Ridley Pearson - Pied Piper

He knew that the Trojan Horse and the snipers were prepared to provide cover, to defend them if needed. One of his rangers would let ERT in through the front door, Narcotics to follow his own ERT unit. He brushed his thumb against the protective vest just to assure himself he had remembered to wear it. Drug labs were the absolute worst. If the small weapons fire didn’t take you out, the fire would.

He bounded silently to the platform of the back porch, his crew coming to a halt below. He hand-signaled their surveillance technician forward. The man snaked a thin tube of fiber-optic wire beneath the crack in the door, viewed a small monitor strapped to his chest, withdrew the wire and pronounced a thumbs-up to his squad leader.

Ustad signaled the two trailing rangers to break formation. Armed with a bolt cutter, they would attempt an incursion through the locked storm cellar on the building’s south side, but only in the event of weapons fire.

So far, so good. The back of the house was empty. The intelligence was proving sound. The lab was believed to be in the basement.

From that moment out, Ustad feared a shooting gallery. The key element missing was the floor plan. They had no idea of it, other than a generalized opinion that similar structures of a similar era accessed the basement from a door in or near the kitchen. That was the door they’d be looking for.

Ustad waved the big dick up the stairs. Leaving the device to two men, the two others readied their weapons. He held his five fingers out straight and folded them in, thumb first, one by one until his hand became a fist. As he began his count, the ram swung back once, forward once, back again and then blew the door, frame, hinges and all, right to the kitchen floor. The team flooded into the kitchen. Within seconds, Officer Randy Deschutes signaled that he had found the basement door.

The big dick rocked once, twice and smashed into the door.

It held, reinforced.

Back it came, the glowing arrow on its nose aimed for the doorknob. Again the huge ram lunged into the door. Splinters of wood flew through the air, but again the door held. Ustad cursed in Arabic. Sitting ducks-the worst of situations.

On the third attempt, the doorjamb dislodged. The next two collisions drove the door down the basement stairs in a cacophony of destruction. Ustad heard the all too familiar hand clap of small weapons fire, and saw a member of his team spin and fall to the floor. The man rolled over, wincing in agony, but not bleeding; the vest had saved his life; he had four broken ribs.

Ustad shouted, “Police!” stuck the barrel of the shotgun down the dark hole and fired off two rounds. Three to go.

Weapons firing. Voices shouting.

The sound of banging metal told Ustad the storm cellar had been breached as well. They had them from two perimeter positions. The Bad Guys were pinned.

“Drop the weapons!” echoed from below.

More gunfire, short and percussive.

Ustad heard a sliding sound directly overhead followed by the distinct snap of a marksman’s rifle. He turned in time to see a body tumble off the roof into the backyard. The cookers had placed a lookout on the top floor. Watching the street instead of the backyard, he had missed the approach of the ERT unit and was hellbent on escape. Coming to his feet, he spun and let loose automatic weapons fire. Ustad was clipped in the shoulder by a bullet. Charged with adrenaline, he barely felt it. Instead, he hoisted his shotgun, got off a round and watched the fleeing man stagger with the hit. The escapee limped away following the same route Ustad and his squad had used.

Ustad depressed his radio-com button and shouted, “Devon, armed bird coming right at you!” Lightheaded, he sank to his knees, his full attention fixed on the shooter limping at a run toward the Allied moving van.

The back door of the trailer swung open and Devon Long jumped out, weapon in hand. Ustad saw him open his mouth to shout a warning but did not hear him over the surrounding chaos.

The escapee came to an abrupt stop and raised his weapon at Long.

Ustad mumbled, “No! No!”

Long elevated the barrel of his assault rifle but immediately identified that his weapon was trained in the direction of his own people. He could not fire at the escaping shooter without risk to his colleagues. Overeager, he had jumped from the trailer too soon.

Long dove to the dirt and rolled for a safer angle as the sniper unloaded his weapon wildly. A volley of muzzle flashes followed. The sniper spun and fell to the dirt. Long, favoring his right side and obviously hit, was over the man in an instant, kicking the weapon away and one good boot toe into the man’s ribs.

Ustad smiled. He slumped forward, and passed out.

No deaths, Boldt reminded himself as he patiently waited for Lofgrin’s SID technicians to finish with the downstairs so he could examine the second floor. No deaths. Four wounded-two on each side. But the bad guys were worse off, and the meth lab was the second largest lab bust in the city’s history, netting huge quantities of meth and LSD.

The kitchen and basement were disaster areas of splintered wood, blood, discharged weapon shells, glass and debris. All was marked. All recorded. There would be more reports, more internal hearings than could possibly be justified to anyone outside the system. They would still be sorting things out on the Fourth of July. Labor Day if they weren’t careful.

The kitchen was an evidentiary wasteland. Lofgrin wasn’t going to find anything of interest to Boldt there. The grounds surrounding the house were no better, thanks to the army that had come and gone.

“When?” he shouted ahead at Lofgrin. It was three in the morning. He was going to need a cup of tea soon.

“You kept everyone out of there for a reason,” Lofgrin reminded, meaning the upstairs. A pair of ERT officers had conducted a body hunt upstairs and then Boldt had sealed the area. He was anxious to get up there, but only behind Lofgrin’s evidence technicians. With this extreme contamination, he wanted to maintain the best crime scene possible.

According to the evacuated neighbors, the house had been lived in by an elderly couple without children. The wife had recently died, sending the husband into a nursing home and leaving the place all but abandoned for the past few months. The neighbor to the east had removed the junk mail and tended to the flower beds. Newspapers found downstairs suggested the basement had been in use as a drug lab for the last six weeks, pointing Narcotics into a new area of investigation: meth cookers in decent neighborhoods.

Boldt walked a block and a half to air out his head, picked up a tea for himself and an armful of coffees and donuts and returned to the crime scene where press and the department’s people of power shared microphones. Mulwright and Hill were there, as was Dunkin Hale from the FBI and a deputy prosecuting attorney. Boldt steered clear of all of them.

He passed out the coffees, winning points with the ID technicians, and then joined Lofgrin on the back porch. The man was smoking a cigarette.

“Since when do you smoke?” Boldt asked, astonished.

“Don’t start, okay? I got enough with Diane.”

“I’ve known you twenty-some years.”

“I turn fifty next week, okay?”

Boldt knew about the birthday. He and Dixie had once planned to take Bernie to Victoria for a men-only jazz weekend, but Liz’s illness and the task force had put the plan on hold. “Okay,” Boldt said, making it sound as if he didn’t know about this birthday in case they could still cook up a surprise.

“When I quit this shitty habit twenty-seven years ago, I promised myself that for the week leading up to my fiftieth birthday I could smoke. Then not again until I’m sixty-five, when I earn an entire month. At eighty, if I make it that far, all bets are off: no time limits. Smoke as much as I like, nonfilter or whatever. And to hell with anybody who has a problem with that, including Diane.”