When No One Came, page 1
When No One Came
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By L. J. Breedlove
Published by L. J. Breedlove
Copyright 2020 L. J. Breedlove
ISBN: 9798201761745
License Notes
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your e-book site and purchase a copy. Thank you for respecting the work this author.
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. While place descriptions and news events may coincide
with the real world, all characters and the plot are fictional.
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
When No One Came | Mac Davis, Book #4
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
Postscript
Further Reading: Blood and Water
Also By L.J. Breedlove
About the Author
When No One Came
Mac Davis, Book #4
It's Every Cop's Secret Nightmare
Seattle Police Detective Joe Dunbar knew he'd screwed up big time, maybe even fatally. He swallowed hard, followed by a deep breath to steady himself. He'd managed to dodge the gunfire coming from the dark and nearly derelict house on Queen Anne. But he was trapped, now. He had already called for dispatch for backup. Shouldn't they should be here by now?
Something cold settled in his stomach.
They weren't coming, he thought. He had nightmares like this. They weren't coming.
He considered his options, and then he sighed: Hell of a thing, when a cop had to call a reporter for backup because his own had abandoned him.
"Mac," he said softly into his phone. "It's Joe Dunbar. I need help."
Chapter 1
Friday, October 17, 2014, Seattle, Washington
Seattle Police Detective Joe Dunbar knew he’d screwed up big time, maybe even fatally. He swallowed hard, followed by a deep breath to steady himself. He’d managed to dodge the gunfire coming from the dark and nearly derelict house on Queen Anne. But he was trapped now.
Houses on Queen Anne sat up on the hillside, usually with a one-car garage below them. Nice homes. Craftsman bungalows. Cottages with big porches. An occasional Victorian. Dunbar liked the area. It was home to artists and professional couples, most of whom had bought their houses decades ago when it was still affordable to buy homes in this neighborhood.
He hadn’t expected a shooter to be holed up in one of them — hadn’t thought anything about coming here to see someone, even at 10 p.m. at night. But the address he’d been given was in the seedier side of Queen Anne, down near the warehouses and industrial district along Highway 99. More unkept trees hiding the houses. More industrial buildings. More vacant and rundown houses like this one. Hard to believe a derelict house could even exist in Seattle with its sky-high housing prices, but this block had several of them. Joe thought briefly that he should inquire about them later.
He’d been thinking about buying a fixer-upper. On a police salary, that’s all he could afford — if that. Most of Seattle’s cops didn’t live in Seattle. They couldn’t afford to. He had a studio apartment in the U District. He liked it there, but he’d like a house — if he could afford it.
Still thinking about a fixer-upper, he’d parked on the street, and started to climb the steps up to the house. A cold, sick feeling in his gut said something was wrong here. So, he’d stopped, called dispatch and requested backup. Then he resumed climbing the steps, wary now, focused on his environment, not on thoughts of other things. He pulled his HK .40 USP, and let it dangle down along his pant leg. Better to be cautious and embarrassed than proud and dead.
He wasn’t sure what alerted him. The sound of a door opening? The sound of the shooter moving? A sixth sense? He didn’t know, but he dove into the manzanita growing out of control on the hillside next to the steps just as a shot rang out. Missed him. But now he couldn’t figure out how to move out of his hiding spot.
The shooter had the uphill advantage. The dryland garden on the slope was overgrown, but it still offered only minimal coverage. His particular shrub was barely 5 feet tall, and hardly dense enough to protect him from another shot. It was camouflage, not a barrier. But in the dark, maybe that was enough.
He glanced back toward the street. Where was his backup? He’d called for backup — where were they?
Not coming, he thought suddenly, the sick feeling in his stomach growing stronger. He actually thought he might throw up. They weren’t coming. Surely, they would come. Surely, they were just slow. It hadn’t been that long since he’d called in, although it seemed like it had been long enough. But that was how it was when you were under attack. This wasn’t the first time he’d been shot at, after all. Not the first time he’d had to call for backup.
He was 32 years old. He’d been a cop for 10 years. After he went to college for a B.A. in law and justice, he got hired on at SPD. He moved into homicide as a detective, mostly so the bosses could get him off the streets and away from the general public, he often thought. He was a dogged investigator. A skilled interviewer. But Officer Friendly? No. Which was fine. He had no desire to spend his days talking to kids about how cops are your friends. Where he grew up, no one would have believed that anyway.
He’d feared this day would come. He and Nick Rodriguez had talked about it over a beer late at night. But he hadn’t really believed it would happen — that someday, he’d call for backup and they wouldn’t show? A cop’s nightmare, especially for a Black cop. His nightmare.
