This time the shot hit somewhere in the torso, but after reeling back against the wall as before, the guy pulled himself up, pushed the cop out of the way, and stumbled out into the alley. The arm that shoved him felt like a steel bar, but by now he was so stunned, the guy could’ve used a feather.
“Mother of God!” the cop muttered. He followed the guy outside, his smoking pistol still leveled at him, but a small crowd had formed out in the alley, so he had to lower the gun and decock it. The crowd let the guy trot past them and down the alley, his gait improving with every step until he was sprinting by the time he vanished out of sight.
Torn between pursuit and his downed partner, the cop retrieved his radio and mashed the mike button: “KMA, Sam One-Niner, the 245 suspect…” Shit, how in hell was this going to sound on the radio? He’d just reported that the suspect was down-now he was running down the street?… “Suspect is on foot heading west down the alley behind the Bobby John Club, heading toward Fairfield Street. All units be advised, the 245 suspect is wearing a black leather jacket, dark coveralls, some kind of backpack, and a full-face motorcycle helmet. Suspect… shit, suspect does not appear to be armed but should be considered dangerous.”
At Del Paso Boulevard, Patrick ran left onto Fairfield Street. Using the thrusters in his boots, he leaped to the second-story roof of an abandoned printing shop, then paused to do another system self-test. Battery levels were already in the emergency reserve range. The emergency reserves were for escaping and survival, not for fighting. If he encountered any police now, he’d have no choice but to surrender.
Patrick called up and interrogated the discrete global positioning satellite search function on the heads-up display inside his helmet. A tiny red blip appeared, with a direction and range to the target. The red blip was Jon Masters, riding inside a specially equipped AMC Hummer they were using as a mobile support vehicle. Both Patrick’s suit and the Hummer carried satellite navigation transponders, for each of them to see and track the other’s location. Masters was now less than two-tenths of a mile away, cruising around the target area and trying to look as inconspicuous as a six-thousand-pound Hummer wagon could look on a city street in the middle of the night.
Using the thrusters, Patrick hopped from roof to roof along Fairfield and Forrest streets until he got to Arden Way. He waited on the roof of an apartment building until he saw the Hummer moving closer. Then he leaped off the roof, landing on a patch of lawn-right beside a startled guy just getting out of his car in the parking lot not forty feet away. Patrick ignored him. Fifteen seconds later, when the thrusters had recharged, he made another leap across the parking lot and lit down a few feet away from the Hummer as it slowly cruised down Arden Way. He pulled open the door as it stopped; then Jon hit the gas and sped away as fast as the big all-terrain vehicle could take them.
After they crossed the river and headed down Sixteenth Street south toward the downtown area, Jon finally asked, “How did it go?”
“Great! It went great!” Patrick said, removing the helmet. Remembering his awful visage when he had taken off the helmet after the demonstration, Jon had been afraid of what he might see this time, but Patrick looked pretty normal. “Everything worked great!”
They had installed a portable gasoline-powered generator in the back of the Hummer, and Patrick started it up with a push of a button, then brought a cable around and plugged it into a receptacle on a bottom corner of his backpack. Although he couldn’t monitor the power levels without the helmet on, he knew from testing that it would take thirty to sixty minutes to recharge the backpack power unit.
“We’re done for the night, right?” Jon asked hopefully. “You got what you were looking for?”
“Hell no-we do it the way we planned!” Patrick answered. “I got a lot of good information, but I need more. The next stop might give us the rest of what we need to bust these guys.”
“There seemed to be a lot of cops around…”
“We’ll do it the way we planned, Jon,” Patrick repeated. “We’ll go to a wider radius to keep this vehicle away from the next location. If all else fails, I’ll meet you at Sac Executive Airport, at our rendezvous point. I can hide in the hangar or up on the tower.”
Jon fell silent. It had to be played out…
Rosalee Subdivision,
Elder Creek neighborhood,
Sacramento, California
A short time later
Sometimes it took days to find the best location for parking a surveillance van. Ideally, the crew wanted a spot a block or so down the street from the target address, close enough to see and photograph everyone entering or leaving the premises with a medium telephoto lens or to look inside an open garage, but not so close as to attract attention to itself or the target. Even in better neighborhoods, the van had to be moved periodically so it didn’t attract attention or become a target for thieves or vandals.
Although it only involved sitting, waiting, watching, and listening, doing a surveillance was tough, uncomfortable, tiring work. Depending on the neighborhood and the nature of the operation, the cops doing the surveillance could sometimes switch with other officers for food or relief breaks. But a lot of times they were stuck inside the van for the entire eight-hour shift, forced to use “piddle packs,” portable toilets, garbage bags, or soft drink cans to do their thing.
But the worst part of a surveillance, even after only a couple of days, was the godawful smell. Thankfully, few cops smoked inside the van anymore, but a closed-up surveillance van quickly collected a variety of odors-fast food of every conceivable kind, sweat mixed with various deodorants and perfumes, fumes from a leaky exhaust, and other, more unmentionable, smells. Leaving the van actually made it worse. The cops grew accustomed to the smell after a couple of hours, no matter how bad it was, and if they then left the van to grab a bite or take a piss, the fresh air made getting back into the stinky, stifling, claustrophobic vehicle that much worse.
The Rosalee subdivision, between Sixty-fifth Street and Stockton Boulevard north of Elder Creek Road, was one of the predominantly white areas of the Elder Creek section of town, with lower- to middle-class homes on generally nice suburban or semirural streets. Go a few blocks in any direction around Elder Creek, however, and it was very different territory. Some houses showed pride of ownership, with clean yards, neat landscaping, and fresh paint; but most were rentals, subrentals, sub-subrentals, or squatter-occupied, and no handyman or can of paint had come near them in years. The area was a melting pot of races and ethnic backgrounds: whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, plus every possible mix.
The house just north of the target address on the corner was a very nice single-family property with a decent-looking lawn, well-trimmed shrubs still wrapped in burlap to protect them against the winter frost, plenty of lights surrounding the place, and a For Sale sign in the yard. The reason for the sale was probably the ramshackle house next door, a one-story frame structure of rotted wood and cracking stucco set in a dirt yard covered with patches of brown grass. It was surrounded by a mangled, rusting chain-link fence, and a huge pit bull terrier prowled the yard, barking fiercely at the slightest provocation. Some of the windows were boarded up, and others caged in steel bars bolted onto the outside of the house.
Usually it’s the dirtbag traffic around a house that gets cops’ attention, but this time it was the dog that had roused the interest of Intelligence and Narcotics again. When the occupants of the house were first busted, they had a fierce rottweiler guarding the place; after the bust, the dog was gone. The new occupants had a dog too, but it was small, a beagle or something like it, just as noisy but no killer guard dog. Drug dealers rarely used beagles as watchdogs. A few kids’ toys in the yard, a morning newspaper, and pizza boxes in the trash cans were more indications that maybe the occupants weren’t dealing or cooking meth.
But a few weeks later, all these domestic touches began to disappear. The foot traffic increased, the toys vanished, the take-out food containers were gone-meth users never ate very much-and the beagle was replaced by a pit bull. It definitely attracted attention.
The objective of this surveillance was to observe and look for opportunities. It had been suspected that the Satan’s Brotherhood was using this house for selling or distributing crank, but Narcotics had never been able to get enough solid evidence to prove it. They had tried every trick in the book: making traffic stops of vehicles that had recently been to the place, hoping to find some crank inside so they’d have probable cause to get a warrant to search the house; tailing frequent visitors, hoping to catch someone on possession with enough stuff to go after
