The soupy, stink-riddled mist had dissipated enough for a few of the gang members to clear their watering eyes and follow the trail Caitlin blazed toward the thick congestion of houses and yards. She shot two, and then a third, in rapid succession, all shots aimed low, for the legs, since incapacitating the bangers was as good as killing them, under the circumstances. More followed those three, and then still more, until Caitlin felt she’d entered some crazed video game, she was clacking off so many shots.
Everything was going just fine until a police helicopter sweeping overhead blazed its spotlight down over the scene. The beam pierced what was left of the thick, soupy vapor and exposed her for all to see. A dozen bangers, maybe, left to give chase. More bullets needed than she had left in the magazine, Caitlin thought, as they struggled against their own retching to sweep their weapons around.
The police chopper was hovering directly over them, its spot as big as an oversize truck tire, carving a cone-shaped ribbon of light into the night. Caitlin aimed her SIG up toward it, instead, and clacked off three shots. A poof sounded, as the big bulb exploded and a shower of glass rained down onto the remaining gang members, slowing them up enough for Caitlin to continue dragging Diablo Alcantara into the dark cover of a yard adjoining a pair of multifamily houses.
Her back slammed into the frame of an aboveground swimming pool sturdy enough to steal her breath, just as Alcantara regained enough of his senses to try to wrench himself free of her grasp and then to launch an elbow backwards. It struck Caitlin in her left cheek, rattling her jaw and smacking her teeth against each other.
Alcantara managed to tear free, but instead of running, he launched himself at her, so enraged that his one functioning eye looked ready to bulge out of his head. Caitlin tried to bring her gun back around, only to have him knock it from her grasp. She tried to snatch it out of the air, then heard a plop as it smacked the pool water, which looked like a pocket of refined oil shining in the night.
Alcantara came at her again, and Caitlin realized he’d never gone anywhere at all—he was latched to her by a watchband that had become ensnared in her denim shirt. The shirt was soaked with perspiration and dappled with vapor spots that dragged the rancid stench with them. Alcantara fired a jab-like blow, which she managed to deflect. But his next strike landed in the side of her neck.
Caitlin shrugged off the stinging pain just in time to duck under the next blow and shoulder him hard into the aboveground pool. Her intention was to spill Alcantara over into the water, but the impact buckled the framing and, instead, unleashed a torrent of water from a tear she’d cut in the liner. Its force separated and pushed both of them backwards, Caitlin feinting one way and then launching a palm strike from the blind spot created by the marble-sized fake eye wedged into his eye socket, straight into his nose.
Bellowing in pain and blowing out a torrent of blood from his nose to match the water still cascading around him, Alcantara barreled in toward her, his one working eye as big as an eight ball. Caitlin let him get close—close enough that he practically rammed that big eye straight into the thumb she plunged forward and twisted.
Caitlin had never heard a scream as deep and as shrill as Alcantara’s. She grabbed hold of both his shoulders when he sank to his knees, and began dragging him toward the side street parallel to J Street, where the bangers had gathered. The fight had stripped her cologne-soaked bandanna free. The stench and bite of the old Ranger’s skunk-stench concoction pushed tears from her eyes.
Caitlin could barely see when she reached the side street. Sirens were screaming everywhere, and bright lights poured through the haze that had settled before her vision.
“Stop right there!” an SAPD uniformed officer screamed at her, pistol trembling in his hand instead of steadying on her. “Stop, or I’ll shoot you dead!”
5
HOUSTON, TEXAS
“I’m sure you understand my position, Mr. Masters,” Julia De Cantis, head of the Village School, said, from behind a desk that seemed much too large for her.
“I don’t think I do, ma’am,” Cort Wesley told her, fidgeting anxiously in the easy chair. The color of its leather had apparently been selected to match the wood tones of both the desk and the impressive array of bookshelves, which looked ready to swallow the room.
“Call me Julia, please. Everyone does, even the students.”
“I still don’t understand your position, Julia.”
De Cantis started to lean forward, then stopped suddenly, as if hit by a force field separating Cort Wesley’s space from hers. Outside, the early morning sun seemed to twinkle off the dew-rich grass of the school’s spacious twenty-eight-acre grounds. There was no one about yet, except a few of the boarding students out jogging. Fortunately, Cort Wesley’s son Luke wasn’t among them; he had no idea of his father’s presence here, and would have forbidden it if he had known.
“While it is customary for rising junior students to select their own roommates, the issue of your son boarding with Zachary Russo presents the school with several issues.”
“Keep talking, Julia,” Cort Wesley prodded, after De Cantis had stopped, as if that were the end of things.