The Vengeance of the Tau (4 page)

“Go ahead, Fifteen.”

“I have shots fired—repeat, shots fired—at the Oliveras residence! 1112 Forest Avenue. Request backup!” More screams filled his ears. “Jesus Christ,
lots
of backup!”

“Roger, Fifteen. Backup is rolling.”

“So am I.”

The big car lurched forward as Rainwater jammed the pedal and shifted into drive at the same time. The tires spun madly before finding the road surface, startling several of the college couples strolling nearby.

The screams were still reverberating in Injun Joe’s ears when the big car bore down on one of those couples as they crossed the street with twin Walkmans donned.

“Shit!” Rainwater bellowed, as he turned the wheel to avoid them.

The car wavered out of control and sideswiped a tree. Injun Joe braked and composed himself, giving the big car gas slower the last stretch to Forest Avenue. Once on Forest, though, he floored the pedal. The engine’s roar almost drowned out the torturous sounds still raging in his ears.

Then suddenly, just like that, the sounds ceased. A few stray gunshots lingered before silence took over. Where chaos and death had run rampant less than two minutes before, there was, simply, nothing.

Joe Rainwater drove straight up to the main gate of the estate and lunged out of his car. The gate was locked, but the brick fence was only five feet high. He scaled it and dropped to the mansion’s sprawling front lawn. His 9mm Glock pistol palmed, Injun Joe advanced warily toward the house.

He came upon the first body ten feet in, at least what was left of it. Cooling blood and entrails steamed upward into the night. The smell made him gag. The guard’s midsection had been shredded. He had been virtually disemboweled. His face was frozen in agony.

Rainwater came upon the remains of two additional men before he reached the mansion’s entrance. There might have been more, but for the last stretch his attention was focused on the empty hole where the front door used to be. Wooden shards of it lay all over the porch. Injun Joe had to step over larger fragments as he crossed the threshold. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of gunpowder. Its telltale smoke still hung in the air. Around him bullets had shattered virtually every visible window—bullets fired from the inside by Oliveras’s guards toward whatever was killing them.

Another trio of bodies lay at absurd angles at various levels of the curving staircase. The blood of the lowermost one oozed to the marble foyer and formed a pool. Injun Joe did his best to avoid it as he mounted the spiraling steps toward the mansion’s second floor.

Jesus Christ …

Like the guards outside and on the stairs, the men on the second floor had been torn apart. Two lay facedown at the head of the hallway in widening pools of their own blood. Rainwater could hear the wail of approaching sirens now and debated whether to go on alone. The chance that whoever had done all this was still within the mansion was quite real, and the thought of facing them with only the Glock did not strike Rainwater’s fancy. Then again, he was a cop who was looking at the upshot of eight months’ work that might have cost him a marriage. The cop in him made a mental note that the walls on this floor, like those of the first, had been peppered by bullets. Oliveras’s guards hadn’t gone without a fight, then, but there was no evidence that they had scored a single hit on whatever had killed them.

The sirens were really screaming now, and Rainwater proceeded on down the second-floor hallway. He took a long step across one body lying crosswise in the hall and leapt over a second that had been turned into little more than butcher meat. A third corpse’s eyes were cocked right on him as he skirted it and headed toward Oliveras’s bedroom.

The drug lord’s door resembled the front one downstairs except that there was even less remaining. Part of it still stood attached by the hinges, but the result was almost comic. The inside of Oliveras’s bedchamber was anything but.

Joe Rainwater tried to tell himself it was for the best, that justice had been served perversely, though appropriately. But there was nothing even remotely pleasing about the coppery, musty smell or the sight of red splashed across the floor and walls. Only a single reading lamp was on, and the lack of light spared Rainwater the full brunt of the sight. In three tours in ’Nam and fifteen years on the force, Injun Joe had never seen anything like this.

The remains of Ruben Oliveras were …
everywhere
!

