The Quickie - James Patterson [33]
I handed the pictures back to Mike, who was crouched next to me. He was sheathed in Kevlar, a tactical shotgun held port arms across his chest. I was wearing a full vest, too, and it felt incredibly heavy across my back and shoulders.
Or maybe it was just my head-about-to-explode guilt and anxiety dragging on me.
“Couple of real lookers,” I managed to get out.
“Did you notice how light-skinned Victor is? Six foot. He matches Amelia Phelps’s description almost to a T. He did it, Lauren. He’s our guy. He just about killed a cop fifteen years ago, and he finally got his chance with Scott. The son of a bitch was Scott’s shooter. I can feel it.”
I stared at my partner. There was a far-off look in his eyes, a malevolent gaze. “These two are going to wish their mother strangled them at birth,” he whispered.
I raked my hair back with my fingers. I remembered again that Mike’s dad had been killed on The Job. Now we were going after cop killers. I wondered suddenly if this was such a good idea. Actually, I knew it wasn’t.
“We’re here,” Trahan called from the wheel as the van slowed. “Lock and load, ladies.”
There was a heady metallic smell in the van’s enclosed space. Adrenaline probably. Or maybe testosterone. Things were happening way too fast. The click of weapons echoed off the stark, steel walls.
We were parked on East 141st Street somewhere off Willis Avenue. I guessed the Manhattan real-estate bubble had yet to blow in this direction, looking out at the weed-filled lots and crumbling buildings.
Anything to keep my mind off what was happening now.
Across the desolate street, a wind-blown page of El Diario caught against the skeletal bumper of a stripped-to-the-bones Escalade. The only structures that looked semi-sound around here were the housing projects across the gun-metal strip of the Harlem River behind us.
Trahan pointed at an ancient, listing, four-story walk-up midway down the block.
“There she blows,” he said. “That’s the club.”
Club? I thought, confused. What club? What Trahan was pointing at were just two graffiti-covered steel shutters bookending the shadowed doorway of an anonymous-looking storefront. The crumbling tenement windows above it were empty. Not just of people. Of glass and aluminum frames, too.
Trahan caught my dumbfounded look.
“You have to see this place inside,” he said with a rueful shake of his head. “It’s another world.”
Trahan took out his cell phone and made a call. He tssked after a few seconds, snapped it shut.
“Damn confidential informants,” he said. “She’s not picking up.”
“It’s a woman?” I said.
“Of course,” Detective Marut said. “She was sleeping with Mark Ordonez until he left her for another lady. There’s no better informant than a woman scorned.”
“When did you last hear from her?” I asked.
“Right before we picked you up,” Trahan said. He bit the antenna of his radio in frustration.
“I wanted to hit it fast, flash-bang through the front door, get everybody down. Now I’m not so sure. My CI there said that the place was packed. We can’t risk somebody getting hurt, especially us, unless the Ordonez brothers are definitely in there. Then, fuck everything!”
“Hey, wait a second,” I said. “Where’s the Emergency Service Unit? They live for this kind of stuff. Why don’t we let them handle it?”
“Scott was our brother,” Khuong said gravely, his eyes hard and dark as coal. “This stays in the family.”
Good lord. I didn’t like the sound of that. I was getting a scary vibe off everyone, actually. These guys were too keyed up. Letting their emotions get the best of them. This thing felt more like a war party than an arrest procedure. Whatever happened to removing the emotionally involved from the case? Like I of all people should