He watched the house at the top of the hill, gun in his hand, waiting to see a target. Could he shoot at someone he couldn’t really identify? What if it was some innocent moving about up there, not the person who had shot at him? He glanced around the hill and at the street below. He was exposed in all directions. If the shooter had friends, he was dead. If the shooter moved to a slightly better angle, he was dead.
Joe set his jaw and hunkered down. He wasn’t going out easy.
He’d gotten a call this morning from a man who had been on his list of men who had gone north last spring. That was how he thought of it. They’d gone north. An online guru who called himself Sensei, coupled with a few gun dealers and a constitutionalist sheriff, had seduced a bunch of white guys from Seattle into the white militia movement. Hundreds of men, each of them with hundreds of guns. A nightmare.
If you moved up the ranks of Sensei’s following, you could be invited north to a survivalist weekend in the North Cascades, an area as wild and rugged as it got. Men who went on one of those trips came back different. One told his wife he’d been blooded now. Told her that right before he took her and their daughter hostage because he was convinced the state was coming to take his guns.
SWAT took him out before he killed them. But wives and kids hadn’t been so fortunate.
Joe had been one of the investigators who had talked to some of those men — including the one who took his family hostage. He would always wonder if he had been part of what had pushed him over the edge. Rodriguez said no, a Facebook account using the name MLK4whites had been agitating and pushing at the men. But still. It weighed on a man to think he might have caused another man’s break with reality.
So, when someone called and the name he gave was on Joe’s interview list, Joe was willing to listen. The man said there was something going on. A new group was forming. Could he come to his home tonight? He got off shift at 10 p.m.
Joe felt obligated to go. He still felt responsible for the health and well-being of those men, in spite of them being racist fucks who had gotten sucked into a white supremacist militia recruiting scheme. Stupid fuckers, he thought. One of them, after killing his wife and children last spring, had fled the police, leaving his arsenal of a hundred or more weapons behind.
“Stupid enough to flee from his own arsenal,” had entered cop lore. Cop humor was dark and bleak. He grinned. Mac Davis, the cop reporter for the Seattle Examiner, had made the phrase legend. He considered Mac for a moment.
Mac Davis was a former Marine who came back from Afghanistan and went to college. Came out a journalist. Which was a pretty damn bizarre transformation. Cops gossiped about back in the day when Mac ran the streets of Seattle. Got busted for felony theft, and a judge cut him a deal to go into the Marines. He’d been 17. Joe wondered what the judge had seen in him. Probably the same thing Joe saw, that Nick Rodriguez saw — hell, everyone saw it — there was a killer lurking
But damn, Mac was a good man to have at your back. He stood by his friends. Joe suspected the Examiner didn’t send him out to do cute kid stories either.
He looked at the dark house, the empty street, and took another deep breath. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. There were no messages, no missed calls. He’d called Rodriguez, but he hadn’t picked up or returned his call either. Well it was late on a Friday night. Rodriguez was a family man with kids in soccer. He was probably asleep. Soccer started early on Saturdays. He smiled, thinking of the gruff lieutenant coaching 10-year-old girls on a soccer team. For whatever reason, he hadn’t gotten the call, hadn’t called back.
So, Joe was on his own. He never thought he’d get to the point he’d call a reporter for backup. But then, he’d never expected to be hung out to dry by his fellow cops either.
He found Mac Davis’s number, and punched the call button. “Mac,” he said softly, hoping the sound wouldn’t carry and give his position away. “It’s Joe Dunbar. I need help.”
Mac Davis was at the Bohemian. He, Angie Wilson and a bunch of other reporters from the Examiner were here to drink, dance, and maybe get lucky.
Mac already knew he was getting lucky that night. He and Angie had plans — her place, in spite of the roommates. He thought again about the need to get a place of his own. He liked living with his aunt. He had the top floor, she had the downstairs. They shared the common areas. It was easy, comfortable. After all, he’d lived there as a teenager before he went off to Afghanistan in the Marines. Then he’d come back and gone to college. When the Examiner offered him a job, he’d moved back in. And Lindy was an art professor at the University of Washington. She brought in an eclectic group of friends that Mac liked having around, even if they were old enough to be his mother. And crazy. But that didn’t bother him.
He put that dilemma aside. The DJ had just given him permission to take over while he took a break. And hell yeah, he would. It was partially why he was here.
Angie, of course, was a big part of the reason as well. But right now, he was mixing beats and sounds, creating something new, something that encouraged people to get out on the floor and dance. His own table emptied. He watched Angie as she danced with a reporter from features. She was petite but not fragile. She had a sturdiness about her that was partly her muscled body, and partly her personality. Angie could be counted on. He knew that. She’d demonstrated it last spring.
She had a teal streak in her hair, and was wearing a blouse the same color. He liked the fuchsia color better, he thought. For some reason, watching that streak in her hair move with her as she danced turned him on.
