October's Ghost

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN BEST LAID PLANS

Art watched from his Bureau Chevy parked half a block from motel number three, an inviting sort of place that had no name, just a price listed in faded neon. In his early days with the Bureau, when stakeouts and tails were procedures still to be learned, he had wondered why bad guys, especially the ones who could afford not to, would choose places like these to hide out in. The answer came not in the accommodations, but in the management, who ran their businesses with a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil attitude. Literally anything could go on behind the numbered doors, and as long as the bills were paid — in cash, up front — there was no need to question the activities.

“She’s going in,” Andy Harriman reported from the passenger seat next to Art. He lifted the binoculars to his eyes for just a second and checked the front of the motel. “No visual. It’s a bad angle.”

Art took the mic from its clip on the dash. “King Eight to King Six and King Four.”

“Go, Eight.”

“Go.”

“Frankie’s in.”

Two acknowledgments of the information came immediately. Art and Andy’s unit, King Eight, had the best vantage point. They were parked on Vermont south of Eleventh, and were focusing their attention farther south on the “$22.50” motel, which occupied the southwest corner of Vermont and Twelfth. Agents Dan Burlingame and Drew Smith in King Six were a half-block south of the motel, parked in a strip mall on the opposite side of the street. King Four, with agents Tina Mercer and Tim Russo, was parked on Twelfth, nosed east toward Vermont and had a very limited view of the scene. All three units, however, could be to Frankie in just seconds.

Art cupped his left hand over the small earpiece connected to the receiver. His right hand dropped down out of habit and ran across his jacket. The move did not go unnoticed to a smiling Harriman.

“Mr. Smith okay?”

“Right where he should be, Andy,” Art said unabashedly. The ready signal from Frankie sounded in his ear. “One more time.”

“Hi!”

The desk clerk looked to the lady across the counter with little care for her bubbly personality. “Room for two?” Were there ever any rooms for one?

“No. No. Nothing like that,” Frankie responded with mild embarrassment. “I’m returning a wallet.” She reached into her oversized purse and retrieved the item. “Mr. Flavio Alicante called our store and said he thought he’d left it there.” She flipped open the “license” and avoided holding her breath. “But he didn’t give me a room number. He just gave this address.”

The clerk eyed the picture, then the lady, then the wallet again. It was bulging with something in its recesses. Money? Hmmm. “You want me to give it to him.”

Yes! “No, it’s got, you know, kinda a lot of money in it, and he made me promise to deliver it in person.” She smiled apologetically.

“Yeah. Okay.” He glanced down at the keyboard beneath the counter. “He and his buddy are in one-oh-six. Out the door and to the left.”

Frankie’s smile dissolved instantly. She dropped her bag and pulled out her shield and weapon, which was pointed upward. “FBI. Do not move, do not say anything.”

The young man’s eyes tripled in size as his hands slowly came up. “Yeah, whatever you say, lady.”

“Yes!” Art slapped the steering wheel, but a radio call from headquarters interrupted his celebration. He reached for the mic, looking right, and took no notice of the yellow taxi passing to his left and heading south on Vermont. He also missed the lone passenger in back.

“There it is,” the man said to his partner in the driver’s seat.

“Got it,” the driver acknowledged, sliding the small compact into the northbound left-turn pocket for Twelfth Street. He stopped before reaching the intersection, however, and waited for a break in the midmorning traffic coming south on Vermont. The last car in the traffic wave was a yellow taxi, which turned into the driveway immediately to his left. He cranked the wheel and followed it in. “Time to go to work.”

The man in the passenger seat undid the restraining strap on his shoulder holster. “You got it.”

“Art, we’ve got the address of where the shooters are staying.” It was Lou Hidalgo calling from the office.

“What? We just found them, Lou.” Art looked right to Andy, who returned the perplexed look. “How did you find out?”

“I can’t explain everything. It’d take too long. But listen, this thing runs deeper than we thought. Much deeper.”

Lou had full knowledge of the whole story, unlike the rest of the agents working on this. What the hell did “deeper” mean in this situation? What could run deeper? “Wait, Lou. We found them. All we do now is set up the plan to take them.”

“There may not be time, Art. A wiretap team in Miami recorded a conversation between those guys and their boss, or their contact. We don’t know exactly. But whoever it was, was sending someone out to get a tape from them.”

“A tape? We have the tape,” Art said.

“I know, but that’s not the point,” Lou explained with frustration. “The whole conversation, even the way they made contact, was set up to keep locations secret. The contact was not supposed to know where they were, but he asked directly for it, with full knowledge that they didn’t have the tape. Just a tape.”

“But why would the person running these guys break security procedures to…” Art froze with the realization.

“They wouldn’t. The shooters could have express-mailed the damn thing back to Miami faster than it would take to send someone out here to get it,” Lou said. “And with less risk. Whoever’s coming is not here to play messenger.”

