Last shot

Chapter 55

The ground stank of sewage, and the night canyon fog wasn't helping any. To the right of the complex gate and its supporting stand of adobe-block wall, Maybeck had offset two segments of the transportable chain link, creating a gap through which the other ART members silently whisked in their olive drab flight suits. Subdued gray flags and Service patches decorated the sleeves. The ARTists held their MP5s, set to three-round bursts, at high-ready. Having come from home, Tim alone wore civilian clothes-jeans, T-shirt. His hip-holstered. 357 also made him stand out; the others wore. 40 Glocks slung at the thigh. Even bulkier in his tactical vest, Bear clutched his cut-down twelve-gauge Remington in a hand made invisible by darkness and a black glove. Tim breezed through the gap in the fence, and Bear came a moment later, looking wary but popping his broad frame through.

Maybeck cocked a finger at the one house that was clearly completed, and the eight deputies jogged in a silent single-file approach, the odor thickening. Freed had discovered that the parcel hadn't passed the perc test for a septic drain field. Too much clay and rock, not enough subsoil to take the runoff. After an inspection determined that the information previously given about the land's absorbency was falsified, the Department of Health had pulled the permit and the Building Department had issued a cease-and-desist order. Pierce was countersuing, a move Tim knew-thanks to a primary education at his father's school of shenanigans-was a stall tactic until an understanding could be reached with the right city official.

Tim caught sight of the security pickup, hidden between two Dumpsters. No sign of another vehicle-he still held out hopes for the Camry that had been stolen near the landfill. If Walker had another vehicle, he would've stashed it elsewhere, establishing a motor pool for strategic switches.

Thumbing down the volume on their radios, the deputies reconvened at the end of the walk. They'd met briefly down the hill at the staging point with the chief and Tannino, who'd gladly slipped out of an extended-family engagement. Tim had pressed for an unorthodox entry plan to take into account Walker's unorthodox skills. They were going after a soldier trained to lead assaults of the kind they were trying to use against him. Walker could anticipate just about every angle. And probably had. He would've planned a number of escape routes from the house, maybe even leaving booby traps at the doors, windows, and halls. Rather than having the team barrel into a potential clusterfuck, Tim would slip in alone, move tactically through the house, and try to kill Walker or flush him out. The others would take positions of cover around the perimeter and wait for Tim's signal.

A few gestures and the deputies spread noiselessly around the house, their dull-toned flight suits blending into the darkness. Tim stood alone in the darkness before the silent house. A tingling at his fingertips signaled his nervousness. He tapped his belt, making sure the Mag-Lite slotted through the ring didn't give off a jangle.

He moved swiftly to the front door and worked the lock with his pick set, giving up little more than a click as he eased inside. The closing door shut out the moon, leaving him in the pitch-black interior. Crouching with his. 357 drawn, he waited maybe a full minute, breathing the faint scent of smoke and blinking frequently to stimulate his night vision. The flashlight would only broadcast his position.

He rose to search the family room, moving with excruciating slowness, stepping over a few boxes and an unzipped duffel bag. By the fireplace he found a collection of cans. Beans, mini hot dogs, tuna. He ran a finger along the inside of an opened can, and it came away wet. A heap of ashes, when stoked, hid a dying ember. A hobo camp pitched in an upscale family room.

Down the dark hall, Tim heard a thump, then the resistance of unseasoned floorboards.

Straight-arming his. 357, Tim pivoted around corners, making his way to the master bedroom. He slipped through the doorway, his back to the inside wall, sweeping with his revolver. Empty, save a translucent Japanese screen, a nightstand, and a bed centered on the bare floor. The window looked out on moonless, starless sky, so Tim sensed the furniture only as shadows within shadows. He'd just cleared the adjoining bathroom when he heard an undeniable creak behind him.

He swung, gun aimed at the darkness.

Under the bed.

He had to check beneath the raised bed frame, a move that wanted a partner to cover the space from the doorway. Another sound-scuffling, faint, but no question-cemented Tim's sense that he was in the room with Walker. Tim pulled his Mag-Lite from his belt, set it silently on the sawdust-powdered floorboards. Straightening up, he clicked it on by stepping on the button. A circle of light formed on the far wall. With his boot, Tim pushed the flashlight into a roll. It purred across the floorboards, parallel to the bed, drawing with it a twirling disk of light along the far wall.

