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Monday, October 20, 2014, Seattle, Washington
Monday morning, Mac drove across the river and into downtown Seattle where the Examiner offices were located. He was going to be glad he started work at 6 a.m., and didn’t that make him sour? A situation so bad, that a 6 a.m. work day was a bonus? But traffic across the 520 was hell during rush hour.
He was surprised at how well things were jelling at the house. Competent people who had some common sense? Who knew?
He had expected people to go haring off, doing things on their own, jeopardizing everyone. Hell, just one person — the wrong person — carrying an old phone could do that. Instead, people seemed to route security questions through him, and logistics questions through Shorty, since most of those require some computer knowledge. And yesterday, most people spent time on their phones with insurance agents. He didn’t envy any of them that.
Rand played taxi driver, since he had one of the few functioning cars. He’d taken Janet to her place so she could pack a bag and get Pulitzer. Then they’d swung by Rand’s place for a bag too. Janet decided not to move out at the moment — it looked like there was enough income for now, thanks to the FBI. She said she’d see if they were still at the Parker house November 1. Moving was a bitch.
No one had argued with that. So, the house now had seven kids and a large dog. Pulitzer was in heaven. The kids seemed to be happy to play on the big lawn, and Pulitzer played with them. He dug holes too, which made Mac laugh as he sat out on the patio in one of the lounge chairs and talked to Joe for a good part of Sunday afternoon. It was overcast, but not rainy, and warm enough if you had a jacket on.
Mac found he liked being here. He hadn’t been around kids much. And Pulitzer was the only dog he knew. Maybe he wasn’t the loner he thought he was.
Janet said she was picking up a rental car after work today. Shorty was going to give Angie a lift to get her car on his way to school. And then logistics would ease a bit. It wasn’t like you could walk to the bus stop in Medina. This was a neighborhood that assumed you had a car. Probably a car and driver.
Mac continued down his mental checklist as he finished this new commute to the Examiner offices downtown. A longer commute, and no short-cuts. You did the bridge, period. He grimaced.
Veteran Trust was actually working out. Mac had been impressed Saturday night. Even though Stan Warren had flashed an FBI badge at Benton Weeks, Weeks still called down to the house, woke Mac up, read him Stan’s badge number, name and gave him a description before letting him in. Veteran Trust just might be trainable.
Mac had spent most of Sunday talking with Stan and Rand. Then Joe some more. Joe was the key, Mac thought. At least until they could talk to Nick, Joe was the best source for information that they had. And no one knew when someone could talk to Nick. Anna Rodriguez looked stressed, but Mac saw the other women reach out to her, and he left her alone. Nick was still in a medically induced coma. He didn’t know if that was good or bad. Maybe Juan would know.
Something about this drew him in, and that scared him a bit. If being a loner wasn’t enough for him, then what? He knew how to be a loner.
But truthfully, this was a collection of loners.
Stan? He’d divorced years ago, and for the last two years he had been content to be in a long-distance relationship with Janet.
Joe? Rand? Mac didn’t know anything about their personal lives. He knew Joe liked craft beers and long-distance bicycling —his Facebook page said so. Rand worked with an outdoor excursion company in the North Cascades to relieve the stress of his job as an agent. If either of them had a significant other, they didn’t mention them.
Same was true for Shorty in a weird way. Shorty had lots of connections, and he was never without a girlfriend. But Mac rarely met them, and never bothered to remember their names, because they changed so frequently. Shorty was close to his family, but Mac thought he might be Shorty’s only close friend.
So here they were, this collection of people who really didn’t like people all that much. And they were managing to collaborate just fine. It baffled Mac, even as he accepted the fact that he liked it.
He belonged, he thought suddenly. Outside of the Marines, he never felt like he really belonged anywhere. Even at the Examiner. Most of the staff there were wary, at best.
But these people? They mattered to him, and he knew he mattered to them. He belonged.
Mac had also dealt with Juan Moore Sunday. Juan was really their own civilian, and even he was a nurse with military experience. But he had a hard time adjusting his thinking to being under attack. Still, when Juan left for his shift Sunday afternoon, he left with a reliable Colt .45 revolver in a lock box under his seat. He hadn’t been happy about it.
Mac had made sure he knew how to use it, and that he would use it if it came to that. “You’ve got a wife and kids, and they need you,” Mac said. “You hesitate, and you’re dead. So, don’t hesitate.”
