Comic Book Hero Chapter 13

Holly was still giggling under her breath as she helped her father put away the last of the equipment and roll up the workout mats. The sour looks Dieter gave her only seemed to amuse her more. But just when his annoyance threatened to break into full fledged anger, she sighed and abruptly sat down on one of the rolled up mats and put a stop to the nonsense once and for all.

“Poppa, just knock it off, will you? What happened was all your fault and you know it. I told you that someday you’d try that ‘establishing primacy’ bull-crap on the wrong person and get your head handed to you. And now it’s happened, and you’re sulking like a spoiled little boy.

“And you’re not the only one who’s pissed, you know that? I’m plenty ticked off, too. You waited all night until I was out of the room to pull that stunt, because you knew how I would feel about it. You know I’m beginning to like him, so you’re going into your macho-over-protective mode. And don’t look at me like that, you are and you know it.”

Holly reached up and took her father’s hand, pulling him down to sit beside her. He did so stiffly, not meeting her eyes, those eyes that looked so much like her mother’s. Stubbornly he turned his face away, knowing that those eyes would undo him. But Holly’s voice softened, her love for him reflected in her tone, and that was almost as hard to resist as her gaze.

“Poppa, I know you love me, and I know you want to protect me. And I love that about you. You’ve always been my hero, my giant knight in shining armor. Even when Momma died, I always felt safe, because I always knew you’d protect me. Even from my own foolishness, like swinging off of buildings and jumping motorcycles.

“But let’s be real, Poppa. The one thing I’ve never needed your protection from was boys. Not since you taught me how to break cinder blocks with my bare hands! Believe me, guys respect that.” She smiled at him expectantly, but he didn’t smile back at her joke. He stared away, his face a rigid stone, his eyes locked unseeingly on the brick wall opposite, his gaze focused somewhere else. Finally he answered her, and his voice held a rasp that she had only heard sometimes when he talked about her mother.

“I know that he will not hurt you, not that one. He would never even think about that. But he will break your heart, or worse, he will get you killed. Stay away from him, Hilda. Just stay away.”

Holly sighed and shook her head. She said, “Poppa, I’ve had my heart broken before, and I survived it just fine. And six weeks ago that man saved my life. I am not a child, Poppa. I’m already older than Momma was when she married you. You’ve prepared me well, and I can take care of myself better than almost anybody I know. Please stop trying to make this decision for me.”

There was a pleading note to her voice now, but Dieter’s expression had gone even colder. He turned now to look at her, and Holly was startled at the pain she saw buried beneath those cold, cold eyes.

“You have picked the wrong argument to use, daughter. Your mother is dead. She died when she was the same age as you are now. And she died because of me.”

And with that Dieter got up and walked stiffly away and out the far door. He did not allow himself the luxury of looking back at the only piece of his wife still left to him. If he had, he would have seen that she looked very, very small.

*****

Tom pushed himself through the air like a flying avalanche, heedless of where he was going or what he had to go through to get there. His heart pounded and his muscles ached from their recent abuse but he ignored them, savagely pushing the pain to the back of his mind. He tilted his head back and let the icy wind flap his hood like a birds wings. But despite the cold whistling past his masked face, his cheeks still burned with the remembered shame and fury.

He passed above the large expanse of Golden Gate Park, flew past its beaches and over the brightly lit bridge it had been named for. The lights of the long span gave way to the floating glow of ships, from large freighters to small fishing boats and pleasure craft, and the bobbing signals of the channel markers. They all passed below him and soon gave way to the open water, a horizon spanning plain of flashing waves that danced under a nearly full moon. Tom flew on, farther from shore than he had ever flown before, until the artificial day of the San Francisco skyline was only a dull glow behind him. Before it disappeared completely he stopped his headlong flight and pulled up, hovering above the still waters, allowing the emotions that seethed in his belly to boil up inside his throat. He screamed, hovering there high above the waves, a primal expression of his rage that went unheard in the night. It was a raw sound, a roar that should have echoed back on him, but instead was swallowed up by the vast expanse of sky and water. He wanted to scream again, to let loose at the uncaring heavens with all the power of his soul, but instead he gritted his teeth and fought it back down. He hung there, his lungs laboring and his mind awhirl, and the only witness to his anger was the uncaring wind and wave.

