Inheritance: A Novel Part 4

Paul didn't see what Mike had done until Seles rapped his knuckles on the back quarter panel. All the patrol cars were white Ford Crown Victorias with a thick blue stripe down the sides. Written in red decal letters above the top stripe was 1-800-CRIME STOPPERS. Every car had the logo, but on Barris and Seles' car the letters now read 1-800-PIMP STOMPERS.

"Holy c.r.a.p," Paul said. He turned to Mike. "How did you do that?"

"I disavow all knowledge," Mike said. "But I would imagine all it would take is getting in good with the guys in the body shop. If someone were to do that, he could probably get hooked up with all the decals he wanted. Not like I would know, though."

"No," Paul said, "of course not. But didn't Garwin just tell you-"

"A little secret about Garwin. Whenever he tells you to do something just smile and nod and he'll go away happy. Then you go back to doing whatever it was you were doing in the first place."

Barris turned towards them. "That's real funny, Wes. Nice."

"What?" Wes said. He looked genuinely indignant. "I didn't do anything."

"You guys are the only ones who think this s.h.i.t is funny, you know that? You behave like children."

"It wasn't..." he said to Barris, then turned to the others. "He thinks it was me. Why does he always think it's me?"

Barris and Seles got in their car and drove off in tire-smoking hurry, Barris with one hand out the window and his finger up in the air.

Mike, Wes, and Collins all laughed. Paul felt like he'd fallen into a good thing with these guys. They were cool, and they were making him feel welcome.

"We're going to the Cave, right?" Collins asked. "My blood sugar's gonna crash if we don't eat soon."

Just then, an emergency tone sounded on their radios. Instantly, the other three officers stopped talking and focused on the radio. Paul watched them. It still intrigued him, even after nearly a year on the Department, how an emergency tone could instantly silence any conversation.

"In Fifty-two Seventy's," a dispatcher said. "High Street and Garden Ridge, I have a shooting with a hit, clearing all but West."

All the way across the city, Paul thought. Not our service area.

"We'll meet you there," Mike said, picking up the conversation as though the tone had never sounded. To Paul he said, "We better eat quick. When they start killing each other early like this, it means we're in for a h.e.l.l of a night."

Chapter 2.

Detective Bobby Cantrell turned off the Chevy's headlights as they left the main road and pulled into the south entrance of the old Morgan Rollins Iron Works factory. He parked just inside the gate, which was little more than a remnant now, a rusted ribbon of metal hanging from a leaning post, and told his partner, "We're gonna walk from here."

As they got out of the car, his partner, Detective Raul Herrera, looked up at the silhouetted ruins of the old factory and whistled. The place looked like the skyline of some war-torn, bombed-out city, backlit by the hazy orange glow of the San Antonio skyline many miles to the west. He frowned. This place felt weird. Wrong somehow. Off to their right was a train yard. He could see the tops of its old trains rusting on the tracks. Beyond that he had a view of the sprawling slums of San Antonio's East Side. There was urban desolation everywhere he turned. There was misery everywhere he looked, but at least it was a living, breathing place. Not here, though. Not this factory. This place felt dead. He shivered, despite the heat.

Which was something else altogether. It'd been dark for hours, but it was still miserably hot, and he could feel the baked-in smell of rot and corruption that emanated from the old factory.

"You didn't want to get any closer?" Herrera asked, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. It was damp with sweat and gritty from all the dust in the air.

"This is fine," Cantrell said. "They may be just a bunch of junkies, but if they see us coming they'll take off for sure."

As he spoke, Cantrell studied the outline of the old factory, looking for the best place to enter. The problem wasn't the junkies. Most of them were so browned out they wouldn't know what hit them until the handcuffs bit down on their wrists. The real problem was the structure itself. It had been falling apart for twenty years, since the company closed it down. There were catwalks up there that looked sound, but would collapse under a man's weight without warning. He and the other detectives on the San Antonio Police Department's Narcotics Unit had been lucky so far. No accidents. He wanted to keep it that way.

"What did you call this place again?"

"The Shooter's Gallery," Cantrell said, still watching the structure.

"And we can make our cases here?"

Cantrell glanced over the roof of the car at his new partner. It suddenly occurred to him that he might have a lot of ground to cover with Herrera.

"Didn't you grow up in San Antonio?" Cantrell asked.

