October's Ghost (25 page)

“How?”

“An ambush. The rebels destroyed the vehicles providing security, then the tank trucks themselves. A total loss.”

The president looked disbelievingly at his brother. “The shipment must get through to Asunción. It must!”

“It will, Fidel. Los Guaos is preparing another shipment.”

“This time with ironclad security,” Fidel said, making a fist in the air.

Raul wanted to add something positive to the event. “We did kill all the rebels who ambushed the convoy.”

“How did they...?” The president’s eyes lit up, and a smile appeared upon the gray-bearded face. Yes. They wouldn’t know that there was... “Excellent.”

Raul nodded. The surprise would not stop the rebels, but it would bloody them. Guevarra was a madman. The perfect madman to fly under these circumstances. “Fidel, soon we must speak of a target.”

“Yes. Soon.”

*  *  *

“Captain Cresada reports that the patrol never returned,” Manchon explained. Night had come to the island, and with it some respite from the day’s advance. He, Ojeda, and Papa Tony sat quietly beneath a hastily erected tent in a field outside Aguada de Pasajeros.

“None returned?” Ojeda asked for clarification. “Not a single man?”

“Not one.”

Antonio held the latest report from Langley on his lap. The colonel was concerned, obviously at the apparent loss of several men, but also at something Antonio couldn’t identify.

“None?” Ojeda asked again, a single nod all the response needed.
There could not be. We made certain
. His thoughts drifted back to a decade before, training with the Soviets in the land that became their own Vietnam.
Not one man...
Decimation of the Mujahedeen ambushes had been commonplace there also, though not common enough to stave off defeat. “I want any patrols who are out of protective range to be issued shoulder-fired SAMs.”

“You think... ?”

“We will not take the chance.”

*  *  *

It was cheating, but who gave a damn? He owned the lake, the fifty acres around it, and all the fish in it stupid enough to bite at his shiny lure in the dark hours approaching midnight. The light shining down from the dock didn’t hurt, of course, but Joe Anderson had convinced himself that if he was going to leave this earth anytime soon, he was going to take as many of his favorite quarry as he could with him, regardless of laws banning night fishing.

Correction...second-favorite quarry.

“Phone, hon’,” his wife yelled from the back door of their house, which was nestled in the trees in Minnesota backwater country. She had gotten quite used to his late night expeditions to thin out the aquatic population.

Joe looked greedily down at a northern pike hovering below the surface. In a few weeks it would be too cold to fish from the dock, and soon it wouldn’t matter at all. So what? He smiled at the fish. “You’re mine. Just wait.”

He laid his Zebco rod down and went to the back door, picking the receiver up off the dinette table just inside.

He looked to his wife. “This time of night?”

She just shrugged.

“Hello.”

“Captain Anderson?”

Shit...
Joe thought, knowing before another word was said that the fucking northern pike was going to get away.

CHAPTER TEN

CONVERGENCE

“Bourbon, Ted.” Sullivan pushed the glass closer to the mirrored wall of beautiful bottles, some clear and others filled with the dirty brown liquid he craved.

“Still early, George,” the bartender said. “You gonna pace yourself this time?”

This time? Was he insinuating...?
It wasn’t worth arguing, George knew. Ted was the guy with the liquor. Ted was his friend right now. Almost his best friend. “Nice and slow tonight.”
Last one in this joint, you lousy, overprotective ass.

The sound was more than beautiful, a sweet, refreshing swish as the bourbon reached down from the neck of the bottle and filled the glass only to the point where the optimist/pessimist debate could ensue. Never enough, the naysayer in Sullivan decided, lifting the glass to his lips, taking in the first taste of the liquid that helped him to relax. Helped him to think. There was much to think about, much to plan. A story to get. His story.
To hell with Bill.

“Yank my story,” Sullivan muttered, downing half of what remained in his glass.

“What?”

Sullivan lifted his head, eyeing the bartender. Not only was he a mother, he was a nosy mother. “Nothing. Trouble at work.”

Surprise, surprise.
“Maybe you should change your line of work.”