“Goddammit!” Art keyed the radio. “Okay, I’ll get LAPD to seal off everything fast so our visitor can’t get close.”

“Or visitors, Art,” Lou added.

“Wonderful.” He laid the mic on the seat and pulled his earpiece out. “You listen for Frankie’s signal to close in.”

“Trouble?”

Art grabbed his cell. “I don’t know, but I want blue suits out here fast.”

“Is there anyone else in the office?” Frankie asked as she walked behind the counter, one hand grasping the clerk’s collar into a bunch.

“No, just me.”

She glanced into the small room off the office. A bed and nightstand were visible, as was an open door to a bathroom. “Anyone in there? In the bathroom, maybe?”

“No. I swear.”

The young guy was too scared to lie, she knew. They had them.

“King Eight,” Frankie said, tilting her head slightly downward toward the mic behind her lapel as she looked across the parking lot and down the street toward her partner’s car. Another vehicle passed in front of the office window, catching her attention before she could finish the message. When she saw who was in the backseat, the word she uttered was not the one those listening were expecting.

Drew Smith lowered the binoculars, a questioning grimace on his face.

“You see something?” Dan Burlingame asked, his third doughnut of the morning half-gone.

“I’d swear the guy riding in that cab was the reporter.”

“You mean Sullivan?”

“Yeah,” Smith answered. “And a car going north turned into the motel right behind. Two guys in it. Nice clean compact.”

“Are you sure about the reporter?”

“Not positive, but it’s still a lot of traffic for that place this time of day.”

Dan Burlingame nodded, swallowed, and reached for the radio.

“Sullivan?” Andy repeated with surprise.

Art looked right as he waited for the Metro Division lieutenant to come to the phone. “What?”

“She says Sullivan just pulled in in a cab. Into the lot.”

“Shit!” Art dropped the cell and reached for the mic, but King Six’s call cut him off.

“King Eight, this is King Six. We may have some movement. One cab and one blue compact just entered the lot.”

Art looked back to the motel, following the cab Frankie had mentioned as it came to a stop in the lot. Behind it, pulling into a space, was another car with…

“Damn!” Art dropped the car into gear — you never waited with the engine off while covering another agent— and keyed the mic. “King Four and Six, move in! Now! Watch occupants of blue compact! Possibly armed!”

Art turned the wheel hard into traffic lanes and stepped on the accelerator but had to brake almost as soon as a wave of cars shot by, the lead vehicles honking at the intruder into the lane. Over a block away King Six was moving to pull out of the strip-mall lot, Drew Smith weaving the car through pedestrians and other vehicles. Only King Four, sitting on Twelfth Street, was able to move immediately toward the motel, but neither agent had been in a position to see what the others had. They were going off only the barest instructions.

In just more than a blink of an eye, with careful planning being tossed aside because of circumstances’ intervention, almost everything that could have gone wrong had.

George Sullivan handed the driver a twenty and looked toward the two-story motel, then to the key in his hand. Behind him there were car doors closing, but he was focused on what he had to do. On where he had to go. Straight ahead. The same number as on the key tab. Room 106.

Were the guys who wanted to kill him in there? He’d tried to convince himself that they wouldn’t be. They would have taken off by now, right? Hanging around would be stupid. All the indicators told him that he’d be able to open the door, find the room empty, and rummage around to see if there was anything he could use to make a story. All the logical things told him that.

And then there was the annoying voice from a higher plane of realization that kept saying “Yeah, right!” And it said it louder.

But he couldn’t listen to it. There was no other way to prove himself. Giving up the bottle, if he could keep it up, was a personal victory. He needed a public one to make his life worth living. He had to have this story, had to find out who the killers of Portero and the FBI agent were. And the path to that end lay a few feet away.

The barest opening in traffic appeared. Art didn’t hesitate. He floored it and squealed the tires into the right lane. In the distance he saw the red and blue grill lights of King Six coming in the opposite direction. To his right and ahead, agents Russo and Mercer had stopped their car on the street, the motel building preventing its being seen from the lot. They were advancing along the north wall toward the lot.

That left only…

“No!” Art screamed. What are you doing?

Frankie Aguirre made the decision in a split second, based upon factors that she could not control but had to confront. There were two known murderers less than fifty feet from her, and a man they wanted to kill was heading for their room. She had no two-way communications with the teams watching her backside and had no way of knowing when they would get there. Quickly, for sure, but quick might not be fast enough. Frankie knew that things were gong to start happening in seconds.

She was there. She was alone. She had to do it.

“Stay down,” she told the clerk as she pushed him to the floor and walked through the glass door to the lot. Sullivan was at the door of 106, something in his hand. The door started to open before she could shout a warning to him. It was going to be two against one, she realized, catching her mistake in ratio a split second later.

