The Tin Man (35 page)

“I’m just glad you’re in one piece, bro,” Masters said. “I was worried.” He went south on Stockton Boulevard. They could see a knot of headlights and blue flashing lights up ahead and guessed it was the first police roadblock. Jon made a right onto Thirty-seventh Avenue and Patrick steered him through neighborhood streets, hoping the turn hadn’t attracted attention. Before long they were safely headed northbound toward downtown Sacramento. “How did it go, Patrick?” Jon repeated. “Why didn’t you rendezvous with me?”

Patrick started the generator in the back of the Hummer, then retrieved the power cord from the
generator and plugged it in. But the backpack power unit was not charging, and the environmental system was completely shut down. “The suit’s damaged,” he replied. “A knife cut it. I lost the environmental control system and power drained out at three to four times the normal rate. I was lucky to get out of there.” Patrick took a deep breath and leaned back against the headrest. “I think I hurt a little girl too,” he said.

“What?
Oh no, Patrick! Christ—how did it happen?”

“The bomb,” Patrick explained. “The bomb I used to bust open the front door destroyed part of the bathroom where the little girl was.”

“They had a child in there, where they sell and make drugs? How badly was she hurt? Did you call an ambulance?”

“Yes,” Patrick responded. “She was bleeding, a little shocky—but she screamed pure holy terror when she saw me.” Jon was relieved; a child’s death would have been unendurable. “Jon, you should, have seen that house. It was filthy. The child, she was sleeping in a bedroom that they used to make drugs. I could smell the chemicals. She was sleeping on garbage, eating leftovers off the floor, breathing fumes that would’ve knocked out an adult. It was horrible …”

“Patrick, it’s all right,” Masters said. “For all you know, you might have saved her life by doing that raid. You didn’t put a child in harm’s way.
They
did.” He paused, unsure whether to ask Patrick what he wanted to know; then: “What happened with the suit? How was it damaged?”

“It was a knife attack,” Patrick replied. “I was struggling with this guy who looked like a commando, complete with face mask, combat harness, the works. He pulled a knife. I grabbed his arm, but
I couldn’t stop him, he was too strong. The blade touched the suit and just went right on through. Power levels dropped off sharply after that, but the system remained intact. But I also discovered that the cops could wrestle with me and win. Any slow action and the suit couldn’t activate. I barely got out of there without being handcuffed.”

“It must be the nature of the BERP process,” Jon surmised. “We never tested the system with a soft or slowly penetrating force, only a sharp impact. The same characteristic of the suit that allows you to move freely means that a slowly penetrating force won’t activate the electro-reactive collimation.”

“So a bomb blast won’t kill me,” Patrick said, “but a knitting needle pushed in slowly will go through my heart with ease?”

“We should be able to fix that,” Jon said, cringing at the image. “We might be able to have you selectively harden sections of the suit. What about the power levels?”

“Dropped way down after the cut in the suit,” Patrick said again, “especially after being hit repeatedly.”

“Hit?”

“Hit … as in shot,” Patrick said.

Jon’s gulp was audible. “How many times were you shot, Patrick?”

Patrick took a moment to count. “About a dozen times in the space of six minutes. Plus I got hit by a baseball bat a couple of times and bitten by a pit bull—I nearly killed it too.” He said all this so matter-of-factly, Jon noticed, that he could have been a piece of stone relating what had happened.

“So we need to bump up the power reserves a bit, and reprogram the power-monitoring logarithms,” Masters said. “We still haven’t cured those discharges,
inside the suit, have we?” No reply. “Patrick, are you sure you’re okay?”

Patrick’s tone changed a bit as he went on: “You know what I did, Jon? When I planted that charge by the door, I didn’t take cover. I just stood there and let it rip. It was almost as if I was thinking, If this bomb kills me, fine. If I survive, fine, I’ll do this mission. I survived. I don’t know why I did that. Maybe I thought it was like a test or something, a validation, proof that what I was doing was the right thing.” Patrick was quiet for a long moment, but Jon could actually feel the tension, the rage building in the backseat. “Those son of a bitches,” Patrick went on in a low, angry voice. “They kill, they terrorize, they poison others, they abuse their children—I want to kill every last one of them!”

