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Friday, October 17, 2014, Seattle, Washington
Seattle Police Detective Joe Dunbar knew he’d screwed up big time, maybe even fatally. He swallowed hard, followed by a deep breath to steady himself. He’d managed to dodge the gunfire coming from the dark and nearly derelict house on Queen Anne. But he was trapped now.
Houses on Queen Anne sat up on the hillside, usually with a one-car garage below them. Nice homes. Craftsman bungalows. Cottages with big porches. An occasional Victorian. Dunbar liked the area. It was home to artists and professional couples, most of whom had bought their houses decades ago when it was still affordable to buy homes in this neighborhood.
He hadn’t expected a shooter to be holed up in one of them — hadn’t thought anything about coming here to see someone, even at 10 p.m. at night. But the address he’d been given was in the seedier side of Queen Anne, down near the warehouses and industrial district along Highway 99. More unkept trees hiding the houses. More industrial buildings. More vacant and rundown houses like this one. Hard to believe a derelict house could even exist in Seattle with its sky-high housing prices, but this block had several of them. Joe thought briefly that he should inquire about them later.
He’d been thinking about buying a fixer-upper. On a police salary, that’s all he could afford — if that. Most of Seattle’s cops didn’t live in Seattle. They couldn’t afford to. He had a studio apartment in the U District. He liked it there, but he’d like a house — if he could afford it.
Still thinking about a fixer-upper, he’d parked on the street, and started to climb the steps up to the house. A cold, sick feeling in his gut said something was wrong here. So, he’d stopped, called dispatch and requested backup. Then he resumed climbing the steps, wary now, focused on his environment, not on thoughts of other things. He pulled his HK .40 USP, and let it dangle down along his pant leg. Better to be cautious and embarrassed than proud and dead.
He wasn’t sure what alerted him. The sound of a door opening? The sound of the shooter moving? A sixth sense? He didn’t know, but he dove into the manzanita growing out of control on the hillside next to the steps just as a shot rang out. Missed him. But now he couldn’t figure out how to move out of his hiding spot.
The shooter had the uphill advantage. The dryland garden on the slope was overgrown, but it still offered only minimal coverage. His particular shrub was barely 5 feet tall, and hardly dense enough to protect him from another shot. It was camouflage, not a barrier. But in the dark, maybe that was enough.
He glanced back toward the street. Where was his backup? He’d called for backup — where were they?
Not coming, he thought suddenly, the sick feeling in his stomach growing stronger. He actually thought he might throw up. They weren’t coming. Surely, they would come. Surely, they were just slow. It hadn’t been that long since he’d called in, although it seemed like it had been long enough. But that was how it was when you were under attack. This wasn’t the first time he’d been shot at, after all. Not the first time he’d had to call for backup.
He was 32 years old. He’d been a cop for 10 years. After he went to college for a B.A. in law and justice, he got hired on at SPD. He moved into homicide as a detective, mostly so the bosses could get him off the streets and away from the general public, he often thought. He was a dogged investigator. A skilled interviewer. But Officer Friendly? No. Which was fine. He had no desire to spend his days talking to kids about how cops are your friends. Where he grew up, no one would have believed that anyway.
He’d feared this day would come. He and Nick Rodriguez had talked about it over a beer late at night. But he hadn’t really believed it would happen — that someday, he’d call for backup and they wouldn’t show? A cop’s nightmare, especially for a Black cop. His nightmare.
He watched the house at the top of the hill, gun in his hand, waiting to see a target. Could he shoot at someone he couldn’t really identify? What if it was some innocent moving about up there, not the person who had shot at him? He glanced around the hill and at the street below. He was exposed in all directions. If the shooter had friends, he was dead. If the shooter moved to a slightly better angle, he was dead.
Joe set his jaw and hunkered down. He wasn’t going out easy.
He’d gotten a call this morning from a man who had been on his list of men who had gone north last spring. That was how he thought of it. They’d gone north. An online guru who called himself Sensei, coupled with a few gun dealers and a constitutionalist sheriff, had seduced a bunch of white guys from Seattle into the white militia movement. Hundreds of men, each of them with hundreds of guns. A nightmare.