As the flashlight passed beside the bed, a shadow stood out clearly against the opposite wall, cut from the beam of light passing beneath the frame. A man's silhouette, enlarged by the angle and the scrolling illumination. Boots pointed, frogged legs, and, finally, the alarmingly clear curve of nose and lips. When the screen of the wall passed into darkness, Tim heard a whoosh as fabric slid across floor, but Walker didn't pop up into his sights. The flashlight continued spinning past the bed, striking the far wall and rolling back, now wobbly, to reveal the suddenly empty space beneath the bed.

Tim stared, stunned at the magic trick, until the roaming yellow circle threw a barely raised ledge into relief-an offset square of floor.

The portable was at his lips: "He's on the loose. Repeat: He's on the loose, under the house. Rear left quadrant. Let him slip past." Grabbing the flashlight, Tim dove under the bed, sliding so his head and shoulders dipped into the recently buzzsawed hatch. He caught an upside-down view of a scrambling form moving like an ape through the cramped space. He aimed, but there were too many support posts and cross-beams severing the diminishing form.

Tim jerked himself back up and ran down the hall, wrists crossed so he could point gun and flashlight simultaneously. He flew through the kitchen door into the backyard. Caught off guard, a dark form pivoted, blocking out the low moon, legs braced and hips sunk in submachine-gun-wielding posture. "Drop the gun! Drop the fucking gun!"

Through his surging heartbeat, Tim recognized the voice as Thomas's, and he realized he wasn't going to be blown to bits on the back porch. He held his revolver to the side. "It's me."

"Drop the gun. Now!"

The flashlight, Tim realized, was blinding Thomas. Tim dropped it and his revolver. "Thomas, it's me. Rackley."

In the background he saw a form streak past. He wanted to grab his radio but knew better given the razor edge that separated him from friendly fire. Thomas lowered his MP5, squinted, and raised it again, pointing at Tim's chest. "Show me your fucking hands."

Tim spread his hands farther. "Thomas, it's Tim Rackley. Walker just slipped through. I gotta give the go command. Put your light on my face. Come on."

With one hand Thomas retrieved a Mag-Lite from his belt, his head never rotating. He clicked it on, shined it on Tim's face, and then his muscles loosened. "Jesus. Sorry."

Tim snatched the radio from his belt. "Okay, he's through. Fall in behind and run him to the fence." He grabbed his. 357 and the light and sprinted upslope.

The others had already folded in behind Walker, a line of MP5s trained at his back as he labored up the hill, fifty yards ahead. Bear shouted after him, but he kept moving.

Walker was ten yards from the fence.

Tim raised the radio to his lips. "Now!"

The ground vibrated, and then two LAPD helicopters flew up from the canyon beyond the fence, giant in their sudden proximity. Walker froze, trapped in the spotlights, raising an arm to shield his eyes. A sniper in each chopper, kneeling on one knee, viewed Walker down the length of a rifle. Tim could see the red dots pinning Walker, catching his arm, his face, his chest as he shifted, reeling under blasts of air. The deputies fanned to a half circle, keeping a good distance.

A voice boomed from the chopper bullhorn: "Hands on top of your head!"

Walker spread his arms wide, brought his hands together over his head, laced his fingers. Wind shoved his hair on end and snapped his T-shirt. He staggered a few steps to the right, then a few steps more.

Tim started forward, picking his way up the vast rise of chaparral, Bear doing the same fifteen yards to his right. The helicopters hovered just over the fence line.

Walker turned slowly to face Tim, his front shadowed, the spotlights blazing around him. Gun steady in both hands, Tim tried to shout at him over the sound of the rotors to stop moving.

Keeping his hands laced above his neck, Walker dipped his head as if in acknowledgment of the shouted commands. He raised a boot and took a final step. A clang and he dropped from sight, disappearing into the earth, an upended grate popping into view.

The deputies sprinted up the hill, Tim in the lead. He kicked the grate aside and swung his gun barrel and flashlight over the black hole. A fifteen-foot drop, walled in concrete, a hot reek of sewage and nothing else. The other deputies huffed up behind him.