Tomás heard the key turning in the lock, grabbed his Browning, and jumped into the latch side of the doorway. As it began to swing inward, he flipped it with one hand and stepped into the opening, his gun pointing at…

“Sullivan?” Tomás said it with a surprise that caused his bedridden partner — who had expected just an over-zealous cleaning woman — to sit bolt upright despite the pain.

George Sullivan was equally shocked. His jaw dropped, then his eyes left their lock on the face and saw the gun. “You… You…”

Tomás reached for Sullivan with one hand and pulled him toward the doorway. As he did, he saw past the stupid reporter — little more than a walking dead man, now — and to the parking lot. Walking toward him were two men. One was lifting something in his left hand, and the other was reaching under his coat.

“Freeze!” Frankie yelled, startling the two men who had appeared with guns. Their heads jerked to the left, then the nearest one began to turn the same way, his hand emerging from the hidden side of his body with a…

Her Smith & Wesson was already pointed at them, and she squeezed off two quick shots at the nearest one. He immediately fell backward, toward his companion, who was also now spinning her way. The second one was a lefty, which meant that his gun would take just a hair longer to rotate enough to fire. But that hair was too long. Frankie fired twice more, one of her shots registering in the head of number two, which briefly was crowned by a grotesque halo of pink and red mist that was lit by the morning sun. It disappeared as he crumpled to the ground, his partner collapsing atop him in a heap.

Tomás froze briefly as he watched the shootout erupt in front of him. Why were the cops shooting each other? The two guys coming at him with guns had to be cops just following Sullivan, but who had shot them? And how did Sullivan find them? There were too many questions, too many things racing through his mind, and too many distractions for him to notice that the deadeye shooter, some chick, was almost on top of him.

Art heard and saw the exchange from a hundred feet away. He slammed on the brakes through the intersection of Twelfth and Vermont, cranking the wheel right and skidding up over the curb to a stop. Andy already had the mic in his hand.

“King Eight! Shots fired! Agent needs help!”

“Drop it!” Frankie said with as much authority as she could muster, but obviously not enough to overcome the determination to die in the perp pulling Sullivan into room 106.

Tomás jerked the reporter past him, tossing him to the floor, and leveled his Browning at the chick with the gun. His sights were almost on her, his mind wishing the sweet young thing a nice trip into the hereafter, when a strange, cold blackness spilled in front of his eyes, like a waterfall of darkness cascading over his body.

Frankie’s two shots were right on the money, placed where they had to be — the head. The perp’s torso had been blocked as Sullivan was thrown inward. Both 10mm rounds entered through the cheeks, one below each eye. They exited straight back, taking large chunks of brain stem and skull with them. The wet red spray was visible on the dirty white door as number three fell.

One was left. One of Thom’s killers. Frankie continued her fast walk to the doorway, turning in and crouching with her weapon, sweeping the room from right to left. Outside, in her peripheral vision, she saw a head peek around the corner of the building on Twelfth. Behind she could hear footsteps, running footsteps, and car tires grabbing hold of asphalt with the terrible sound of a panic skid.

All those things were inconsequential, though. Her senses were narrowing their focus to the scene before her. The scent of gunpowder and whiskey was pulled through her nostrils with every rapid breath. Hands grabbing for something, a glass tumbling to a carpeted floor, and the pleas of the condemned assaulted her auditory filters. The gun felt hot and very light in her hand, as though she were holding a feather. And her eyes… Her eyes saw everything in the room at once and then focused with an instinctive, highly selective tunnel vision on what mattered most.

“Drop it!” she said, stepping toward the man on the bed. His gun was pointed at Sullivan, who was half lying, half sitting in the corner nearest the bathroom.

“I’ll kill him!” Jorge screamed, his words broken as though tortured by pain. Tears streamed down his face, and the pistol trembled slightly in his hand. But he kept it pointed directly at the whimpering reporter. His finger pressed on the trigger a hair.

“AND I WILL BLOW YOUR FUCKING BRAINS ALL OVER THE ROOM!” Frankie said, stepping still closer. And closer. And closer, until the smoking barrel of her weapon touched Jorge’s temple. He winced as the hot steel burned the tender skin on the right side of his face.

Art swung into the room as Russo and Mercer approached from Twelfth. “Behind you, Frankie,” he said. A quick look to the ground at his right confirmed that the guy in the doorway was very dead. He knew that to his rear Burlingame and Smith were covering the other two recipients of Frankie’s shots, though he didn’t know their condition.

He also didn’t know the condition of his partner. Slowly he slide-stepped toward her and the perp, coming up easily on her right.

“I said drop it,” Frankie repeated, her grip steady, the Smith & Wesson barely moving. “Now.”