Until a tinny voice spoke in his ear to remind him he wasn’t really alone at all.

“Earth to Blackwood. If you’re finished sulking like a little kid, we’ve got business to attend to. Or have you forgotten about the Galleria thing tonight?”

Tom swore under his breath. “Dammit Murray, can’t I ever get away from you?”

“Nope. Not as long as I’ve got a satellite hookup. And as long as you leave your camera and audio on. By the way, that was some stunt you pulled on Dieter. I was impressed, and I bet he was, too.”

Tom scowled. He did not want to be reminded of recent events, and yet he still felt the need to vent some of his frustration.

“If I had it to do all over again, Murray, I would’ve kicked him a couple of times, too. Christ, what the hell is wrong with him! All I want him to do is teach me how to fight, but whenever I see him we have to act out this stupid game of ‘mine’s bigger than yours is’. I’m the hero, I saved his ass, and he’s supposed to like me, dammit!”

“Uh huh. Excuse me, sir, but would you like some more whine with your self pity? Grow up, Blackwood! This is real life, people hardly ever do what you expect them to. They’re never grateful, and they don’t always like you, even when you do save their bacon. That’s just the way it is, so get over it already. Besides, a lot of this you brought on yourself. I warned you to stay away from Holly.”

“Hey, dammit, I have stayed away from her, she just won’t stay away from me. You saw what happened.”

“Yeah, I did, and you’re right. She turned a punching demonstration into a full contact body rub. But Dieter, her loving and doting father, saw it too. Do you think he cares who started it? Hell, no! All he cares about is that you represent a potential source of danger to his little girl, and that’s gotta be getting under his skin like sandpaper.

“As a father of two girls myself, I can sympathize. You’re lucky if he doesn’t try clipping your wings with a baseball bat, bro.”

Tom blinked, surprised at the new voice in his ear. “Mike? What the hell are you doing over at Pablo’s at this time of night?” he asked.

“I’m not, I’m at home, networking with Murray’s system at the workshop. We set it up that way, remember? Cathy and the kids have gone to sleep, they think I’m still working on that project for the studios.”

“Huh. Just make sure the door’s locked, you know how Tyler is about knocking. So how long have you been listening?”

“A few minutes. Just long enough for Murray to play me the shot of you taking out that jerk friend of his. Nice moves, bro, we’re proud of you.”

“ ‘Play the shot’? Murray, don’t tell me you recorded that whole thing!”

“Damned right I did, I got the entire fight on disk. And someday, when we’re old and gray and everything about you has gone public, I am going to present my old pal with his very own copy of you dumping his ass on the ground.”

Murray ended the statement with a dramatically evil chortle. Mike quickly joined him, and soon Tom felt his own lips beginning to curl up at the corners. The fist in his stomach began to unclench, as the tension in his body released its hold. He felt the laughter bubble up in his chest and he let it out, a chuckle that soon became a full blown laugh. Like the rage before it, the sound was swallowed up by the vast, uncaring night.

Shaking his head at his own foolishness, Tom turned his body around and oriented on the distant glow of the city lights, willing himself to fall in that direction. Aw, hell. Dieter Reisbach is tomorrows’ problem. Tonight I’ve got better things to do.

*****

After the beating delivered by Carlton Biggs, Tom had waited a full two weeks before his visit to the Reisbachs’ dojo, wanting to be fully healed before he put himself into the big Germans hands. But during that time he and the rest of the planning commission had not been idle. In one of the many meetings between the three men at Murray’s workshop, Pablo had first put into words what he and Mike had been working towards while Tom was out of the country.

“Look Tom, it’s like you said when you first got us all together; you can do a lot more than the cops can, so why do the same job that they do? Sure, you can keep patrolling the city, and with a little luck you can stop some muggings and some drug deals, and maybe even save a life or two. But a cop could’ve done the exact same thing, and maybe even more. So what’s the point?

