Point of Impact nf-5 Read online

  Somebody was listening on the radio, because Howard heard, “Don’t shoot him! Don’t shoot him! We’re on the way!”

  Howard tongued the radio’s off switch. He couldn’t turn off his mike, but he silenced the earphones. He didn’t need the distraction.

  He took a deep breath and let part of it out, held the rest, preparing for the shot. You never bluffed in a situation like this. He put his finger inside the guard and onto the trigger. Wouldn’t take much, just under three pounds, a nice, crisp pull, like breaking an icicle.

  “Don’t! Don’t kill me! Please!”

  Ziegler’s left hand came away from the maid, releasing her, and made a pushing motion toward Howard.

  “Come on, we can make a deal here! I’ll… I’ll give you my supplier! That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  The knife moved away from the maid’s neck. Ziegler hadn’t dropped it yet, but he was about to. His knife hand had already relaxed, and he had taken a half step away from his hostage.

  Howard let out another sigh, quieter this time. Thank you, Lord. That would have been all he needed, millions of teenage girls hating his guts for killing their screen idol. He’d dodged a bullet himself when that knife dropped—

  Somebody ran around the comer from outside and into the garage and fired a handgun twice, hitting the suspect square in the chest.

  Zeigler collapsed. The maid screamed and fell to the floor, onto her hands and knees, scrabbled for cover behind the muscle car.

  Instinctively, Howard spun toward the shooter, gun leading.

  It was Brett Lee.

  Lee quickly pointed his gun toward the ceiling, his other hand open and raised. “Easy, easy!”

  Howard said, “Why did you shoot, you fucking moron? He had dropped his weapon!”

  “Sorry. It looked like he was about to hurt the hostage.”

  “I thought you wanted him alive!”

  Lee didn’t say anything else. He put away his weapon.

  Howard shook his head, went to check on Zeigler. One in the heart, one in the upper chest, he’d be dead before the paramedics could get him to the ambulance. Shit!

  Howard stood, holstered his revolver, helped the crying hostage to her feet. “It’s all over, ma’am. You’re safe now.” He glared at Lee. Sweet Jesus.

  He heard the sound of helicopters moving in and swore under his breath. He was gonna take the vest off. No way he wanted the name “Net Force” to show up on the evening news after this fiasco.

  Commander Michaels would surely agree with that idea.

  More DEA agents boiled out of the house, guns waving around. Day late and a dollar short.

  What a snafu.

  Sweet Jesus.

  16

  Net Force HQ, Quantico, Virginia

  “So, the only lead we had to the dealer is cooling on a slab at the morgue in sunny L.A.?”

  “Yes, sir,” John Howard said. “Apparently to the regret of teenage girls everywhere.”

  “Jesus,” Michaels said.

  “My feelings exactly. My guess is, Mr. Lee of the DEA is going to have some tall explaining to do to his superiors.”

  Michaels shook his head. John Howard and Jay Gridley both looked at him as if expecting some wisdom, and he didn’t have any on tap. He said, “Well, at least our information helped the DEA beat the NSA to the target.”

  “Might have been better the other way,” Jay observed. “I kinda liked the Zee-ster’s movies myself. He had a certain style.”

  That the first part of Jay’s observation was a thought Michaels had already had didn’t make it sit any better. And while he’d seen the actor in a couple of movies and hadn’t been that impressed, dead was dead, and shooting somebody with his hands up was bad juju, no two ways about it. Especially a rich and famous somebody.

  He said, “Well, if you give folks a knife and they cut themselves with it, that’s their problem. The director can’t fault us for what DEA screws up. What is the deal with NSA and DEA, anyway? Some kind of ongoing bad blood?”

  Jay said, “Not that I know of. No more than any other interagency rivalry. CIA, FBI kind of thing. You get the ball, you don’t pass it, you shoot, even if we’re all on the same team.”

  “What about personal histories? Agent Lee and Mr. George go to competing schools? Sleep with each other’s girlfriends?”

  Jay looked surprised. “Hmm. Never thought of that.”

