The Tin Man (32 page)

“Shut up, turn, and face the wall!” one of the
cops yelled. Patrick started walking out the door, hands raised.

“Oh shit,” the second cop muttered, “he’s not going to stop. I heard gunshots in there—do we shoot this asshole?”

“He doesn’t have a gun, dammit,” said the first cop. “I don’t see any weapons.” He shouted again for the guy to freeze, but he kept on coming.

“Fuck,” said his partner, holstering his weapon. He shouted, “Cover me!” and ran full speed into Patrick like a charging linebacker.

The first cop heard a dull
clunk
when the two bodies collided. The guy was knocked backward into the wall by the flying tackle, but his buddy lay facedown on the floor and wasn’t moving. The guy simply got on his feet, took a second, as if regaining his balance, raised his hands again, and started for the door, careful not to step on the unconscious cop.

“Freeze!” the first cop shouted again, aiming his 9-millimeter SIG. “Stop right there or I’ll shoot!” He had made the decision to shoot; his partner was down. At Patrick’s next step, he fired three rounds—two in the chest, one in the head. He heard the scream as Patrick collapsed on his back.

The cop grabbed his portable radio and keyed the mike with a shaking hand, keeping his gun aimed. “KMA, Sam One-Niner, shots fired, officer down, officer down, one suspect down, send cover and an ambu—”

He broke off in midword, gaping as the guy in the helmet crawled to his feet, held on to the wall for support for a moment, then walked toward the door.

This time the shot hit somewhere in the torso, but after reeling back against the wall as before, the guy pulled himself up, pushed the cop out of the way, and stumbled out into the alley. The arm that
shoved him felt like a steel bar, but by now he was so stunned, the guy could’ve used a feather.

“Mother of God!” the cop muttered. He followed the guy outside, his smoking pistol still leveled at him, but a small crowd had formed out in the alley, so he had to lower the gun and decock it. The crowd let the guy trot past them and down the alley, his gait improving with every step until he was sprinting by the time he vanished out of sight.

Torn between pursuit and his downed partner, the cop retrieved his radio and mashed the mike button: “KMA, Sam One-Niner, the 245 suspect …” Shit, how in hell was this going to sound on the radio? He’d just reported that the suspect was down—now he was running down the street? … “Suspect is on foot heading west down the alley behind the Bobby John Club, heading toward Fairfield Street. All units be advised, the 245 suspect is wearing a black leather jacket, dark coveralls, some kind of backpack, and a full-face motorcycle helmet. Suspect … shit, suspect does not appear to be armed but should be considered dangerous.”

A
t Del Paso Boulevard, Patrick ran left onto Fairfield Street. Using the thrusters in his boots, he leaped to the second-story roof of an abandoned printing shop, then paused to do another system self-test. Battery levels were already in the emergency reserve range. The emergency reserves were for escaping and survival, not for fighting. If he encountered any police now, he’d have no choice but to surrender.

Patrick called up and interrogated the discrete global positioning satellite search function on the heads-up display inside his helmet. A tiny red blip
appeared, with a direction and range to the target. The red blip was Jon Masters, riding inside a specially equipped AMC Hummer they were using as a mobile support vehicle. Both Patrick’s suit and the Hummer carried satellite navigation transponders, for each of them to see and track the other’s location. Masters was now less than two-tenths of a mile away, cruising around the target area and trying to look as inconspicuous as a six-thousand-pound Hummer wagon could look on a city street in the middle of the night.

Using the thrusters, Patrick hopped from roof to roof along Fairfield and Forrest streets until he got to Arden Way. He waited on the roof of an apartment building until he saw the Hummer moving closer. Then he leaped off the roof, landing on a patch of lawn—right beside a startled guy just getting out of his car in the parking lot not forty feet away. Patrick ignored him. Fifteen seconds later, when the thrusters had recharged, he made another leap across the parking lot and lit down a few feet away from the Hummer as it slowly cruised down Arden Way. He pulled open the door as it stopped; then Jon hit the gas and sped away as fast as the big all-terrain vehicle could take them.