He could hear the police cars rolling onto the property now, more sirens already blazing in their wake, as he backed out of Oliveras’s bedroom. Outside in the hallway Injun Joe leaned over and inspected the guns of the nearest corpses. The clips of two automatic weapons had been nearly drained. A pump-action shotgun had been emptied of all six shells. Again, though, there was no evidence to suggest that they had hit a damn thing. A dozen heavily armed men, professional men, plus Oliveras, cut down in two minutes tops without taking one of the attackers with them.

Joe Rainwater gazed one more time at the impossible and then headed for the stairs to greet the arriving officers.

Chapter 4

“
MAY I HELP
you, sir?”

“Yes, I think you can,” Blaine McCracken said to the proprietor of Collectibles, who was standing near a display of smoked glass.

Collectibles was located in Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco’s answer to Boston’s Faneuil Hall or New York City’s South Street Seaport. Ghirardelli took its name from the chocolate factory that had once occupied the red-brick structure now housing dozens of stores ranging from trendy knickknack shops to upscale boutiques. There were actually six separate buildings with as few as two and as many as five levels. The buildings enclosed an outdoor courtyard, lined with benches and small tables that provided the square with a parklike atmosphere.

McCracken had strolled purposefully about this courtyard for nearly a half hour before making his way to the first of the Clock Tower Building’s two floors where Collectibles was located. He wanted to make sure he had not picked up any unwelcome escorts on his way to the antiques store that the business card in the envelope had directed him to. It was warm for April, with only a slight breeze. So the lunchtime rush had seen the courtyard grow more crowded by the minute and McCracken became more edgy. He took no comfort in a crowd that would allow a potential enemy to easily become lost.

Cursing his own timing, Blaine had moved on to Collectibles and let the jingling door bells announce his arrival to the proprietor.

“I believe you have something for me,” McCracken continued, handing over his jagged piece of parchment.

The proprietor took it and stepped behind the counter, eyes reluctant to leave McCracken. He was a tall, lean man, floral shirt worn over baggy pants dominated by pleats. His skin and eyes were dark. He might have been Arab, but not necessarily. Blaine tensed as the proprietor’s hand dropped beneath the counter and then came up fast. He relaxed when he saw it was holding a second piece of torn parchment. The man fit the two fragments together. The jagged edges filled in against each other. The match was perfect. The proprietor gazed again at McCracken.

“I have what you have come for in the back. If you’ll give me just a minute …”

Without waiting for a reply, the proprietor disappeared through a bead curtain behind his counter. No further discussion was either required or expected. The fact that an elaborate signaling procedure had been set in place indicated to McCracken that the proprietor had no idea who would be coming to make the pickup. He was simply a go-between.

The man
reemerged
wordlessly through the curtain, leaving the beads to clack against each other in his wake. Without comment, he handed Blaine a simple manila envelope that had packing tape wrapped around its top so that the metal clasp was obscured. McCracken folded the envelope in two, pocketed it, and turned back for the door. Simple as that. Playing a role, about to find out what Al-Akir had so desperately sought.

“A gift from Allah—that is what Al-Akir called it. A force that will allow us to destroy our enemies at last. A force that makes whoever holds it invincible.”

Blaine found that the Arab Fazil’s words were far less unnerving now that the envelope was in his possession.

He stepped out of the shop and headed back for the courtyard. Around him Ghirardelli Square was even more crowded with lunchtime shoppers and strollers, many wishing to partake of the various eateries and stands. Any one of the dozens of people could have been watching him, and McCracken was sensitive to the feeling of eyes cast his way. He took his time making his exit, emerging finally on Beach Street, the same route by which he had entered.

Beach Street runs parallel to the bay, and is flat as a result. It is the only street adjacent to Ghirardelli, and having its own red-brick storefronts built into the square’s side resulted in an outdoor mall-like strip made up of the same type of shops as those found within. Beach was open to traffic, but cars had to inch their way forward against the frequent clutter of shoppers spilling out into the street before them.

The beautiful spring afternoon did nothing to make McCracken relax. Around him San Francisco breathed like no other American city. Young men buzzed the streets on Rollerblades. Couples of both the mixed and single-sex varieties strolled arm-in-arm without hesitation or reservation. McCracken fell in behind a youngish pair of men sporting identical ponytails.