Then he added, “I got some information on where the Major might be hiding. There was a German-speaking commando already inside that house when I arrived. I think he was thereto take out the surviving Satan’s Brotherhood members. Another biker gave me information on a hideout in Wilton. I want to go there. Tonight. Right now.”

“Patrick, you can’t and you know it,” Jon said. “The reason we were successful today is because we did pretty good intelligence work and planning. We don’t have another target planned right now. You have some initial intel on a potential target. Fine. Let’s build on that. But now is not the time to do it. Your suit is damaged, it’s not taking a charge, and there are cops and National Guard troops everywhere. The only reason we haven’t been bothered so far is because there are already so many Hummers on the streets right how that we blend in.”

Patrick thought for a long moment. “You’re right,” he said at last. “And we’ve got to get the cops involved in this too. I realize I’m fighting the
cops even more than I’m fighting the bad guys. That’s no good. Let’s get the suit fixed, and then we’ll plan our next move.”

W
hat in the
hell
is going on?” Arthur Barona thundered as he strode into Tom Chandler’s office at Special Investigations Division headquarters. His suit was rumpled; he had clearly dressed in a hurry. Chandler was on the phone, trying to listen to the information being passed to him and to the bellowing chief of police at the same time. “I just got tossed out of bed by the damned mayor himself,” Barona went on. “He’s been
getting calls about a rogue Narcotics cop
killing civilians and busting up people’s homes and businesses? I want answers, and I want them
now!”
He stormed out of the office to the conference room across the hall.

Chandler put the phone down and went to join Barona. “That was Deputy Chief Ohrman, Chief,” he said. “He’s ordered Homicide to take over the investigation.”

“What in hell is going on?” Barona repeated. “Reports of an officer in body armor and full riot gear blowing up somebody’s home, killing the occupant and nearly killing a youngster? Another cop in riot gear breaking into the Bobby John Club, nearly killing three patrons? Cops not trying to apprehend the suspect as he flees on foot? …”

“That’s inaccurate information, Chief,” Chandler
said. He started from the beginning, detailing the two incidents of the strange invader in body armor who appeared to be rushing around the city in a Hummer going after drug dealers and biker-gang members. “That’s all we know right now,” he ended.

“What about this Hummer?”

“A witness reported the suspect getting into a Hummer on Arden Way shortly after the Bobby John Club incident.”

“Arden? That’s several blocks from Del Paso Boulevard.”

“The guy moves fast,” Chandler said. “He’s got some kind of jet thing in his boots that lets him jump …”

“Or there’s more than one of them,” the chief said. “It’s not any of your men, is it?”

“I’ve started a telephone recall of the entire division and ordered Property to do a full inventory of our property rooms,” Chandler replied. “I don’t think it’s any of my men, but I’m going to do a full accounting just in case. Every man has to account for his whereabouts tonight. But I can tell you, it’s not any of them.”

“What about you?” Barona asked. “Where have you been tonight?”

“At home with my wife, Chief,” Chandler replied irritably. That wasn’t entirely accurate—until about eleven-thirty, he was with a woman friend up near Folsom Lake. But his wife would vouch for him if anyone bothered to check. She was accustomed to putting up with his antics. “Yeah, DC Ohrman thinks I was the guy, as if I’ve got nothing better to do these days than to run around in tights busting heads. That’s bullshit. I was home.”

“All right, Tom, all right,” Barona said. “What else? What about the witnesses?”

“Witnesses and officers on the scene describe an individual, probably male, five eight or five nine, medium build, wearing what appeared to be a dark gray tight-fitting outfit similar to a wetsuit, stiff but flexible; a strange high-tech-looking helmet that altered and amplified the suspect’s voice; and a thin backpack, similar in size and shape to a sport-jumping parachute but thinner,” Chandler answered, checking his notes. He paused, then added, “Our officers at both the Del Paso Heights and Elder Creek scenes report that the outfit worn by the suspect was probably some sort of new lightweight body armor. Several officers reported discharging their weapons at the suspect and hitting him, but the suspect appeared unhurt or only slightly injured.”