Jorge squeezed the trigger a slight bit more. “I mean it. I’ll kill him.” Another gun appeared to his front, and his eyes shifted to see straight into the barrel.

“She means it, too,” Art said, his own finger applying pressure to the trigger. “So do I.”

Death suddenly seemed certain for Jorge. Death. The end. Over. Defiance and bravado lost their appeal with that revelation. He did not want to die. Not for the sake of finishing a lousy job. No way. He backed off pressure on the trigger. “Okay. Okay. I give.”

“Finger off the trigger, and lay it on your lap,” Art directed. The perp followed the instructions without hesitation. “Cover me, partner.”

“Got him,” Frankie said robotically as Art reached in and picked up the Browning.

“You all right?” Art asked Sullivan, who sat wide-eyed, his chest heaving, in the corner.

“I… I… I…” It was all George could get out as his breaths came in deep, heavy waves. He was alive. Alive! “I’m alive.”

“Yeah,” Art reacted. “Good for you.” Fucking idiot. There would be time for that later. “We got him.”

Frankie pressed the barrel harder against the perp’s head, until he began to lean away and down to the pillows. You killed Thom. YOU KILLED THOM!!!

“Partner.” Art swiveled his aim slowly left until it was centered on the man’s head. He didn’t want to move it anymore. “Frankie.” Don’t make me do it. Not again. “Frankie.”

She heard her partner’s words. They were almost pleas, but pleas for what? For her not to do something? Just like this scum hadn’t done anything to Thom. Like… Like…

“Bring your right hand slowly to your back,” Frankie said, waiting for the suspect to comply before having him bring the other back. “Cuff him, Art.”

“Gladly.” Art holstered his weapon and brought out his handcuffs. A sigh of relief escaped his lips, for many reasons. Their suspect was now in custody.

Frankie backed away and holstered her own weapon. She felt as though she hadn’t breathed in hours, in days even, and took in a deep, cleansing taste of air. Looking down, she saw Sullivan, now in a semi-fetal sitting position, his chin tucked between his knees. He looked like shit, and she hoped he felt like it, too.

“Next time, hotshot, someone might not be there to save your ass,” Frankie said directly to him. His eyes came up, then looked away. Frankie walked through the door without commenting further, passing Dan Burlingame on his way in.

“You keep your face down,” Art said to the suspect. “You so much as move, and I’ll shoot you just for the fun of it.”

Burlingame came up from behind. He eyed both Sullivan and the perp before speaking. “The two outside are dead, Art. Three total.”

The sound of approaching sirens began. Art knew there’d be a symphony of them in the next minute. “Jesus, Dan.”

“Hell of a job of shooting,” Burlingame commented. “Four on one, and she cleaned up.”

“Yeah,” Art agreed without glee. Killing was killing, even when justified. It was never the best way. Sometimes it was the only way. This time it didn’t have to be. “Watch him,” Art said to Burlingame. He was standing over Sullivan a second later.

“You sorry sack of shit.”

George looked up, his eyes red but dry. There were no more tears left in him. Hardly any emotion. Just a sobering realization that his life was poised on the edge of the drain and ready to slide in.

“You nearly got my partner killed ‘cause she had to save your ass,” Art bellowed. “And why? Why the fuck did you come looking?”

“I… I needed the story.” Sullivan swallowed hard. “I need something.”

Art spit out a disgusted breath. “Yeah, you need something, all right. You need a fucking lesson in life. Look around, huh. You see what you caused? What you caused because you ‘needed a story’? Bullshit! You’re a fucking crybaby who only has his booze to keep him company!”

“No more booze,” George said simply.

Art wondered if the claim was true. Probably not, despite the fact that the guy seemed stone-cold sober. “Wonderful first step, hotshot. Now try and fix all this.”

Sullivan looked to his left, leaning forward to see past the plain wooden dresser. The body of the man who had dragged him in the room lay against the doorframe. Beyond that, in the parking lot, were what looked like two more bodies. And farther still, leaning against the hood of an awkwardly parked car, was the woman who had saved his life.

“Tina,” Art said, calling the other agent in. He took what he hoped would be a final look at Sullivan, and he didn’t know what to feel about him right now. It couldn’t be pity; that would be too generous. Hate? For what, for being an idiot? Anger in part. But what else he should think of George Sullivan eluded him. Only distaste was prevalent in his mind at the moment. “Get him out of here.”

Art turned away as Mercer lifted and led Sullivan from the room. He took a few steps toward the bed and rolled the suspect over. The movement caused a grimace of pain. “Listen carefully, whoever you are, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent….” Art finished the Mirandizing of their suspect, then lifted him with a one hand grip of the man’s shirt to a sitting position against the headboard. There was another wince. “Now we’re gonna have to talk.”