"Houston."

"And you never worked the East Side when you were on Patrol?"

"Two years on South, five on Central."

"Never heard this place come out on the radio?"

Herrera shook his head. "Not that I can remember."

Cantrell closed his door and walked up to the front of the car. "Well, welcome to The Shooter's Gallery. We got junkies by the dozens here. And enough brown tar heroin to make the Mexican Mafia blush."

"Really?" Herrera said, wide-eyed.

"Oh, yeah. It's a gold mine in there."

Herrera glanced up at the factory, then back to Cantrell. "If it's that good, how come we don't sweep the place? Get them all in one shot."

Cantrell just laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"Raul, when you were working a district on Patrol, didn't you have a favorite honey hole where you'd go to write a few quick tickets to keep the sergeant off your a.s.s?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, well, The Shooter's Gallery is ours. We knock out our small cases here and then go on to the bigger stuff later."

Herrera glanced over the factory in silence, but he was obviously disappointed. Cantrell knew the look. Most patrolmen who promoted directly into Narcotics had casino eyes. They were looking for the big busts, the eighteen wheelers full of cocaine, the sophisticated methamphetamine labs, the cornfields full of pot. When they learned that the little bulls.h.i.t cases were the real meat and potatoes of the job, they looked a lot like Herrera looked now.

"Alright," Cantrell said, because he felt like he owed it to the new guys to set them straight, "you remember when Sarge told you he expects six felony cases every month?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I'll let you in on a little secret. There's n.o.body big in there-just a bunch of burned-out bottom-feeders who live for their next high. The name of the game is quant.i.ty, not quality. What we do is come in here and pop six small time cases every month for one or two balloons a piece. That covers our six felonies with the Sarge. After that, you can focus on making your real cases, your big ones. You just got to learn the game. Give them the numbers they want, and then you can spend the rest of the month doing whatever you want."

"And it's just that simple?"

"Just that simple," Cantrell said. "Come on. Let's go make some numbers."

Cantrell led the way up to the main part of the factory and pointed out the rough spots for Herrera to avoid. By the time they'd made it to the hive-like series of corridors in the superstructure, where most of the junkies shot up, they'd already spotted a few who were pa.s.sed out and riding their highs in quiet little corners.

"You don't want any of them?" Herrera asked.

"No."

"Why not?"

Cantrell looked around before he answered. When he spoke again, it was in a whisper. "The ones out here have already shot up. We want the ones closer in to the courtyard. They shoot up there and stumble out here to sleep. You're only gonna find dope on the ones still inside the Gallery."

Herrera nodded. Cantrell watched his trainee's gaze shift down to the ground. Cantrell didn't like knocking the new guys down like that, but sometimes it had to be done. Patrolmen came to Narcotics with a skewed sense of tactics. They approached everything with the beat cop's mindset of visible authority and control. The bodies folded up in the shadows of the superstructure were a good example. Herrera was having obvious trouble pa.s.sing them by. He clearly wanted to go over and check out every one. Teaching the new guys to blend in to a bad situation, to accept the kinds of tactical risks no beat cop would ever take, was one of the hardest lessons to pa.s.s on.

They pa.s.sed a man sitting in the dust, his back against a wall of corrugated tin, head slumped down between his knees, the ground dark and wet between his legs. His hands were open on the ground next to his feet. Cantrell glanced at him, then moved deeper into the ruins of the factory.

But Herrera hung back. He took his Stinger MiniLight from his back pocket and lit the guy up with a quick flash.

Cantrell spun around on him and hissed, "What are you doing? Kill that light."

"I think he's dead," Herrera said.

"What?" Cantrell paused for a second, then walked closer. "No."

"Yeah, I think so."

Cantrell lit the man up with his own flashlight. He saw the puddle between the man's legs, a red rope of something that looked like fish guts hanging from his lips. He knelt down in front of the man and turned his light up into the man's face. The eyes were wide open and the corneas were already clouding over.

"f.u.c.k."

"What is it?" Herrera asked. "Overdose?"

"No. Look at his face."

Herrera knelt down next to him and his eyes went wide. The left side of the dead guy's face looked like somebody had beat on it with a hammer.

"What's that written on his face?" Herrera asked. "You see that, there on his forehead?"