The chief asked something, but Chandler’s mind had drifted off momentarily. High-tech, high-tech … it reminded him of a conversation he’d had with someone not too long ago. Who was it? Chandler couldn’t remember …

“Chandler!
What about weapons?”

Chandler shook himself from his reverie. “No weapons reported, Chief, except my surveillance officers said the suspect planted a satchel charge at the door of a known meth house in the Rosalee section of Elder Creek that was under surveillance at the time.”

“So what it looks like is that we have a vigilante or some well-equipped militia type with explosives roaming the streets,” said Barona, “taking out the last of the Satan’s Brotherhood with more explosives—this time delivered in person by a soldier in body armor. Sounds like whoever booby-trapped those drug machines is looking to finish the job by picking off the survivors one by one.”

“Looks that way to me too, Chief,” Chandler said
absently. He was still trying to tease out that memory. Revenge … high-tech … soldier… what in hell was it?

“And the DC is turning this over to Homicide?” Chandler nodded. He couldn’t tell whether Barona was perturbed by this news or not. “Okay, but I still want you working with them. I want to know the results of your division internal investigation too. We might have to do the entire department. We’ve got to make sure this wasn’t a rogue cop.”

“I can guarantee it wasn’t,” Chandler said. “And if it was a cop, he’s a pretty stupid, sloppy one—he’ll get caught soon enough.”

“Better make that happen, Chandler,” Barona said. “Find him and throw his ass in jail. Whoever this guy is, I want him hung out to dry.”

Good for you, Chief, Chandler said to himself as Barona stalked out. You bust my hump even though I’ve been taken off the case—and you’ll proudly take all the credit for busting the guy if you have the chance.

Chandler looked over the notes of his conversations with his surveillance teams. It seemed incredible—too incredible to tell the chief: a guy who seemed invulnerable to bullets. A guy who had an outfit that moved like nylon but could instantly harden into a suit of armor, A guy who could leap fifty feet away and twenty feet up. It was a vigilante or militiaman, all right—but a vigilante unlike anyone ever seen before. Either this was some kind of joke, a ploy by his officers in the field to cover for the work of a vigilante or militia group, or it was a science-fiction movie come true.

And if it was true, this guy could be the ultimate police officer, the ultimate weapon in the hands of law enforcement—or the ultimate nightmare for them.

W
omen. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em—can’t shoot ’em. After all the shit that happened in the past couple of months, Tom Chandler thought, and just when it seemed as if he’d be able to come up for air—hell, now Kay wanted a commitment from him, wanted to stop sneaking around, wanted him to divorce his wife. Shit.

He had come to his girlfriend’s house to get away from the craziness and relax. Some welcome. They had a good thing going here. Why’d Kay want to screw it up by wanting a commitment? Of course, that still didn’t stop them from dropping down and doing it doggie-style right on the living room floor, but Chandler was glad to get the hell out.

It was a long, dark drive from Kay’s place overlooking Folsom Lake to Douglas Boulevard, which would take him back toward the interstate and home. The heavy runoff from the deep snows in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, combined with nearly forty straight days of rain, filled Folsom Lake, a one-million-acre man-made reservoir thirty miles east of Sacramento, almost to capacity. They were releasing water from four of the eight big steel gates on the dam, but the water level in the lake was still rising. It was an annual balancing act for water officials in this area: measure releases from the dam to keep the reservoir full to supply the fast-growing Sacramento Valley with water through the upcoming long, dry summer; release enough water to keep the forty-year-old dam from rupturing; but don’t release so much as to cause flooding down the American
River and inundate the city of Sacramento. State and federal water officials were not always successful keeping all three properly balanced.

Folsom Lake had always been special for Chandler. As a kid, he used to skip school, ride his bike more than twenty miles, and hang out at the lake, trying to stay one step ahead of the truant officers. He lost his virginity at Folsom Lake; he met his first two wives at Folsom Lake. It could look like a raging ocean, as it did now; in four months it could look like a desert wadi with a little stream running down the middle, as it did the year one of the gates on the dam broke and three-quarters of the lake spilled out. It didn’t matter to Tom Chandler—he would always be drawn to it.