“I like being a reporter,” George disagreed. “I’m good at it.”

“I was talking about your moonlighting,” the bartender said, looking at the glass that was nearing empty.
Give it up, guy.
Regulars were good for business, but he hated watching the pathetic ones drink their lives into a toilet.

“I’m good at that, too.” George looked away, back to his drink.

Too good, the bartender thought to himself, wondering if this regular put the same amount of effort into the job that paid his tab.

*  *  *

“Strike eight,” Frankie said, scratching the establishment known as the Tree House off of their list after getting back in the Chevy.

“Nice place,” Art commented. “Remind me never to go there unless I’m drunk first. That way it won’t look so bad.”

“It’s not the looks, partner,” Frankie said, wiping the tip of her nose. She looked up at the flashing sign as Art pulled away. “A urinal with neon.”

They were getting a good taste of what Sullivan required in a place to get shit-faced, namely “not much.” Bottles, bar stools, and a bathroom, sometimes all in one room, according to Aguirre’s discriminating nose. Art’s was less affected. His additional years in the Bureau, particularly his time working the OC hits in Chicago, had seen him observing many an autopsy, where the term “smell” took on meanings it was never intended to represent.

“West we go,” Art said without enthusiasm. “Where to?”

Frankie checked the list as her partner swung their car left onto Sunset from Rampart. “A place called Freddy’s. Fifty-nine-hundred block of Sunset”

Art finished his turn and slid over into the right lane, slowing as the staggered convoy of LAPD cars, their lights and sirens clearing the way, came at him from the opposite direction.

“Cavalry’s got work to do tonight,” he said, noticing just a second later that a helicopter was close behind the patrol cars, racing east on Sunset a few hundred feet in the air.

“Just another night in L.A.,” Frankie observed. She was wrong.

*  *  *

The Los Angeles Police Department’s jurisdiction is divided into four Bureaus—West, Valley, South, and Central—which are comprised of a total of eighteen divisions, not including the elite Metro Division. Each division monitors and maintains its own patrol function, with officers responding primarily to 911 calls dispatched from a central communications center. When things in one division heat up, as is common in a city whose criminal element does not follow the statistical laws of even population distribution, units from adjacent divisions can be called in to assist. Certain happenings mandate such cooperation to a higher degree. At the top of those is one radio call— “Officer needs help.”

Why such things happen is a question social theorists and criminologists have debated for decades, and to excess in the very recent past, but none could have predicted or explained the motivation for what began in the streets bounding Echo Park, a slab of green littered with bottles and drug paraphernalia located just inside Rampart Division’s area of responsibility.

A jet-black vintage Cadillac Seville, its compressed springs and low-aspect tires identifying it as the ride of choice for gang members, glided slowly up the street on the park’s north side, just yards from a group of young men hanging out on the hood of a vintage Monte Carlo parked along the curb. The first words from the Cadillac, which would be seen as benign to most people not familiar with the gang culture, challenged the allegiance of the boys on the Monte Carlo, questioning them as to “who they claimed.” The answer, which was as much a statement of pride in one’s gang as it was a truthful response, was all the occupants of the Cadillac needed.

Two sawed-off double-barrel shotguns poked through the open side window from the backseat, and a single semiautomatic pistol from the front. The weapons trained on the group of twelve young bangers. Understandably they started to scatter at the sight, but not fast enough.

The fire came quickly and violently, striking three members of the La Playa Flats gang in the back as their homies dove to the ground, pulling out their own hardware, mostly .22- and .25-caliber pistols. They were not as well armed as their rivals, the Madera Honchos, but did not hesitate to shoot back as soon as their guns were in hand.

On the east side of the park, sitting in their patrol car, two officers of the Rampart Division’s P.M. watch were finishing their dinners—Styrofoam bowls full of rice and teriyaki beef strips—when the repeated sounds of gunfire reached them. Immediately they radioed in that they were going to investigate “shots fired,” not an uncommon occurrence, and hurried to the north side of the park. They turned from Echo Park onto Park and instantly knew that this was more than an ordinary “shots fired.”

