John Lescroart - The First Law

John Holiday was down. He lay in a hump out in the fairway of the pier.

McGuire and Hardy were charging up from the truck.

It was Glitsky's only chance to move and he took it, pushing off from the building, turning to get a gauge of where Gerson had gotten to. Glitsky's own position, caught between Gerson and the Panos crowd, had been completely untenable, but Holiday's intervention and then the truck's arrival had given him a few seconds.

Off to his right, by the mouth of the pier, Glitsky heard the blast of a shotgun, then another, intermingled with several explosions of pistol shot in rapid succession-someone was firing an automatic with both hands. A quick glance caught Hardy going down.

Zigzagging, Glitsky broke for the cover of the barn.

McGuire, the lone man standing now out on the pier, had fired his two loads at Nick Sephia. If the man wasn't dead, McGuire figured his dancing career was over at least. McGuire had ejected his shells, had two more in his knuckles ready to insert. But it all took time. Not a lot of time, but enough for Rez, who jumped out of his doorway now and ran toward McGuire, one of his gun hands extended with the automatic in it, screaming a long wild note. He closed to three or four feet, pointed the gun at McGuire's head and pulled the trigger.

But there was no report. The automatic had misfired. Staring at it in fury for the briefest of seconds, Rez swore and threw it down onto the asphalt. Glitsky, less than twenty feet away in the door of the barn, could almost see the moment when Rez realized he still had his other gun in his other hand. McGuire was finished with his reload, though, snapping the barrel back up into place as Rez extended his other arm.

Glitsky, braced against the barn door, aimed carefully and, holding his gun with both hands, fired twice, the first bullet taking Rez under the right arm, passing through both his lungs and his heart, the second missing entirely. But the second shot wasn't needed. Firing squads had killed people more slowly-Rez was dead before he hit the ground.

But the reverberation from that shot hadn't died when another two rang simultaneously, one to Glitsky's left from the front of the pier, and the other behind him. Spinning around, his own gun in his two-handed grip, Glitsky saw Gerson not ten feet behind him slide slowly down the front of the stucco of the warehouse next door, leaving a trail of blood on the faded wall. He turned back to see that Hardy was now slowly getting up, his gun in his hand, and Moses crossing over to him.

Glitsky suddenly wasn't sure that he could move at all. In the sudden and deafening silence, he let his hands go to his sides and leaned heavily against the barn door. But there was Holiday, whose early volley had certainly saved Glitsky's life, lying without any movement on the asphalt. If he was alive, if any of them were alive, they would need to call an ambulance. And seconds could matter. Glitsky had to check.

Hardy and McGuire had something of the same thought, and the three men converged on their fallen ally. Holiday wasn't moving at all. They had gathered in a knot around him, Glitsky going down on one knee, a hand to where the pulse should be on Holiday's neck, when suddenly the silence was again defiled.

A woman's voice, harshly commanding, "Put it down! Guys, look out!" They all turned, scattering with their weapons pointed, but then immediately came one last and again nearly simultaneous round of gunfire.

Gina Roake walked slowly, ignoring them, warily approaching the body of the man who'd turned and squeezed off a shot at her when she'd called out.

Glitsky, Hardy and McGuire had all seen it, Roy Panos lying flat on his stomach, his gun extended where he'd been aiming, directly at Gina. Before she'd called out, he was obviously intending to take out at least one and maybe all of the men before they could finish him.

Gina stopped at his body and kicked at it as she might have some dead vermin, her pistol pointed the whole time at his head. Then she looked up at the three other gunmen, her shoulders fell and she walked toward them.

None of the principals could have guessed the length of the battle, although none of them would have believed it lasted less than ten minutes. But from the first shot to the last, the total time of the engagement was one minute, twenty-two seconds.

Len Faro stood outside the lit perimeter of the./crime scene for a moment before wading in, thinking that this had been about the deadliest two weeks since he'd come on with the force. By the time he arrived at Pier 70, dusk was well advanced and the place was a madhouse of activity with three TV and a couple of local radio crews, six or seven black-and-whites, several unmarked cars, two ambulances, the coroner's van, and a limousine that he guessed would belong to one of the higher brass.

Which, now that he thought of it, made little sense if this was a gang shooting. And that's what he would normally have expected in this location. So, wondering now, making his way through the phalanx of vehicles, he showed his badge to the officer at the tape and stepped over it. The scene was lit by the television lights as well as headlights from the cars, but even without the illumination, Faro could see at a glance that there'd been significant carnage.

He passed the first body only a few feet onto the pier itself and paused by the knot of daytime CSI people attending it. "Gangbangers?" he asked Gretchen, tonight's photographer. After all, four bodies were lying in plain sight-there might be more inside any of these buildings- and Faro had up until now only seen this kind of slaughter in a drive-by or other organized retaliation environment.

But Gretchen looked shell-shocked herself, and in a woman to whom violence was literally a daily event, this was surprising. "Gerson," she said. And at first he thought she was asking him if the lieutenant had been notified to come to the scene.

"I assume," he began, then stopped. "What about him?"

She motioned with a toss of her head back down the pier another forty feet or so, where another group of men were standing around another body, propped under a thick streak of brown on a stucco wall. Was that Frank Batiste down there? The deputy chief did not come to homicide scenes unless something was radically unusual. Faro broke into a trot, was with them all in five seconds-Cuneo and Russell from homicide, John Strout the chief medical examiner, two daytime CSI people. Everybody with hands in their pockets against the biting wind. To get to them, Faro had to pass a third corpse on the pier on his way down, and a fourth buried in a hail of broken glass in one of the doorways. Other homicide inspectors, half the lot of them- Barrel Bracco, Sarah Evans, Marcel Lanier-appeared as recognizable suddenly in the glut of faces.

Still, getting up to this victim, Faro slowed before he'd quite reached it, took a last step or two, stopped dead in his tracks. Jesus Christ, he thought.

Barry Gerson's eyes were open. He hadn't yet been moved, and so sat with his legs almost straight out, tipped a little to his right side, at the bottom of the brown line, which disappeared into his back. Faro leaned down closer, made out two small holes in the front of his jacket. He straightened up and turned to the knot of men. "How did this happen?"

"We're in the process of trying to piece that together right now, Sergeant." Batiste had come up through homicide-he'd been lieutenant before Glitsky-and so he knew the drill. "I'm hearing from these inspectors"-he indicated Cuneo and Russell-"that there's been some history among these men."

Faro, out of the loop, glanced at his dead lieutenant, came back to Batiste. But Cuneo, pointing up the pier, was the one to speak. "The first stiff back there is John Holiday, Len. Beyond him is Roy Panos. That speak to you at all?"