Howard said, “Why did you shoot, you fucking moron? He had dropped his weapon!”
“Sorry. It looked like he was about to hurt the hostage.”
“I thought you wanted him alive!”
Lee didn’t say anything else. He put away his weapon.
Howard shook his head, went to check on Zeigler. One in the heart, one in the upper chest, he’d be dead before the paramedics could get him to the ambulance. Shit!
Howard stood, holstered his revolver, helped the crying hostage to her feet. “It’s all over, ma’am. You’re safe now.” He glared at Lee
He heard the sound of helicopters moving in and swore under his breath. He was gonna take the vest off. No way he wanted the name “Net Force” to show up on the evening news after this fiasco.
Commander Michaels would surely agree with that idea.
More DEA agents boiled out of the house, guns waving around.
16
“So, the only lead we had to the dealer is cooling on a slab at the morgue in sunny L.A.?”
“Yes, sir,” John Howard said. “Apparently to the regret of teenage girls everywhere.”
“Jesus,” Michaels said.
“My feelings exactly. My guess is, Mr. Lee of the DEA is going to have some tall explaining to do to his superiors.”
Michaels shook his head. John Howard and Jay Gridley both looked at him as if expecting some wisdom, and he didn’t have any on tap. He said, “Well, at least our information helped the DEA beat the NSA to the target.”
“Might have been better the other way,” Jay observed. “I kinda liked the Zee-ster’s movies myself. He had a certain style.”
That the first part of Jay’s observation was a thought Michaels had already had didn’t make it sit any better. And while he’d seen the actor in a couple of movies and hadn’t been that impressed, dead was dead, and shooting somebody with his hands up was bad juju, no two ways about it. Especially a rich and famous somebody.
He said, “Well, if you give folks a knife and they cut themselves with it, that’s their problem. The director can’t fault us for what DEA screws up. What is the deal with NSA and DEA, anyway? Some kind of ongoing bad blood?”
Jay said, “Not that I know of. No more than any other interagency rivalry. CIA, FBI kind of thing. You get the ball, you don’t pass it, you shoot, even if we’re all on the same team.”
“What about personal histories? Agent Lee and Mr. George go to competing schools? Sleep with each other’s girlfriends?”
Jay looked surprised. “Hmm. Never thought of that.”
“Maybe it’s not relevant to the situation, but why don’t you poke around a little and see what you can find. From our meetings, it doesn’t seem as if these two have any great love for each other, and I’d just as soon not get Net Force splattered with incidental mud if these two are going to keep throwing it at each other.”
Jay nodded. “Good idea, boss. I’ll do that.”
“Even though it’s primarily their problem, we can’t just wash our hands of it. We have to help them keep looking, and right now, all we’ve got is a dead movie star and a dead end.”
“Not altogether,” Howard said. He grinned, showing bright teeth against his chocolate skin. “There is the matter of the recovered capsules. Unfortunately, they were near the end of their life span; the movie star could afford to buy them and let them go bad if he wanted, and by the time the DEA got the things to their lab, they were so much inert powder internally.”
“Which doesn’t do us much good, does it?” Michaels said.
“Well, sir, probably not. But while you’ll notice that the report says there were three of the capsules, that is actually in error.”
Michaels looked at him, waiting.
Howard reached out and dropped a purple cap onto his desktop.
Jay grinned. “General! You swiped one?”
“Liberated it,” Howard said. “It won’t do us any more good chemically than the ones the DEA’s got, but I figured what they could learn from four, they could learn from three.”
Michaels picked up the cap and looked at it. “Doesn’t seem like it’s worth all the trouble, this little thing.”
“Diamonds are small, too, boss, and so are wetware and lightware chips.”
“Well, as it happens, we have a friend in the FBI lab who would like to get his hands on this,” Michaels said. “That way, at least we’d know as much as the DEA about what’s in it, for whatever that is worth. Maybe some rare herb found only in bouillabaisse served in a certain bad section of Marseilles, France.”
“Sir?”
“Sorry, General, it’s from an old spy comedy vid I once saw. But the regular FBI boys have a huge database and long memories, and their lab techs are second to none. Might be they could come up with something. I’ll run this past them and see what they can find. Good work.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“And I was very happy not to see you on the news.”
“I thought you might be,” Howard said.
After Howard and Jay were gone, Michaels put the capsule into an empty paper clip box and stuck it into his pocket. Chain of evidence was no good, given how they’d come by it, but he was just looking for information. This whole mess was still the DEA’s bastard child, and the sooner he could get Net Force out of helping take care of it, the better. He’d drop by the lab and have a chat with the assistant section head, a man he knew from his field days. They could work something out.
“Don’t take the Hammer,” Bobby said.
Tad, whose last little hit of heroin was wearing off, frowned through the start of a headache. “Why not?”
“Because I need you straight.”
Tad grinned his lopsided grin.
“Well, okay,
“We’re rich and good-looking, how bad could it be?”
Bobby smiled, but it vanished quickly. “The Zee-ster’s dead.”
“No way! I just saw him. Gave him the caps from that last batch. He looked great. He can’t be dead.”
“I got a contact in the police who says his body’s in a big drawer at the new county morgue and the doctors are flipping coins to see who gets to slice and dice him. He’s past tense.”
“Aw, geez, that’s too bad. I liked him. He knew how to party. What’d he do, wrap one of his cars around a tree? He never could drive worth a crap.”
“He was shot twice in the heart by a DEA agent leading a drug raid on his mansion.”
“Whoa. You’re shittin’ me.”
“No. Storm and Drang put up a fight when the narcs kicked in the door. Word is, the Zee-ster’s house walls got more holes in’em now than a colander. Both bodyguards are shot half to pieces, too, but Storm will probably make it. Drang is still in surgery, and they don’t think he’ll survive, or if he does, he’ll be a big hamburger patty… he took a couple rounds in the head.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah, it’s awful and all, but stop and think about what that means. Why would the feds be going after the