The driver of the Cadillac, upon seeing the police cruiser turn toward him, reflexively floored it and swung to the left, trying to make a U-turn in an area that would not permit such for the big four-door. His homies in the backseat, alternately trying to hit their rivals with wild blasts from the shotguns and ducking into the false safety behind the doors, didn’t see what the driver had, and, as the Caddie screeched to a stop in its abortive swing to get out of there, they fired again without looking, their shots traveling straight down Park and hitting the LAPD car in the windshield and grill.

“Two Adam Twenty-one! Officer needs help! Shots fired!”

It was as if a lightning bolt had reached down from above and struck every LAPD unit in Rampart, Northeast, and Hollywood divisions. The twelve other Rampart units on patrol that evening, upon hearing the ‘Two’ in the unit I.D. that denoted it as one of theirs, dropped what they were doing and raced toward the park. Six Northeast units, just north of the park in their own division, also sped off with lights and sirens even before central communications put out the call as a Code Three.

But it was from the west, from Hollywood Division, that the greatest outside response came. Eight units, including one of the LAPD’s helicopters that had been involved in a particularly nasty domestic-violence call, left the senior patrol officer of the watch, Sergeant Charlie Burns, to finish up the paperwork and witness statements and headed off to aid their brother law officers who had put out the call to the east of their location. It was a relatively quiet night in Hollywood otherwise, so the immediate loss of nearly all the division’s patrol force was not likely to cause a problem.

Sergeant Burns thought that as he climbed into his car near the intersection of Beachwood and Sunset, his ears tuned to the unfolding situation at Echo Park and his thoughts with the officers who were in need of assistance, unaware that he would soon be in a situation not dissimilar.

*  *  *

Sullivan walked out of Freddy’s onto Sunset, wondering if he’d be able to find a cab at this time of night. He took a few steps east on the brightly lit boulevard, his gait slow and measured so as not to test the limits of his coordination. Not a damn one in sigh—

“Get in!”

The hands grabbed him from behind, pushing him toward the curb. A second later a dark-colored car screeched to a stop in front of him, and the back door came open. The hands pushed hard, shoving his head downward just as the police did in the movies.
Could it be?

Sullivan regained his senses as the back door closed to his right. He was facedown on the car seat and brought his head up as the sound of another door closing filled the car. Who was...?

“Don’t move!” Jorge emphasized the words with the barrel of the revolver, which he pressed against the reporter’s forehead as he reached over the seat back and held him by the lapels. “Don’t say nothing, don’t do nothing.”

Tomás eased out into traffic, not wanting to draw any attention. Sunset was a busy street, one that they had heard lots of sirens from in the past few minutes, so the automatic decision to get off of it was natural. It was also a mistake.

*  *  *

A car approaching is always cause for caution for a police officer, which made Sergeant Burns’s instinct to look up understandable. He saw the blue Chevy’s driver just as the man saw him, and there was the unmistakable mask of tension upon his face that most bad guys exhibited when confronted by the cops. That piqued the sergeant’s awareness, as did the man’s blatant attempt to continue looking straight ahead as he neared the patrol car. He was saying something out of the side of his mouth, Burns noted, probably trying to tell his buddy in the passenger seat...

Gun
.

The sergeant’s head jerked fully to the left at the sight of the revolver pointing into the backseat. Beachwood was a residential street, and therefore not a wide one in the cramped confines of Los Angeles. The driver and his passenger passed ten feet to Burns’s left, then accelerated quickly south on Beachwood.

*  *  *

“Dammit!” Tomás swore, his eyes watching in his rearview mirror as the police car began a tight turn away from the curb.

Jorge was pressed back against the seat when Tomás stepped on the gas, and his eyes caught the sight of the car a hundred feet back just as its light bar came to life. He looked down at Sullivan, the gun pressing harder into his forehead. “I’ll blow your head off if you move.”

“He’s on us!” Tomás shouted above the noise of the Lumina downshifting for a quick burst of speed.

“Lose him,” Jorge said, knowing it was more hope than directive.

*  *  *

There was no mistaking it now for Burns. The car was rabbiting.