Decker heard more words, muffled and faint, and he realized these were coming from outside his own head, not inside. “Lieutenant! Lieutenant!” It was Fireplug, crouching against the foyer’s inside wall. “Hang on — I’m coming to get you.” Decker held up a hand to stop him, but Fireplug was already scuttling across the room, and Decker felt strong hands gripping the shoulder straps of his vest, then felt himself being dragged backward, back toward the front door. “Holy fuck,” Decker heard Fireplug say. Just before the wall blocked his view, Decker managed to turn his head and catch a quick glimpse through the doorway and into the room beyond.
“Holy fuck,” Decker echoed.
The man was still seated in the recliner, arms dangling. The man no longer had hands. The man no longer had a head.
The woman was screaming — again, or still? Decker didn’t know which. Her shrieks filled the air, piercing the smoke that clouded the rooms, piercing the haze that clouded Decker’s brain.
* * *
Decker winced as he eased his butt onto the low wall at the end of the garage, leaning back gingerly against the suspect’s house. Inside, the bloodcurdling shrieks continued — emanating, E.J. had reported, from a pair of stereo speakers. A goddamn recording, Decker had realized the moment E.J. had relayed this information. A trick. A trap. A lure. And Decker had gobbled down the bait, the hook, the line, and the sinker. In the distance, as if answering the screams, two sirens — no, three — wailed louder as they approached.
Decker took inventory of his aches. Ringing ears. A couple sore ribs, cracked or possibly broken; maybe a mild concussion, too. And an oozing puncture wound in his right deltoid, where the sliver of splintered wood had burrowed into him. One of the sirens was probably an ambulance, but Decker was damned if he’d leave the scene except under his own steam, with his own team. The bomb squad was on the way, too, or would be soon, but they moved slow; Kevin’s team had even more crap to carry than the SWAT team did.
God, he thought suddenly, almost sick with fear. Kev. Please not Kev. Please let Kev be off today.
* * *
The bomb squad’s truck lumbered into the driveway. Decker stood, and the instant he saw the driver’s face — his brother Kev’s face — he knew that his prayer had been ignored.
The truck lurched to a stop and Kevin Decker—“Boomer,” to his bomb-squad colleagues, “Kev” to his big brother Brian — leaped out and ran to him. “Jesus, Bry, you okay?” Before Decker could answer, Boomer wrapped him in a hug. Decker grunted from the pain in his ribs, and Boomer released him. “Shit, you’re hurt?”
“It’s nothing. Bruised ribs. But my head hurts like a sonofabitch.”
Kev sniffed Deck’s face and hair. “Bang head, I bet,” he said.
“I don’t remember whacking it on anything.”
“Not a banged head,” said Kev. “Bang head. I get it all the time.”
“What the hell’s bang head?”
“A nitroglycerin headache,” Boomer explained. “Means the device was dynamite. Nitroglycerin — the explosive in dynamite? — makes blood vessels dilate. You can get a headache just from handling the stuff, absorbing it through the skin. The fumes are the worst, though — they go up your nose, into the capillaries, and straight to your brain.” He frowned at the house. “Guess that means I’ve got a vise-clamp headache with my name on it waiting for me in there, too, huh?” He looked back at Decker. “God, I’m glad you got out okay. Sounds like a close one.”
“Closer than I liked.”
From inside the bomb-squad truck came a series of short, sharp barks. Kevin’s head snapped around. “Izzy. Quiet,” he commanded. The barks were replaced by high-pitched whines. “Izzy.” Izzy, named after a character on Miami Vice, was Boomer’s dog, a big German shepherd whose job — whose passion; whose very reason for living — was sniffing out explosives. Until recently, the bomb squad had relied mainly on a robot, which sounded great but worked like crap, always getting stuck or running out of battery power, requiring somebody to go in and retrieve it. The robot was so unreliable, in fact, that Decker’s SWAT team — the ones generally tapped to go fetch the malfunctioning machine — had acquired a nickname that was all too accurate: the “Robot Rescue Team.” Decker generally hated seeing the robot get hauled out and sent in; today, though, he would welcome it.
“You starting with R2D2?” he said hopefully.
“Nah. If there’s already debris, the robot would get snagged for sure. Faster and better to go right in with Izzy.”
“How’s his nose today?”
“Awesome. As always.”
Decker gave Kev’s shoulder a squeeze. “Y’all be careful in there.”
Kev nodded reflexively, but he didn’t answer, and Decker noticed that his brother looked distracted, as if he were listening to something other than the words of brotherly love and caution. “Is it true? The guy’s still sitting in there?” Decker nodded. “Head blown off? No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Good,” snapped Boomer, with a vehemence that surprised Decker. “I just wish he’d died slower. Sick son of a bitch.”
“Hey, now,” Decker said. “Don’t make it personal. Forget about me; forget about him. Just do your job. What’s that thing you’re always saying, about how the dog knows when you’re off kilter?”
“What, ‘The dog is only as good as the handler’?”
“No, the other thing you’re always saying.”
“Oh, you mean ‘Shit flows down the leash’?”
Deck nodded. “Yeah. That. You stay focused in there, so Izzy can, too.”
* * *
Shit flows down the leash. The words were stuck in Decker’s mind now, replaying like a broken record. Like a premonition. Or maybe, he preferred to think, like a mantra, a message he was sending to Kev via brother-bond ESP.
He pictured the dog sniffing its way around the walls of the foyer and toward the blasted den; pictured Kev casting furtive glances over his shoulder at the headless, handless corpse slumped in the La-Z-Boy. Shit flows down the leash, bro, he messaged. Keep your head in the game.
Decker couldn’t stand it. Ducking under the crime-scene tape Fireplug had stretched across the front sidewalk, he climbed the stairs and positioned himself in the open front door. The interior still reeked of explosives, though the smoke had dissipated. Boomer and Izzy had made it halfway across the foyer by now, working their way along the front wall of the house, when suddenly the dog’s head snapped up and he stood on his hind legs, his front paws on the wall, his nose homing in on something. Decker leaned in and saw a dark smear on the wall. Blood, Decker thought, touching his shoulder. My blood. Did the dog know the blood was Decker’s? Could he smell the kinship with Kevin? Hell, yeah, he thought. Blood brothers. Brother’s blood. Thicker than water. For sure he knows it’s mine. “Leave it,” he heard Kev say, saw Kev give the leash a twitch. “Keep working.” The dog resumed snuffling, following the baseboard around the room, to the doorway of the den. “Good boy,” Kev praised. “Good work.”
The dog disappeared through the doorway, into the den, and Kev followed, a leash-length behind. The den would be a bigger challenge for them to check and clear, Decker knew. For one thing, it was a bigger, more complex room, with chairs and tables and lamps and other mangled furniture, plus the smells and soot from the SWAT team’s flash grenade and the dead guy’s dynamite. Then there was the stink of the dead guy himself — seared flesh and vaporized hair and leaked-out shit and piss — not to mention the creepy presence of the guy, too. Despite the lack of eyes, or even a head, for crissakes, Decker somehow imagined the dead guy watching, tracking Boomer and Izzy as they made their way along the wall. “Check,” Decker heard his brother say in a low voice every few seconds, and even at a distance — even through the residual ringing in his ears — Decker could hear the strain in his brother’s voice. C’mon, Kev, he messaged. Focus.
Suddenly he heard the dog yelp with pain and fear — fear, from a creature trained to hu
rl himself without hesitation at a 250-pound thug. A split-second later, he heard Boomer shout, “No!” Decker braced for a blast, but there was none; only shrieks from both the dog and the man.