After they crossed the river and headed down Sixteenth Street south toward the downtown area, Jon finally asked, “How did it go?”

“Great! It went great!” Patrick said, removing the helmet. Remembering his awful visage when he had taken off the helmet after the demonstration, Jon had been afraid of what he might see this time, but Patrick looked pretty normal. “Everything worked great!”

They had installed a portable gasoline-powered generator in the back of the Hummer, and Patrick started it up with a push of a button, then brought a
cable around and plugged it into a receptacle on a bottom corner of his backpack. Although he couldn’t monitor the power levels without the helmet on, he knew from testing that it would take thirty to sixty minutes to recharge the backpack power unit.

“We’re done for the night, right?” Jon asked hopefully. “You got what you were looking for?”

“Hell no—we do it the way we planned!” Patrick answered. “I got a lot of good information, but I need more. The next stop might give us the rest of what we need to bust these guys.”

“There seemed to be a lot of cops around …”

“We’ll do it the way we planned, Jon,” Patrick repeated. “We’ll go to a wider radius to keep this vehicle away from the next location. If all else fails, I’ll meet you at Sac Executive Airport, at our rendezvous point. I can hide in the hangar or up on the tower.”

Jon fell silent. It had to be played out …

S
ometimes it took days to find the best location for parking a surveillance van. Ideally, the crew wanted a spot a block or so down the street from the target address, close enough to see and photograph everyone entering or leaving the premises with a medium telephoto lens or to look inside an open garage, but not so close as to attract attention to itself or the target. Even in better neighborhoods,
the van had to be moved periodically so it didn’t attract attention or become a target for thieves or vandals.

Although it only involved sitting, waiting, watching, and listening, doing a surveillance was tough, uncomfortable, tiring work. Depending on the neighborhood and the nature of the operation, the cops doing the surveillance could sometimes switch with other officers for food or relief breaks. But a lot of times they were stuck inside the van for the entire eight-hour shift, forced to use “piddle packs,” portable toilets, garbage bags, or soft drink cans to do their thing.

But the worst part of a surveillance, even after only a couple of days, was the godawful smell. Thankfully, few cops smoked inside the van anymore, but a closed-up surveillance van quickly collected a variety of odors—fast food of every conceivable kind, sweat mixed with various deodorants and perfumes, fumes from a leaky exhaust, and other, more unmentionable, smells. Leaving the van actually made it worse. The cops grew accustomed to the smell after a couple of hours, no matter how bad it was, and if they then left the van to grab a bite or take a piss, the fresh air made getting back into the stinky, stifling, claustrophobic vehicle that much worse.

The Rosalee subdivision, between Sixty-fifth Street and Stockton Boulevard north of Elder Creek Road, was one of the predominantly white areas of the Elder Creek section of town, with lower- to middle-class homes on generally nice suburban or semirural streets. Go a few blocks in any direction around Elder Creek, however, and it was very different territory. Some houses showed pride of ownership, with clean yards, neat landscaping, and fresh paint; but most were rentals, subrentals, sub-subrentals,
or squatter-occupied, and no handyman or can of paint had come near them in years. The area was a melting pot of races and ethnic backgrounds: whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, plus every possible mix.

The house just north of the target address on the corner was a very nice single-family property with a decent-looking lawn, well-trimmed shrubs still wrapped in burlap to protect them against the winter frost, plenty of lights surrounding the place, and a For Sale sign in the yard. The reason for the sale was probably the ramshackle house next door, a one-story frame structure of rotted wood and cracking stucco set in a dirt yard covered with patches of brown grass. It was surrounded by a mangled, rusting chain-link fence, and a huge pit bull terrier prowled the yard, barking fiercely at the slightest provocation. Some of the windows were boarded up, and others caged in steel bars bolted onto the outside of the house.

Usually it’s the dirtbag traffic around a house that gets cops’ attention, but this time it was the dog that had roused the interest of Intelligence and Narcotics again. When the occupants of the house were first busted, they had a fierce rottweiler guarding the place; after the bust, the dog was gone. The new occupants had a dog too, but it was small, a beagle or something like it, just as noisy but no killer guard dog. Drug dealers rarely used beagles as watchdogs. A few kids’ toys in the yard, a morning newspaper, and pizza boxes in the trash cans were more indications that maybe the occupants weren’t dealing or cooking meth.