Cantrell shook his head in disgust. "This is f.u.c.king perfect. This place is a bust now. Homicide's gonna want to shut it down for sure."

"Seriously, Bobby, what is that stuff written on his face? Gang graffiti?"

Cantrell studied the body without answering.

"We need to canva.s.s the area, right?" Herrera asked. "See if anybody saw anything."

"Yeah, right. You're gonna get some great witnesses out of these oxygen thieves. I'll tell you what this is. This here is misdemeanor homicide. Ain't n.o.body gonna be broken up this piece of s.h.i.t's dead."

"Still, we ought to-"

"Fine," said Cantrell. "We'll sweep the area."

There was another man sitting in the shadows just a few yards away from the body, and Herrera walked over to him carefully, his gun snug against his thigh. He kicked the man's foot, hard.

"Get up," he said.

The man didn't move.

Herrera kicked him again, even harder. "Come on, a.s.shole. Get up. I want to talk to you." The man fell over onto his side, landing face up. His face was smashed, just like the other junkie, the same strange symbols scrawled across his forehead. "Holy s.h.i.t!" Herrera backed away from him. "Cantrell! Hey Cantrell, I got another one over here."

Cantrell was standing next to him a moment later with his gun in his hand.

Herrera lit up the body with his flashlight. "Look at his face," Herrera said.

Cantrell shook his head.

Herrera moved his flashlight over the rest of the scene. They were standing in what amounted to a long corridor. The walls on either side of them were rusted sheets of corrugated metal that the resident dopers had covered with blankets and piled high with trash. There were three more bodies further down the corridor, all of them dead, and it looked like parts of the walls were spattered with blood. Somebody had gone through here and torn everything to pieces. Walls, clothing, blankets, trash, bodies-everything was destroyed. Herrera thought, Run a tornado through a homeless shelter and this is what you'd have left over.

He started to speak, but Cantrell put up his hand to silence him.

"Shhh," he hissed. "Listen."

Herrera stood perfectly still. Somewhere in the darkened gloom ahead of them, a goat was bleating quietly. He looked at Cantrell for guidance, but Cantrell's eyes were focused on the dark.

Both men had their weapons ready. They covered each other as they moved out, leap-frogging past each other, taking the hallway in stages all the way to the far end, where the hallway opened up on an immense circular chamber with no ceiling. The walls around it were twenty feet high at least. Three gray, crumbling smokestacks jutted up against the ash gray sky beyond the rim of the far wall. The air smelled like blood and the horrible gut-wrenching stench of decay.

There were bodies everywhere.

Most looked like they'd been beat to death with a bat.

A weird-looking white goat was standing in the middle of the chamber, looking at them with black, gla.s.sy eyes. Another just like it, white and s.h.a.ggy like a sheepdog, was nearby. It had been carved, neck to belly, so that now the carca.s.s was open on the ground like a canoe.

Something glinted off to their left, and both men immediately turned to the man seated cross-legged in the shadows. He wore a white, long-sleeved shirt, black pants, and a black Stetson cowboy hat. His hands were working furiously on a three foot high pile of sticks that he was tying together with baling wire while he rocked back and forth, murmuring in a language they couldn't understand.

Cantrell tried to tell the man to show his hands, but couldn't quite get the words out. He was stammering, choking, like he had a walnut crammed down his throat. He tried to raise his gun, but it felt heavy in his hand. Part of his mind was screaming at him to get his gun up, front sight on target, scan the area for additional threats, but that was a small part, a distant far away part.

He glanced at Herrera. The detective was standing too close to the man, his hands hanging limply at his side. To Cantrell he looked like a deer caught in headlights, frozen with fear.

"Get back!" Cantrell tried to scream. But the words still wouldn't come.

The man on the floor glanced up at Herrera, though his hands never stopped lashing the sticks together. His forehead was marked with the same three symbols they'd seen on the bodies out in the corridor. His eyes were solid white, like they'd turned up into his head, and his mouth was hanging open, no teeth showing behind the man's razor thin lips.

The man's hands stopped moving. The next instant, he rose to his feet in a series of jerks and starts, like a drunk moving through a darkened club under a strobe light.

The strike was so fast and vicious that Herrera never even had a chance to react. The man punched out at him with one hand, locking an iron grip around his throat with a force that bent him over backwards like his spine was made from a rope of licorice.