"The border Lords" - читать интересную книгу автора (Parker T Jefferson)

3

The neighbors greeted them with tales of gunshots and screams and a guy smoking off in a black Range Rover, so the Blowdown team went in through the wide-open front door.

Hood followed his autoloader into the kitchen where Angel lay nearly decapitated by a shotgun. The blasts had also torn the stove hood open and flung a storm of flesh and blood against the wall. The machine pistol was gone and the tortilla lay, shriveled, black and smoking, on the griddle.

In the living room Ray and Johnnie had taken multiple rounds and they lay in ribbons on the floor. Johnnie had gotten his gun up, or at least a gun lay next to him. It was one of the silenced.32 machine pistols that no one at ATF had ever seen until late last year. The Halo game had gone into sleep mode, its Gregorian chant soundtrack swelling across the room.

Hood and Morris moved through the house as a team. Hood had that nobody-alive-here feeling but his stomach and nerves were stretched tight. Like Anbar, door-to-door, he thought. Like a drug tunnel he'd once found himself trapped in by unhappy gunmen. They covered the empty house quickly, then backtracked to the living room where Hood shut off the video game and the chanting stopped.

He peeked through the blinds and looked outside at Bly and Velasquez. The two agents were helping the Buenavista cops seal the scene against the public. The agents looked cooperative enough right now, but Hood knew that in just a few minutes they would seal the scene against the Buenavista cops and bad feelings would arise. That's how it went down when the feds were in town.

Hood found another of the strange machine pistols in Ray's bedroom. He stood in front of a bedroom window and let the strong morning sunlight illuminate the weapon. The stainless steel planes threw off the light like the facets of a gemstone. He unscrewed the noise suppressor and retracted the telescoping handles and set aside the curving fifty-round magazine. Now the gun looked very much like the ones that he had seen being packed for shipment at the Pace Arms factory in Costa Mesa. He read the engraving on the frame: LOVE 32. That was it. No serial numbers, no manufacturer grip marks, nothing else.

"Who names a gun 'Love 32'?" Hood asked.

"Beats me, Charlie. But it's a sweet carry. Easy to conceal and basic, like a Mac, but it's got elegance. Reminds me of one of my kid's Transformer toys."

"Angel's was on the kitchen counter but it's not there now."

"I'll bet we can solve that one."

Blowdown had suspected for some time that the sicarios in the Den were using these silenced weapons on their jobs-several witnesses had reported that the guns were all but silent. Hood held the Love 32 in his hand and turned it once again into the morning light. This was what Ozburn had gone undercover for. Risked his life for. A gun. Hood shook his head.

A moment later all four met in the side yard. The side-yard camera, hidden within a functioning motion-detector light, had been yanked from the wall and thrown to the ground. The wires dangled from the wall base. Velasquez swung open the door to the faux circuit breaker box. It was partially hidden by a riot of wisteria vine that had crept from its trellis to the eave of the house. The key was still in the control panel lid and Velasquez turned to his team with a woeful look.

"It's been disabled," he said. "System off. By someone who had a key." Within an hour Blowdown was sequestered with Soriana and Mars back in the Buenavista field office war room. Hood told the story while Velasquez compiled video recordings of the last minute for each of the six monitors.

The videos from the first five cameras showed nothing unusual. But monitor six-trained along the side-yard wall of the Den-did register a quick disturbance.

Hood's heart hovered, then fell.

"Oh, shit," said Bly.

"Freeze it," said Mars. "I can't make it out."

"No way I'm seeing this," said Morris.

Velasquez backed up the video and froze a frame midway through the brief movement: Sean Ozburn reaching up to camera six, a smile on his face, and his hand about to close over the lens.

Hood watched in disbelief but his disbelief couldn't change the truth.

There was Ozburn: tall and well muscled, with a head of long blond hair that reached his shoulders, a gunslinger's mustache. He wore his usual biker clothes and boots and a black bandana. Arms tattooed-Mom, Seliah, the Stars and Stripes, a soaring eagle. In the foreshortened wide-angle image, a combat shotgun dangled from his free hand, down near the bottom of the screen, small as a toy. No doubt who it was: badass Sean, meth and gun specialist with Aryan Brotherhood connections, La Eme connections, friend of the North Baja Cartel.

Supervising agent Frank Soriana, a stocky and often jolly man, looked at the Blowdown team as if they had all, including himself, just been sentenced to death.

Mars, his morose subordinate, stared down at the cheap carpet.

Velasquez played out the rest of the video in slo-mo and the team watched Sean's hand come up and cover the hidden camera; then the screen flashed bright white, followed by black.

He played it through in slow motion again.

"When's the last time you talked to him?" asked Soriana.

"Six days ago," said Hood.

"What about Seliah?"

"Two days ago. She wasn't any more worried about Sean than usual."

"Talk to her again. Tell her what's happened. Tell her we need to find him."

"Do that sooner than later," said Mars, not looking up from the floor.

Hood dreaded it. Seliah Ozburn was a friend.

"Robert," said Soriana. "Burn a video of Ozburn onto disc and another onto stick and delete every other copy. Every single one, including the master backup. I want the disc and the stick five minutes ago."

Velasquez moved toward the main control panel.

Soriana turned his back to the team and took a call. He listened a moment. "Tell CNN and the Union Tribune those are baseless rumors. Tell the L.A. Times and CBS the same thing. I don't care what Buenavista police told them."

Back still turned, Soriana rang off and punched in a number from his contacts. "Chief Reyes? Frank Soriana, ATF. Hey, look, we've got a situation here with your men making noises about ATF and the shoot-out in Buenavista. Can you tell your guys to leave ATF out of it? We don't need this, Gabe, not after last year. You hear me, don't you?" There was a long silence; then Soriana said, "Thank you, Chief. We appreciate that a lot. Call me when you know what the heck happened out there, okay?"

He snapped his cell phone closed and turned back to them.

"Silence to the world, people. If this gets out, Sean's a dead man and Blowdown is finished. But if we can keep a lid on it for a few days, Ozburn still has cover and we're still in business. It's our only chance."

"Chance to what, sir?" asked Hood.

"To find his ass and arrest him. You with us or not on this one, Charlie?"

"I am us."

"We don't have all the information," said Mars. "There's more here than we're seeing."

"I've already seen enough," said Soriana. "Find him. Tell me what you need to do the job. Do nothing else in this life until you find Sean. Dyman, Robert, get over to Ozburn's cover house ASAP. Maybe you'll find some clue as to what the hell got into him. Hood, Janet-talk to his wife. She'll know more than she thinks she does."