“We’re in big trouble if they did,” Gage said. “Joe, where’s next?”
“Near the Flower Mart on Brannan.”
Gage drove west from the bay, then south away from downtown. He hit Brannan Street just east of the deserted flower market, then drove farther west toward Gilbert. The commercial street was abandoned except for the generic homeless people curled up in doorways with their overfilled shopping carts parked next to them on the sidewalks. Gage slowed when he neared his turn, then crept along, searching the street, headset pressed tight against his ears.
Listening.
Chapter 88
Sometimes you have to take one for the team.”
The voice was faint and staticky, but recognizable.
“We got it,” Gage said. “We got it.”
Gage peered through the van’s windshield as they crept along. The voices strengthened.
“Are you listening to me?”
Gage spotted the numbers stuck on the brown-painted brick front of the second warehouse from the next corner. The streetlight reflected off a red-on-white “For Sale or Lease” sign hanging above the trailer-wide roll-up door. He scanned the unlit windows filling the prongs of the sawtooth roof, then pulled around the corner and into a parking space.
Gage slipped though the divider curtain and into the back.
“Let’s go,” Viz said, reaching to remove his headphones and turning toward the rear door.
“Wait,” Gage said. “We don’t know what we’re up against.”
“What if…?”
“Yes, I’m listening.”
Gage pointed at Viz. “Just wait.” He closed his eyes and concentrated on the voices.
“Why are you dragging this out, Brandon?”
Gage knew why. Brandon would keep talking and stalling, hoping Gage would pick up his voice in the ether. Brandon had read enough search warrants and took enough testimony to know the range of the device was at least two hundred and fifty feet, and he knew Gage was somewhere out there.
“I’m not,” Brandon said. “I just need time to think.”
“We need those DVDs. The time for thinking is over.”
“But Socorro will never say anything. Will you, Socorro? You won’t say anything?”
“No,” Socorro said. “Never. Just let me go. I have children.”
“See,” Brandon said, “you always have that threat. She can’t be there all the time to protect her kids. Now she knows you’re serious. And she needs medical attention.”
Gage reached out and grabbed Viz’s shoulder. Casey locked on his arm.
“Let’s not get her killed,” Gage said.
“It’s hard to think in here. It’s like a coffin.”
“The grow room is still there,” Gage said.
“A plywood coffin. It’s suffocating.”
“Viz, get us a satellite shot of the warehouse.”
Viz flipped open his laptop.
“Suffocating? Brandon, you look like you’re about to vomit. A little blood make you queasy?”
Viz’s hands shook as he typed the address into the SAT-View Web site. Seconds later he had the image.
Anston again: “It all looks a lot different down here in the trenches instead of up on the bench. It’s easy to be a tough guy in a black robe.”
“There are skylights up there,” Viz said. “I can climb up the fire escape of the building behind, then drop down.”
“You’ll sound like an explosion when you hit the roof of the inner structure.”
Viz glanced around the inside of the van. He reached for a fifty-foot coil of coaxial cable and held it up. “This is strong enough to hold me.”
Gage nodded. “You head for the roof. Keep an eye out for Boots. And be careful, he may have called in someone to back him up. I’ll take the front door.” He looked at Casey. “You take the office window.”
Gage slipped a handheld receiver onto his belt and pointed toward the rear of the van. Viz headed out first. After he called to say he’d gotten into position on the roof, Gage and Casey climbed out and walked down the sidewalk toward the warehouse.
“What’s going on. First we had a trip down memory lane on the way over here, practically a geography lesson. Then an architectural review of this place. Jesus Christ, you talk like a maniac when you’re panicked.”
“That’s not it.” It was a new voice. A Texas accent.
Footsteps and scuffling replaced the voice.
Brandon yelled. “Anston, let go of me.”
Gage heard the sound of Brandon’s shirt ripping.
“You traitor. Boots, help me. You… whatever your name is
… check the perimeter.”
Then a yelp and a crash, and silence.
Gage yelled into his cell phone:
“Viz. Go, go, go.”
He held his hand up toward Casey, who was poised with a garbage can raised above his head, ready to throw it through the office window and climb inside.
Gage pressed himself against the brick wall next to the warehouse door. He turned his head toward Casey and mouthed, Wait.
The metal door scraped opened an inch, then two inches, then three. The barrel of a 9mm semiautomatic appeared. Then a hand. Gage chopped down on it with the butt of his gun. The wrist cracked and the 9mm crashed to the sidewalk. Gage grabbed the arm, dragged the man through the door, and swung him headfirst into wall. Gage winced at the thunk of flesh and bone.
Casey set down the trash can and cuffed the man to a water pipe.
Gage ducked his head inside. Boots’s Lexus SUV was parked just inside the roll-up door, next to the plywood grow room occupying most of the warehouse. Gage’s angled view through the opening revealed a series of ten tables stretched across the room, each topped by an empty, full-length black plastic tub.
He slipped through the warehouse entrance, then edged toward the inner door. The smell of marijuana, long since seized by the DEA, but still infusing the plywood, filled the air. He peeked inside the grow room, then ducked back, everyone’s places fixed in his mind:
Brandon was slumped against the right wall, holding his chest where the tape was torn off.
Anston was crouched behind Socorro, who was tied to a wooden chair by the left wall, his gun to her head.
Boots was poised behind a four-foot-tall grow table, pointing his gun at the ceiling, trying to track Viz’s steps moving from north to south, waiting for the order to fire.
“Back off, Gage.” Anston’s voice was calm. Hard. He sounded like a thirty-year-old intelligence agent. Not a sixty-eight-year-old white-collar lawyer.
“I’m not coming in,” Gage said. “Let her go. There’s no point. We’ve recorded everything.”
“Then you’ll just have to give me the recording.”
“And we’ve got Brandon’s records from the hotel.”
“That’s Brandon’s problem.”
Gage heard Viz’s boots hit the cement outside the structure behind Anston, who then fired through the plywood. Gage ducked inside. He heard Casey’s footsteps behind him. He pointed to the right and dived left and rolled behind bags of potting soil stacked three feet high. He crawled farther toward the left as Casey took up his
