16

THE TOWN HOUSE COMPLEX was made up of forty-two separate houses in six brown-brick buildings, two ranks of three buildings each. The backs of the buildings faced each other across a rectangle of brown grass with three neglected swing sets and a large dirt square that might once have been a swimming pool.

Each building had a parking lot out front, and the lots were connected by driveways at the ends.

During the trap-baiting phase, Lucas, Bob, and Rae had sat with their working phones at the west end of the front lot, and hoped the killers, if they came, would have precise enough instructions that they would come to that corner.

Lucas was on the west end of the front lot and Rae was on the east end, eighty or ninety yards away. Bob was watching the back lots, in case the cartel people came in that way. The windows in the town houses were small. Other than the small windows, they were essentially surrounded by the concrete walls of commercial buildings across the street and down the street in both directions. If it came to shooting, there shouldn’t be any collateral damage.

They’d been waiting for an hour when Soto cruised by in the black Tahoe. Lucas couldn’t make out the driver and the truck kept going, took a right at the corner, and disappeared. Four or five minutes later, another black Tahoe went by—but Tahoes were common in Texas, so it might have been a different one. The second time, he noted the tag, which was from North Carolina.

Between the two Tahoes, a half dozen other cars passed the front of the complex, and two turned in, and the drivers went into their homes. One of the cars that went by was a maroon Ford Fusion, driven by Kort, who was trying to stay as light on her butt as possible. A motel cushion helped, as did the pain pills, but she was still tender. Her .223 sat on the floor of the backseat, covered with a black blanket. She didn’t see Lucas in the Jeep because he was lying well back, and he didn’t recognize her in the Ford.

The maroon Ford went by a second time, and Rae called Lucas and Bob on their shared radios: “I’m interested in the maroon Ford,” she said. “The woman inside seems to be looking at the town houses, even though she’s not turning in. This is the second time she’s done it.”

“I can’t see her face that well,” Lucas said. “I’m getting some sun off the windshield where I’m at.”

Bob said, “Well, I saw her turn at the corner up there, turn right and come down toward me, and then she turned right at my corner, and then turned right again at the end of the block, like she’s going in circles. Want me to drop in behind her if she comes around again?”

“I’ll do it,” Lucas said. “I looked her right in the face at Darling’s farm. I’ll recognize her if I see her again. That Ford’s been moving fairly slow, I’ll pass her and take a long look.”

—

THE FORD didn’t come back, not that they saw, until it was too late. The Tahoe came back, though, and turned into the front parking lot.

Lucas called Bob and Rae and said, “Rae, you see the black Tahoe?”

“Yeah.”

“I think that’s the third time that it’s been around. It for sure has been around twice in the last fifteen minutes.”

“All right. You gonna move on him?” she asked.

“Doing it now,” Lucas said. “Bob, you want to come over to this side?”

“On my way. Thirty seconds.”

Lucas would recognize either Soto or Kort, and they would recognize him, so he didn’t try to get too close to the Tahoe. As the driver parked it, Lucas pulled into a space fifty or sixty feet away, behind another car and a pickup. The Tahoe’s driver didn’t get out right away.

Rae was looking at the driver from the other end of the block, through a pair of Canon image-stabilized binoculars. “He’s just sitting there. All I can tell you is that he’s a short guy. His head doesn’t get to the top of the headrest. He has dark hair. Thin.”

“That could be him,” Lucas said. And, “I can’t see him. Keep me up on what he’s doing.”

Bob called: “I’m setting up at the end of the parking lot. Right behind that rug company van. You see me, Rae?”

“Gotcha. If he gets out and walks to the town house he’s in front of, you’ll be shooting right at me,” she said. “Don’t do that.”

“I will take care,” Bob said.

“Okay, he’s getting out,” Rae called. “There’s another car turning into the lot. I think he might have been waiting for it. Or maybe not.”

“Maroon Ford?”

“No, it’s one of those little cream-colored British Cooper things.”

Lucas saw the Mini Cooper pulling slowly into the parking lot, driven by a heavyset, bushy-haired man wearing black plastic-rimmed celebrity glasses. He was talking on his cell phone. Lucas had never seen the man before, but he could see a short man walking on the other side of the car. The Mini paused in exactly the wrong place, from Lucas’s point of view, and Rae called, “What do you think, Lucas?”

“I haven’t gotten a clear look at him . . .”

The Mini Cooper driver finally picked out a parking space and pulled away. The short man climbed a stoop at the front of a town house, rang the doorbell, and took a furtive look around, peering directly at Lucas without seeing him in the Jeep. Lucas called, “That’s him. That’s the guy.”

Bob called, “Coming in closer.”