“Mac,” Juan started to protest. “I can’t live like that.”
“Then you’re dead,” Mac said. Paulina had come up behind them at some point during that conversation.
“Juan,” she said quietly. “He’s right. My father? He still greets visitors at the door with a weapon handy. And it’s been 20-25 years? The gun is hidden, now, this is true. But there would be no hesitation to use it if necessary.”
Mac thought he’d like her father. He nodded once at her. And went on to other conversations on his list.
And there had been a lot of conversations on his list, he thought with a grimace.
So commuting to work Monday morning was really the first chance he had to talk to Janet about newspaper things. “Are we going to run the story?”
“When in doubt, print,” Janet replied. It was an old journalism axiom Mac had heard her use before. Many times before. “Does it worry you, that except for that brief foray into the UW Medical Center, we’ve been left alone? I would have expected them to come for us before we had a chance to get organized.”
Mac considered that as he pulled into the parking garage attached to the Examiner building. “They may not have thought they needed a plan for that,” he said slowly. “With that much overkill, they may have just assumed they would kill Nick, terrorize everyone else into silence, and walk away.”
Janet frowned as she got out of the car. “And when they didn’t, they send the three stooges out to finish the job. Turns out there’s more backup than they expected — including the FBI — and they back off? Maybe. Did we go to ground so well that they haven’t been able to track us? Maybe. But today? Today you and I are at our usual places. Juan went to work yesterday without problems. It worries me.”
“Be interesting if there are stakeouts at people’s houses,” Mac mused. He thought about the note he’d gotten from Anderson. It was clear he didn’t want Mac to call him. In hindsight, Mac thought Anderson had been staking out the house and saw him go in. Whatever he wanted to say, he didn’t want to say it in front of Angie.
Stan Warren had assigned Rand to the Sand Point neighborhood to knock on doors today asking about a stranger watching the two houses. That shot became more significant as the time went by. Why would the spotter take a shot? Real fire power was minutes away. If anything, he scared Stan enough to make him move faster, and probably saved them from injuries if not death.
Irony or intentional? Mac chewed it over.
“Or spotters outside places of work?” Janet asked. Mac grimaced. How would he do it? If he missed his targets and they went to ground, how would he lure them back out where he could get at them? He might well leave them alone long enough for them to fall back into old habits. Habits that could be traced.
Mac thought about that while he made his blotter calls. Most of the law enforcement agencies emailed over a list of blotter entries, and he would go through those. But the real stories were the ones that weren’t there — pending investigation, they’d say if you called them on it. Or the items were so vague you missed the significance of it. They intended you to miss it. Cops called to a cop’s house for domestic violence? All that was in the emailed press release might be the street, and all clear..
So, he called. And he asked questions about those cryptic items.
He had a list of every law enforcement agency in the Puget Sound area — law and emergency response. There was even a funeral home list somewhere in his desk, a holdover from when newspapers actually called for obituaries. He’d used it a couple of times. But this main list, he called daily; then there was a secondary set of numbers that he called once a week, a few each day. Today he’d call some that didn’t get a call very often — he wanted to check the station houses near the Sand Point neighborhood.
Some things merited a sentence in the ‘police actions’ column. Some got a short story for the page 2 briefs. Others got bigger treatment. And some would get follow up stories from either himself or from Joe Conte. Today, though, he asked casually had they heard about a drive-by shooting out in Sand Point? Because dispatchers, clerks, and cops were the biggest gossips in town — and they’d gossip with him because after nearly three years of this, he seemed like one of them.
And no one had heard anything. Only one of them he thought was lying to him. There’d been a pause, and the desk sergeant at the Seattle North Precinct said, “Where’d you hear nonsense like that? In Sand Point? Mac, if you’re going to make things up, at least make it believable. White Center maybe, or Federal Way.”
Mac chuckled obligingly, thinking to himself, ‘asshole.’
“Got a weird tip,” Mac said. “You know how it is.”
“You all need to upgrade your tip line bonuses then,” the man groused.
“Sarge?” Mac said slowly. “So, you know there was no concern about shots fired out there? For sure?”
“That’s what I said,” the man said, and his voice was cold. “Nothing to be concerned about.”
“Just checking,” Mac replied. He glanced at his notes to see who he was talking to. Sgt. Scott McBride. Well, well, what a coincidence — the name the three stooges had dropped. “Awful early on a Monday morning for you to have all the weekend calls about gunfire memorized by address.”