“I told him no way I’d pay that kind of rent,” McCracken heard a high-pitched voice saying, directly to his rear. “I mean, can you believe it? I mean, have you ever?”

McCracken kept walking. Before him, a pair of balding men in dark suits slid in behind the young ponytailed couple. Something about the motion disturbed Blaine. He started to slow, considered veering off, and moved his hand ever so slightly for the SIG-Sauer 9mm pistol holstered on his hip.

“Keep walking, sweetie,” the already-familiar high-pitched voice ordered from a yard back. “And please, please, don’t reach for the gun.”

Blaine let his hand dangle back by his side.

“That’s better, sweetie. Keep walking now.”

McCracken’s eyes cheated about him. He’d been boxed in; that much was clear. What remained to be determined was exactly how many were enclosing him. There were four at least, two in front of him and two behind, and four could be handled.

“My,” the high voice started, “you’re a big one, aren’t you? Know what I’d like you to do now? Just whip out that oh-so-big weapon of yours and hold it by the barrel. Play any games and I’ll have to shoot you, and wouldn’t that be a waste?”

McCracken’s hand slid up the nylon of his holster. He could take out the pair of balding men before him without bothering to draw the SIG, but that would still leave the two behind him, including the speaker. Obnoxiously high voice or not, the leader had played this game before and knew what he was doing. At the very least Blaine needed the gun free before he acted. He slid it from the holster, holding it along the top halfway down the barrel. Then he started to ease it out from beneath his jacket. A simple matter now to have it palmed and ready to fire.

McCracken heard the grinding of wheels an instant before one of the young men on Rollerblades sped close. Before he could respond, the SIG was torn from his hand and the young man was gone.

A high, piercing laugh invaded his ears. “Weren’t expecting that, were you, sweetie?”

“Can’t say that I was.”

“He speaks! Oh my, I’m in heaven. I always did want to meet you, Blaine McCracken. We were expecting someone else entirely. An Arab, and I do detest them so.” The laugh again, slightly embarrassed. “I have your picture.”

“Don’t tell me, you want my autograph.”

“No, sweetie, what I want is for you to keep walking to that van parked up there on our right with its rear doors open.”

McCracken had picked out the van in question several seconds before. Chancing a move now unarmed, with no clear picture on the enemy’s strength, was suicide. He had no choice other than to cooperate until he could make a more defined assessment.

Rollerbladers … What was next?

“I like your beard, so scruffy and ruffled-looking. Makes you look strong. Tell me, do you lift weights?”

McCracken twisted his head backward in order to glimpse the high-voiced speaker. The man was short and frail looking with close-cropped hair over a balding dome and baby-perfect skin. His teeth looked like something ordered out of a catalog.

“Do I please you? Think hard now. Your fate rests in my hands.”

“My fate … Could be worse, I guess.”

The little man’s expression stiffened. “The van’s just up ahead, sweetie. No tricks or you’ll have to be hurt.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes. I would.”

McCracken returned all of his attention to the van, now only twenty feet away. Heavyset men in workmen’s overalls stood on either side of the open rear doors. The Rollerbladers were coasting about the front. The little man had been waiting for Al-Akir, obviously to keep him from retaining the manila envelope and to ensure that he would never pursue it again. So somebody else knew about the prize the Arabs were seeking, somebody whom the little man was working for.

“Slide to your left now, sweetie.”

Blaine knew that once he was inside the van, it was over. If he was going to make a move, it had to be outside. It had to be now.

“Looks like you’ve finally met your match, sweetie. This is one for the record books. I can’t
wait
to tell my friends.”

Almost to the van now, Blaine knew he would have to try something desperate and hope for the best.

“Be a good boy, sweetie.”

McCracken had tensed his fingers for action when he saw the group of seven Chinese teenagers swaggering down the sidewalk in the van’s direction twirling nunchaku and clubs about in their hands. He figured they were the little man’s final bit of insurance, until he sensed behind him that the dandy had tensed slightly. The boys were wearing matching black vinyl jackets with red Chinese writing stitched across both sides of the chest. The lead ones slid close, and Blaine saw the fire-breathing dragons embroidered on their jackets’ rears.