Flesh Eaters (6 page)

Shaw actually laughed.

“Seriously?” he said. “Is that a promise, Councilman? I’ll tell you what. If you find somebody stupid enough to do my job, you send ’em down here and I will personally hand them the keys. But until then, do us both a favor. Next time you get a case of the ass, save your phone calls for somebody else. Got it?”

Shaw hit the END key and threw the phone down on his desk. He stood there looking at it, aware that his staff had gone silent. They were all watching him. He took a few slow breaths, forcing the anger back down where it couldn’t be seen.

“That might have gone better,” Eleanor said.

“Like hell.” Shaw let out a long breath. “I shouldn’t have baited him like that.”

“Yeah, but it made you feel better, didn’t it?”

He laughed. “A little, yeah.”

“You don’t think Harper will really listen to him, do you?”

“About relieving me? No. Or, rather, he will, eventually, but it won’t be for a while. And he definitely wouldn’t do it while we’re still working this situation. Afterwards, yeah, he’ll probably find some way to make all of this my fault.”

“You don’t sound too worried,” she said.

“Fuck them,” he said. “Let ’em bring it if they can.”

He swept the room with an angry gaze.

“You know what? Fuck it. I’m going out for another smoke. Keep an eye on things for me.”

“Okay,” she said. “Oh, uh, what about Dr. Bailey?”

“Fuck Bailey. If he calls again, tell him I’m busy.”

Shaw went out to the front steps of the library, lit up another cigarette, and listened to the sounds of dogs baying in the night. Their cries were lonely, frightened. Most were starving. Perhaps a few had even realized the fate waiting for them. To Shaw, it was the sound of loyalty betrayed.

It was a feeling he understood intimately. Six years back he was commanding the Special Operations Unit, a division comprising all five of the department’s SWAT units, the negotiators, and the bomb squad, while waiting for his appointment to deputy chief to finally come through. He’d been on top of the world. With one son on the job already, another in the Academy, and his appointment to the command staff all but assured, he was creating a legacy. He was going to be a patriarch.

And then Grace got sick with breast cancer.

Shaw’s world slipped off its rails.

He went from the hectic, high-powered world of city politics to the waiting rooms of doctors who were specialists in things he couldn’t even pronounce, and for the first time in his adult life, Shaw found himself completely out of his depth. He took Grace to endless doctor’s appointments. They did everything the doctors said to do. But in the end, the chemo and the drugs failed. They had caught the cancer late, and it moved through her hard and fast, relentless as an approaching winter.

Utterly baffled by fate, Shaw turned in the only direction he could.

He’d been brought up to believe the police department was a family. His fellow officers were his brothers and sisters, the department their mother and father. Even if the rest of the world was going to shit, an officer could always retreat inside the family that cared for him and preserved him and loved him. The fraternal brotherhood of police took care of its own. It was the core belief that had sustained him through thirty years of police service. It was the gospel he had preached to his two sons. It was the solace he sought now.

And yet the brotherhood failed him in his time of need. Faced with the demands of competing for the appointment to deputy chief and taking the time off to be with Grace as she slipped into the final stage of the disease, he’d done the only thing his conscience would allow him to do. He had friends on the command staff, and he tried to get them to go to bat for him, but it didn’t work. Everybody felt sorry for him, sure, but if he wanted the appointment, they told him, he would have to slug it out with younger captains, all of them with graduate degrees and the willingness to snuggle up in the embrace of the Houston political machine. That meant going to parties, playing golf with councilmen on the weekends, being seen. None of which he could do. He watched, from Grace’s hospital bed, as first one, and then another, younger captain moved into the command staff . . . and soon his only friends and supporters were the dinosaurs, all of them nearing the end of their careers, their stroke with city council and the puppeteers in the political machine all but dried up.

