The First Law (53 page)

He hadn’t slept at all last night. The business with pushing Thieu off the roof, so suddenly conceived and hurriedly executed, might have been a mistake. Not so much that he would ever be suspected of the actual murder; that had been clean enough. But the real problem was that now and forever, any thought of getting out from under Panos was completely impossible. Because naturally Wade knew about Thieu. Wade always knew. He’d called as soon as he’d heard, said he’d figured it out and appreciated the consideration, would not forget who his friends were. The death of the woman in jail had locked him in with Wade, too, of course, but that hadn’t been Gerson, personally. It had been someone in the sheriff’s department and all Gerson had to do was ignore it.

But Thieu was different. Not that Gerson had ever liked the self-righteous, brilliant little shit, but when he saw the nooses tightening around Nick’s and Julio’s necks, he should have tried some other tack first—offered Thieu money, maybe a raise or a job at the Diamond Center. Big money for mostly doing nothing. Gradually get Thieu involved in the racket.

At least Gerson might have talked to Wade and gotten a sense of things. But instead, he’d panicked.

And now here he was at Pier 70.

“Lieutenant!”

Gerson turned around. He’d only come up the pier about seventy feet and somehow Glitsky was already here, had already gotten in behind him.

“Lieutenant,” Gerson echoed. He stepped toward him.

“I thought I asked you not to come out here. That I was bringing Holiday in.”

The smile faded. “I don’t see him, though, do I?”

“And you might not now, if he sees you first.”

“He’s going to see me anyway, downtown.”

Half turning to look around behind him, Glitsky intended the movement as cover while he reached in to get at the weapon in his shoulder holster. He was going to place this son of a bitch under arrest and let the chips fall.

But a movement out in the no-man’s-land completely got his attention first. Two men were double-timing toward the foot of the pier while a third was already down on one knee, arm extended. A glint of metal. Someone was aiming a gun at him.

Glitsky jerked his gun from the holster and dove hard to his left just before he heard the noise of the two shots. Formal firearms training stresses the advisability of two-shot volleys, and Glitsky was still rolling as another two shots, much closer—Gerson!—exploded behind him. Still exposed on all sides, he lay flat on his stomach, his gun extended in a two-handed grip.

Gerson, still perhaps thirty feet away—the outer limit of accuracy for a pistol shot—had turned sideways and was now advancing, presenting very litde target, but Glitsky took aim at his torso and squeezed off two quick rounds, then rolled again as the return fire pinged around him. He found himself wedged into a corner where a building jutted a foot farther out than its neighbor. This sheltered him slightly from Gerson, but left him wide open from the foot of the pier, where he now clearly saw Sephia, Rez and Roy Panos drawing down on him. They’d come onto the pier itself.

He couldn’t forget Gerson, approaching now under the same cover Glitsky was using from his right, but he had to get off a shot at the trio on his left or he was surely dead. He got on his feet just as other shots—a volley really—exploded and a bullet smacked the stucco six inches from his head.

Reaching around the corner of the building, he took another wild shot at Gerson then whirled in time to see that part of the volley he’d heard must have come from John Holiday in the barn. The thugs had been coming at Glitsky three abreast, almost casually now that they had him cornered, but now suddenly Roy Panos was down on the ground, rolling back and forth, screaming that he’d been hit. Sephia and Rez had scattered, pressed up against the covering building facades, at the unexpected fire.

They’d just got their vests on when they heard the first shots from back on the street and now McGuire’s pickup flew in a spray of gravel across the no-man’s-land and skidded to a stop at the mouth of Pier 70.

Hardy was out before they’d stopped moving, the situation clear to him at a glance. This was already a heated firefight, the smell of cordite acrid in the breeze. One man was already down, with Glitsky pinned out in the goddamned middle of nowhere. Sephia and Rez were in a couple of adjacent recessed doorways, and somebody else—Hardy didn’t recognize him by sight—was beyond Glitsky, along the wall of a warehouse.

Sephia and Rez looked his way and without hesitation opened fire.

A shot richocheted off the hood of the pickup.

McGuire, exposed on the driver’s side, got down and slid across the seat, coming out with his shotgun beside Hardy, squatting behind the front tire, peering out. On the pier, another shot rang and he saw Sephia and Rez pull back.

“Who’s that?” McGuire asked.