There was silence. “Don’t go asking for trouble, Davis,” he said. “You’ll be writing checks even the fat pocketbooks of your publisher can’t cover.”
Mac thanked him for his time, and moved on down his list.
“Take a look at Joe’s story, will you, Mac?” Janet said, when he filed the last of the short stories into her queue.
Mac called it up and read through it. Joe Conte had talked to some neighbors. They’d heard shots fired, they said. They called 911, but no one came out. So, they figured it was just fireworks or something. And then the next day, they’d seen the mess of the two houses.
“Gangs,” one neighbor said. “Drug dealers fighting it out.”
He didn’t know them, they kept to themselves. He hoped they wouldn’t be back. “We don’t need their kind in our neighborhood.”
Mac wondered if ‘their kind’ meant Latino? He figured it did. Probably why neighbors were so ready to believe gangs and drug dealers. He wanted to punch someone.
Another neighbor said he’d called again on Sunday morning, and a police officer told him it had been a gang shootout. That troubled him, the neighbor said. There were kids in those two homes, he said. They seemed like nice people. He didn’t know who he’d talked to at the police station. Whoever the 911 dispatcher transferred him to.
Mac read it twice. Well, that explains why the neighbors weren’t more concerned, he thought coldly. He looked up at Janet and met her eyes. “We’re going to have to say something about the fact that the residents of one of those houses is a police officer,” he said. “That might prompt some neighbors to talk more about what happened.”
She nodded. “Craft me a paragraph while I read your stuff.”
Mac rewrote a couple of paragraphs. He didn’t use Nick’s name. He did say that the police officer was seriously injured in the attack, but no details had been released. Angie came in and handed him some printouts of the photos she’d sent to Janet’s queue. He studied them and nodded. He’d write the captions for them.
He made a printout of the story and handed it to Angie. The newsroom was silent. The other beat reporters were drifting in, but they could tell a big story was breaking. More than one of them glanced at Janet’s hair, grimaced, and found other places to be. Janet ran her hand through her hair when she was pushing deadline and things weren’t going well. The messier her hair, the worse the problem. Mac grinned. It was her only tell. She was calm otherwise. Her face was serene. She might be typing a bit faster than normal. But that was it.
But her hair. He’d ducked out on occasion himself.
Not today. Today it was his beat, his story, at least in part, and he’d push copy at her until deadline. He glanced at the clock. It was the only thing on that wall. A big utilitarian clock with a second hand. He switched over to a different screen, pounded out cutlines — the captions — for Angie’s photos. As he had been before, he was amazed at Angie’s ability to capture the story with her camera.
“We have permission to use the picture of the kids?” he asked her. Angie nodded.
No faces are visible,” she pointed out. “And don’t use names in the captions, obviously.”
The picture was haunting — scared kids holding each other on the floor of the designated safe room. Mac grimly wrote cutlines for it, and then printed all of them for Angie. When she nodded, he sent them to Janet’s queue. Janet still had to lay out that page and they were getting close to deadline. Really close.
He glanced at Janet. She ran her hand through her hair again and looked up at the clock. Then she went back to her computer. Laying the page out, Mac thought, with a glance at her screen.
Mac focused on his edits of Joe Conte’s story. He called Stan Warren. “We’re on deadline,” he said briefly. “We’ve got a neighborhood take on the story — bizarre. Details later. Can I say that the FBI have the attack under investigation.”
“No attribution?” Stan asked.
“No attribution. Just that one sentence.”
“I’m good with it,” he said, and hung up. Smart man. Reporters had a tendency to see if a source would give them a bit more, and then a bit more. Mac grinned and plugged it in.
He glanced at the clock, ran spell check, and sent it to Janet. Done. He always felt like he should throw his hands up in the air like those calf ropers did on television. Wrapped, tied and done.
“It’s yours,” he said. “Cutlines are done too.”
She nodded once, called the story up and read it. She tweaked something on her screen, and hit the send button. She sat back in her chair.
The clock hit 8 a.m. They were done. And on deadline.
“Find Conte,” Janet said. “Have him join us across the street. I’ll be over as soon as I talk to Angie’s boss about getting her assigned to this as a special project. And grab Mike Brewster too.” She tapped her fingers.