Lucas: “Good, but keep an eye on the guy in the Mini. Don’t know what he’s doing.”

Rae: “I’m coming. Call it, Lucas.”

Lucas was climbing out of the Jeep, keeping as much of the vehicle between him and the man on the step as he could. He said to the radio, “I’m going to call him down.”

Bob: “The guy in the Mini has got keys out. I think he’s going up to that town house . . .”

Soto pushed the doorbell again and Rae said, “Lucas, wait just one . . .”

Lucas didn’t think he could and instead lifted his pistol and shouted “You! Stop! Federal marshals.”

—

SOTO TURNED toward him and his right hand dropped diagonally to the left side of his belt line: a concealed weapon. Lucas could sense Rae running in from the east side and Bob was coming from farther west, staying close to the front of the town houses where Soto wouldn’t be able to see him.

Lucas shouted: “Federal . . .”

And the town house door opened and a big man was standing there in a T-shirt and cargo shorts and Soto shoved him back and lurched inside.

Bob was still coming and Lucas screamed, “He’s inside, might come out the back. Bob, cover the back!”

Bob pivoted and ran hard toward the end of the building and a second later was out of sight. Lucas ran toward the still-open door and Rae was coming up with her M4 and Lucas got to the door and saw the man in the cargo shorts pressed against a closet door and Lucas shouted, “U.S. marshals, where is he?”

The man called, “Out the back, he’s got a gun . . .” and pointed, and Lucas and Rae went that way.

Lucas was at the back door and saw Soto a hundred feet away, angling toward one of the center buildings, and he shouted, “Stop! Stop!”

Soto kept going, then Rae leveled the M4 and Lucas said, “What?” and she fired a quick burst past Soto and into the brick side of the building behind him and Bob was coming and shouting, and Soto abruptly stopped and put his hands in the air. He had a pistol in one and hastily threw it on the ground.

Lucas called to the others, “Watch for another gun,” and Bob shouted, “Into the dirt, facedown, into the dirt.”

Soto, his hands above his head, knelt, then lowered himself facedown into the dirt. Rae had the rifle pointed at Soto’s head, and Lucas came up from the side, and then Bob was there with handcuffs. “Bring your hands down behind you, one at a time . . .”

He did and Bob cuffed him. A minute later, they’d taken another pistol off the short man, from an ankle holster, and a heavy switchblade from a side pocket. Lucas pulled Soto’s wallet out of a back pocket, took out a Florida driver’s license that said “Stanley Evans.”

Lucas looked at Soto and said, “Stanley Evans? Right.”

“He’ll be in the database,” Rae said.

“Scared the shit out of me when you opened up,” Lucas said to Rae. “I was afraid chunks of lead would be coming back at me.”

She shook her head: “Low penetration rounds. They hit that brick wall and turn into dust. Certainly would have chewed up ol’ Stanley, though.”

She looked at Soto, who said his first words: “Fuck you.”

Rae said to him, “Let’s go for a ride, Stan.”

—

KORT HAD TRAILED Soto to the town house complex, had checked the place out in two passes, finally agreed with Soto that he should go ahead and make the approach to the manager, whose apartment number they’d gotten from the town house complex’s website, along with a map of the complex.

She was a block behind when Soto turned into the parking lot, and she stopped on the side of the street, watching. He sat in the car for a couple of minutes, doing God knew what, then got out and walked toward an apartment door.

The rest of it happened like a bad dream: the cop from Darling’s place popped out from behind a car, pointing a pistol at Soto, and then she saw a tall black woman running across the parking lot carrying a black rifle, and she grabbed her phone but it was way too late and the whole thing was going up in smoke . . .

She’d been thinking about what Soto had said about giving everything up to the cops, to avoid the needle, and she felt the panic clutching at her throat. She’d never been arrested. Soto would give her up . . .

The big cop, Davenport, ran across the lot and disappeared into the town house like an actor in a silent movie, and the black woman went in behind him. Then she heard the shots . . . a machine gun, not Soto’s pistol. Was he dead? She put the car in gear and rolled toward the apartment complex . . .

—

THE MAN in the cargo shorts came out the back door and asked, “What happened?”

“Sorry about that,” Lucas said. Bob had Soto by one arm, Rae had him by the other, Lucas was off to the side. “We had a complicated situation out front and he managed to get to your door. Didn’t want to risk a shot with civilians around. Like you.”

“He doesn’t look all that tough,” the man said. He was built like a construction worker, thick arms with a Statue of Liberty tattoo on the right bicep, a heavy gut. “I coulda kicked his ass.”