“I don’t know,” Hardy said. “But if he’s shooting at those guys, I’ve got to believe he’s with us.”

“Yeah, but he’s still shooting in our direction. What kind of shit is that?”

“That’s what happens when you’re all in a line.”

And this, clearly, was the problem. From this angle, McGuire couldn’t use his shotgun to fire at anyone this side of Glitsky, since the buckshot pattern risked hitting Glitsky beyond. By the same token, any shot of Glitsky’s—or Holiday’s, for that matter (though Hardy and Moses didn’t know it was him)—was essentially in their direction. Somehow they needed an angle, and there was no way to get to one that wasn’t immediately life-threatening.

Another couple of shots slammed into the pickup, rocking it on its wheels.

“Forty-fives,” Hardy said.

“We’ve got to rush ’em,” McGuire said. “It’s the only way.”

At that moment, John Holiday, perhaps coming to a similar conclusion about needing an angle, broke running from the shelter of his barn. Ten or twelve feet out into the road, he stopped abruptly, whirled, and with an almost agonizing slowness, took careful, two-handed aim at Gerson, who snapped off a shot of his own, then hit the ground himself in a continuous roll back away from Glitsky’s position.

Holiday squeezed off a first shot.

“Now! Now! Now!” McGuire yelled.

More shots from the pier, but there was no time to analyze or even look at what was happening farther down there. Now it was all movement with a focus on Sephia and Rez, as McGuire, using Holiday’s break as a distraction, cleared the back end of the truck. “Comin’ in, Abe!” Hardy yelled and sprinted out of the truck’s protection, two steps behind McGuire, both of them running full out, low to the ground.

“Go right right right!” McGuire screamed as he brought the shotgun up.

Moving out onto the pier itself now, still running, Hardy got a glimpse of Sephia hunkered down against a kind of covered doorway on the left. Moses was going to take him.

Rez was his target. He stood six feet closer toward the mouth of the pier, to Hardy’s right. He raised his gun with his left hand, tried to draw a quick bead, and fired, but he hadn’t reckoned on the broken bone in his hand, the immense kick of his weapon. His grip didn’t have the strength it needed. The recoil knocked the gun from his grasp, sent it clattering onto the asphalt.

A deafening explosion to his left as first Sephia opened fire with everything he had, emptying his gun, while McGuire straightened up and fired first one load, then almost immediately the second. Out of the corner of his eye, Hardy saw Sephia thrown backward, glass breaking down over him as he fell slumped to the ground.

But Rez had an automatic in each hand now, both of his arms pointing straight out in front of him. He seemed to be laughing, taking aim at Hardy from no more than fifteen feet. Starting a desperate dive for his gun, Hardy was in the air when something hit him in the chest and he went down at first sideways, then over flat on his back.

John Holiday was down. He lay in a hump out in the fairway of the pier.

McGuire and Hardy were charging up from the truck.

It was Glitsky’s only chance to move and he took it, pushing off from the building, turning to get a gauge of where Gerson had gotten to. Glitsky’s own position, caught between Gerson and the Panos crowd, had been completely untenable, but Holiday’s intervention and then the truck’s arrival had given him a few seconds.

Off to his right, by the mouth of the pier, Glitsky heard the blast of a shotgun, then another, intermingled with several explosions of pistol shot in rapid succession—someone was firing an automatic with both hands. A quick glance caught Hardy going down.

Zigzagging, Glitsky broke for the cover of the barn.

McGuire, the lone man standing now out on the pier, had fired his two loads at Nick Sephia. If the man wasn’t dead, McGuire figured his dancing career was over at least. McGuire had ejected his shells, had two more in his knuckles ready to insert. But it all took time. Not a lot of time, but enough for Rez, who jumped out of his doorway now and ran toward McGuire, one of his gun hands extended with the automatic in it, screaming a long wild note. He closed to three or four feet, pointed the gun at McGuire’s head and pulled the trigger.

But there was no report. The automatic had misfired. Staring at it in fury for the briefest of seconds, Rez swore and threw it down onto the asphalt. Glitsky, less than twenty feet away in the door of the barn, could almost see the moment when Rez realized he still had his other gun in his other hand. McGuire was finished with his reload, though, snapping the barrel back up into place as Rez extended his other arm.