Bear recoiled from the stench. "He jumped into the fucking sewage system?"

"You gonna go down there?" Maybeck asked, also yelling over the choppers.

"Not if I don't want to land on his gun barrel," Tim shouted. "I think it's a closed system. I want a schema of all the grates."

Freed raised his phone and stepped away.

"Let's start getting bloodhounds and more men up here, just in case there's an outlet," Tim said to the small huddle. "He's trained in mountain nav, so we need to move. Maybeck-guard this hole. Let's sweep the property and see if there are any other pipes he could crawl out of."

Freed was yelling into the phone with more animation than seemed necessary to be heard above the rotors' whomping. He slapped the phone shut and ran back over. "The contractor said they fucking routed the sewer system to the storm-drain channels."

"Goddamn it," Bear said.

"Do we sweep the hills?" Maybeck asked.

"We can't cover that kind of ground," Tim said. "There are drains and runoff channels all through these canyons. He can crawl out anywhere. Get more choppers in the air-that's our only shot."

Maybeck was bent, hands on his knees. "He's a First Force Recon marine. By the time more choppers get here, he'll be sipping margaritas in Mazatlan."

Tim reached Tannino at the staging point and told him to have police block off the surrounding roads. The marshal's grunt said it all-the Santa Monicas stretched long and far, touching countless streets and spilling out into numerous communities. The storm-drain network ran from beneath their feet all the way to the ocean.

It would be like trying to trap water in a fist.

Within ten minutes LAPD SWAT arrived in force, providing support and keeping watch over the various grates on the property. The deputies reconvened in the model unit and started picking through Walker's possessions. One of the helos had peeled off to recon the surrounding gullies, but Tim could see the other through the windows, a giant predatory insect, tilting forward as if tethered to the mountainside by the leash of its spotlight. A few minutes later, it was joined by two more.

To the chagrin of the overworked criminalists, cops and Service brass clomped through the house. They were hot on the trail at last, and preservation had to bend to the exigency of a fast search.

The legal file box in the corner haunted Tim's peripheral vision despite his efforts to focus elsewhere. Bear regarded it with a canine absorption usually reserved for In-N-Out Double-Doubles, toeing it just above the ESTEBAN MARTINEZ stamp. Standing with his arms crossed so his jacket bunched at his compact shoulders, Tannino alternated his attention among Tim, Bear, and the box, slowly piecing matters together. "Bear," he finally said, "why don't you go put that in your truck so you can deliver it promptly back to Counselor Martinez in the morning?"

"Right," Bear said, hefting it into the crook of an elbow. "Good idea."

Denley puzzled over a new answering machine by the fireplace. It had been removed from its box but still appeared unused, ensconced in bubble wrap. "No phone line, so what the fuck's he want with this?" he asked nobody in particular.

Thomas's face stayed drawn and bloodless, and he apologized to Tim at intervals. "I'm sorry, Rack. I thought you were him, you know, a ruse. Jesus, I almost…"

After dispensing another "Don't worry about it" that he hoped would have a longer shelf life than the two prior, Tim dug through the duffel bag, impressed with the range of equipment Walker had managed to accumulate. In his brief break between crime scenes, Aaronson had pegged Walker's bullets as homemade. The slugs were composed of an alloy containing titanium-titanium! — which would have required sophisticated equipment not present even at this most finished of Sunnyslope homes. Which raised the possibility of a cache elsewhere-a cache from which Walker, when he slipped through LAPD's net, could replenish. The disposable cell phone-another terrorist advance recently appropriated by fugitives-on the mantel was so cheap it didn't have a call-history feature. A single key beside it fit the front door.

Bear, crouching over the duffel as if regarding a picnic basket, said, "Looky here." He withdrew a DVD case and showed Tim the label. JUNE 1. As Bear stepped off to argue Aaronson into a laptop loan, the chief tapped Tim's shoulder with his cell phone. "Pierce Jameson wants to talk to you. They transferred his call from the command post."

Tim pressed the phone to his ear to hear Pierce say, "The hell's going on down there? My lawyer's en route."