If you moved up the ranks of Sensei’s following, you could be invited north to a survivalist weekend in the North Cascades, an area as wild and rugged as it got. Men who went on one of those trips came back different. One told his wife he’d been blooded now. Told her that right before he took her and their daughter hostage because he was convinced the state was coming to take his guns.
SWAT took him out before he killed them. But wives and kids hadn’t been so fortunate.
Joe had been one of the investigators who had talked to some of those men — including the one who took his family hostage. He would always wonder if he had been part of what had pushed him over the edge. Rodriguez said no, a Facebook account using the name MLK4whites had been agitating and pushing at the men. But still. It weighed on a man to think he might have caused another man’s break with reality.
So, when someone called and the name he gave was on Joe’s interview list, Joe was willing to listen. The man said there was something going on. A new group was forming. Could he come to his home tonight? He got off shift at 10 p.m.
Joe felt obligated to go. He still felt responsible for the health and well-being of those men, in spite of them being racist fucks who had gotten sucked into a white supremacist militia recruiting scheme. Stupid fuckers, he thought. One of them, after killing his wife and children last spring, had fled the police, leaving his arsenal of a hundred or more weapons behind.
“Stupid enough to flee from his own arsenal,” had entered cop lore. Cop humor was dark and bleak. He grinned. Mac Davis, the cop reporter for the Seattle Examiner, had made the phrase legend. He considered Mac for a moment.
Mac Davis was a former Marine who came back from Afghanistan and went to college. Came out a journalist. Which was a pretty damn bizarre transformation. Cops gossiped about back in the day when Mac ran the streets of Seattle. Got busted for felony theft, and a judge cut him a deal to go into the Marines. He’d been 17. Joe wondered what the judge had seen in him. Probably the same thing Joe saw, that Nick Rodriguez saw — hell, everyone saw it — there was a killer lurking behind those gray eyes of his. That tightly controlled ball of rage, that seemed like it wouldn’t take much to set off. Better send him into the military where it could be put to use. Joe pondered whether the judge had thought about the fact he’d just given a stone-cold killer the best training Uncle Sam could provide. Made a man wonder, sometimes, about people’s ability to think ahead.
But damn, Mac was a good man to have at your back. He stood by his friends. Joe suspected the Examiner didn’t send him out to do cute kid stories either.
He looked at the dark house, the empty street, and took another deep breath. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. There were no messages, no missed calls. He’d called Rodriguez, but he hadn’t picked up or returned his call either. Well it was late on a Friday night. Rodriguez was a family man with kids in soccer. He was probably asleep. Soccer started early on Saturdays. He smiled, thinking of the gruff lieutenant coaching 10-year-old girls on a soccer team. For whatever reason, he hadn’t gotten the call, hadn’t called back.
So, Joe was on his own. He never thought he’d get to the point he’d call a reporter for backup. But then, he’d never expected to be hung out to dry by his fellow cops either.
He found Mac Davis’s number, and punched the call button. “Mac,” he said softly, hoping the sound wouldn’t carry and give his position away. “It’s Joe Dunbar. I need help.”
Mac Davis was at the Bohemian. He, Angie Wilson and a bunch of other reporters from the Examiner were here to drink, dance, and maybe get lucky.
Mac already knew he was getting lucky that night. He and Angie had plans — her place, in spite of the roommates. He thought again about the need to get a place of his own. He liked living with his aunt. He had the top floor, she had the downstairs. They shared the common areas. It was easy, comfortable. After all, he’d lived there as a teenager before he went off to Afghanistan in the Marines. Then he’d come back and gone to college. When the Examiner offered him a job, he’d moved back in. And Lindy was an art professor at the University of Washington. She brought in an eclectic group of friends that Mac liked having around, even if they were old enough to be his mother. And crazy. But that didn’t bother him.
He put that dilemma aside. The DJ had just given him permission to take over while he took a break. And hell yeah, he would. It was partially why he was here.
Angie, of course, was a big part of the reason as well. But right now, he was mixing beats and sounds, creating something new, something that encouraged people to get out on the floor and dance. His own table emptied. He watched Angie as she danced with a reporter from features. She was petite but not fragile. She had a sturdiness about her that was partly her muscled body, and partly her personality. Angie could be counted on. He knew that. She’d demonstrated it last spring.
