Floyd residences, and the interior was dark. The brown house to its left belonged to the Barkleys. Two unoccupied unmarked cars and a cruiser formed a barricade in front of it.
Overhead, an Eyewitness News helicopter chopped at the air, and any minute now the press would attempt to penetrate the scene. They would be barred from this section of the street, but there was every chance that Leonard Barkley would flip the table, set off explosives, and turn this porous residential neighborhood into a shooting gallery.
As I had those thoughts, a pair of black-and-white cruisers parked crosswise on the north and south ends of the 800 block, cordoning off the area, bracketing Floyd’s brown house, Barkley’s brown house, and the green house in between.
The stage was set.
Richie and I were there mainly to arrest Barkley, and I hoped to God that that would happen without anyone firing a shot. I had an edgy feeling, a cross between high anxiety and disbelief. We’d been looking for Barkley so intently, and he had gotten away so many times, that I could hardly accept that he was trapped, that we would be reading him his rights within minutes or hours.
As I mentally prepared for the unknowable, Conklin spoke on the phone with Paul Chi. I picked up that Chi and McNeil were inside the Barkley house with Randi and her personal cop escort, Officer Carol Ma Fullerton. That Randi and her husband were separated by one twenty-five-foot-wide front yard had to have been planned.
Conklin hung up from his call with Chi and filled me in on the consensus of the cops inside the Barkley house. Based on Randi’s nothing-to-lose attitude and escape potential, she’d been locked up inside a windowless back room with cops taking shifts at the door.
It was too bad for Barkley that he’d jumped onto Marty Floyd’s computer and logged on to Moving Targets. And I felt bad for Randi, pining for her husband.
But I snapped out of it.
Leonard Barkley didn’t deserve sympathy.
He was the number one suspect in the high-profile killings of Paul and Ramona Baron, and the three men who’d been dropped at the jazz center like puppets with cut strings. And it was entirely possible that Barkley had also shot Roger Jennings and other San Francisco drug dealers we didn’t know were his victims.
Was Barkley in charge of the entire Moving Targets operation? Was he a soldier taking orders? Could he be charged with any of these killings I had just counted up?
I brought myself back to the imminent Barkley takedown. Barkley was a dead shot, a proficient killer. His neighbor Marty Floyd was a transit cop and so had also been trained in the use of guns. I was glad to see that Brady had called in the FBI to back up our SWAT team. Commander Reg Covington had a high record of success, and he was in charge.
Conklin and I watched from our squad car. SWAT was using the hoods of their vehicles as gun braces. A BearCat ran up on Marty Floyd’s lawn, and twelve men in tactical gear swarmed out. Two took positions on either side of the front door. Others took posts near the windows and at the back and side doors.
I radioed Covington.
“It’s Boxer,” I said. “What can you tell me?”
Covington said, “Barkley’s not answering his phone. Neither is the house owner. We’re warning them, then going in.”
I watched from the relative safety of our squad car as Covington lifted the bullhorn. A high-pitched squeal that felt like an electric current connected every person in the unit as one.
Covington’s voice boomed toward the brown house.
“Mr. Barkley, this is Commander Covington, SFPD. We don’t want anyone to get hurt. You and Mr. Floyd open the door and show us your hands. Do not do anything stupid.”
I watched the door, waiting for it to crack open, for Barkley to step out with his hands above his head. I could almost see him, wearing fatigues and a new beard. Could see him limping from a wartime injury. I waited to hear him say, “Don’t shoot.”
That’s not what happened.
Someone panicked. An officer at the barricade twitched his trigger finger and fired a burst of bullets at the brown house. Automatic gunfire was returned from windows on the second floor.
Conklin and I ducked inside our vehicle as World War III broke out on Thornton Avenue.