  “Maybe it’s not relevant to the situation, but why don’t you poke around a little and see what you can find. From our meetings, it doesn’t seem as if these two have any great love for each other, and I’d just as soon not get Net Force splattered with incidental mud if these two are going to keep throwing it at each other.”

  Jay nodded. “Good idea, boss. I’ll do that.”

  “Even though it’s primarily their problem, we can’t just wash our hands of it. We have to help them keep looking, and right now, all we’ve got is a dead movie star and a dead end.”

  “Not altogether,” Howard said. He grinned, showing bright teeth against his chocolate skin. “There is the matter of the recovered capsules. Unfortunately, they were near the end of their life span; the movie star could afford to buy them and let them go bad if he wanted, and by the time the DEA got the things to their lab, they were so much inert powder internally.”

  “Which doesn’t do us much good, does it?” Michaels said.

  “Well, sir, probably not. But while you’ll notice that the report says there were three of the capsules, that is actually in error.”

  Michaels looked at him, waiting.

  Howard reached out and dropped a purple cap onto his desktop.

  Jay grinned. “General! You swiped one?”

  “Liberated it,” Howard said. “It won’t do us any more good chemically than the ones the DEA’s got, but I figured what they could learn from four, they could learn from three.”

  Michaels picked up the cap and looked at it. “Doesn’t seem like it’s worth all the trouble, this little thing.”

  “Diamonds are small, too, boss, and so are wetware and lightware chips.”

  “Well, as it happens, we have a friend in the FBI lab who would like to get his hands on this,” Michaels said. “That way, at least we’d know as much as the DEA about what’s in it, for whatever that is worth. Maybe some rare herb found only in bouillabaisse served in a certain bad section of Marseilles, France.”

  “Sir?”

  “Sorry, General, it’s from an old spy comedy vid I once saw. But the regular FBI boys have a huge database and long memories, and their lab techs are second to none. Might be they could come up with something. I’ll run this past them and see what they can find. Good work.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And I was very happy not to see you on the news.”

  “I thought you might be,” Howard said.

  After Howard and Jay were gone, Michaels put the capsule into an empty paper clip box and stuck it into his pocket. Chain of evidence was no good, given how they’d come by it, but he was just looking for information. This whole mess was still the DEA’s bastard child, and the sooner he could get Net Force out of helping take care of it, the better. He’d drop by the lab and have a chat with the assistant section head, a man he knew from his field days. They could work something out.

  Malibu, California

  “Don’t take the Hammer,” Bobby said.

  Tad, whose last little hit of heroin was wearing off, frowned through the start of a headache. “Why not?”

  “Because I need you straight.”

  Tad grinned his lopsided grin.

  “Well, okay, relatively straight. We got problems.”

  “We’re rich and good-looking, how bad could it be?”

  Bobby smiled, but it vanished quickly. “The Zee-ster’s dead.”

  “No way! I just saw him. Gave him the caps from that last batch. He looked great. He can’t be dead.”

  “I got a contact in the police who says his body
’s in a big drawer at the new county morgue and the doctors are flipping coins to see who gets to slice and dice him. He’s past tense.”

  “Aw, geez, that’s too bad. I liked him. He knew how to party. What’d he do, wrap one of his cars around a tree? He never could drive worth a crap.”

  “He was shot twice in the heart by a DEA agent leading a drug raid on his mansion.”

  “Whoa. You’re shittin’ me.”

  “No. Storm and Drang put up a fight when the narcs kicked in the door. Word is, the Zee-ster’s house walls got more holes in’em now than a colander. Both bodyguards are shot half to pieces, too, but Storm will probably make it. Drang is still in surgery, and they don’t think he’ll survive, or if he does, he’ll be a big hamburger patty… he took a couple rounds in the head.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah, it’s awful and all, but stop and think about what that means. Why would the feds be going after the Zee-ster? He’s a user, not a dealer.”

  “He spreads it around some,” Tad said. “I mean, he did. Could be they caught somebody he ran with, they gave him up.”