She had a teal streak in her hair, and was wearing a blouse the same color. He liked the fuchsia color better, he thought. For some reason, watching that streak in her hair move with her as she danced turned him on.
He grinned. Well, the DJ would be back soon, and he could dance with her. Watch that streak — and her happy grin — up close.
He felt the phone buzz in his pocket. He almost ignored it, but there’d been too many crises in his life of late. He couldn’t ignore it, even on a Friday night. He pulled out the phone, and looked at the caller ID and frowned: Seattle Police Detective Joe Dunbar? Why would he be calling this late?
Dunbar was brash, dogged and a bit macho. He wasn’t ever sent out to the elementary schools.
Mac could relate. When Mac had a story with kids in it, they were usually in body bags. And Mac didn’t like those stories either. Mac really didn’t care for cops, victims of crime, or criminals, which made being a cop reporter a bit weird.
But then, most of his friends still laughed hysterically at the idea he was a cop reporter. The cops who remembered him from his teen years were equally astounded.
“Always thought I’d see you back here, some day,” one of them said. “But I assumed you would be in cuffs, and we’d be reading you your rights.”
Mac shrugged. He couldn’t argue. He would have said that was the only way they’d ever get him inside a police station again.
But life was weird, and the Seattle Examiner didn’t have an opening in sports when he graduated. But maybe he’d be willing to do cop reporting? Until something opened up?
He’d agreed. Reluctantly. But newspaper jobs were hard to find.
When a sports job opened up finally, he didn’t even apply. He might not like cops, but he understood them. He thought what they did was important. And that holding them accountable was equally important.
Mac thought Dunbar was about his own age — and Mac was staring 30 in the face. October 31. He sighed, as he did every time age came up, and rolled his eyes. He should consider it a marker of success. Truthfully, he hadn’t expected to live this long. It used to be a running gag with his friends: Mac Davis was killed in a shootout with police today. Mac Davis died of gunshot wounds from an engagement with Afghanistan rebels. Mac Davis was killed by an enraged husband who found him in bed with his wife — at age 97, Mac would add. So he was trying to convince himself that living to see 30 was a badge of honor. Of course, he wasn’t there yet — still time to end up dead.
OK, that was a bit dark, he acknowledged. Last May he’d come damned close to ending up dead in the Cascade mountains. Too damned close. Joking about it, even in his own head? Too soon.
But 30? How the hell did he get to be 30? And still living in his aunt’s house? Still unmarried?
But alive. There was that.
He’d gotten to know Dunbar during the story in May. Dunbar was a tall, thin, Black man who looked like he might be a marathon runner or a bicyclist, maybe. According to his Facebook page, he liked craft beers. He actually was a skilled interviewer to Mac’s surprise.
He was also a Black officer in a department that seemed increasingly hostile to officers of color.
Or maybe it was hostile because Joe was brash, dogged and a bit macho. But it was hard to believe that was the problem; the Seattle Police Department had a lot of cops who fit that description.
Mac frowned at the call, then put music by Mary J. Blige on. He liked her music. Liked introducing her music to the white-bread friends he and Angie dragged along tonight. He turned his back to the crowd and answered the call.
“What’s up?” he said.
A moment of silence.
“I can’t believe I have to ask this, but I need backup, and no one came from the PD,” Joe said softly. “Can you come?”
“Where?” he asked, looking around for someone to get the DJ back here.
Dunbar told him. “I’m hiding under a manzanita on one of those damned slopes down from a Craftsman house. Looks a lot like your place. Shooter is in the house. Abandoned. I’m pinned down.”
Mac got the eye of the bartender and gestured with his chin that he needed to leave. The bartender looked surprised; everyone knew Mac liked to DJ when he got the chance. Mac gestured with his phone. The bartender nodded. A bouncer was dispatched to find the DJ.
“OK, Joe,” Mac said. “I’m on my way. I’m not far actually. Hang tight.”
“Thanks, man,” Joe said. “I can’t believe....”
“Yeah,” Mac said. He couldn’t believe it either. He’d heard rumors. Anecdotes from people who had heard a story about some cop, in another department, another city. It was something all cops feared.
Especially if you were a Black or Latino cop. He wondered briefly where Rodriguez was then sent him a text message.