He grinned. Well, the DJ would be back soon, and he could dance with her. Watch that streak — and her happy grin — up close.
He felt the phone buzz in his pocket. He almost ignored it, but there’d been too many crises in his life of late. He couldn’t ignore it, even on a Friday night. He pulled out the phone, and looked at the caller ID and frowned: Seattle Police Detective Joe Dunbar? Why would he be calling this late?
Dunbar was brash, dogged and a bit macho. He wasn’t ever sent out to the elementary schools.
Mac could relate. When Mac had a story with kids in it, they were usually in body bags. And Mac didn’t like those stories either. Mac really didn’t care for cops, victims of crime, or criminals, which made being a cop reporter a bit weird.
But then, most of his friends still laughed hysterically at the idea he was a cop reporter. The cops who remembered him from his teen years were equally astounded.
“Always thought I’d see you back here, some day,” one of them said. “But I assumed you would be in cuffs, and we’d be reading you your rights.”
Mac shrugged. He couldn’t argue. He would have said that was the only way they’d ever get him inside a police station again.
But life was weird, and the Seattle Examiner didn’t have an opening in sports when he graduated. But maybe he’d be willing to do cop reporting? Until something opened up?
He’d agreed. Reluctantly. But newspaper jobs were hard to find.
When a sports job opened up finally, he didn’t even apply. He might not like cops, but he understood them. He thought what they did was important. And that holding them accountable was equally important.
Mac thought Dunbar was about his own age — and Mac was staring 30 in the face. October 31. He sighed, as he did every time age came up, and rolled his eyes. He should consider it a marker of success. Truthfully, he hadn’t expected to live this long. It used to be a running gag with his friends: Mac Davis was killed in a shootout with police today. Mac Davis died of gunshot wounds from an engagement with Afghanistan rebels. Mac Davis was killed by an enraged husband who found him in bed with his wife — at age 97, Mac would add. So he was trying to convince himself that living to see 30 was a badge of honor. Of course, he wasn’t there yet — still time to end up dead.
OK, that was a bit dark, he acknowledged. Last May he’d come damned close to ending up dead in the Cascade mountains. Too damned close. Joking about it, even in his own head? Too soon.
But 30? How the hell did he get to be 30? And still living in his aunt’s house? Still unmarried?
But alive. There was that.
He’d gotten to know Dunbar during the story in May. Dunbar was a tall, thin, Black man who looked like he might be a marathon runner or a bicyclist, maybe. According to his Facebook page, he liked craft beers. He actually was a skilled interviewer to Mac’s surprise.
He was also a Black officer in a department that seemed increasingly hostile to officers of color.
Or maybe it was hostile because Joe was brash, dogged and a bit macho. But it was hard to believe that was the problem; the Seattle Police Department had a lot of cops who fit that description.
Mac frowned at the call, then put music by Mary J. Blige on. He liked her music. Liked introducing her music to the white-bread friends he and Angie dragged along tonight. He turned his back to the crowd and answered the call.
“What’s up?” he said.
A moment of silence.
“I can’t believe I have to ask this, but I need backup, and no one came from the PD,” Joe said softly. “Can you come?”
“Where?” he asked, looking around for someone to get the DJ back here.
Dunbar told him. “I’m hiding under a manzanita on one of those damned slopes down from a Craftsman house. Looks a lot like your place. Shooter is in the house. Abandoned. I’m pinned down.”
Mac got the eye of the bartender and gestured with his chin that he needed to leave. The bartender looked surprised; everyone knew Mac liked to DJ when he got the chance. Mac gestured with his phone. The bartender nodded. A bouncer was dispatched to find the DJ.
“OK, Joe,” Mac said. “I’m on my way. I’m not far actually. Hang tight.”
“Thanks, man,” Joe said. “I can’t believe....”
“Yeah,” Mac said. He couldn’t believe it either. He’d heard rumors. Anecdotes from people who had heard a story about some cop, in another department, another city. It was something all cops feared.
Especially if you were a Black or Latino cop. He wondered briefly where Rodriguez was then sent him a text message.
The DJ came back. Mac looked at him regretfully. “Sorry, just got an emergency call from work,” he said. “I’ve got to get out of here ASAP.”
“No problem,” the DJ said easily. Mac suspected he’d just smoked a joint, and he grinned. He wouldn’t mind hanging out back and sharing one with the DJ and bar staff himself. But then he wouldn’t be able to be the substitute DJ.
He hopped down from the sound booth and found Angie. “Gotta go,” he said. “Joe Dunbar is in trouble. Can you get a ride home?”
Angie nodded. She looked a bit worried, and Mac brushed the teal streak of hair back out of her eyes. “Will you be OK?” he asked.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “But what about you? What’s Joe doing?”
