“He’s ringing the doorbell now,” McElroy narrated. “Front door’s opening.” Led Zeppelin’s volume ratcheted up a notch. “I see the suspect. Talking to pizza guy. Pizza guy’s going inside. Door’s closing.” The music softened and blurred again.
“Can you hear anything?”
“Nah. The music’s drowning ’em out.”
Decker cursed their lack of gear. If they had parabolic microphones, McElroy would be able to pick up every word that was spoken, even from across the road. “Okay, keep watching, Mac. Tell me everything you see.”
“Roger that.”
Two faint songs later—“The Battle of Evermore” and “Stairway to Heaven”—Decker radioed Hackworth again. “Cap? Deck here.”
“Go ahead, Deck. What’s happening?”
“That’s the thing, Cap — nothing’s happening. Pizza guy’s been in there a long damn time.” Decker checked his watch. “Eight minutes. Shouldn’t take but two, three minutes to pay for a pizza, right? Five, tops.”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Hackworth said. “What if our guy couldn’t find his wallet? What if he’s writing a check, and the Domino’s dude has to get a license number? What if they’re just feeling chatty?”
“What if this creep swings both ways?” countered Decker. “What if he’s killing the pizza guy right now?”
“I never heard of a sex killer who went after women and men,” said Hackworth. “They like one or the other. Women, nine times out of ten. Anyhow, we got nothing on the suspect that suggests the pizza guy’s at risk.”
It wasn’t what Decker had wanted to hear, but it was what he’d expected to hear. He was pretty sure, even before he radioed, what Hackworth would say. He was also pretty sure, despite his chafing impatience, that the watch commander was right. A moment later, McElroy’s whisper proved it. “Lieutenant? Pizza guy’s coming out.” A minute later, the Bondo-patched, primer-splotched car was gone.
* * *
At three, Decker radioed Hackworth again. “Before you ask,” the captain said, “the answer’s no—we still don’t have the warrant. How much longer is the chain saw plan workable?”
“Not much. Thirty minutes, tops. There’s only an hour of daylight left. Besides, when’s the last time you saw a tree-trimming crew start work at four? That’s quittin’ time, boss.”
“Don’t give up on it,” said Hackworth. “We’ll get that warrant yet. Maybe you can take him down first thing in the morning. Wake him up with a chain-saw serenade — that might knock him off balance even more.”
“If we have to stay out here all night, Cap, tree branches might not be the only limbs we go after with the chain saw.”
“Ha. Steady on, Deck. You’ll know the second we’ve got the warrant. Stay sharp. And stay safe.”
* * *
When four o’clock came and went without the warrant, Decker sighed and shelved the tree-trimming plan, then gave the order to break out the night-vision gear — one rifle-mounted scope for each team leader and each sniper, plus one for McElroy. The scopes were big and heavy—1960s technology, military surplus leftovers from Vietnam — and the image they gave was grainy as hell. Still, grainy night vision was better than no night vision, when lives were on the line. Decker was constantly lobbying for newer, better gear, and constantly being shot down, but he owed it to his guys to try.
Things had remained quiet at the house; the rock music had stopped once the Led Zeppelin album ended, and a light had come on in a room at the back of the house, according to the rear spotter, Cody. Judging by the light’s random flickering — and the audio Cody could hear smatterings of — the suspect was watching the local news.
Decker’s two best options, as he saw it, were to storm the house sometime after Satterfield went to bed, or to sit tight till morning and send in the tree trimmers then. He hated the thought of waiting another fourteen hours, but he also hated the thought of sending a team into a pitch-black house to capture an ex-soldier, even with night-vision gear. Better to wait it out, much as he despised waiting.
He was just about to radio this assessment to Hackworth when his earpiece erupted. “Lieutenant! It’s Cody! I hear a woman in the back of the house — in the den or whatever that room with the big window is. She’s screaming her head off!”
“I’m hearing it, too, Lieutenant,” said McElroy. “She’s screaming bloody murder.” Even Decker could hear it: a series of shrieks that made his stomach lurch — shrieks that combined fear and pain like he’d never heard.