“On it,” Mac said. He grabbed his phone to make the calls and grimaced. He turned back to his computer, called up the staff directory, and looked up their numbers. Going to be a pain in the ass to input all those phone numbers back into his new phone. He had a backup of all of them — courtesy of Shorty who thought of such things — on his laptop, because he had a lot of private numbers for sources. But he hadn’t put them in his new phone. Not yet. A reporter was only as good as his sources, and for sources to be any good, you had to be able to reach them. He needed to get that done. Add it to the list, he thought.
“We meeting before or after I walk through SPD?” he asked.
“Before.”
He tracked down Mike, called Conte, and then went to get Angie and walk over to the coffee shop across the street where he and Janet went for coffee most days after deadline.
Well, Janet got coffee. He used to have Mountain Dew, which they disdainfully kept a few cans for him. This past summer he’d switched to iced tea, and they were so startled, he kept ordering it. But nothing beat Mountain Dew for the caffeine and sugar hit. He might need one this morning.
Angie ordered some kind of coffee drink, something, something mocha, and the barista nodded approvingly. Mac asked for a Mountain Dew, and the barista all but refused to take the order. He glanced at Angie who was trying not to laugh. He sighed.
“I’ll bring them out,” the barista said. “No Janet today?”
“She’ll be along,” Mac promised, amused at the disgruntled man. “A bunch of us today.”
The two of them staked out the big booth in the back. Mac rotated his shoulders and stretched. That had been a hard two hours, he admitted to himself. The waiter brought him his Mountain Dew and a glass. He thanked him, and just to prove he was somewhat civilized he actually used the glass.
Angie watched all of this with amusement. It was a morning ritual, and she joined Mac and Janet probably once a week. He grinned at her.
Mike Brewster slid into the booth next. He was 5-foot-10, brown hair, brown eyes hidden behind wire-framed glasses that were always just a bit lopsided. Mac thought his ears must not be quite even? Mike pushed the glasses back into place. He was wearing a casual suit, shirt and tie. Dressing down from what Steve Whitman had required of his special projects team, but he might be the only guy in the newsroom who wore a tie.
Well, the business desk did, but Mac wasn’t sure they counted as newsroom.
Joe Conte came in through the door. Tall, dark-haired, lanky, probably in his 30s. He’d been with the newspaper for a long time — before Mac got here. He looked tired, and a bit unhappy to be pulled out of bed on his day off. Mac could relate. But it wasn’t the first time for either of them.
“Good story,” he said briefly.
Joe nodded his appreciation for the compliment. “Weird one,” he said, and when his coffee came he cupped his hands around it like the very presence of it comforted him. Mac had long ago decided Seattleites were weird when it came to their coffee.
Janet came in finally. She had printouts of page 1 and the inside jump, and plopped them on the table before going up to order her own coffee. “Read,” she ordered. Unnecessarily, Mac thought, as everyone reached for one.
“Holy shit,” Mike Brewster murmured as he looked at the photos. He was the only one new to the story. He started to read.
Joe Conte glanced at Mac when he reached the parts he’d added. “Should have added you to the byline,” he observed. “I couldn’t get any cop to comment.”
“Footnote byline,” Mac replied. “You did the bulk of the work.”
Mike was back to looking at the photos. There was a large one of the shot-up houses on page one, and then page 3 had been laid out as a package. The picture of the kids dominated page 3. He traced the photo with his finger as if it helped him to believe what he saw.
“This is a cop’s house?” Mike asked. “Someone shot a cop’s house to pieces? And there’s no investigation? No crime scene tape? What the hell, guys?”
Janet sat down. “And that’s the question this team has to answer,” she said crisply. “But here’s some preliminary questions. This is a dangerous assignment. You can walk away from it, and there’s no hard feelings, no bad reviews. Volunteers only. Anyone want out?” she asked. No one left.
“Second, you can’t discuss this story with anyone not at this table. And I mean anyone, not even the publisher or executive editor. Shrug and refer them to me. You all know that shrug, right?”
There were grins. They did. “You need to take safety precautions. Mac will go over those with each of you one-on-one. Follow them. I know he’s a paranoid asshole, but he’s our paranoid asshole, and you will do what he says.”
Mac snorted, but he didn’t argue. What could he say? She wasn’t wrong.
