Now Jason said, “Pellafino is asking the chief about you, what you’re doing here. He knows about Harkenbach. He says he’s got some friends in Shadow Canyon that got ‘caught up’ in this, he’s trying to figure out what they should do. It’s obvious these friends of his are Coltrane and his brat.”
“What did Esterhaus say to him?”
“He wasn’t discreet. He called you an egg-sucking snake and an arrogant piece of shit. Just so you know.”
“Thanks for sharing.”
“He also said you’re a sleazeball and that the rest of us are your clown posse.”
“You feel the need to tell me all this—why?”
“He also told Pellafino that the collective IQ of your entire team is eighty. That hurt. That cut deep, man. I don’t like that kind of nasty shit. He’s a cracker-town parking-patrol flatfoot who’s not ten percent as smart as he thinks he is. My IQ alone is one hundred seventy.”
Falkirk figured that 170 was as much of a lie as the nickname “Foot-Long.”
“What I think,” Jason continued, “is that wherever Coltrane and his brat jumped to from the Bonner house, they’re now back in this timeline, and they’re hiding out at Pellafino’s place.”
Having reached that conclusion even before he’d been told that Esterhaus had called him an egg-sucking snake, Falkirk said, “You have the address?”
The hacker gave it to him. “Coltrane has the key to everything, so we’ll have to ghost our way inside and come down on him like a ton of bricks before he knows we’re there, blow off the fucker’s head before he can port.”
Jason Foot-Long Frankfurt was a workstation keyboard guy who spent every operation on his ass, but he seemed to half believe he was a boots-on-the-ground participant when he said “we” and “our” and talked tough about blowing people’s heads off.
“So,” he continued, “you want us to haunt the street, quietly slide the neighbors out of collateral-damage distance?”
When a building harbored a heavily armed lunatic or a cluster of terrorists, with the likelihood that hundreds or even thousands of rounds of deep-penetrating ammunition might be expended and pass through the walls of nearby homes, neighbors were often secretly extracted through back doors and side exits before a hard-core SWAT assault was launched against the structure. Although this usually could be done without alerting the targets about what was coming, there was always a possibility of doing just that. In this case, because Coltrane had the key and could port out of this world with as little as a twenty-second warning, they could not take the chance that he or his daughter or this Charles Pellafino might look out a window at the wrong moment and see an evacuation taking place.
Anyway, Jeffrey Coltrane didn’t have an arsenal, at most merely a single pistol that he’d bought years earlier. The firefight, if it occurred, would be one-sided and brief. Maybe this Charles Pellafino had a gun, being a former cop, but that was only one more shooter to worry about, and he wasn’t likely to be armed with a fully automatic carbine with a drum magazine. Falkirk’s crew would do reconnaissance and then hit the residence suddenly and hard. In less than a minute, maybe a lot less, there would be three dead—Coltrane, Pellafino, and the girl—and the key to everything would be his.
“You just sit tight,” he told Jason. “I’ll organize the hit.”
Falkirk terminated the call and brooded for a minute or two as Louis Wong piloted the Suburban on a random tour of town, waiting for instructions.
Before Falkirk seemed to lie a one-lane straight-as-a-ruler highway to success.
There were only two wild cards.
He had already figured out that the Edwin Harkenbach who’d shot him was not the Ed of this world, but a version from elsewhere.
And the Michelle Coltrane who’d been with the physicist had not been the woman who walked out on her family seven years earlier. She also was from elsewhere.
Evidently, the Ed from elsewhere was engaged in matchmaking or was trying to do one small good thing to atone for all the damage he had otherwise inflicted on multiple worlds. Or maybe his motive was something else altogether. Who knew how the hell the old guy’s mind worked? In Falkirk’s estimation, most geniuses were idiots with one special talent, and they made less sense than the people whom they thought less intelligent than themselves.
Regardless of his motivation, the Ed from elsewhere had been scouting out the Coltranes on this world and probably on others.
After being surprised by Falkirk and shooting him, Harkenbach and the bitch ported back where they came from. Most likely, they were shaken by what happened and would be hesitant to come here again
anytime soon.
But there was no guarantee. They might already be back in this version of Suavidad Beach, trying to find Coltrane and his daughter.
That was not necessarily a bad thing. It meant that there were now two keys to everything in this timeline, the one possessed by Coltrane and the one used by the Ed from elsewhere.
Falkirk would be satisfied with either key. However, if by some stroke of luck, he wound up with two, with his adversaries dead to the last, all the trouble that he’d been through would be worth it twice over.
As they cruised along Forest Avenue, he placed a call to Lucas Blackridge, his SWAT specialist, and discussed the takedown of the Pellafino house.
77