"Wise choice." Tim let the silence stretch out an extra beat. "Your son was here."

"Ain't that something."

"Funny-he had the key, too."

"Well, we left the site as it was. Someone must've left a key behind."

"And you know what else is odd?"

"What's that?"

"You turned the electricity on in the model unit again, just this morning."

"I don't actually oversee the electrical for all of my companies, Deputy. There are quite a few of them. Companies. On that particular site, you might have heard that we had some problems with sewerage? 'Nuther round of testing coming up next week, the guys need somewhere to plug in their gear."

"I thought there would be a simple explanation."

"There usually is. Adios, 'migo."

"Wait a sec. About the 'sewerage'-"

"My contractor just informed me that our system accidentally got routed into the storm drains. I'm furious. With what this'll cost me to fix, heads are gonna roll."

"Yes," Tim said, "they will."

By the time Tim handed off the phone to the chief, Bear had the security footage paused at the appropriate frame on Aaronson's laptop.

The image unfroze to show Tess waiting in The Ivy's side drive as Porsches and Ferraris rolled through the valet. She wore a cocktail dress, staying hunched as if cold, her hands tucked under her bare arms. She held a ticket out to a valet, explaining something-Tim could read the words "purse" and "car" on her lips. The valet handed her a set of keys, then jogged off to retrieve another car. Tess glanced around, then climbed into the Mercedes Gelaendewagen positioned in the prize front spot.

"Wait a minute," Bear said. "Isn't that…?"

Tess leaned over to the driver's side and dug through the jacket hung over the seat. She came up with something and tilted it in her hands.

Chase's BlackBerry.

Tim chuckled with a kind of awed respect.

Tess worked furiously on the tiny keypad, glancing at intervals back at the restaurant. Her focus grew more intense, and she punched another flurry of buttons. The face of the BlackBerry was visible-given digital enhancement and a miracle, they might be able to discern what she'd typed. She did a double take as the valet taxied a Carrera back through the drive, and then she returned the BlackBerry to the jacket pocket and hopped out while the valet was distracted with the Porsche handoff.

She held up the ticket and explained something, gesticulating her confusion.

"Poor thing," Bear said. "They switched her and Chase's valet stubs."

"Inconvenient."

The valet puzzled over her ticket, then ran off. A moment later he returned with Chase, who smiled at Tess, clearly uncomfortable. Tess greeted him with poise, shaking his hand. Chase retrieved his own valet stub, and they compared them, then the keys, and then they and the valets shared a strained laugh. Chase waited with her while the valet ran off to get her car. They stood side by side, looking out at the street in parallel rather than at each other. Chase smoothed his suit jacket and spoke, his expression indicating he was offering a few words of apology or contrite explanation.

The valet rattled up with Tess's car. She nodded good-bye to Chase, even squeezed his arm, climbed in, and drove off.

"Home girl's got moves," Bear said. He was popping the DVD out from the laptop when the disposable phone on the mantel rang. Everyone in the room froze. Down the hall Denley's hoarse Brooklyn-accented voice continued until someone hushed him harshly.

Tim stood before the plastic phone, watching it rattle against the wood. After the third ring, he answered, keeping his voice gruff. "Yeah."

"Not bad, Troubleshooter. Payback for the stunt I pulled with your digital transmitter and the Doberman. That was nice."

If Walker already felt safe enough to make time for a chat, they'd lost their opportunity at him. Tim guessed he'd have needed a car-the Camry, strategically hidden? — to put that kind of comfort distance between himself and the house so quickly after he'd washed out through the culvert. Knowing Walker, he'd stashed fresh clothes and equipment in the trunk, a kit bag that'd help him roll right into the next phase of his plan.

"I could have killed you," Walker continued. "Tonight."

"So why didn't you?"

"You're more useful alive. For now. Remember that. You live because of me."

Tim kept the phone against his face until the dial tone turned to a hiccup.

"Two phone calls, one day," Tannino said. "This guy might come after you."

"Rack's not a target." Bear pocketed the DVD. "He's his idol."

"Or vice versa," the marshal said wryly. "But I'm not complaining. That's the one goddamned thing we have going for us."