Free Spiral by David L Lindsey Page B

plastered to their car seats by massive amounts of blood that had been blown out their backs and splattered across the backseat and windows.
They walked over to the limousine. All six doors of the car were open. Some of the detectives backed away to give them room.
"First guy here in the backseat is Jerry C. Lowell from Austin," Dystal said, referring to the notebook. "Guy over there is Ramon Sosa Real, Mexican driver's license, Mexico City address, and that fella there is George L. Crisman, here in Houston. Chauffeur is Esteban G. Moreno, Houston. There was lease papers for this thing in the glove box in Sosa's name."
The limousine reeked of feces and blood. The men would not be identifiable without first being scrubbed at the morgue.
"What did they use?" Haydon asked.
"Aw, shit," Dystal growled angrily, spitting a squirt of amber juice. "There was forty-five casings all the hell over the place."
"Mac-lOs."
"I 'magine. People said they saw the boys shooting, saw 'em changing clips in the 'pistols,' but they didn't hear nothing. So I guess they had silencers too. Real slick."
"You said one of the motorcyclists was killed?"
"Yeah. Come on around here."
They followed Dystal's beefy shoulders around to the front of the limousine. The car had climbed up on the slope of the embankment, curling the motorcycle up under its front wheels as it went. A man's bare thigh, split lengthways to the bone, which showed white through red flesh, stuck out from under the rear wheel of the motorcycle. His head, with the bullet-shattered helmet still firmly buckled, was lying under the cycle's engine. One of the header pipes coming off the engine had ripped loose and smashed through the mirrored visor, wedging itself into the space where his face should have been. Haydon could smell the burned flesh. The rest of the man was ground up under the motorcycle, out of sight. Bright green radiator coolant and blood ran down together and formed a marbled puddle under the glistening black panel of the limousine's front door.
"I doubt if the boy'll have an ID," Dystal said. "I can't tell if his motorsickle's got a license plate."
"Was there return fire?" Haydon asked, suddenly noticing the bullet holes in the cyclist's helmet.
Dystal shook his head slowly, looking at the mess at the front of the limousine. "One little detail there. Witnesses say that when this one got plowed under here, the second shooter rode up after blowing away those two boys in the Mercedes, and finished him off." He turned his dark lenses to Haydon. "How ya like that?"
Another detective walked up and started asking the lieutenant about the procedures for removing the bodies. Dystal turned, talking to him, and walked away.
Mooney stepped to the rear of the limousine and surveyed the layout of the intersection.
"They picked a good spot, Stuart. Regular stop-and-go traffic flow gave them time to get in place around the targets. No place for the limo, or the Mercedes, to evade in the bumper-to-bumper traffic once the shooting started. Easy access to the expressway, and the cycles could hump right on past the stalled cars by squeezing between the lanes. A police car couldn't have pursued them even if it'd been sitting right here at the time it happened."
Haydon nodded. "Doesn't look like an amateur hit, does it?"
The falling afternoon sun was not yet low enough to take on color, and its fierce white light reflected like scattering sparks off the chrome of the parked and moving cars. Pale splashes of red and blue from the police units skittered up and down the shallow angles of the cement embankments and overpass girders. The car radios echoed to one another through the underpass and mixed with the loose rumble of traffic.
The medical examiner's investigators were going over the bodies systematically, beginning with the two men in the Mercedes. They were followed by the police photographer, and then the crime-lab technicians.
Peter Lapierre stood in the middle of the intersection with a