“Joe? This is your story as of now. Mac will feed you bits and pieces. Cover it as you would any big story like this. Mac is working on some background stuff. So you two need to switch shifts. Sorry,” she said, when Joe winced. Joe didn’t like 6 a.m. shifts either.
“But it also means that you may become a target,” Janet said. “If you feel uncomfortable for any reason? You call Mac.” Mac gave out his new number; Mike and Joe entered it into their phones. “Better to call for help and it be nothing, than to be trapped in a Queen Anne deserted house with no help.”
Joe Conte nodded. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m spooked enough to call because a fly went by.”
Janet nodded once. “Good,” she said. “That might be all the warning you get. Here’s my new number, by the way.” She gave it to them.
She looked at Joe. “You talked to the neighbors,” she said. “You’ve been on the story since it went down Friday night. What are your thoughts? The things you couldn’t put in the story for whatever reason?’
Joe considered that question. “Serious tech was involved,” he said. “Had to be. They rerouted phone calls in two neighborhoods. Had trackers on cops’ phones? And I have to think that those cops are as paranoid as Mac about their phones.”
Mac pulled out his reporter’s notebook and a pen, and jotted down ideas as Joe talked.
“I’m pretty sure that the neighbors who called in Friday night and Saturday were routed through dispatch to a specific person. Whoever that person was is key. He had to be in on it. I think a fake dispatcher might have answered the calls Friday night, but that couldn’t be in place for too long. So after that, all calls regarding the ‘incident in Sand Point’ were routed to someone, probably billed as a task force. Because an attack on a cop? There should be a task force."
“Are we sure there isn’t one?” Mike Brewster asked.
Joe Conte tapped the photo of the house with the glass out front. “It still looks like that. Not even crime scene tape. I drove by on my way here. That is unbelievable. No, there’s no real task force. But a lot of police may think there is one.”
Mac nodded slowly. That made sense. Be a bitch to sort out who was who. “Did anyone give you a name of a contact for the task force?”
Joe shook his head. “No,” he said. “Everything is confidential pending an investigation. I was going to walk up there and ask in person today. You going to do that instead?”
Mac considered that. “Yeah,” he said. “I need to get a sense of things. But I may have some names for you to call afterwards.”
Joe nodded at that.
“What else?” Janet asked.
“That’s a lot of fire power,” Mike said slowly. “Someone purchased weapons, ammunition, either through the police department, which would show up in purchase records, or privately, which would show up in gun registrations. Mac, can you give me the precise name of the weapons and ammo? I’d like to take a look around some databases.”
Mac glanced at Janet. This is why she included Mike, Mac thought. That would never have occurred to him. He nodded. “By the end of the day,” he promised. “I need to confer with someone on the ammo.”
“What else?” Janet asked.
“There are some questions that have come up in the wind,” Mac said. That was an odd way to say it, he knew, but he didn’t have any better explanation. “So, what happened to the investigation that was promised after the Army of God had sympathizers in the PD? Remember, one guy was apparently let go when he let out a material witness who later took hostages? The second names are some of the Sensei people from last spring. Joe Dunbar was lured into the trap on Queen Anne by someone who claimed to be one of the men he questioned. The list of people who would know Dunbar would be responsive to one of those names is short. But on it would be Craig Anderson, Andy Malloy, and that asshole of a sheriff, Pete Norton. We need to do an update on their cases.”
Janet nodded. “I’ll assign that last story to the court reporter,” she promised. “Joe, can you work on the story about the cleanup after Army of God bombed the abortion clinics?” Joe nodded.
Mac looked at the man he shared the police beat with. “One thing I’ve been thinking since this happened is that we call it the police beat, but what we really cover is crime, not police,” he said slowly. Joe narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “The city government beat? They cover the institutions and the players, not just the items on the docket — maybe too much so. But we’re the reverse. An occasional feature about something the cop PIO sends us about a cop coaching Little League. An announcement from the Police Chief about some new initiative. But we don’t really look at the institutions of law enforcement. We see them as neutral sources of information like looking up something in a database.” He glanced at Mike with a nod.
“But they’re not neutral,” Joe said thoughtfully. “And lots of times they are the story or should be.”
“Exactly,” Mac agreed. “Do you know anyone in IA?”
Joe shook his head.
“What about the SPD Police Union?”
Joe shrugged. “Possibly,” he said. “But not because they’re union reps or leaders. Rank and file officers who happen to be union reps? But I don’t know who.”
