The Killing Place, page 20
Stuart took a sniff. Not a cigarette, a joint.
He rolled his eyes. A bunch of idiot kids getting in the way was the last thing he needed right now.
Making no attempt to hide, he holstered his gun and climbed through the window.
“What the hell?” the girl said.
“Huh?” the pot smoker said.
“Hey, you get lost on the way to the golf club or something?” the guy next to the girl said, and laughed. He sounded stoned too.
Stuart stood up, brushing dust off his suit. The lights from two cell phones shone on him.
“He looks like a narc,” the girl whispered.
Stuart flashed his badge. “I am a narc. Do you live in that trailer park?”
The teenagers froze. The pot smoker hid his joint behind his back.
“Yo.” Stuart snapped his fingers a couple of times. “Earth to losers. Do you live in that trailer park?”
“No,” the guy said, with a derisive tone that showed he was slumming from some middle class neighborhood.
“Are there any more of you?”
“No.”
“Have you seen anyone else sneaking around here?”
“No.”
The girl chimed in. “Well, there was that wino an hour ago, the guy that puked in the doorway.”
The post smoker giggled. “That was funny!”
“Shut up,” Stuart said. “Anyone else?”
“No.”
He jerked a thumb toward the window he had just entered. “Get lost before I call your parents.”
They hurried out. As the pot smoker passed, still trying to hide his joint, Stuart plucked it out of his hand and stubbed it out on the wall.
“Asshole,” the kid muttered.
Stuart gave him a good-hearted kick to the rear to send him on his way. Not too hard. He’d been a loser kid once too, after all. It hadn’t been all football games and Boy Scouts.
Once the kids had slouched out of sight down the street, Stuart checked the building, moving from room to darkened room with his pistol out and searching with only what little light came through the shattered windows. He had cleared so many buildings like this he could do it in his sleep.
He found no evidence that anyone else had come there that night, although he found plenty of evidence that it was a local party spot—tags and dirty pictures scrawled on the walls, crushed beer cans, and little plastic packets that had once contained meth or heroin or other drugs.
The second story was just as bad as the first. From a window he could get a good view of the entire trailer park. He stood well away from the window, hidden in the shadows, and surveyed the area.
The trailer park had three orderly rows of trailers in it, totaling about two dozen homes in all.
He could guess which one was Elmer Barro’s easily enough. A double-wide trailer had a huge American flag flying over it, as well as a Confederate battle flag, a skull and crossbones pirate flag, and a Gadsden flag with its coiled snake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” On the ground in front was a patch of what looked like AstroTurf—no grass could be that green in the desert, could it?—and a pair of pink flamingos.
Lights shone around the edges of dark curtains. Elmer Barro was home.
Stuart moved into the interior of the building and checked his cell phone, cupping his hand over the screen to reduce the light. Standing in an inside room with no windows, he didn’t think any light would be visible from outside, but extra caution was always valid caution.
No signal.
Stuart shook his head. Seriously? Sure, they were next to the Interstate on a bad side of town, but there should be a signal. Maybe it was because he was inside a concrete building, but still.
Then he remembered Stacy complaining about the bad cell phone coverage the main service providers delivered in Arizona. He’d come across patchy areas before, and sometimes the phone service would cut out for a few minutes for no reason, even in the middle of town.
Stuart went back to his vantage point and waited.
The trailer park was pretty quiet. It didn’t look like many of the residents spent much time outside on lawn chairs enjoying the evening like he’d seen in other places. The noise and dust from the Interstate made that uninviting. Lights shone inside several of the units. An older man with a baseball cap and a gray ponytail came out of one trailer and got into a battered old Honda. He pulled out of the park, its engine in bad need of a tune-up.
While he had a perfect view of the trailer park, Stuart didn’t like his reconnaissance position. He could see the trailer park, the warehouse just to the left past the chain link fence, and nothing else. He couldn’t see the road leading to the trailer park gate or the road from which he accessed this building.
Plus he was at pretty far range for a pistol shot. He could brace against the windowsill and take his time aiming, but with so many civilians in the area, he didn’t want to risk a shot.
So he decided if he saw any suspicious activity, he’d call Alexa and run down, hoping he’d have enough time to intercept the killers before they got Barro out of his trailer.
Assuming the phone service returned by then. If it didn’t, he’d have to take them on himself.
Not a very good tactical situation, but being alone, it was the best he could come up with.
At least he’d have the element of surprise. They’d be focused on the trailer park, not some FBI agent hiding in the shadows.
And the killers might not even show up at all. Or they might show up at Alexa’s position.
He moved back to the interior room. Still no signal.
Damn.
He did a quick check of the trailer park again, then went to windows on all three sides of the building to survey the area. Although he tried to move silently, avoiding all the beer cans and other trash, he couldn’t help but crunch a bit of broken glass underfoot or make worn-out sections of the floor creak. Soft sounds only, but he’d prefer not to make any sounds at all.