The DJ came back. Mac looked at him regretfully. “Sorry, just got an emergency call from work,” he said. “I’ve got to get out of here ASAP.”
“No problem,” the DJ said easily. Mac suspected he’d just smoked a joint, and he grinned. He wouldn’t mind hanging out back and sharing one with the DJ and bar staff himself. But then he wouldn’t be able to be the substitute DJ.
He hopped down from the sound booth and found Angie. “Gotta go,” he said. “Joe Dunbar is in trouble. Can you get a ride home?”
Angie nodded. She looked a bit worried, and Mac brushed the teal streak of hair back out of her eyes. “Will you be OK?” he asked.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “But what about you? What’s Joe doing?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “I’ll call. I might still be by?”
She grinned. “That would be good.”
He bent down, kissed her briefly, and headed for the door. They’d been a couple since May when they’d worked together in the North Cascades. Partners in getting the story. Partners in staying alive. And when they got back, they’d been making a go of being partners personally as well. But it still felt new, even going on four months. Felt like they were feeling their way along very carefully because neither of them wanted to blow it.
And abandoning a woman in a bar was blowing it, Mac acknowledged to himself. No matter how dire the circumstances.
What the fuck had Dunbar gotten himself into?
Mac wasn’t quite running as he got to his car parked along the street, but he was moving rapidly. Mac knew where Dunbar was talking about; he ran Queen Anne a lot. And if you do six miles a day, five days a week, eventually you get to know an area really well. He reached into his backpack stashed behind the driver’s seat and pulled out the Glock he routinely carried, although not into a bar — that would be stupid. He put on a black jacket, checked that the gun was loaded and a round chambered, and stashed the gun in a pocket. He started up the car, driving as fast as he thought he could get away with. Fifteen minutes. He was grim. This smelled like more than no backup; it smelled like a setup.
Mac was over 6-foot tall, with broad shoulders, gray eyes. He’d grown out a beard this summer — no challenge, he just had to quit shaving for a couple of days — a circle beard, because Angie had seen a picture of him with one and teased him into it. He snorted. But he’d done it.
He was strong; a little slimmer than when he’d been a Marine, but that was a healthy thing because he’d been bulked up then. He moved faster now.
Mac settled into hunter mode: set aside everything else and focused. At the same time, it felt like his awareness broadened. He cataloged the cars on the street, the amount of traffic, a pedestrian who’d had too much to drink and was shouting at the cars as they drove by him.
He parked southwest of the address and walked downhill. Just a man out walking, no biggie, nothing to see here.
He kept his hand in his pocket. He didn’t like this. The street was too empty. True, this was a rust-bucket industrial area, warehouses abandoned by companies for places with easier access, houses abandoned by people because crime had moved in. A pocket neighborhood on the edge of the bigger Queen Anne hill.
A street light was out. More than one, he noted. But no cars on the street? No lights on in the houses?
Sometimes, in marginal areas, the people who lived there developed instincts. It was like it was on the wind. This was a good night to lay low, to keep out of sight. Go home and lock the doors. Or maybe go to the suburbs and visit the folks.
Mac had grown up in neighborhoods like that. Like that, and worse. He got a flash of a memory of living out of the back of a car, a big American-made vehicle, back when they made those. Blue. He hadn’t been very old. Four maybe. Knew about staying quiet though.
A night like tonight, Mac thought grimly.
He heard a shot.
“Shit,” he said and started to run. So much for discretion. So much for surveillance. He pulled out his phone, and called 911. “Officer down,” he said. “Need an ambulance, now!”
The dispatcher wanted all kinds of info, and he just dropped the call. They had where he was calling from. They had the number and knew who it was from. Not that he was completely sure they’d come for his call either.
He saw the address on the street-level garage, and turned up the steps. “Joe?” he said softly.
“Here,” the man gasped.
“You OK enough for me to check things out?” Mac didn’t like the feeling that there was still someone out there. Someone who would shoot them both.
“Go,” Joe said. His breath was coming in gasps, but Mac took his word for it.
Mac faded into the shadows alongside the steps that abutted the garage. He moved up the slope slowly. His least favorite scenario: urban shooter uphill, no cover, no backup. He centered himself. He’d been Marine recon in Afghanistan. He could take out a shooter in Queen Anne. But he treated it with the same seriousness, the same caution. Didn’t matter, Afghanistan, Queen Anne, a bullet could make you dead in either place in a hurry.