When Grace died, Shaw found himself a wreck in more ways than one. The woman who had devoted her life to loving him and raising his sons was gone. She had been his rudder, and now he was floating without direction. In his youth he had seen the department close ranks around officers in times of grief like his, but to his dismay he found that times had changed. The brotherhood was not what it had once been, and in his floundering confusion, he was left feeling bitter, disgruntled, openly antagonistic toward the administration. They soon lost patience with him. Over the next year he was pushed farther and farther from the inner circle, until finally he was placed in the Emergency Operations Command. It was, perhaps, the cruelest blow imaginable, as it placed him under the direct command of the fire department’s chief. It still rankled him, a cop working for a firefighter.

The family, Shaw realized, had kicked him to the curb. They wanted him gone.

Part of Shaw died with Grace. Not just his heart, not just his career, but his sense of worth, his sense of value. All of that was gone, and he was left standing in the wreckage, nursing his pride and too bull headed to admit he was beat.

And now, as he stood on the stairs of the M.D. Anderson Library, listening to dogs bay in the night, he looked at his hands and realized his cigarette had smoldered down to the filter. He dropped the butt to the concrete and rubbed it out with the toe of his boot. Then he took another from his pack and lit it.

Anthony showed up midway through his second cigarette.

“You got another one of those?” he asked.

Shaw handed him the pack and lit the cigarette for him.

“Thanks,” Anthony said.

He was dressed in a green T-shirt tucked into battle dress uniform pants, a floppy boonie hat pushed high up on his forehead, the way all the younger officers wore it these days. His shirt was snug enough to reveal his well-muscled, wiry frame. He carried himself with the easy confidence of a veteran SWAT officer, full of the knowledge that on the male hierarchy, he owned the top rung of the ladder.

Back in his youth, Mark Shaw had been a founding member of Houston’s SWAT Unit. He recognized the swagger, the confidence, in his son’s body language, and it made him smile.

But the smile didn’t last long.

He couldn’t think of Anthony without thinking of his other son, Brent. Anthony had gotten his mother’s small stature—he was only five-nine—and her striking good looks. Brent on the other hand, was the spitting image of Shaw, a big bear of a man, several inches over six feet, with a barrel chest and a round face and a deep, clear voice.

But that was where the similarities ceased. Anthony had gotten his father’s drive, his mental toughness, his ability to make decisions under pressure. But not Brent. Brent, the older of the two, was a gentle giant. He rarely asserted himself, and lately had taken to drinking far too much. Shaw hadn’t confronted him about the drinking, not yet anyway, but he had seen the signs of incipient alcoholism—the absences, the mood swings, the weak excuses for bad performance. Shaw knew it was yet another problem lurking in the wings, something he would have to confront as soon as all this other crap went away.

Shaw pointed east over Anthony’s shoulder.

“Did you know your mother and I built our first house about a mile that way?”

Anthony glanced back at the darkness, but said nothing.

“It wasn’t bad for a policeman’s first house,” he said. “Two bedrooms, a little yard with a garden. Your mom grew strawberries back then. I remember those things, not like you buy in the store.” He sighed. “I saw it last night—the house, I mean. It’s underwater mostly.”

Anthony blew out twin streams of smoke through his nostrils.

“Nearly everything’s underwater, Dad. This city’s gone.”

Shaw took a drag of his smoke and nodded. For Mark Shaw, those flooded ruins out there weren’t just houses. They were homes. Lives had been lived there. Houston, for all its corruption and faults, was a place where men could raise their families. They could live quiet lives, not of desperation, but of honor, and integrity, and devotion to the ones they loved. And that was it. Family. Everything grew out of the family. That was the concept that defined a man, that ultimately decided if his life had value.

He wondered if Anthony understood that as well as he should.

“You okay, Dad?” Anthony asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You sure? You look tired.”

“I am tired.”

Shaw took a last drag on his smoke, jammed it out on the handrail, then dropped it in disgust. Sometimes he hated cigarettes, even though he knew he’d be lighting up again in ten minutes.

“You’re not gonna have to worry about what’s going on here in a few days,” Anthony said. “We get that dynamite, and we’re home free. I’ve already scouted out the bank. It’s perfect. The whole building’s underwater, just like Brent said. Once I get that dynamite, Jesse and I can be in and out of that vault in no time. Give me an hour and we’ll all be seven million dollars richer.”