And he didn’t like all this moving around. He could miss something. Ideally, he’d have a sentry positioned on each side of the building, and a runner to relay whispered messages between them. Plus another five on the ground floor. And a squad down the street watching the trailer park gate.
Hell, why not ask for air support too?
At least everything looked clear. No old Ford Fiesta, no people skulking in the dark. And those kids hadn’t come back. Good. He didn’t need them caught in the crossfire.
He returned to his vigil overlooking the trailer park. A man with an impressive beer gut came out of one trailer to smoke a cigarette. A dog barked somewhere. Stuart studied the shadows in that direction, seeing nothing. After a minute, the dog stopped barking and the man finished his cigarette and went back inside.
Stuart turned away from the scene to check the other sides of the building again, and then froze.
He had heard the brief, soft sound of movement. After a moment, he heard it again.
The sound of someone climbing in through the window.
He waited. The sound didn’t repeat, but he felt sure he had heard it. The same sound two times.
Two people had entered the building he was in. The building that gave a perfect view of the trailer park. The building any smart, careful killer would enter in order to check out the lay of the land.
He heard glass crunch underfoot on the floor below. They were moving around down there.
Stuart checked around him. The room where he had kept watch was a large one, completely bare except for trash like all the others. To his right stood another, smaller room, and beyond that a hallway and the staircase downstairs. To his left was another large room with windows overlooking the neighborhood. Behind him was the dead-end interior room, probably once a storage closet or photocopier room, where he had tried to make his calls.
Stuart crept to it, avoiding a creaky area of the floor he’d stepped on before and the clumps of broken glass that lay scattered everywhere in this place.
He made it to the room’s darkened interior without making a sound. Then he positioned himself in the doorway, tucked in the shadows with only the muzzle of his gun pointing out.
More footsteps, closer this time. Stuart withdrew further into the shadows.
“Here,” a man’s voice whispered.
Two dark figures appeared in the room, one male and one female. While they appeared as little more than silhouettes, they had the general size and shape of the pair described by Beachy’s neighbor and Dr. Whitaker. They sure weren’t a pair of dope-smoking teenagers. Their bodies too mature, their movements too purposeful.
They went up to the window.
“That must be his trailer,” the woman whispered, pointing. “The one with the flags.”
“In a minute there will be one less racist in the world,” the man replied.
They turned to each other and kissed. The man put his head on the woman’s shoulder, having to hunch down to do so. The woman stroked his back.
“I know it’s hard,” she cooed. “But this makes it better, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, it makes it better,” he said, his voice coming out high and weak, almost like a baby’s. Stuart cocked his head. He still kept his gun trained on them, but he paused. This was the rarest of occasions, to see a serial killer before they had been caught, when they didn’t know they were being watched.
Now it was the woman’s voice that broke. “If we get enough, it will all be better. The pain will go away.”
The man gripped her hard. “Yes, it will all go away.”
The woman’s voice grew strong again. “And even if it doesn’t, we can at least know we did our best, that we got justice for some people.”
“Yeah,” the man said, as if trying to convince himself. “Yeah.”
Stuart stared. It was like they were psyching themselves up, like they didn’t really want to do it, but the way they had dispatched the victims showed that once they started, they showed no hesitation at all.
He’d read about this with some serial killers. They’d kill, fall into a pit of self-loathing and despair, and build back up again into a homicidal fury.
He’d never heard of a serial killer couple snuggling before a hit, though.
“Let’s do this,” the woman said.
After a moment’s hesitation, the man replied, “All right.”
“He’s a Nazi.”
“A gun runner.”
“Think how many people must have died because of him.”
“That makes him a murderer.”
“We’re only doing what’s right.”
“We’re only doing what’s right.”
“Bringing justice to people who didn’t get it from the police.”
“Bringing justice to people who didn’t get it from the police.”
“Let’s get him.”
“Yeah!”
They gave each other a high five.
Time to stop this. Stuart stepped out of the darkness, gun leveled.
“Freeze! FBI. Put your hands above your head!”
The couple sprang away from each other and ran in opposite directions.
Cursing, Stuart went after the man. If this had been Iraq, he’d have shot his legs out from under him, but there were rules here and the guy hadn’t even drawn a weapon. Stuart realized he should have brought along a taser.
The male suspect bolted through the doorway to the next room, rounding the corner. Stuart pursued. He knew the woman was disappearing into the small room in the other direction, perhaps to make it to the staircase and flee downstairs. The first priority was to grab the guy. He’d been the one actually committing the murders.
The male suspect disappeared around the corner. Stuart hugged the opposite side of the wide doorway as he passed through.
And that caution saved his life, because the man had spun around and stood right beyond the doorway, ready to slash at him with a huge Bowie knife.
Stuart pulled away, bending his body so the knife missed his side by less than an inch, cutting through his suit as if it were air.
He raised his gun to fire, and felt an iron grip clamp around his wrist. At the last moment his hand was wrenched to the side. The gun flashed, illuminating a twisted face for a split second, and the bullet smacked harmlessly into the far wall.