  “Whatever. But this puts us in a kind of bad spot. We ran with him, too. Somebody might remember us.”

  “Remember me, you mean. You look like ten thousand other surfer dudes. Me, I kinda stand out.”

  Bobby waved that off. “The point is, we let ourselves get public with him more than we should have, because he was a movie star and cool and all. If he had the Hammer caps on him when they took him out of the game, they are gonna go over his background with a microscope… everywhere he went, everybody he saw. A guy like that can’t move in this town anonymously unless he wears a bag over his head, and Zeigler never was one to hide his pretty face. The cops and the feds will burn many shoe soles tracking every move the man made. Somebody will cover all of the trendy places where the Zee-ster liked to party.”

  Tad nodded.

  “All right, here’s what I want you to do. You search your memory and dig up every time you saw Zee in public, anywhere might have had a security cam lit. Get to those places before the feds or the local police do, get the recordings or wipe them or whatever.”

  “Yeah. I can do that.”

  “He never came here, and when I bought drinks or dinner, I paid cash, so there’s no e-trail on me. I’ve made up a list of the places where I went with him alone, or where you and him and me were. Add those to your list. Crowd he traveled with, they don’t know us well enough to send anybody here, hell, they were usually too stoned to know who they were, much less us, but vids are different. If we’re on a tape, a RAM drive or a DVD, that’s bad. If that’s gone, we’re clear.”

  Tad nodded again. “Yeah, I got it. Only a few places they might have captured images of us.”

  “We can’t do shit about some tourist who snapped a few frames of Zeigler while we were at Disneyland or the beach or whatever, but the feds probably won’t find them, either. I think we can ride this out, we do it right.”

  “I wonder how they did figure out to go for him?”

  “He fucked up. He liked to brag about doing five girls at a time while he was on the Hammer, and like you said, he passed out dope to the people around him like it was chewing gum. Doesn’t matter how they found him. What matters is, they don’t find us.”

  “I hear that.” Tad had no desire to finish out his little remaining time on earth in a cell. He’d punch his own ticket before he’d let that happen.

  “So we’re on vacation for the next couple months,” Bobby said. “No production, no deliveries, we are shut down. Maybe we’ll go to Maui, drive the crooked road out to Hana, kick back on the black sand beach and watch the girls awhile.”

  Tad nodded absently. “Yeah.” But what he was thinking was, he had Thor’s Hammer in his pocket, the last one Bobby had made, and it still had a few more hours of shelf life left. If he didn’t take it, it was going to go to waste, and Bobby wasn’t gonna be making any more until he felt safe.

  Tad might not have a couple months left in him, you never could tell.

  Should he take it? He and Bobby hadn’t spent that much time with the Zee-ster out in public. Half a dozen spots in the last couple of months, no more, and most places didn’t keep vid records more than a day or two, maybe a week, before they recorded over the old stuff. He could shave it close, check out the first few places, drop the cap, and finish the last few before it came on full blast. And even after it came on, he could maintain enough to take care of the security stuff, he was pretty sure. For a couple hours, anyway.

  There was some risk, sure, but what the hell, he didn’t have much to lose, did he?

  There was one other possibility, something he hadn’t ever tried, but he’d held in reserve, just in case something happened to Bobby before it did him. He could let the cap croak, clean up the security cam stuff, and head out to the islands with Bobby. Then, in a week or two, he could find some reason to split with Bobby for a couple days. Tell him he was gonna go camp out by the Sacred Pools or something — Bobby hated camping — then catch a flight back to L.A.

  He’d been with Bobby a long time. And while he wasn’t in Bobby’s league as a chemist, he knew a fair amount about drugs. He had managed, over the time they’d been dealing the Hammer, to be around Bobby at one point or another during every step of the creation and blending of the ingredients for the drug. Yeah, he didn’t even know what they all were, but he knew where to find the powders and how much to use of each.