Mac nodded. “I don’t either,” he said. “And yet the Police Union is the most powerful organization in this town.”
Janet looked skeptical at that. “You’ve said that before, Mac. That’s a pretty strong statement,” she observed. “Can you back that up?”
“No,” he said. “And maybe that’s evidence. But it would be interesting to see which candidates the union backs in city elections. When was the last time someone the union opposed won a city council seat?”
Mike looked intrigued. “I can look that up,” he promised. “I might run that same query through city council decisions.”
“And look at police budget approvals by the council,” Mac added. There had been a story on that recently, but he couldn’t quite recall it. He looked at Janet. “Could someone do a data search on our own stories regarding the Police Union?” he asked. “Maybe set up an internal wiki for us?”
She nodded. “I’ll have someone do that,” she promised. “What else? Angie? You were there.”
Joe and Mike looked startled. Apparently, they hadn’t known that. Well, Janet had been there too.
“There had to be a spotter,” Angie said now. “Someone had been watching the Rodriguez house for some time. Had to be. And whoever did this, they came back to try for the Moores’ place. Why? That makes no sense. Yes, I get the fear factor, and Paulina Moore is probably right. But I keep thinking, someone knew something, saw something. They were doing cleanup, or trying to.”
Mac and Joe Conte both nodded. That made sense to them.
“So something set this attack in motion,” Angie said. “Someone was going public, I think. Or they thought someone was. Nick, maybe. Probably. But someone else knew what Nick was going to say, and whoever that was, they came back for them.”
Janet frowned suddenly. “Right before you lost the call to our source, Stan Warren said put it on speaker phone.”
“You think they heard his voice,” Mac said flatly. “And they came back for him? Why not make a run at his home?”
“Probably didn’t know where it is,” Janet said. “He’s only been here a couple of months.”
Mac tapped his fingers on the table, then added that to his list. “We about done?” he asked. “I want to walk through SPD, and then I need to find Stan Warren. He and I need to talk.”
Janet nodded. She swallowed the last of her coffee, and walked out the door. Mac was right behind her. Something, a glint on metal, something, triggered his reflexes, and he grabbed her and jerked her back into the coffee shop as a rifle shot smashed into the building.
Janet swallowed. “Would have gotten me,” she said. Mac nodded. She turned to the barista who was standing there in shock. "Call the cops,” she said. “Someone just shot at your building.”
The man nodded shakily and reached for his phone.
“Tell them I’m across the street, if they need to talk to me,” Janet said. She hesitated. Mac gave her a brief one-armed hug. He opened the door, waited, and when he went out, he was crouched below the usual range of fire: waist to T-zone. There was no shot. He studied the street before straightening. No one shot him. He nodded to Janet and the others. “Now,” he said quietly. “Walk across quickly and into the building. I want to check things out.”
Mac heard a police siren headed their way and ignored it. Instead, he wandered across the street and up to where he thought the shot came from. There was no one there. He looked around for any sign that someone had been there, had fired a gun from there. There was a receipt anchored by a small rock.
He bent over, picked it up: Up your game, Marine!
He shoved his hands back into his windbreaker, and his hand rested on his Glock. It just felt better to have it in hand.
He glanced around again. And then he went back into the Examiner building.
“Why?” Janet asked him when he came up to the newsroom. “Were they really trying to kill me?”
Mac shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe just scare you into going home? And then follow you to see where you go?”
She grunted. “Obviously they don’t understand the job of a news editor,” she said. “I’m not leaving unless it’s on a stretcher. Gotta another paper to get out.”
Mac grinned at her. He knew she was shook, but he gave her points for bravado. “You keep that attitude,” he praised. “I’m headed up to the cop shop.”
“Mac?” she asked. “Did you find anything?”
He shook his head. He stashed his Glock back in his backpack and put it in a desk drawer. Conte watched him, but didn’t say anything. It was easier not to take anything to the SPD but a notebook and pen. Trying to go into the building with a firearm was a rookie mistake. Mac made it once; he wouldn’t do it again.
A six-block walk.
But he felt vulnerable right now to walk even six blocks without a handgun within reach. Still, he put his notebook and pen in his pocket and headed out a back door that circulation used leading to an alley behind the building. From there he cut through alleys and went around an extra block or two to end up at the police station. He hadn’t spotted anyone watching or following him. But then, neither had Nick Rodriguez. And Nick was a careful man.