Patterson, James - Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

The phones on the lieutenant’s desk rang without pause. Just outside the office, banks of flickering video monitors showed grainy black-and-white images of passengers going through ticket checkpoints, scenes of luggage loading docks and carousels.

Uniforms and military units bustled around the room while Jacobi and I babysat the lieutenant’s fax machine, waiting for it to cough up the paperwork we needed.

I wondered if Garza and O’Mara believed that a maintenance crew was working on a small mechanical problem.

Were they sipping mimosas and reading the Financial Times?

I slugged down the dregs of my coffee, sunk the empty container into the trash can.

Jacobi coughed, buried his face in his hands, said, “Damn,” and coughed again.

At 6:05 p.m., the fax machine burped, and the DA’s letterhead chugged out of its works followed by the warrant we’d been waiting for.

As the last sheet ended its halting journey, Mendez returned. He took the pages out of the tray, read them.

“Okay,” he said with a smile. “Let’s rock and roll. We’re legal.”

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 131

MY PULSE RACED as sixteen of us put on oversized black Windbreakers with POLICE stenciled front and back. We all checked our weapons, then jogged down four steep flights of stairs to the garage.

I joined Mendez in the lead cruiser, thinking ahead as we sped across the tarmac. Mendez contacted the control tower. Barked into his radio, “Shut down this runway. Forthwith.”

I was anxious, but more than that, I was exhilarated to be leading this command. And I was anticipating bringing Garza down. I wanted him so badly it hurt just to think about it.

Striplights blazed on the airfield, and a United jumbo jet roared overhead, its impossible weight lifting into the wind-whipped gloaming.

I peered up at the grounded American 777, then watched as the rolling staircase was locked to the side of the aircraft.

Patrol-car doors opened and closed all around the plane.

Cloaked in twilight, we trotted toward the aircraft.

My adrenaline flowed as Mendez, Jacobi, and a sharp team of young cops followed me up the stairs, the soles of our shoes ringing on metal as we climbed skyward.

I tapped on the aft door with my gun butt, and it slid open.

I signaled to the flight attendant to be quiet and to step aside. We entered the first-class cabin from the rear.

I saw the back of Dennis Garza’s head right away. He was in the third row, right side, aisle seat, an ugly red gash blazing through his hair.

A redheaded woman sat beside him at the window.

Maureen O’Mara.

And I saw a problem. A big one.

Two hundred pounds of beverage cart filled the aisle from one side to the other. That cart and two flight attendants stood between us and Garza.

Garza heard us approach, turned his head, and squinted at me.

“You,” he said.

O’Mara patted his hand, said, “Be cool, Dennis. Everything’s okay.”

“Dennis Garza. Maureen O’Mara,” I called out. “I have warrants to take you both into custody as material witnesses.”

“Like hell,” Garza shouted. He fumbled in his jacket pocket. Then he rose out of his seat, stepped into the aisle.

O’Mara yelled out, “Dennis. No!”

Moving with the sudden-strike swiftness of a snake, Garza grabbed the flight attendant closest to him, wrapping her streaked hair around his hand, pulling her head back hard so that it was only inches from his face.

I saw something glint in his hand. It was a syringe!

He had his thumb on the plunger, the needle already piercing the taut skin of the flight attendant’s neck.

The young woman screamed, the sound of her terror filling the cabin, reverberating off the walls.

“I want safe passage out of here. Or I’ll shoot her full of insulin. She’ll be dead before she hits the floor,” Garza threatened.

Garza’s once handsome face was almost unrecognizable. His features were bruised and twisted, his lips curled back, pupils huge, eyes darting.

He looked every bit the maniac I believed him to be.

“It’s up to you,” he said. “I don’t care if she lives or dies.”

I finally spoke back to Garza. “That much I already knew.”

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 132

I WENT COLD INSIDE, staring into Garza’s dark, thoroughly crazy eyes. Maureen O’Mara was kneeling on her seat, staring at Garza in horror, as if she didn’t know who he was, either.

Sweat beaded on my upper lip as panic drove shrieking passengers to push past the cops and clear the rear half of the cabin.

In front of me, the remaining first-class passengers hunched forward, covering their heads as sharpshooters formed a wall behind me, using the seat backs as gun rests.

Garza’s back was to the cockpit. He couldn’t move forward or back, but he could endanger everyone on the aircraft.

And he could kill the flight attendant on his way down.

Garza tightened his painful grip on the attendant’s hair. A drop of blood at the girl’s neck fell, spotting the collar of her starched white blouse. She whimpered, stretched up onto her toes.

I read her name stamped into the gold wings pinned to her vest. “It’s going to be okay, Krista,” I said, making eye contact, watching the tears slide out of her eyes.

“Let her go, Dennis. No one is putting away their guns,” I said in a steady voice. “And you’re not going to kill anyone. We’re all getting out of here alive.”

Just then, the cockpit door opened behind Garza with a sound like a vacuum seal breaking. A young flight officer stepped into the cabin, a baton cocked like a baseball bat over his shoulder.

Garza turned his head, only slightly loosening his hold on the flight attendant. She wriggled and tried to wrench herself free.

The split second I needed was there, in the grip of my hand. I aimed and squeezed the Taser gun trigger, sending fifty thousand volts into Garza’s shoulder. It was enough juice to stun a rhino.

Garza choked out a scream and dropped to the cabin floor, curling into a fetal position. I stood over him, Taser pointed at his head as Jacobi cuffed him.

“You’re under arrest for reckless endangerment,” I said as Garza groaned and writhed at my feet. “You have the right to remain silent, you son of a bitch. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.” And it most certainly will be.

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 133

IT WAS AFTER 9:00 P.M. when Jacobi and I brought Dennis Garza and Maureen O’Mara into the squad room, both of them in handcuffs.

“How the mighty have fallen,” cracked Jacobi.

I was bone tired, scraping the bottom of my energy reserves, but elation kept me going. Dennis Garza was in custody, charged with reckless endangerment, possession of a deadly weapon, obstruction, and suspicion of murder.

He wasn’t killing people at Municipal Hospital.

And he wasn’t sunning himself on a beach in Rio.

O’Mara had been charged as an accessory after the fact, but we were bluffing and she knew it.

We had no evidence whatsoever that O’Mara had witnessed a crime or had even seen the blood in Garza’s house.

Twenty minutes after we brought them in, O’Mara was calmly reading a book in her cell, keeping her mouth shut, waiting for one of her law partners to bail her out of jail.

But we weren’t finished with her yet.

I still felt a little shaky and weak in the knees. I went to the bathroom, washed my hands and face in the old porcelain sink. Ran my damp hands through my hair.

I remembered the last time I’d eaten, the granola bar I’d bolted down after Noddie Wilkins called to tell me that Jamie Sweet had died.