“He is the worst man you’ll ever see in person,” Lucas said. “He might even be worse than anyone you’ll ever see in the movies.”

“No kiddin’?” The man was checking out Soto again.

“No kiddin’.”

Rae and Bob were walking Soto around the building, to the front parking lot, and Lucas hurried to catch up. Bob had his phone out and was talking to the Addison police, saying, “It would be helpful if we could have a crime scene person come by . . .” and a second later, with a hand covering the phone’s microphone, he called to Lucas, “They’ll have some cops here in five, crime scene guy in ten.”

Lucas said, “Okay.”

Rae was asking Soto, “Who were you trailing? We know you were trailing one of us, and thought it might be . . .”

They had come out from behind the building and were walking toward Lucas’s Jeep. They would handcuff Soto to one of the steel seat supports and take him to the lockup at the federal building, until they could arrange something more permanent.

At that moment, the maroon Ford stopped on the street and a woman got out of the far side of the car and looked toward Lucas and the other three and Lucas saw the gun coming up and screamed, “Down, everybody, get down . . .” and his gun was coming up and as they all dropped to the ground, the woman swept them with a burst from an automatic rifle, and Lucas was banging away at the car with his .45 and Rae was struggling to get the M4 off her shoulder and then the woman was in the car and speeding away. Lucas’s mag was empty and he dropped it and slammed in another and he turned and looked and Rae had her M4 up but wasn’t firing, and Bob had his pistol up . . .

The Ford made a turn at the corner and was gone. Lucas ran halfway to the Jeep, realized that a chase would be hopeless—the Ford was out of sight for too long, he’d have no idea of where she went in the tangle of streets around the airport. He stopped, said, “Goddamnit,” and turned and hurried back to the others to see if anyone had been hurt.

Bob was on the phone again, calling out a description, and said, “Then get me to nine-one-one . . . Wait a minute, I’ll dial from here.”

Soto lay flat on the ground, faceup, eyes open and fixed. Rae still had her gun up, looking out at the surrounding streets, shook her head as Lucas walked back, and then they both walked over and looked down at Soto. Rae said, “My God.”

Soto’s chest was soaked with blood. He’d been hit at least a half dozen times, Lucas thought. When he, Bob, and Rae had dropped to the ground, Soto had stayed upright, maybe thinking he could run out to the woman’s car. Not a good idea.

Bob was talking to a 911 operator, giving a description of the fleeing car and where it was last seen. Rae was staring at the body. “What the hell? What the hell was that?”

Lucas said, “She wasn’t shooting at us. She was taking out a guy who might talk.”

Rae squatted next to Soto and shook her head. The man in the cargo shorts came out the front door, a beer in his hand, and looked at them and said, “Oh, boy. That’s . . . Oh, boy.”

—

AFTER THAT, it was paperwork and long conversations with bureaucrats at SOG and with Forte in Washington, and local cops coming and going, and the crime scene guy picking up the dropped revolver and brass and measuring distances. The medical examiner’s van came and Soto’s body went away, and a crew from the fire department washed away a six-foot-wide blood puddle on the tarmac.

The local police hadn’t seen the shooter’s car, except when they saw too many of them: the Addison police department stopped eight cars of the right description, but said they could’ve stopped a hundred, or a thousand, if they hadn’t given up first.

By nightfall, they were mostly done with the routine, and Russell Forte called from Washington and said, “We got a quick hit on the fingerprints. His birth name was Marco Obregon, born in Miami, but he changed it to Marco De Soto, maybe to get out from under the other convictions. He’s got a rap sheet about a mile long—convicted on attempted murder and aggravated assault and simple assault, acquitted on one charge of murder, nolo’d on another, convicted on possession of a firearm by a felon, acquitted on a couple of drug charges. He was like a walking monument to the credulity of parole boards. He’s got an address in Coral Gables and an FBI is on the way there.”

“We need the name of the woman he was working with,” Lucas said.

“We’re going for that,” Forte said. “We haven’t seen anything yet—maybe the FBI guys will turn something up.”

—

BACK AT THE HOTEL, Lucas, Bob, and Rae changed clothes and then met in the bar and ate nachos and drank a few margaritas, and Rae said, “This has been an unusual day.”

“Your people giving you a hard time?” Lucas asked.

“Nothing like that—they’re more like excited. Wish-I’d-been-there stuff,” Rae said.

Bob asked Lucas: “This happen to you much?”

“From time to time,” Lucas said. “The weirdest thing about today was, we might have saved Garvin Poole’s life.”

Bob popped a handful of salted peanuts and said, “Didn’t think of that. But you’re right. As long as that woman doesn’t catch up to him. She’s the one I wouldn’t want to meet in the dark.”