Mac winced in pain. He’d been hit on the top of his left shoulder, where the vest provided little protection.
They all walked towards the driver of the car Alt had intended to hijack. She was shaking and crying. Lich opened the back door to her car and helped her sit down. Officers were coming now from both the bottom and top of the ramp. He turned to his friends. They had just saved his life, and he thanked them. “Took you guys long enough.”
“Hey, better late than never, boyo,” Lich replied.
“Yeah, and nice driving too,” Mac replied as he walked to his now totaled SUV.
“Christ Almighty,” Riley hooted. “You save the guy’s life, and he bitches about his precious SUV.”
Mac smirked as he grabbed a turtleneck from the back compartment. Guess the trip up north was out of the question. As he fashioned a sling for his left arm, he reached into the front seat, moved the now deflated airbag from the steering wheel and grabbed his cell phone, wanting to call Sally. “Dick, could the airbag even deploy against your girth?”
“Fuck you,” Lich replied, rubbing his knee. They all shared a pained smile and small laugh. They’d survived.
“Tell you one thing that wasn’t a joke,” Mac said. “They knew we were coming. I tried to ask Alt how they knew, but…”
“Yeah, well we still may have someone who can tell us,” Riles responded.
“Guess who survived our little shootout?” Lich added.
“Who?” Mac asked.
Riley grinned, “Want another shot at Ted Lindsay?”
Chapter Forty-One
Mac was transported to United Hospital. His wound on the top of his left shoulder required thirteen stitches. He wouldn’t be able to use his arm for a week or two. The Emergency Room doctor told him to take it easy, keep his arm in a sling, and he wrote a prescription for pain medication and ordered him to start a physical therapy program in a week or so, once the wound had healed.
Rockford was going to be fine, although he would be laid up for a while. He was raging about the shootout. “Find the mother-fucker who tipped those assholes off,” he said at least a half dozen times.
Two C.I.R.T. officers were in surgery and would be for several hours. The doctors were hopeful, but they both had been hit hard. Several others had been wounded, and the ER was a busy place. Having seen all of his fellow officers lying around with multiple wounds, Mac didn’t feel too bad about his little hit to the shoulder.
Paddy offered them a ride back to the Department of Public Safety Building. As they walked to Paddy’s cruiser, Mac pulled out his cell phone, and cleared the last call, the one Sally had made while they were driving downtown a few hours earlier. She answered on the first ring. She was calm on the other end, but Mac could hear the relief in her voice.
“You won’t believe what we have been finding!” she said excitedly.
“What?”
“I’ll show you when you get here. But one thing I will tell you is that those guys at PTA had electronic surveillance on both your place and mine.”
“What? You gotta be shittin’ me.”
“I’ll tell you all about it when you get here.”
Mac was pissed again. Well the boys at PTA wouldn’t be bugging any more places. Mac was sure of that. They pulled into the parking garage and the chief and Peters were waiting for them.
“I sure am glad to see you boys in one piece,” the chief said, shaking each of their hands. “Well done. Well done.” He took a long, concerned look at Mac in his sling. “Boyo, you sure you should be here?”
“I’ll be fine, Chief,” Mac replied, holding up a vial of pain medication. “Where’s Lindsay?”
“We’ve got him in an interview room, waiting for you. I figure you guys have more than earned the first shot at him. But first, why don’t you see what we’ve found.”
They took a waiting elevator up to the chief’s office. When they entered, Sally saw Mac in the sling and came to him. She touched him lightly on the left arm and looked him in the eye and gave him a little smile. Mac smiled back, his look telling her he was okay.
“Let me show you what we’ve found,” she said, taking him by the right arm. A long folding table had been brought in. The documents from the Cross file were spread out onto the table.
“They’ve been watching you guys for a while,” she said to Mac, Riley and Lich. “When the police searched the PTA building, we found this room down in the bottom of the parking garage. They had surveillance equipment, computers, listening devices, you name it, and they were watching, especially Mac and even me,” Sally said to everyone. “We found a few guys down there who were part of the operation. We have them in custody. They’ve also given us the names and aliases of a few others. The department, the state police, and the FBI have that information, and we’re on the lookout for all of them.”
“Holy cow,” Riles replied, a look of amazement on his face.
“Yeah, pretty amazing what they were up to. But they had good reason to be watching. They were up to some nasty stuff with this Cross business.” She laid it out for everyone. Cross had been an operation run out of a facility in West Virginia. Lindsay, Alt, and company were selling arms, ammunition, communications equipment, and other military hardware out the backdoor. The FBI was already looking at the log, and it appeared the hardware had been sold to groups who weren’t exactly friends of the United States.
“They made millions on this stuff,” Sally said. “It looks like they shut it down around the time of the September 11th attacks.”
“This file is what Landy Stephens gave to Jones then?” Lich asked waving to the documents on the table.
“We think so,” Sally replied. “Jones either wouldn’t play ball with them, or they didn’t give her the chance too.”
“So, they took her out,” Riles replied.
“Yeah,” Mac added. “But before they could, she shared this information with Claire Daniels, so she had to go too.”
“Did they kill Senator Johnson?” Lich asked.
“Yup. We found a computer guy down in that little room, and he’s singing. Says they killed Jones, Daniels, and the senator. He also worked the surveillance system at Victory Ramp so we couldn’t see that Alt guy shoot Knapp.”
“The senator was just a patsy in all this, then, huh?” Lich asked.
“Yes,” Sally replied. “What a plan. They kill Jones, making it look like the work of Knapp. They kill Daniels and pin it on the senator. Before the senator can clear his name, they kill him and make it look like a suicide. They kill Knapp before we can talk to him, thinking he’ll never have the chance to deny he killed Jones.”
“Except Mac found this file and that DVD system at Daniels’ place, and we got ’em. Hell, if you weren’t onto it all along,” the chief replied, a smile on his face. “Your dad would have been proud today, Mac, very proud.”
“Thanks, Chief,” Mac replied quietly, trying to keep his emotions in check.
“So, are the feds going to come in and louse this up, prosecute these guys for espionage or something?” Lich asked.
“We’ll work all that out,” Flanagan replied. “You boys don’t worry about that stuff. Ms. Kennedy and I will handle that.”
