Free October's Ghost by Ryne Douglas Pearson Page B

ATF.”
    “Right. Pass along my...you know.” Art hated these moments. Death had never been something he’d handled well. When his grandmother, the woman who’d raised him, had passed, he had withdrawn for almost a year, secluding himself in the dorm at the University of Alabama. His grades went up, but A’s and B’s had seemed almost meaningless at the time. Now he knew better. It was what she had wanted, what she had pushed him to do. This death, though, was an aberration. His grandmother’s time had come. Thom Danbrook’s had been chosen by another with no authority to do so. There was only one power in the universe with that authority. The ultimate power. The ultimate protector. The ultimate judge. Thom’s killers would come to know the latter intimately, Art vowed.
    “You want some coffee?” Art asked once Lowe had left.
    “Yeah, I’ll settle for your stuff today.” Frankie slid her empty mug across their adjoining desks, which faced each other. “I don’t need anything wiring me today.” She took the steaming cup and sipped it gingerly for a moment. “A lot of bodies here this morning.”
    “You’ve never seen this before, have you?” She shook her head. Art knew she hadn’t. “It’s terrible when it happens, but it really shows you what people are made of.”
    “I saw a few folks on the way in who rode Thom pretty hard when he was here,” Frankie said, remembering that Thom, the perfect gentleman, had kept his private life just that. But rumors were rumors, and they always found a way of starting. The truth had started the ones circulating about Thom, first quietly questioning his sexual orientation and later openly attacking it. Still, he hadn’t run away from his life. The request for a transfer to the Bay area had been made when he first arrived in L.A. years before. Frisco was where he had been accepted to law school on a part-time basis. Thom Danbrook, attorney. Frankie wanted to cry at the thought of it never happening.
    “Mortality is a powerful teacher,” Art said. He hoped it would be enough to end the stupid, silent discrimination against those who just wanted to do their job. Thom had drawn his gun and faced down two shooters, for Christ’s sake! Wasn’t that enough? “We’ve got ‘em all at our disposal.”
    “What’s the plan?” Frankie looked at the roster that Art handed her.
    “Omar Espinosa is coordinating the field teams. He’s got three of them over at the other victim’s place.”
    It occurred to Frankie that she had no idea who the man was. “Who was he?”
    Art related the particulars. “He had a little apartment up off of Highland. Manager’s card was in his wallet, which was a break. We wouldn’t have had an address this fast otherwise, ‘cause the DL is out of Florida.
    “The other teams are going to start hitting the areas where the van was stolen from and where it turned up.”
    Either the killers had someone waiting for them, or they had other wheels already procured. That was the way pros would have done it, and these guys were looking like pros, which didn’t bode well for a quick resolution. Still, the agents had learned that all criminals, by way of their choice of profession, had some innate stupidity that, somewhere along the line, would cause a slipup. Catching the mistake was the trick.
    “I’d say we have to find out why these guys wanted to kill Portero,” Frankie suggested.
    “The busboy said one of them...” Art flipped back through his notes. “Medium height, curly black hair, mustache. That one called Portero’s name before they fired. He also saw the other one, the balding guy who shot at me, bend down and take something from Portero’s shirt pocket.”
    “If this leads to anything, I think we owe that busboy a lunch.”
    “I told him we’d put in a good word for him with the INS,” Art said. “He’s been trying to naturalize for a couple years now. Anyway, so we have two shooters who knew their intended victim and