But a few weeks later, all these domestic touches began to disappear. The foot traffic increased, the toys vanished, the take-out food containers were gone—meth users never ate very much—and the
beagle was replaced by a pit bull. It definitely attracted attention.

The objective of this surveillance was to observe and look for opportunities. It had been suspected that the Satan’s Brotherhood was using this house for selling or distributing crank, but Narcotics had never been able to get enough solid evidence to prove it. They had tried every trick in the book: making traffic stops of vehicles that had recently been to the place, hoping to find some crank inside so they’d have probable cause to get a warrant to search the house; tailing frequent visitors, hoping to catch someone on possession with enough stuff to go after the house itself. None of this ever panned out. Neighbors were too terrified of the Brotherhood to cooperate with the police, and there was simply not enough weight moving into or out of the place to attract serious manpower. Surveillance on the house had been spotty at best, and it was finally terminated because the police couldn’t justify the cost or time to the captain, or the probable-cause circumstances to a judge who would be asked to sign a search warrant.

But the house was definitely Brotherhood and probably a meth lab—and it had survived the recent bombings. Even on lean days, the place probably turned several thousand dollars’ worth of methamphetamine a week—if someone was going to wipe out the Brotherhood’s drug outlets, this certainly would have been on the list. That was enough information for Deanna Wyler to order surveillance restarted.

The last three hours of this twelve-hour shift were the real dog part. This was when all the coffee in the thermos was cold and the burgers sat like lead weights in the gut, slowing down blood circulation and acting like a big sleeping pill. The van was
cold, the seats smelled musty, and the rubber-covered eyepiece in the 180-millimeter telephoto camera was slimy from all the oily eyes that had touched it.

A few subjects had approached the house this evening, but they had been scared away by the pit bull. One visitor did bring out an occupant of the house; the surveillance teams got some good snapshots of a big biker-looking guy with long, stringy dark hair, a beard, and a leather vest over a bare torso, but little else. The big-ear directional microphone picked up an argument between the two. “What you got, man?” the visitor had asked, his voice coarse and cracking.

“What you need? You need a snort, man? I got what you need.” They had met at the chain-link fence, but it was obvious that the occupant didn’t want to be out in the open too long.

“What the hell is this, man?” the buyer asked angrily. “That ain’t no line.”

“Where you been, muthafucker? There ain’t no shit on the street. The Brotherhood’s fucked. This is it, man. You want it?”

“You rippin’ me off, man.”

The surveillance officer eyeing them through the one-way window scowled. “They could be talking about buying Girl Scout cookies, for chrissakes,” he muttered. He knew there was nothing in their conversation so far to hold up in court. “C’mon, boys, do the deal.”

An exchange was made, and the officers got pictures. The twenty-dollar bag of a white crystalline powder looked like a speck of white paint, a fraction of the normal size of a hit of meth. “They’d laugh that buy right out of the courthouse,” the surveillance officer said. “We need some weight, boys. These mouse-shit-size buys aren’t going to cut it.”

“There’s hardly any dope on the streets,” another officer said resignedly. “Everyone’s scared to be holding any weight. They think whoever took out the Brotherhood might go after them.”

“We should give this thing another week, when the brave cookers start gearing up,” said another officer as the buyer moved off and the seller went back inside. “Nothing worthwhile is happening now.”

“Politics,” the officer watching the front door said. “The chief and the mayor want something for their press conferences, something so they can show folks they’re in control. Election day is coming, and …”

“We got another guy,” the officer with the camera interjected. “Sheesh, I must be getting tired. I didn’t even see him walk up.” He looked up from the eyepiece, rubbed his eyes, then went back on it: “Medium height, about five-nine; husky build … looks like he’s wearing a full set of leathers, jacket and pants. How the hell can those guys wear those things? He’s wearing his helmet too. One of those full-face jobs.”