Stuart tried to pull away, but knew with sickening certainty that he wouldn’t pull out of the killer’s grip in time to avoid the next attack with that knife.
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
Back in Iraq, there was a guy in Stuart’s unit named Luke. Everyone called him Lucky Luke because when chance was involved, he always seemed to come out on top. If there was a football pool, he’d win it. If something had to be decided by a coin toss, he’d call it. Lucky Luke seemed to live a charmed life.
His reputation got cemented one day out on patrol in Karbala when a member of Al-Qaeda in Iraq went gunning for him. He was in Stuart’s squad and Stuart saw the whole thing.
They were moving down a street, hugging the wall of a compound, eyes and ears alert because the neighborhood had gone eerily quiet. The locals seemed to know something was up and had vanished. That usually signaled something big about to kick off.
Lucky Luke was on point, checking every corner and every window like the pro soldier that he was. Then the squad came to a more exposed area, a spot where there was an open lot to their right and an intersection ahead and to their left. They had to cross about twenty yards of open ground to make it to another concrete wall of a compound that would provide some cover.
It was Luke’s job to sprint over there and secure that spot while the rest of the squad covered him.
No one saw the terrorist with the rocket-propelled grenade hiding in the shadows beyond an open upstairs window until it was too late.
The RPG flashed, Stuart and a couple of other guys poured fire into the window, and then glanced over at Luke.
He stood, frozen in the middle of the empty lot, the steaming rocket buried in the ground not three feet in front of him.
If it hadn’t been a dud, Luke would have been splattered all over that empty lot.
After that, anyone who had an incredible stroke of luck, something ridiculously fortunate, got called “Lucky Luke” until the next guy got saved by good fortune and he earned the nickname.
If the guys could see him struggling with a murderer in an abandoned warehouse in Tucson, they would definitely call him Lucky Luke.
The Bowie knife jabbed forward, Stuart twisted his body away, knowing it wouldn’t be enough, and felt jarring impact and a pinprick of pain.
Only a pinprick, because the knife had caught on the handcuffs hanging from his belt, cutting through the leather holder, then getting caught by the steel so that only the tip poked through. He’d just become Lucky Luke.
Stuart’s gun hand was still held tight by the killer’s free hand, so Stuart slugged him with his left, making his head whip to the side, then bringing his fist down hard on the man’s wrist.
The Bowie knife clattered to the floor.
The killer, his face barely visible in the dim streetlight filtering through the windows, roared with anger and headbutted Stuart.
It wasn’t a direct hit, forehead to nose in a crippling move that broke cartilage and temporarily blinded a man for a few precious seconds. That would have been the end of it. Instead it was forehead to forehead, leaving both men stunned.
Stuart recovered first, stomping on the guy’s foot and twisting his own wrist to fire at him again. The man flinched, let out a gasp, and let go of his gun hand.
Stuart took a step back and aimed his gun at the man’s head. For a moment the guy just stood there, stunned.
“Put your hands above your head or I’ll—”
A body flew out of the darkness, slamming into him.
The woman. She’d come back.
While she didn’t weigh much, the blow came with such force, and from such an unexpected angle, that Stuart stumbled and fell, landing on his elbow. His gun went off a third time as it flew from his grasp.
The woman swarmed over him, punching and clawing. Stuart cursed and knocked her aside. No room for chivalry with this pair. He looked around.
The first thing he saw was that his gun lay just out of reach.
The second thig he saw was that the male suspect, apparently only grazed, had retrieved his knife and was bearing down on him.
One part of the Lucky Luke story Stuart didn’t like to tell people, was that on his second tour of duty, Luke’s luck ran out. He took a hollow point bullet through the gut that slashed through his internal organs and cracked his spine. Now he was stateside living off of veteran’s benefits, walking with a cane and wearing a colostomy bag.
*
Alexa slammed on the brakes to her four-by-four, squealing to a halt on a street of locked warehouses a block from the trailer park. While she felt an overwhelming urge to not waste an instant and drive right to the scene, she didn’t want to alert the killers. Stuart had worried that while they preferred to kill with a knife, they might carry guns too. She wouldn’t do her partner much good if she took a bullet before she could even assess the situation.
She leapt out of her vehicle and stumbled. The world spun for a moment and she had to grab her sideview mirror to keep from falling.
Alexa stood still for a moment, getting it together. Fatigue, stress, and unhealed wounds threatened to overwhelm her, but she couldn’t afford to be overwhelmed, not yet.
The crack of a gunshot woke her up.
She rounded her four-by-four, wobbled, righted herself, and tried to locate the direction of the shot. It sounded like it had come from the next block, the direction of the trailer park, but not that far away. Had Stuart stopped them in the street?
Alexa ran around the block, wincing with every step and moving far more slowly than the situation warranted.
She spotted the entrance to the trailer park. All seemed quiet in there and she saw no one on the street. This was not the kind of neighborhood where people investigated a stray gunshot.
