“Ah, Jesus, he can’t be.” Lucas plucked at Bob’s body, trying to get an arm under his head, to help him breathe if there was breath left in him, but there wasn’t.
Weaver was saying, “C’mon, man, are you okay? Are . . . Jesus, you’re hit in the back, are you okay?”
Lucas felt no pain, he was staring down at Bob, but Bob had left the building, and Lucas knew it. “Bob! Bob!”
Weaver was pulling at him. “Are you okay . . . Are you okay?”
Lucas rose to his knees and Weaver was shouting at him, “Let’s get the vest off . . .”
Lucas let them pull the vest off; his back hurt, but not like it would with a gunshot wound. Weaver shouted, “You’re okay, you’re fine, you got hit but the vest took it . . .”
Lucas looked up at Weaver, who’d lost it: every word came out as a shout, almost a scream.
Lucas grabbed one of his arms and pulled himself up, said, “Easy, man. Easy.”
He looked down at Bob. His friend lay on the crumbling blacktop, his M4 pinned under his body, a pool of blood under his head, a gaping wound above his half-open eyes that were staring up at the overcast sky, at nothing at all.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Lucas heard, dimly, somewhere else, “Fire! There’s a fire! Fire! Hey!”
He tried to step away from Weaver, but his knees were shaking, and Weaver held on to him, and Lucas sank back on the blacktop next to Bob’s body, head down, arms wrapped around his knees, stunned, unable to think, unable to speak.
He didn’t know how long he was there, but it was a while. FBI agents came by from time to time to touch him on the shoulder, and he nodded, numbly. He looked up, blank-eyed, when two fire trucks and then an ambulance came careening into the street.
The paramedics checked the wounded agent, then lifted him onto a gurney, slammed him into the back of the ambulance and it was gone, lights flashing, siren screaming, curling around the firetrucks. Firemen ran into the motel and Lucas could see flames behind one of the windows on the second floor. His room? Bob’s? He didn’t know.
More sirens, more cops, more shouting, but he couldn’t shake the darkness that gripped him.
Eventually, Weaver came over and crouched next to him and said, “Lucas, you gotta move. The crime-scene people have work to do.”
Lucas reached over and touched the unbloodied side of Bob’s face, already going cold, then Weaver took him by the arm and led him across the street to the motel, where he put Lucas on a couch in the lobby with a couple of FBI agents. “There was a fire upstairs, one room . . . It’s out. We think it might be connected to those two shooters,” Weaver said.
Lucas nodded, unresisting, sat on the couch for a half hour, frozen up, other cops looking but not talking, and finally he groaned and pulled his cell phone from his pocket and called Weather.
“What happened! Lucas, is that you?” Fear in her voice: midnight in the Central time zone; she woke at six o’clock on days she’d be in the operating room, midnight was far too late for a call.
“Bob was killed.”
Silence, then a hushed, “Lucas, what . . .”
“Bob is dead. Some guys shot him.”
“Oh, my God, Lucas . . . Lucas, are you okay?”
“I guess . . . I’m not hurt. Jesus, what am I going to tell Rae? What am I going to tell her?”
“Lucas, don’t call her. Let somebody else do it. Call her after she knows . . .”
“That’ll make it worse,” Lucas said.
“No, no, it won’t,” Weather said. “Believe me. Please. Let somebody else notify her.”
“He has a girlfriend. They were thinking about getting married.”
“Oh, no . . .”
* * *
They talked for another half hour, Lucas slowly unfreezing. He got up, still talking, wandering through the motel’s first floor. He could smell smoke and something else burnt, and people were leaving the hotel carrying suitcases and bags. When he looked out the door toward the Romano building, he could see the black nylon shroud covering Bob’s body, and then, on one trip through the lobby, he looked out the door and the body was gone.
He said good-bye to Weather, went out into the street. There were twenty uniformed cops from three different jurisdictions, state, county, and local, plus the FBI agents. He found Weaver, and the other man lifted a hand and came over and took Lucas’s elbow: “You’re back.”
“Some,” Lucas said. “What the fuck happened?”
“Still don’t know,” Weaver said. “I was over in my palm tree getting ready to rush the door when you guys got across the street and my guys were coming around from the back of the building, and these two guys . . . fuckin’ assassins . . . came walking out of the motel in those Hawaiian shirts and they had machine guns and they were tracking you and Bob and I yelled at them and they turned and they started shooting and I started shooting and then the guys from the back of the building got into it and we shot the shit out of them. Too late for Bob, he went down right away, but the guy on the left, my left, I think he was supposed to take you down and I got lucky and hit him and then everybody opened up . . . It was a war out here. Their guns: they had these old MAC-10s with thirty-round mags and they kept pulling the triggers, even while they were going down. I can’t believe you were only hit once. I think they were watching you two . . . you and Bob, and didn’t know about the rest of us. They were in the motel, their room was set on fire with gasoline, like on that boat, the Mako. We’re in there now, trying to figure it out, who they are and where they came from. Neither one was carrying an ID.”
“They’re not Romano’s guys?”
“Romano said he never saw them before. I almost believe him, but then . . . we were going through the place, we found that black box, it was empty, but there was a floor safe with maybe a half-million dollars in it, all small bills, wadded up . . . and some more money in back we haven’t counted yet, but a lot. We’ve got their computers, it looks like they’ve got their books on them. Anyway, I told the guys to check the dumpster in the back and they found what I gotta believe is one of the containers from the heroin pickup off the coast.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Like the Coast Guard guy said, a pipe a couple of feet long, fourteen inches in diameter. It’s got a five-pound scuba weight attached with a hose clamp. Black PVC pipe.”
“So we got them.”
Weaver looked away. “Romano said he never saw that pipe, either. Bianchi says the same thing and they actually seemed kinda . . . confused. We put the pipe in front of Bianchi and he said he had no idea what it was and he looked like he really didn’t. The thing is, finding that pipe was awful convenient. They should have gotten rid of it months ago. Should have thrown it out the car window into a ditch, or into the ocean, not dropped it in a dumpster behind their store.”