He thought he heard someone running. Just light steps, a man moving swiftly in athletic shoes. Or a rubber-soled cop shoe? Maybe. He went up onto the porch in one smooth move, his gun at the ready, and then flattened against the wall of the derelict house. Abandoned, he thought. No one had lived here for a while. He kicked open the door, and when no one fired at him, he went inside, cleared the street side rooms. No one.
But someone had been here, had shot a gun from here. He could smell it. A slight rotten egg smell, more like ozone. But they were gone. He hoped.
He eased out of the house and took a good look around before starting down the steps. Time did weird things when you were hunting a man, or being hunted. But he didn’t see — didn’t hear — an ambulance. Worrisome.
“Joe,” he said softly.
“Here.”
Mac slid into the shrubs at the side of the stairs. Joe moved slightly, and Mac spotted him.
“You get hit?”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “Not the first shot. But this last one, he got me. Saw me move, I guess. Got my calf.”
“OK,” Mac said. He felt his pantleg. Wet. A lot of wet. He frowned. He tore the pantleg, and Joe grunted. “Sorry.”
Mostly by feel, although he could see some as his eyes adjusted to the night, Mac put a tourniquet around his leg. “I called for an ambulance,” Mac said. “And nothing?”
Joe grunted. “Must have the street or address flagged,” he said. “I called for backup before I called you. Hell of a note when the reporter shows up before the cops.”
Mac grinned. “OK, I’m going to get you down to the street, and then I’ll move my car down here,” he said. “Ready?”
He leveraged Joe onto his feet and then slid his shoulder under Joe’s arm. He took it slow. He’d hobbled off several battlefields — not all of them in Afghanistan either — this way. Slow was good. Jarring motions? Not so good.
“So tell me,” Mac asked conversationally. “How did they get you out here?”
Joe told him, his speech coming in short gasps, as he paused to breathe through the pain. Mac listened, troubled by the story. Had it really been a man from that list? If not, how had the caller gotten the name? A whole can of worms there.
They reached the street, and Mac let Joe lean against the garage. “Just a few minutes,” Mac promised, and he jogged the two blocks to his rig. He kept his gun in his pocket. He didn’t know if they were safe or not. If Joe had been set up, and the shooter had run, why was there still no response?
He didn’t like it. He left the engine running, got out, and helped Joe into the truck. He frowned, considering what was closest. “Taking you to the Swedish Emergency Center in Ballard,” he muttered.
Joe leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. He nodded.
“Talk to me, man,” Mac said as he headed north down the hill to Westlake Avenue where he turned west toward Ballard.
“They didn’t come when I called, Mac,” Joe said. “Tried Rodriguez. He didn’t pick up. Late. He’s got soccer on Saturdays. Maybe? Called even before the first shot. Then something warned me, and I dove for cover. Good thing. But I must have moved. Pretty good shot to hit something — a Black man in black slacks on a brushy hillside with no lights?”
“I noticed the street lights were out,” Mac said. “And the whole block, a couple of blocks seemed deserted. Someone went to a lot of trouble to set you up.”
“You think it was a setup from the get-go?” Joe considered that. “Must have been. Why, though? And why that bait?”
Mac didn’t know. He wanted Joe to keep talking. Best judge of his condition he had.
“Try calling Rodriguez again,” Mac suggested, vaguely worried that he hadn’t picked up. Maybe Joe was right, and he turned in early. Family man and all that. But he rather thought Rodriguez slept lightly. Most cops did.
Mac did.
Joe found his phone, fumbled with it a bit, and let it ring. Nothing. He frowned. Looked through his contacts, and called another number.
“Anna?” he said, trying not to let the pain show. “It’s Joe. Been trying to call Nick. He around?”
He listened for a moment. Mac could hear the sobs of the woman on the other end of the call. Damn it. “Where is he?” Joe asked. He listened again. “All right, I’m on my way there. He’ll be OK,” he said. “Best hospital in the nation.”
Mac turned around and headed to the University of Washington Medical Center.
“What happened?” Joe asked Anna Rodriguez.
“Speaker phone,” Mac said tersely.
