Fear No Evil

Chapter 53

Dusk was falling on the street where Rosella Hernandez and her family had lived for less than six months. Up and down the road, lights in other Craftsman bungalows were going on.

John Sampson could hear children playing tag and laughing when he and Ned Mahoney came out on the porch of the Hernandez home. The porch light was off. Special Agent Hanson was smoking a cigarette in the shadows.

“ETA?” Mahoney said.

“Two minutes,” Hanson said. “They’ll be gone in ten and everyone can go home except the sifters.”

“Sifters?” Sampson said.

“Watch,” she said. “The marshals come in two teams — one to move the family, one to stay behind and sift through everything that’s left. Anything to do with Rosella, Little Eddie, and Naomi Hernandez will be destroyed. Their social media accounts will be erased, their hard drives seized. Even their Social Security numbers will get rubbed.”

“Tonight?”

“Probably before midnight,” she said. “Here they come.”

Two black Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans turned onto the street from the north and backed into the Hernandezes’ driveway. One backed all the way into the garage.

A four-person crew in hazmat suits came out of that van and entered the house by the back door. Another four-person team, two men, two women, left the other van and walked up to the porch.

“Benjamin Taylor,” the taller male said. “U.S. Marshals Service.”

“They’re inside and waiting,” Mahoney said.

Taylor and his people went in. Sampson said, “I’ve got to get home to Willow.”

“And I have reports to write,” Mahoney said. He looked at Hanson. “Sorry we got off on the wrong foot.”

“And I apologize for being me,” the DEA agent said and laughed.

Mahoney and Sampson climbed down off the porch and headed to their vehicles parked at the far end of the block. A dark Ford pickup came around the corner and passed right by them as they walked beneath a streetlamp.

Though the windows of the pickup were tinted, Sampson could see the silhouette of the driver’s head, which was turned to look right at them. Something about it bothered him.

He slowed and looked back in time to see hooded figures rising in the pickup’s bed. Two of them were kneeling with shouldered automatic rifles.

Two of them were standing and holding weapons far more terrifying.

“No!” Sampson shouted, going for his service pistol.

The pickup slowed as it came abreast of the Hernandez house. The kneeling men’s machine guns opened up, sending a hail of bullets at the front porch.

The two men standing fired their weapons in unison. The long tubes of the rocket-propelled-grenade launchers on their shoulders shot fire out the rear and death out the front.

One of the small missiles detonated against the front door of the Hernandez home. The second blew through a window and exploded inside.

Fire erupted and billowed in the suburban sky as Sampson and Mahoney ran at the pickup, shooting until one of the gunmen turned his automatic weapon on them.

They dove behind a hedge and scrambled deeper into the darkness while bullets chewed the ground. The second the burst stopped, they were back up and over the hedge, chasing the now retreating pickup and emptying their pistols in vain.

Only then did they pause to look at the Hernandez home, which was completely engulfed in flames. The porch was already gone.

There was no movement anywhere around the house.

“Oh my God,” Mahoney said.

“They’re all gone,” Sampson said, dumbstruck. “Every one of them.”