Middle Of Nowhere

   The force of a ton of bricks hit Boldt's chest, knocking the wind out of him. He'd been shot.

   "Drop the weapons!" he heard LaMoia order through his wired teeth. A siren cried in the distance. "On the ground! Now! No one gets hurt!" his sergeant shouted. They had two witnesses to Pendegrass's mention of Sanchez: Boldt and LaMoia. Even if other charges failed, they had all three on assaulting police officers, attempted murder and deadly force.

   Boldt felt down and determined he'd been hit in the vest, not flesh. It didn't feel that way. His breathing was labored, he couldn't speak.

   The phosphorus died down, hissing like a winded runner, and Boldt could see again.

   Smythe was down, fatally wounded—Riorden's doing, not LaMoia's. In testimony it would come out from Riorden that he and Pendegrass had in fact intended to kill both Boldt and Smythe, just as Boldt had guessed. Boldt for obvious reasons; Smythe for his stupidity and greed.

   Pendegrass lay bleeding, passed out against the car, the fallen videotape just out of his reach, his fingers still stretching for it.

   LaMoia, soaked through with sweat, kept his weapon aimed at Riorden's back. The man was leaning spread out flat against the wall of the house, bleeding from his left arm. "You got him?" LaMoia inquired, indicating Pendegrass.

   "I've got him."

   "It's a mess."

   "Yes, it is," Boldt agreed.

   LaMoia hopped out of the trunk, walked over to Riorden and placed the barrel of the weapon against the base of the man's skull. "The location of the Denver video," he said ominously.

   "John," Boldt complained, "that's not how to do it."

   "We did this your way, Sarge. We do this other thing my way." He jabbed the gun. "You give up the video and your shooting of Smythe goes down as a stray bullet. With all this other shit, you'll still get life, but you won't get lethal injection." He added, "You've got three seconds to decide. One . . . two . . ."

   "Chuck has it!" the man spit out onto the wall. "Locked up, I think. I don't know."

   LaMoia backed off, pulled his cell phone from his pocket and hit a button. "You there?" he asked, when a voice answered. "It's Pendegrass. And you've got all the probable cause you need."

C H A P T E R

67

Boldt stepped out of interrogation room A, "the box," at 4 A.M., an empty mug that had held tea in his hand. LaMoia was still in the next room over, getting interviewed by his fellow Homicide officers just as Boldt had. Any officer-involved shooting required the surrender of one's weapon, a half dozen interviews and a mile of paperwork. It wouldn't all sort itself out for another week.

   She sat in one of the gray office chairs, the kind with four spread feet on black rollers. Her left ankle, encased in a removable cast, looked more like a ski boot. Only Daphne Matthews could look so beautiful at four in the morning.

"Hey," he said.

   "Went a little differently than you thought," she told him, barely able to conceal her anger. She didn't like him taking chances like that.

   "He took the bait," Boldt said. "That's what we needed."

"At what cost?"

   "I'm not saying it wasn't messy. I'm not saying I might not do it differently, given hindsight. I considered involving the department for backup. But these guys were too well connected. They would have heard we were out to sting them, and we would have either come up empty or dead. So John took the trunk, and we went for it."

   "You sent me to Pendegrass's house without telling me. Why? Too big a risk?"

   "No. Because you might have talked me out of it." He paused. "You're mad."

   "Damn right."

   "So are they," he said, indicating the interrogation room.

   "Every right to be."

   He sighed. "Yeah. Well I'm whipped. Give an 'old man' a ride home? They confiscated the Crown Vic. I'm without wheels."

   He won a partial smile from her. "Old man?" she quoted.

   "Pendegrass called me that."

   "So blowing out his knee was generous of you."

   "Damn right." He added, "More like lucky, I suppose. I'm not very good prone like that."

   "You're pretty good prone," she said, pursing her lips and letting him know that they could still tease. The kiss had been forgotten. Or at least wiped away.

   She tapped her purse.

   Boldt missed the message. He said, "Are we going?"

   She clicked the purse open. Inside was a black plastic rectangle. A videotape. She explained, "I kicked the Pendegrass home, ahead of SID, as soon as I got John's call. I looked everywhere. Turned the place upside down. Couldn't find it."

   "Then what's that?" he asked.

   "Bernie Lofgrin says that you owe him your original Chet Baker, the one's that's autographed." It was a 1957, original vinyl in perfect condition, one of the prizes of Boldt's jazz collection. Small change, Boldt thought. "He says that he doesn't want to know what's on the tape, and that as far as he's concerned there never was a tape."

   "His guys found it."