Glitsky, braced against the barn door, aimed carefully and, holding his gun with both hands, fired twice, the first bullet taking Rez under the right arm, passing through both his lungs and his heart, the second missing entirely. But the second shot wasn’t needed. Firing squads had killed people more slowly—Rez was dead before he hit the ground.

But the reverberation from that shot hadn’t died when another two rang simultaneously, one to Glitsky’s left from the front of the pier, and the other behind him. Spinning around, his own gun in his two-handed grip, Glitsky saw Gerson not ten feet behind him slide slowly down the front of the stucco of the warehouse next door, leaving a trail of blood on the faded wall. He turned back to see that Hardy was now slowly getting up, his gun in his hand, and Moses crossing over to him.

Glitsky suddenly wasn’t sure that he could move at all. In the sudden and deafening silence, he let his hands go to his sides and leaned heavily against the barn door. But there was Holiday, whose early volley had certainly saved Glitsky’s life, lying without any movement on the asphalt. If he was alive, if any of them were alive, they would need to call an ambulance. And seconds could matter. Glitsky had to check.

Hardy and McGuire had something of the same thought, and the three men converged on their fallen ally. Holiday wasn’t moving at all. They had gathered in a knot around him, Glitsky going down on one knee, a hand to where the pulse should be on Holiday’s neck, when suddenly the silence was again defiled.

A woman’s voice, harshly commanding, “Put it down! Guys, look out!” They all turned, scattering with their weapons pointed, but then immediately came one last and again nearly simultaneous round of gunfire.

Gina Roake walked slowly, ignoring them, warily approaching the body of the man who’d turned and squeezed off a shot at her when she’d called out.

Glitsky, Hardy and McGuire had all seen it, Roy Panos lying flat on his stomach, his gun extended where he’d been aiming, directly at Gina. Before she’d called out, he was obviously intending to take out at least one and maybe all of the men before they could finish him.

Gina stopped at his body and kicked at it as she might have some dead vermin, her pistol pointed the whole time at his head. Then she looked up at the three other gunmen, her shoulders fell and she walked toward them.

None of the principals could have guessed the length of the battle, although none of them would have believed it lasted less than ten minutes. But from the first shot to the last, the total time of the engagement was one minute, twenty-two seconds.

31

L
en Faro stood outside the lit perimeter of the crime scene for a moment before wading in, thinking that this had been about the deadliest two weeks since he’d come on with the force. By the time he arrived at Pier 70, dusk was well advanced and the place was a madhouse of activity with three TV and a couple of local radio crews, six or seven black-and-whites, several unmarked cars, two ambulances, the coroner’s van, and a limousine that he guessed would belong to one of the higher brass.

Which, now that he thought of it, made little sense if this was a gang shooting. And that’s what he would normally have expected in this location. So, wondering now, making his way through the phalanx of vehicles, he showed his badge to the officer at the tape and stepped over it. The scene was lit by the television lights as well as headlights from the cars, but even without the illumination, Faro could see at a glance that there’d been significant carnage.

He passed the first body only a few feet onto the pier itself and paused by the knot of daytime CSI people attending it. “Gangbangers?” he asked Gretchen, tonight’s photographer. After all, four bodies were lying in plain sight—there might be more inside any of these buildings—and Faro had up until now only seen this kind of slaughter in a drive-by or other organized retaliation environment.

But Gretchen looked shell-shocked herself, and in a woman to whom violence was literally a daily event, this was surprising. “Gerson,” she said. And at first he thought she was asking him if the lieutenant had been notified to come to the scene.

“I assume,” he began, then stopped. “What about him?”

She motioned with a toss of her head back down the pier another forty feet or so, where another group of men were standing around another body, propped under a thick streak of brown on a stucco wall. Was that Frank Batiste down there? The deputy chief did not come to homicide scenes unless something was radically unusual. Faro broke into a trot, was with them all in five seconds—Cuneo and Russell from homicide, John Strout the chief medical examiner, two daytime CSI people. Everybody with hands in their pockets against the biting wind. To get to them, Faro had to pass a third corpse on the pier on his way down, and a fourth buried in a hail of broken glass in one of the doorways. Other homicide inspectors, half the lot of them—Barrel Bracco, Sarah Evans, Marcel Lanier—appeared as recognizable suddenly in the glut of faces.