Robert Crais - Free Fall

Cool T shifted in his chair.

Ray leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. “Man, do you think I just fell off the watermelon truck?”

“What I think is that you’ve got a pretty good life doing well by a lot of folks, and you’re about to mess it up.”

Ray looked at Cool T and Cool T grinned. Ray didn’t. He gave me lizard eyes. “That’s what it is to you, that it?”

I spread my hands.

“So you come down here to point that out? Maybe set me straight?”

“Nope. We came to help.”

“Well, we don’t need the white man coming down here to solve the black man’s problems. We can manage that just fine, thank you.”

Pike’s mouth twitched for the second time that day.

Ray gave the eyes to Pike. “What?”

Pike shook his head.

I said, “The DA would file if they thought they could win, and maybe there’s a way we can give them that. Maybe not on James Edward, but on something.”

Ray Depente waited.

“If you want Akeem, you’re going to have to go to him. That means his home, and it used to be a crack house. It’s fortified like a bunker. But once we’re in, I’m betting we can find something that the DA can use to put D’Muere away.”

Cool T said, “Ain’t no way we can get in there. Goddamn police use a goddamn batterin’ ram to get in a crack house. Where we gonna get that?”

Ray glanced at Cool T. “There are other ways.” He looked back at me. “If it was worth it. If it would lead to that sonofabitch getting what he deserves.”

“We won’t know until we get there, will we?”

Ray nodded. “Why are you doing this, Cole?”

“Because I liked James Edward, Ray. Hell, I even like you.”

Ray Depente laughed and then he stood up and put out his hand. “Okay. You want to help out on this, we’ll let you help.”

Forty-two minutes later Joe Pike and I cruised past Akeem D’Muere’s fortified home in Joe’s Jeep. We parked six houses down on the same side of the street in an alley between a row of flowering azalea bushes and a well-kept frame house with an ornate birdbath in the front yard. Ray Depente and Cool T were one block behind us, sitting in Ray’s LeBaron. Akeem D’Muere’s black Monte Carlo and the maroon Volkswagen Beetle were parked at the front of his house, and a half-dozen Gangster Boys were hanging around on the Beetle. A couple of young women were with them. I wondered if they called themselves Gangster Girls.

Pike said, “Brick house across the street. Clapboard two doors down, this side. Check it out.”

I looked at the brick house across the street and then at the clapboard house. A heavy woman with her hair in a tight gray bun was peeking from behind a curtain in the brick house and a younger woman, maybe in her early thirties, was peeking at us from the clapboard. The younger woman was holding a baby. “They’re scared. You live on a street with a gang for your neighbors and I guess peeking out of windows becomes a way of life. Never know when it’s safe to venture out.”

Joe shifted in his seat. “Helluva way to live.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

A tall kid leaning against the Bug’s left front fender looked our way, but then went back to jiving with his buddies. All attitude, no brains.

Pike pulled a pair of Zeiss binoculars from the backseat and examined the front of D’Muere’s house. “Windows set close on both sides of the door. Bars on the windows.”

“What about the door?”

“Solid core with a couple of peepholes. No glass.”

“Does it open outward?”

“Yep.” Pike put down the glasses and looked pleased. Dope dealers often rebuild their doors to open outward instead of inward. Harder for the cops to bust in that way. It was something that we’d been counting on.

Fourteen minutes after we parked in the alley, Cool T turned onto the far end of the street in Ray Depente’s LeBaron and drove slowly toward D’Muere’s as if he were looking at addresses. He stopped in the middle of the street, and said something to the kids on the Volkswagen.

I said, “Now.”

Joe and I rolled out of the Jeep and moved through the backyard of the near house and into the next yard toward D’Muere’s. We moved quickly and quietly, slipping past bushes and over fences and closing on D’Muere’s while Cool T kept the gangbangers’ attention. Akeem D’Muere’s backyard was overgrown by grass and weeds and thick high hedges that had been allowed to run without care or trimming. A creaky porch jutted off the back of the house, and a narrow cement drive ran back past the house to a clapboard garage. The garage was weathered and crummy and hadn’t been used in years. Why use a garage when you can park on the front lawn? Ray Depente appeared from the hedges on the far side of the yard and held up a finger to his mouth. He was wearing a black Marine Corps-issue shoulder sling with a Colt Mark IV .45-caliber service automatic. He pointed to himself, then gestured to the east side of the house, then pointed at us and then at our side of the house, and then he was gone.

Pike took the back of the house and I moved up the drive along the side. The windows along the back and sides of the house were barred, and many had been covered on the inside with tar paper, but there were gaps and tears in the paper and I moved from window to window, trying to see inside. Cool T drove away as I made the front corner of the house, and then I faded back to the rear. The rear was so crummy we could probably pitch a tent back there and no one would notice. Pike and Ray and I crouched in the bushes beside the porch.

Ray said, “Two rooms and a bath on my side. Three full-sized windows, all barred, and a half-sizer on the bathroom. Someone was in the bathroom but the other two rooms were clear.” He looked at Pike. “Will the door work?”

Pike nodded. “No problemo.”

“How about the front?”

“No problemo.”

I said, “Kitchen and two rooms on my side. I made six people, four male, two female. No children.”

Ray nodded. “Any way out the windows?”

“Not unless they can squeeze through the bars.”

Ray smiled. “This is going to work.”

Twelve minutes later Cool T once more turned onto the street and again stopped in front of the house. This time a couple of bangers slid off the Beetle and went toward him. When they did, Joe and I moved up the drive and across the front yard and Ray Depente trotted toward them from the opposite side of the house. One of the girls saw Ray Depente and said, “What the hell?” and then the others saw me and Joe. The second girl ran and a short guy with too many muscles clawed at his pants for a piece. Joe Pike kicked him in the head with an outside spin kick, and then Ray Depente and I were at the Beetle with our guns out. The two guys out in the street started pulling for hardware, too, but Cool T came out with an Ithaca 12-gauge and they put up their hands. Ray said, “Down.”

The Eight-Deuce Gangster Boys went down onto their stomachs.

Ray said, “Make noise, and I’ll bleed you.”

A tall skinny kid with a Raiders cap wiggled around and said, “Why don’t you kiss my goddamn ass?”

Ray punched him one time hard in the side of the head and he shut up.

Cool T opened the LeBaron’s trunk and tossed me a bag filled with plastic wrist restraints. I passed a couple to Pike, and we tied them off. We worked quickly, and as we tied I glanced at the surrounding houses. You could see faces in the windows and behind doors. Watching. Wondering what in hell these fools were doing.

Ray gave two smoke grenades to Pike, kept two for himself, then pulled three ten-gallon metal gas cans from the trunk and four six-foot lengths of galvanized pipe from the backseat. When we finished with the tying, Pike took two lengths of the pipe and trotted to the back of the house. Cool T hefted the other two and started toward the front. When he was halfway there, the front door opened and a chunky guy with a thick neck and a thick belly stepped out and fired a Beretta 9 millimeter, bapbapbapbap. One of the rounds caught Cool T on the outside of his right arm. He screamed and went down, and then I had the Dan Wesson out and I was firing, and the heavy guy fell back. I said, “Guess they know we’re here.”