  He wasn’t a genius like Bobby, he couldn’t create the stuff from scratch, no way. But while not everybody could create a major symphony from nothing, like Mozart, a whole lot of people could play the sucker if they had the sheet music. Tad knew Bobby’s routine; he’d watched it, memorized it, and he could do that much. Ma and Pa out in the RV had all the stuff for Thor’s Hammer, neatly stored in little bottles. He could pay them a visit. They’d never think twice about it. He’d collected the stuff for Bobby several times.

  Of course, when Bobby found out, he’d be pissed, so maybe Tad might have to eliminate Ma and Pa, torch the RV, and hope Bobby would blame it on rival dealers or the law. Then again, maybe Tad wouldn’t be around when Bobby found out. The hole he had to climb out of each time was deeper and deeper. One day, he’d hit the bottom and not be able to make it back, and that was gonna be sooner rather than later.

  It was something to think about.

  “You gonna sit there staring into space all day or what?”

  “Huh. Oh, yeah. I’m going. I need to, uh, freshen up a bit, then I’m good.”

  “Fine. Do what you need to do, but don’t get pulled over for a ticket or whatever, be careful, okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, don’t worry.”

  “I have to worry, Tad, for the both of us.”

  Tad headed for the bathroom and another hit of the Mexican white. As he walked, he fingered the capsule in his watch pocket to make sure it was still there. As long as he took care of business, what could it hurt to take it? It would be a crime to just waste it.

  And even if he did take it, a few weeks from now he could still come back to L.A. And if he skipped the final step when he mixed the stuff, left out adding the self-destruct catalyst, the resulting caps maybe wouldn’t be quite as potent, but they wouldn’t go bad, either. He could take one every day until it killed him, and that wouldn’t be the worst way to go out, now would it?

  He smiled at himself in the bathroom mirror.

  It was like looking at a grinning skull.

  Drayne was pissed off at himself. He knew better than to associate with people he dealt to, he knew better. He’d talked to a lot of dope dealers over the years, had wrangled access to a lot of FBI files via his father, without the old man knowing, of course, and he’d learned a whole lot about the biz before he had ever sold his first pill.

  The upside of things were big bucks and big thrills. Dopers who were smart made fortunes, and they got to make the assorted varieties of cops look stupid while they di
d it. Big money, big rushes, the thrill of victory, and all that green to feed the machine.

  There was a downside, of course. Stupid dopers could get killed by a rival dealer. Or ripped off and maybe killed by a customer. Or busted and sent to the graybar hotel for twenty years on a heavy federal rap. Or busted by the local yokels. Lot of minefield in the illegal trade, and you couldn’t complain to the cops if somebody pointed a gun at you and stole your dope or your money.

  The thing was, if you were a dealer, and if you did it long enough, and if you didn’t move around a bunch while you were doing it, you were sooner or later going to get caught. Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of dealers who stayed in the biz for more than a few years in one place eventually got nailed. Sometimes it was a distributor who gave ‘em up, sometimes it was an ex-wife or girlfriend, sometimes the cops found’em on their own.

  Once you got a lot of cash in your hands, it sometimes made you stupid. You bought expensive, flashy toys, you got to thinking because you were rich you were invincible, and just like Zeigler, all your money didn’t mean squat when the bullets started to fly. You couldn’t take it with you.

  So Drayne had always kept a low profile. No yachts, no car that couldn’t be leased by half of L.A. No bodyguards with muscles and bulges under their jackets to make people wonder who you were who needed bodyguards. Absolutely minimal risks in sales, delivery, taking on new customers. Never more stuff in the house than necessary. Nobody knew what he did except for three people: Tad and the old couple who drove the RV. Tad would never give him up, and Ma and Pa Yeehaw were lifetime criminals who would go down with guns blasting before they let themselves be taken. If not, he’d have them bailed out and gone before the feds knew what they had.

  Not perfect, no ironclad guarantees, but he had been very careful. Until he got sucked into the glitz of Zeigler’s movie-star circles. Even then, Drayne had stood in the back on the Zee-ster’s coattails, and what the hell, it had been fun, watching every door open in front of them, women falling all over themselves to get close to them, and the reflected feeling of celebrity.