Decker snapped his fingers to get the attention of the emergency team. “Guys, let’s go!” he said. “Front door. Go go go.” He turned and pointed to one of the men. “E.J.,” he said. “You haul ass around back. When you hear us hit the front door, you put a flashbang through that big rear window.” He headed around the front corner of the house at a crouch, three of the men following close on his heels, as E.J. peeled off toward the back of the house.
Decker took the four front steps in two strides. “Fireplug, you ready?”
“Ready,” came the answer from one step behind him. Fireplug was a squat, burly former Marine; he carried the team’s forty-pound battering ram as easily as Decker could have carried a baseball bat.
“In five,” Decker counted, “four, three, two, one!” Fireplug had begun his windup on “three,” rotating his torso away from the door, swinging the battering ram like a pendulum. Then, as the arc reversed, he spun toward the door, his entire body — two hundred pounds of muscle and sinew — pivoting into the swing. The broad, flat head of the ram slammed into the knob, punching it through the wooden door and across the room to the opposite wall. The door crashed open and Decker scurried through, moving in a half crouch, the H&K submachine gun sweeping the room in tight arcs that tracked the direction of his gaze. He’d have felt safer with the short-barrel shotgun, but in a potential hostage situation, the shotgun’s swath of devastation was too broad and indiscriminate.
When Decker was two steps in, the foyer lit up as brightly as if a camera flash had just fired in the next room, and the house shuddered from the concussion of the flashbang — the stun grenade — that E.J. had thrown through the rear window, right on cue.
Without even having to think, Decker began mentally ticking off the seconds: one Mississippi, two Mississippi… If the suspect had been within ten feet of the stun grenade, the flash and the concussion would have blinded and stunned him, and Decker would have five seconds or so to find him and overpower him.
Three Mississippi. Decker risked a quick look through the doorway wher
e the flashbang had gone off, then withdrew his head swiftly, so he wouldn’t be exposed during the split second it took his brain to process the images his eyes had captured.
Four Mississippi. He’d glimpsed a wall-sized entertainment center filling one wall, the big TV shattered by the flashbang. Shredded curtains dangling beside the missing window. Five Mississippi. A human figure — a man! — sitting in a recliner in the center of the room. At six Mississippi, Decker made his move. “Police! Don’t move!” he shouted, pivoting into the doorway, the H&K up and trained on the seated figure.
Seven Mississippi: The fist of God slammed into Decker, knocking him back, hurling him across the foyer, slamming him against the front wall. Stunned but still running on reflex, he reset his mental stopwatch: One Mississippi, two Mississippi… The cadence seemed slow and irregular, he noticed with an odd, detached objectivity, as if he were somehow outside himself as well as inside. Gradually he became aware of a second voice in his head — this one his as well — shrieking, What the hell? Why did E.J. use two flashbangs instead of one? Then: Shit. That wasn’t a flashbang. That wasn’t us. That was him. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs, struggling to piece the fragments into a picture that would explain why he was lying here in a heap against the wall. Either the flashbang hadn’t fully incapacitated the guy — had it landed behind him? Did the recliner shield him? Or Decker had screwed it up — counting too slow, moving too slow, giving the guy time to recover? Time to recover and do what, though? Had he fired a weapon? Was Decker shot — thrown across the room by a bullet or a shotgun blast slamming into his vest? No, not a shot, he realized. A blast. An explosion. But what — a grenade? Not the flashbang, but a real one, a frag? “Fall back, fall back,” Decker shouted. “Take cover.”
He took inventory: I’m alive. I can see. He wiggled fingers. Toes. Everything seemed to be there, unless he was already feeling phantom pain in missing limbs. He glanced down, saw arms and legs where they belonged, still attached. A chunk of splintered wood, three inches long and a quarter-inch thick, jutted from his right deltoid. Decker reached across with his left arm — not easy to do, as bulky and confining as the flak jacket was — and gave an exploratory tug. A flash of pain seared his shoulder, but the wood slid out, wet and shiny with blood.