“Don't ever pass up the chance for chocolate,” she said. “It is a simple cure, but good for a woman. A woman needs chocolate to make her soul glad.”
“Uh, thanks,” I said. I wondered if she could tell I was between a smile and a frown, my mouth twitching in indecision.
“I'm going to…” I trailed off. I hooked my thumb and pointed out the back door.
She smiled. Nodded.
“Thank you,” I said, and slipped out the back.
The van was inside the garage, just like she said.
I opened the garage door and a wave of dust poured out onto the gravel driveway. A murder of crows took noisily to the air from the roof. The van looked undamaged. I walked around it, nodding to myself as I headed for the cab.
There, I stopped.
Inside the cab, in the passenger seat, was Kenneth Wade, face bloody and bruised, as dead as dead can be.
Chapter 13
I looked down at the dead cop. His gas mask had been ripped off his face and his head was leaning back against the seat, mouth open slightly, eyes milked over. He had a day or two worth of blond stubble on his chin. He'd been beaten badly. There were dark, livid bruises on his face, around his eyes, and at the corners of his mouth, where a thin stream of blood had dried and turned to black crust. His gun was missing.
Wade's radio was as dead as he was. It had been left in the ON position, the battery drained.
His cell phone was on the floorboard, next to his left bootie, and I tried that. It worked. With a lot of difficulty, I manipulated the tiny phone around the contours of my gas mask so I could talk with the dispatcher's office and tell them where I was and what I needed.
As I put the phone back as closely as I could to where I picked it up from, it occurred to me how many of the cardinal rules of crime scene management I had just violated. I probably shouldn't have opened the garage door. I definitely shouldn't have opened the van's door. And any respectable defense attorney would have a field day with me using the dead man's cell phone. I saw myself, several hours in the future, writing a very long report in which I would use the phrase “necessary due to exigent circumstances” over and over again.
Shaking my head, I closed everything up the way I'd found it and walked around to the other side of the garage, where I figured I could wait for the cavalry to show up.
It seemed to be my day for corpses.
Just around the corner, thrown with apparent haste and swarming with black, iridescent flies, were two more bodies. Looters, from the looks of them. I got close enough to see the bullet holes in their chests. “Lovely,” I said, dreading the extra work their misfortune was going to cause me.
I was staring at the corpses, thinking about how the scene got to look the way it looked, when I heard a twig snap. My gaze darted into the alley behind the garage, into the overgrown tangle of tall grass and weeds and shrubs there. Through the green and brown mess of vegetation I saw a man, a looter, with a shotgun, inching his way towards the garage.
I jumped back behind the corner of the garage, and looked around for a way out. I couldn't risk going back into the street, and I couldn't cross the alley again without giving away my position.
You're screwed.
The man tried to approach quietly, but didn't do a very good job of it. I slipped around to the other side of the garage and picked up a long, skinny piece of metal pipe leaning against the garage. I gripped it, holding it straight up, like a walking stick. The pole was about the size of a broom handle, awkward to swing, but it was all I had to work with.
I pressed my back against the corner of the garage nearest the alley, listened to the crunching vegetation, and got my mind ready for what I was about to do.
Instead of swinging it, I jabbed the pole into the man's shocked face as he came around the corner. I heard his nose crack. Blood went everywhere. He went down to his knees, losing his grip on the shotgun at the same time, and held his face with both hands.
“Shit,” he said. It sounded muffled through the broken bones and web of his fingers.
I took a step back, grabbed one end of the pole with both hands and swung it down over my head, onto the back of his.
It laid him out. He collapsed to the ground, not dead but not moving, either.
I tossed the pole away and grabbed the shotgun. As I looked around, trying to figure out what direction to go in, I heard shouting. Looters. They were in the street, pointing and yelling in my direction. They ran at me, still shouting. One took a wild shot at me with a pistol and I heard the bullet whiz by me, striking the vegetation in the alleyway with the crack of breaking wood.
I ran along the fence line, parallel to the alley. The suit was light, but bulky, and it sounded like I was crumpling up wax paper as my legs scissored back and forth. By the time I reached the far back corner of the yard, they were already coming around the corner of the house. Another shot went by my head and I jumped the fence, ducking into the cover of the overgrown alley. The shrubs pulled on my suit, but I pushed through to the other side. I came out right on top of a group of chickens that squawked in protest as I ran through them. I didn't stop. Kept on running. This time, I headed for the house next door to Carmenita Jaramillo's.
I turned and saw three of them entering the yard. Before they could get a shot off I fired the shotgun at them. They were far enough away that there was little danger of the shot doing anything but peppering their skin, but the noise was enough to cause them to duck for cover. I used the opportunity to duck into the gap between the house and the garage. My plan was to run around the front and try to double back on them, maybe come at them from the opposite corner of the house. But as soon as I entered the gap, I realized that wasn't going to happen. There was a 12 ft high brick wall in front of me, sealing me into a dead end.
I was frantic. I went down on one knee, hugging the wall of the house, shotgun up and ready, waiting for the end. I heard the looters laughing in the backyard, calling out to me. They'd figured out I was a woman. I got the sense of what they were saying, and it didn't sound like they wanted to kill me. At least that wasn't the first thing they were going to do.
But then, suddenly, their laughing turned to surprised, angry shouts, and one of them even let out a girlish squeak of a scream before the sound was cut off by a sickening crunch.
I held my position for at least a minute, waiting to see who came around the corner. When no one did, I inched forward.
I stopped at the corner and took a deep breath, then edged around the corner with the shotgun ready to go.
My mouth fell open inside my gas mask. I lowered the shotgun.
There, standing in the middle of three kneeling looters, their hands clasped over their heads, was Chunk, a rather serious looking shotgun in his hands. One of the looters was down. He looked dead.
“How you doing?” he asked.
The cavalry was a SWAT team divided up into four two-man units, all of them in full biohazard gear. A police helicopter hovered overhead. Once the scene was locked down, the evidence technicians, the SAPD's version of CSI, was brought in. Things happened smoothly after that, more or less by the book.
By the time Chunk and I made it back to the Scar and started writing our reports, the afternoon sky had begun to color with an approaching storm. Towering purple and black thunderheads loomed on the horizon, shouldering up against the low, rounded hills of the Hill Country. The air had a charged, electric smell.
It was drizzling by the time the sun disappeared.
Later, from the report writing room, I could hear rain pounding on the building's metal roof.