Joe nodded and punched a button. “Putting you on speaker, Anna, I have a friend with me. He’s driving. We’re on our way. So, tell me, what happened?”
Mac pulled out his own phone. So what if it was illegal? Fuck ‘em. Joe could arrest him later. He called up his own contact list while listening to Anna Rodriguez, Nick’s wife. And driving. Sure he could multitask. You betcha.
Good thing he was sober.
“Joe, he was just going to the grocery store,” she said. “And he backed out the driveway and this pickup, a black F-150, roars down the street and shoots at him with what sounded like an AR-15. Maybe with a bump stock, because it sounded fully-auto. Must have been sitting up in the cul-de-sac watching. I called for back-up and an ambulance. And locked the kids in the back of the house. And they didn’t come Joe! Why didn’t they come?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Same thing with me. What time was this?”
“Around 9 p.m.? What do you mean same thing with you?”
“I mean I’m on my way to an emergency room with a bullet hole in my leg. But listening to you, I think I was just decoyed out here and the real hit was on Nick,” Joe said grimly. “What did you do then?”
She was silent as she absorbed that question, then continued, “I got the neighbor to help; we got Nick out of our SUV and into his. Then his wife took the kids, and Jorge and I brought Nick here. I won’t ever complain about Nick getting a Ford Interceptor instead of an Explorer again. Saved his life. Gave him a chance at least.”
“What does the doc say?” Joe asked.
“Says he’s one lucky motherfucker,” Anna said with a cross between a sob and laugh. “They had to do emergency surgery. But we live so close. Twenty minutes. And Jorge is a nurse. So I drove, and he worked to stabilize Nick in the back seat.”
She paused. “So much blood.”
“Hang tight,” Joe said. “We’re almost there.”
He hung up and looked at Mac. Mac looked grim, and just shook his head. He punched a number for Stan Warren, an FBI agent now assigned to the Seattle bureau. If he trusted a cop of any kind, it would be Stan Warren. And Rand Nickerson, also of the Seattle FBI. And Dunbar and Rodriguez. Who knew? Four cops he trusted? He would have said it would never happen.
“Stan? Mac,” he said, and explained concisely. “Two things. I’m worried about Nick’s family. The kids are with a neighbor woman. And I’m worried about security at Nick’s hospital room. The one who came for Joe pretended to be one of those militia wannabes from last spring. So that worries me. You got people you can trust? Putting you on speaker phone. I’ve got Joe with me. We’re about 15 minutes out.”
He handed Joe his phone, and concentrated on driving. He took the Fremont Bridge, jogged around on the crazy streets and onto 40th Street. He had to pay attention. He swore UW students had a death wish. Or thought they were invincible. He’d never been sure which. A right onto 6th Ave.
He looked at Joe. “Call the emergency room, tell them we’re coming in,” he said. “Have them waiting with a gurney for you.”
Joe started to protest.
“Don’t argue. Just do it,” Mac said. “Stan getting things lined up?”
“Said he would protect Nick’s kids, and he’s sending Rand to the hospital,” Joe said. He called the UW Medical Center, gave them his ID, and told him what he needed. Handed Mac his phone back.
Mac dialed Angie. “Hey,” she said.
“You OK?” he asked.
“Sure, what’s wrong?”
“You at the bar still?”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “Mac?”
“There was a hit on Joe and Nick both tonight. Last May got mentioned,” he said tersely. “Do me a favor? Have someone take you to my aunt’s place? And then have her take you both to her lover’s place. I need to know you’re both safe.”
“Will do,” Angie said crisply. “Leaving now.”
“Call me,” he said. “And look before you leave OK? If anything, and I mean anything looks strange, you stay right there and call me back. The guys that came for Rodriguez were driving a souped-up black Ford F-150 pickup.”
“Got it,” she said. “Stay safe.”
Mac dropped the call, handed his phone back to Joe. “You hanging in there, man?” he asked.
“Could use some painkiller, maybe,” he said with a laugh.
Mac wasn’t giving him anything. Blood thinners? Nope. Distract him, keep him talking. “What does Anna do? She knew her guns.”
“Works at the ballistics lab,” Joe said. He closed his eyes and winced.
Mac decided a bit more speed was in order. UW had plenty of students — they wouldn’t miss one or two.