“Yeah,” Shaw said.

He looked east, into the darkened ruins, thinking about the house he and Grace had built all those years ago, Brent just a baby.

But so much had happened since then. His sons had grown up, and Grace had died. And now he was facing a murky future. Without Grace, without his rudder, he’d fallen back on the one pillar that had never failed him—duty. The father was the provider; that was his duty. His job was to carve out a future for his children, by force if necessary, but provide for them he must do. To fail was not an option. Even if it meant breaking his oath to the law.

The day before Hurricane Hector, he had been talking with Brent about Brent’s extra job as a security officer at the Republic of Texas Bank. Brent said that seven million dollars in cash was being stored in the bank’s vault. Shaw had thought little of it until the day after Hurricane Hector, when he happened to read an action report that stated all of Southeast Houston’s banks and jewelry stores and museums were now underwater.

The property loss
, the report’s author had written,
will total in the trillions. Maybe even the hundreds of trillions.

Shaw had nodded in agreement. But the thought of seven million dollars waiting down there in the bowels of that flooded bank, already written off by the insurance companies, had started his mind working.

He had two sons, both of whom had joined the police department because he had led them to it with his talk of honor and brotherhood. It was a good job, he promised. No matter how bad the economy gets, you’ll never get laid off.

But Shaw could read the writing on the wall. Houston would probably never recover from the twin scourge of Hector and Kyle, and if Hurricane Mardel hit them like the folks at the National Hurricane Center were saying, the city would be down and out for good.

All his promises of good jobs forever would turn out to be a lie.

And then, like a sign from heaven, the ATF delivered the Venezuelan freighter
Santa Fe
and its shipment of dynamite into his hands.

The decision made itself.

Shaw lit another cigarette, and it focused him back into the moment.

“Are you and Jesse ready to move on the
Santa Fe
?”

“Well, we can be. Not at this second, but we can be. We’ve still got a lot of planning to do.”

“You have twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty-four hours? Dad, holy shit. That’s too soon.”

“You have twenty-four hours, Anthony, or the operation’s a no-go. Got it? We wait any longer and the feds are gonna call in an FBI SWAT Team. We’ve got a narrow window of opportunity here. I want you and Anthony to get your gear together and move out tomorrow morning with first light. Can you make it happen?”

“Yeah,” Anthony said, grinding his smoke out on the pavement. “Yeah, we can do it. But—”

“That’s all I wanted to hear,” he said. “Get it done, Anthony. Just get it done.”

CHAPTER 3

The next morning, Brent Shaw sat behind the wheel of a small ski boat, watching the flooded houses in the distance, trying his best not to think about the dead bodies he kept running over. His dad and his younger brother had promised him this little excursion was going to be quick and easy. So far, it had been anything but.

“Okay, hold it up here,” Anthony said.

“Why are we doing this?” Brent said. “Dad said for us to get this done fast.”

“Just hold up. We’ll get there.” Anthony pumped his palm in Brent’s face like an angry traffic cop. “Right here! Stop!”

The boat slowed and Anthony leaned over the gunwale.

“Oh, okay,” he said. “No big deal. It’s just a dummy.”

“A what?”

“You know, like at the mall. A mannequin.” Anthony reached into the water and scooped up a white arm with a limp plastic bag hanging from the wrist.

Anthony pointed it at Brent.

“See?”

Brent stared at his brother, not the arm.

“That’s great, Anthony. Can we go now?”

Brent didn’t do well around dead bodies. That was no secret. Though he’d been a cop for close to ten years now, the smell of decomposition could still make him vomit unexpectedly. And since riding out from their temporary HQ at the University of Houston’s campus they’d seen hundreds of blackened corpses floating in the water. Brent was in hell.

But of course Anthony was loving it.

They’d run over several floaters already, and every time something thudded against the hull, Anthony would be ready with his one-liners. “Nice! Ten points.” Or Anthony’s personal favorite: “Hey, go back. I think you missed one.”

Brent, meanwhile, would simply close his eyes and groan.