James Patterson - 11th hour

He spoke into the bullhorn. “Pull over. Pull the car over. Now.”

The BMW did slow, went from sixty to forty down Velasco, took a right onto Schwerin, and stopped next to an abandoned lot fenced with broken chain link and filled with garbage.

Revenge braked behind the BMW.

He left the engine running as he screwed the suppressor onto the muzzle, grabbed his flashlight, and got out of his car. He approached the driver’s-side window of the BMW, shone his light in the driver’s face.

The smell of weed coming from the BMW was so strong, one good inhale could produce a profound contact high.

The driver, Jace Winter, said, “Wus up, Officer?” He was smirking. Laughing with his homeys. Unafraid. Stoned out of his mind.

“Cox. Jackson. Put your hands on the ceiling,” Revenge said.

“Man, how’m I going to show you license and registration with my damned hands — ”

“Winter, keep your right hand on the wheel and open your jacket.”

“Yo, what was I going? Twenty-eight in a twenty-five zone?”

“Good night, you piece of crap.”

Revenge pointed the gun into the interior of the car. He shot Winter first, two shots in the chest, another round in the neck. Jackson and Cox went crazy trying to get out of the car, and then the last man they would see in this world sent several shots into various parts of their upper bodies until no one moved.

Revenge stripped off his jacket, balled it up with the gun, and dumped the bundle into Winter’s lap.

A car went by fast, didn’t stop, didn’t even slow. Revenge went back to his vehicle, took out the plastic liter bottle filled with gasoline, and returned to the BMW. He poured gas inside the car, front and back, made a good job of dousing the dead men.

Then he lit a match and tossed it inside the drug-mobile.

There was a loud puff as the flame caught, then the car started to burn, and within a few seconds, the whole of it was engulfed in fire.

Keeping his head down, Revenge returned to his SUV. He watched the BMW explode as he backed out, then he made a U-turn and drove through the projects again.

He felt cleansed and almost high.

Like he was younger, and lighter, the very best version of himself, and since he would never get credit, he thought it was okay to give himself a pat on the back for a very clean shooting. Three heinous sewer rats were dead.

In twenty minutes, Revenge would be sitting in front of the TV watching the game, but he’d be thinking of Jace Winter’s smug face and then his expression when he realized he was going to die.

Revenge listened to the police band, learned that cops were still investigating a report of a cop down but hadn’t yet determined who had been shot or where. He turned off the police band, found a rock station on the radio. He was whistling as he drove home.

I paced around a garbage-strewn vacant lot off Schwerin Street, a potholed one-laner that ran between the Sunnydale Projects and through Visitacion Valley.

Normally desolate, tonight Schwerin was impassable in both directions, cordoned off and hemmed in by twenty-odd police cars, three fire rigs, two ambulances, the fire investigator’s truck, the scene-mobile, and the coroner’s van.

Outside the lot, between the broken chain-link fence and the street, an incinerated car was turning the night sky opaque with smoke.

I coughed into my sleeve, kept a good twelve yards between myself and the smoldering car as Chuck Hanni, our chief fire investigator, processed the scene with his crew. One of his key associates was Lacy, an ignitable-liquid-detecting K-9, a black Labrador with an excellent nose.

The last time I saw Hanni, a meth lab disguised as a school bus had exploded on Market Street during morning rush hour. There had been casualties, but none of them, thank God, were children. Hanni had detailed that horror show with his first-rate expertise, as he was doing now with the remains of a fatal fire that looked to be a triple homicide.

As I watched, the K-9 alerted Hanni. The fire investigator pulled something out of the car, shone his Maglite on it, then sealed it in a paper bag. Claire and Charlie Clapper walked over to Hanni and had a powwow with him, and then they took over the scene.

Techs were taking bodies out of the vehicle as Hanni came over to brief me on what he’d learned so far.

He massaged his scarred right hand as he crossed the lot, the result of an injury he’d gotten in a fire. He wore his everyday chinos and white shirt under a sports jacket, and although Hanni was the first to get his hands dirty metaphorically, I’d never seen him with so much as a smudge of soot on his clothing.

“I’ve got a lot to tell you,” Hanni said.

I wanted to know everything.

He couldn’t tell me fast enough.

“The fire started in the passenger compartment,” Chuck Hanni said. “See, the engine compartment is in relatively good shape. Flames probably vented through the open window.”

“The windows were open?”

“Just the driver’s window.”

“License and registration, please,” I said. “Could have been a traffic stop. Go ahead, Chuck. I interrupted you.”

“Not a problem. So, this is what I see happening. As the interior burned, the windshield failed and the rear seats were consumed. Then the fire entered the trunk and destroyed the back of the car.”

“Yeah, the rear tires are melted,” I said. “So what caused the fire?”

“Lacy alerted on what was left of a plastic bottle that had rolled under the front seat. I think gas was inside that bottle, but anyway, some kind of accelerant. It looks to me like the passenger compartment was doused, and the fire was started with a match or a lighter.

“I doubt the lab is going to get prints or DNA off that bottle,” Hanni continued. “But they can try. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

I was taking it all in, trying to picture it.

I said, “Someone pulls the car over, throws gas inside the vehicle, sets the fire. So why are the victims still inside? When the fire started, why didn’t they get out? Were they already dead?”

“Claire is swabbing their nasal cavities now. She’ll be able to tell you in about five seconds if the victims breathed smoke in or not.”

“Okay. What else?”

Hanni grinned at me and said, “Patience, Lindsay. I’m getting there. I removed all of the debris that fell from the dashboard, headliner, and door panels, and I found a spent round for you. Twenty-two caliber.”

I got a little chill. The good kind you get when your hunches pay off. Doesn’t happen every day. There are a million. 22-caliber guns on the street, and our cop shooter had used one of them on Chaz Smith. Maybe he’d used the same gun to take out a few drug dealers from the projects.

I thanked Hanni and started to call Claire to find out if she’d found soot inside the victims’ nostrils but got distracted by the loud whoop-whoop of a siren announcing that another cop car was arriving at the scene.

It was Conklin and he came toward me at a trot. He was hyperventilating and it wasn’t because of the thirty-yard sprint.

“She’s here,” he said. “We’ve got our witness.”

It felt like Christmas and my birthday and Mother’s Day all wrapped up together and tied with a bow.

A witness had seen a cop pull a car over on Schwerin just moments before that car had become a fireball.

The witness had given her name and number to the 911 operator. She wanted to talk.

Anna Watson sat across from us at the fold-down Formica table inside the RV that served as our command post. She was sixty-four, black, small, chain-smoking Marlboros and stubbing out the butts in a tinfoil ashtray.