“Rock ’n’ roll,” he said.
“You sleepy?” Bob asked.
“Tired, but not sleepy,” Lucas said. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. Let’s watch out for these FBI turkeys, the ones tracking Romano and Bianchi. They’ll have guns and they’ll be running toward us. And it’s dark outside.”
Lucas took a last look out the window: “Not too dark. Lots of lights around.”
Bob said, “Get the handset. Let’s go.”
* * *
Weaver was waiting in the lobby, cocked his head at Bob’s M4 but didn’t say anything. A young woman who was standing behind the check-in desk said to Weaver, “I’m going to hide in the office now.”
Weaver nodded and put his handset to his ear and asked, “Where now?” He listened, then turned to Lucas and Bob and said, “Three minutes. You guys wait here. I’ll run over and squat down behind that palm where I can see Romano coming in.”
He pointed kitty-corner across the street at a clump of palms from where he’d be looking at the front of Romano’s store. “Our guys will track Romano until he turns the corner. Bianchi right now is about a minute behind him. When Bianchi turns the corner, our guys will pull into the lot behind the store. There’s a door back there and we’ll put a car bumper right up against it so it can’t be opened. There are no windows back there. When I see Romano and Bianchi are inside, I’ll call you and you come running. As soon as the team leaders out in back see you moving, they’ll go around both sides of the store, around to the front and we’ll all get to the front door at the same time. One of the guys has a sledge if we need it . . .”
Weaver was cranked, talking a hundred miles an hour, the words tumbling out like pebbles. Bob said, “That’s fine, man, but you’ve got to cool down a little. Take it easy. You don’t want to have a heart attack.”
Weaver looked at him. Nodded and said, “I forgot you guys do this all the time . . . I’ll try to slow it down.”
But he glanced at his watch and then said, “I gotta go, I gotta go,” and he pushed through the door and scurried across the street to the clump of palms and disappeared.
Bob, peering out through the glass doors, said, “This is gonna be hairy. Too many guys with guns and no time to think about it.”
Lucas said, “Yeah. At least we’re going out first, so everybody knows where we are.”
They waited, and Lucas said, “Getting tight.”
As they waited, a Latino man with a pencil-thin mustache, wearing a yellow Hawaiian shirt walked around the corner, saw Bob’s rifle, did a double take, said, “Oh, man,” and Lucas said, “Sir, if you could go back to your room for a minute?”
The man read police and u.s. marshal on their vests and said, “You got it,” and disappeared.
Bob grinned and said, “Didn’t take him long to make up his mind.”
From the office, the counter woman called, “Is it over yet?”
Lucas called back, “Not quite, but we’re close,” and to Bob, “Fifteen seconds? Something like that.”
Twenty seconds later, Bob said, “Here they come.”
* * *
A black SUV pulled into the parking lot across the street and an elderly man got out and went to the front of the store. Less than a minute later, another SUV, identical to the first, pulled into the parking lot and a younger man got out and went to the door. Ten seconds later, four more cars crawled around the corner and bumped over the curb into the lot at the back of the store. One man jumped out of one of the cars and motioned another car forward until the bumper nearly touched the back of the building, a door that Lucas and Bob couldn’t see.
Lucas’s handset burped: Weaver said, “Go.”
Lucas and Bob went out the door, walking fast, Lucas in the lead, to Bob’s left, headed straight across the street.
* * *
Weaver shouted “Go” into his handset and saw Lucas and Bob burst through the motel door into the street. He turned to look for his FBI teams rounding the corner of the building, then looked back at Lucas and Bob. They’d crossed the street and were into the parking lot when two more men ran out of the motel behind them and both raised guns that Weaver recognized as old MAC-10 submachine guns.
Astonished by their sudden appearance, he saw them lift the guns toward Lucas and Bob and he screamed something he didn’t recognize himself, maybe an Indian war cry, and lifted his own Sig at the two men and began firing at them and saw them falter and Lucas and Bob went down and Weaver kept pulling the trigger on the Sig until it went dry and the two men were still up but staggering as a storm of gunfire erupted from behind the store and the two men twisted, turned, and went down. Somebody was shouting, “Stop, stop . . .” and Weaver realized it was him.
* * *
Lucas and Bob crossed the street at a run and then heard a man scream and Lucas half-turned and there was an explosion of gunfire, coming from behind them, Lucas thought, and he was thumped hard in the back and he went down on his stomach, skidding hard on the blacktop, stripping skin off his knees and elbows and one hand, his gun hand; he’d lost the handset he’d held in the other hand and he struggled to get turned around, and he looked back and saw the man with the Hawaiian shirt staggering, apparently hit by gunfire; and another man behind him, also in a Hawaiian shirt, with a long gun in his hand and he was trying to fire back at the feds who’d come down the side of the building. Still turning, confused, trying to get around, Lucas saw Weaver in the shadow of the palm tree firing a pistol at the two men and then the men were both down and Lucas thought, What the fuck?, and looked to his right.
And saw Bob unmoving on the ground.
Gun in hand, he crawled toward Bob and saw Weaver running toward them and he heard glass breaking, a lot of glass, more shouting. He got to Bob, who was lying on his side, facing away from him, and as he rolled him over he saw that Bob had been hit in the head and neck.
“No, Jesus . . .”
Another FBI man was sprawled at the side of the store, an agent standing over him with a gun in his hand. Weaver ran across the street, paused at the downed FBI man, said something to him and then ran toward Lucas and Bob, shouting, “Calling 911!”
When he came up, he looked down at them, then looked desperately back at the side where the other man was lying, and then down at Lucas and then over at the two men in Hawaiian shirts, dead on the ground, and then back to Lucas and he said, “I think, I think . . .”
He didn’t say what he thought, but Lucas knew what it was.