The bodies of four armed and very dangerous men were sprawled around the front room. The tac team had done the job they were trained to do. They’d done it by the book.
Bullet holes pocked the walls, and blood had spattered and sprayed and was pooling on the floor.
A half dozen automatic rifles lay on the floor under the windows, along with many open boxes of ammo. And something unusual was on the kitchen table. It was like a metal tube about five feet long, with a scope, a muzzle, a handgrip, and a butt end that was meant to brace against a shoulder.
I’d never seen one before, but I knew a portable missile launcher when I saw it. I was pretty sure it had a range of three miles and was used to take down aircraft.
Two thoughts slammed together in my mind. These men who had been after me since the day of the crash were arms dealers.
Were they involved in what had happened to WW 888?
Counting casualties on the ground, 430 people had been killed in that crash. Had these men taken part in that unspeakable horror?
I turned back to the array of dead men lying shot to pieces in this shabby room. I walked from one to the other, getting an angle on their faces, looking for the one who had made me his personal target, the one who’d leveled his gun at my head last night.
And then I saw him at the far end of the room near the bedroom doorway. After he’d been shot, he’d slid down the wall into a sitting position on the floor and had left a long, wide smear of blood behind him. His head and shirt were entirely bloodied, and his arm and shoulder had taken bullets in several places.
I moved closer. By God, I wanted to be sure.
The man’s closed eyes were widely spaced and there was a thin scar across his chin.
This was the son of a bitch who’d tried to kill me.
I wanted him dead. But I wanted to talk to him even more. I leaned down and grabbed his shot-up arm, hoping he would scream, hoping he was faking it. I got nothing. No scream, no taunts, no answered questions.
But I swear, the way his lips were set in death, he was still smirking.
I released his shoulder and he toppled, dead weight falling sideways onto the floor.
I was still staring at his body when Conklin called my name. He was on the phone. He said to me, “Wang’s on the line. They’ve got that waiter guy, Henry Yee. He’s in custody.”
CHAPTER 69
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after the takedown on Stockton Street, we were still cleaning up the mess and trying to get answers.
Chi was recovering from surgery and in stable condition. Two pedestrians had been hurt, a woman and her young daughter who had been hit by the spray of gunfire when the men in the apartment opened up on the street.
The press was all over us. It didn’t matter that the shots that had injured the passersby had been fired by criminals. The fallout was all on the SFPD.
Under pressure, Jacobi gave a press conference, saying that military-grade automatic weapons had been seized from apartment 3F at 1035 Stockton, but he didn’t mention the missile launcher and he didn’t take questions, saying only, “I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation.”
No documents or identification had been found on the dead men in 3F. There were also no fingerprint matches, and no one had come forward to claim the bodies. We had too many questions without answers, but we did have the sorry patsy, young Henry Yee.
Conklin and I were with Yee and his lawyer in our small, gray interview room. A camera rolled tape from a corner of the ceiling, and the observation room behind the glass was packed with high-level cops, including Brady, Jacobi, and our DA, Leonard Parisi.
Henry Yee was five feet tall, nearsighted, and pretty much lost. His lawyer, Ernest Ling, was a mild-mannered man who went by the street name of Daddy. Mr. Ling negotiated for Yee, and given Yee’s importance as a material witness, Parisi himself had agreed to drop the gun charge as long as we were satisfied with what Yee told us.
So far, we had established that Yee was twenty years old with two years of high school. He had two small-time drug arrests and no parents.
The lease for apartment 3F had passed to Yee when his mother died. And then, about a month ago, Yee had sublet the apartment to four men from China who paid him eight hundred dollars over the rent for him to sleep elsewhere. Yee worked as a waiter and dishwasher for Mei Ling Happy Noodles and had been sleeping in the storeroom. His subtenants hired him to bring them take-out and do occasional odd jobs. He also stopped by the apartment to change clothes.
Sometimes the four men joked around with him, and he also overheard some of their conversations. So he said.
Yee had been carrying a gun under his apron when Wang and Michaels snatched him up. He had no license to carry, and certainly no need for a gun in his job. The Colt .45 was a gift from his subtenants, and apparently, to Yee, it was a prize.
That gun had been lucky for us, too.