Page 50 of The 24th Hour

Joe yelled, “Everyone down!”

The bullet had hit Officer Devon Brown, who was standing just to Joe’s left side. Blood spouted from Brown’s left thigh as he dropped.

The van pulled up, blocking the cars in the driveway. Whalen got out, wove between the cars, put his arm around Brown’s shoulders, and helped him into the van’s passenger seat.

Whalen said to Brown, “We’ll get you some help, Dev.”

“All I need is a Band-Aid,” said Brown.

Joe stood behind an open car door, using it as a shield. He was searching the canyon with his eyes, looking for the shooter, when Bao ran out of the house to where he stood.

Joe turned to Bao thinking she didn’t look right. Her eyes were red and there were raw spots on the backs of her hands. She smelled of smoke.

“What happened, Bao?”

She said, “I was doing a cursory check of the computers while Jamieson cleared the house. Joe. Those guys were selling drugs. Online. Mail delivery. The house is full of courier envelopes. There were two pill presses in the spare room. Binding chemicals. Plastic bags. The works.”

“Anything on Apocalypto?”

“I was moving fast but I saw nothing but lists and addresses and ledgers of receipts. No ransomware. No hospital anything. These are not our guys.”

CHAPTER 64

JOE LIFTED BAO’S right hand and then looked at the right side of her neck.

“What happened to you? Are you burned?”

“One of those guys just appeared, Joe, I don’t know from where. Next thing I know, he’s at the stove and there’s a frying pan on the burner. He turned on the gas and dumped the grease onto the burner and the fire got a good start. I’m okay, but it could have been worse. I smothered the flames with wet dish towels. Jamieson got the curtains out of the way and the guy ran out the back door.”

Joe asked Bao, “Do you see the guy here?”

As Whalen and Lipari stuffed the modern-day drug dealers into the van, shackled them, checked them, checked again, Jamieson jump-started a rusted Ford sedan in the driveway.

“Dev, hold on to me,” he said to the injured cop as he transferred him from the van to the Ford and headed out to the hospital with him. As the used car lot in front of the house thinned, Bao saw a flash of red in the nearby canyon.

She said, “Look,” as the red flash disappeared behind a rock.

“That’s the guy who set the fire,” Bao said. “That’s him.”

Joe pulled Bao down to the ground just as the guy showed his gun and fired. Joe returned fire and hit the shooter, who howled in pain.

Joe ordered the uniforms into the woods, but they returned to the blue house empty-handed.

Joe said, “Damn. He didn’t get away, did he?”

Lipari said, “We identified ourselves loud and clear. But this dude ran behind the house. There’s a drop-off back there and the ground was muddy. Look.” Lipari showed Joe his mud-caked shoe sole.

“So the jackass slipped. Cafferty and I ran to the edge. Jackass grabbed on to a root about twenty feet down the slope. We couldn’t reach him. We got hold of a good branch to lower down to him, and by then it was pouring. Guy calls out to God, slips, hitting rocks and roots and whatever on his way down.”

Joe said, “Is he alive?”

“Doesn’t look like it. He’s motionless. I yelled. Told him to hang on, we’d come get him. He didn’t answer. I think he broke his neck. He lost his gun near the top of the slope. We have it and his wallet. His name is Keith Ballantine.”

“Can’t leave him there,” Joe said.

He got back on the phone with Steinmetz, told him he needed a search-and-rescue team. “We need it now.”

Joe said to Steinmetz, “We have to retrieve the guy who got away. He attacked Director Wong and then fired on us, hitting Officer Brown, who’s on the way to the ER. Theshooter slid down a steep canyon beyond reach. Alive or dead, I want to bring him in.”

---