“So what Mike and I figured was, we should go after the big fish, you know? Get the guys who run the gangs, import the drugs, and pay off the politicians. Take down the generals, instead of just the soldiers, you know?

“Now the cops know who all of these guys are, or at least most of them, but they can’t do anything about it. They have too many rules that they have to follow, and the bad guys have too many lawyers that know how to hide behind those rules. They bribe the judges, the politicians, and even some of the cops who are supposed to be putting them behind bars. Then they buy off any witnesses, threaten their families, or they just kill them, so nobody can touch these guys.

“Well we don’t have any rules, we can’t be bought off, and they can’t hurt us because they don’t know who we are.”

“Yeah”, Mike added, “But then again, we don’t know who they are, either.

“Okay, the words are a little different,” Tom said, “But this is pretty much what I told you guys three weeks ago. And I thought we agreed that you’d try hacking into the SFPD computer system, see if we can use what they know to pick our targets.”

Mike snorted. “Yeah, right, easy for you to say! Tom, I haven’t done any serious hacking since I married Cathy. Everything’s changed since then, and I haven’t kept up. Everybody’s more security aware these days, they’ve got protection programs that I haven’t even heard of before. That first week I tried some of my old hacks, places I used to browse through like a magazine stand, and I set off all sorts of alarms before I even got through the firewalls. I barely got out without getting caught.

“Alright, maybe if I hit some of the hacker websites and studied for a few months, I could chance it again. But for right now, trying to break into VICAP or any of the other police systems is just plain electronic suicide.”

“Oh, great. So you’re trying to tell me that it’s over, and there’s nothing we can do?” Tom said, frowning through the bandages on his face.

But instead of answering Mike turned to Murray, with whom he shared a conspiratorially grin. The later reached into a breast pocket a pulled out a small plastic and metal tube, about the size of a mans finger.

“Actually,” he said, “We were thinking about getting a little more ‘creative’.”

The tube, he explained, was a key counter, a device available at most of the spy shops that had popped up in major cities all over the country in the past decade. It looked like a cable adapter, of the type used to hook up keyboards to computer terminals, and in fact it could function in that capacity. But inside the device was a flash memory chip, capable of storing a record of thousands of keystrokes used on any system it was hooked up to. By attaching it to where a keyboard cable attached to a computer, and then retrieving it sometime later, you could obtain a complete record of everything typed on that keyboard during that time. Reports, records, personal e-mail… and passwords.

“Wait now, wait a minute. You expect me to put these, these keyboard bugs… in a police station?”

Murray shrugged, completely unfazed by Tom’s’ outburst. “You say that like it’s a problem, Tom.”

“Of course, if you’re not up to it…” drawled Mike, his tone of voice reminiscent of the schoolyard banter of little boys.

Tom turned his scowling face towards his older brother, and snapped, “Oh, give me a break, dammit. What are you gonna do next, Mikey, double dog dare me? There’s no way I’m going to break into a building full of police and plant a bug in the top cops office. It’s crazy, and you guys know it.”

“Hey, not as crazy as you think, man. Look, I know it sounds pretty far out, but just listen. What if we got everything you can possibly want; blueprints, wiring and utility plans, pictures and measurements, the works? Well, we already did! Murray and I went around to every police station in San Francisco, all ten of them, and we even got into the offices of the commanding officers of each district and had a look at their PC’s. Believe me, it’ll be a cakewalk, Tom, just like that night at Lydecker.”

Tom looked in wonder at the two grinning faces before him, and then shook his head. It was hard to believe, but these guys were actually serious. He knew he shouldn’t encourage them, but he just had to know.

“Okay, I’ve gotten used to you guys pulling Bugs Bunny out of a top hat, but this is ridiculous. So just how did you get all this classified info?”

“Simple,” Murray answered. “I already had most of it. San Francisco is pretty friendly to the entertainment industries, they really like us shooting movies in their public buildings. I’d already shot scenes in over half of those places, and you better believe I kept all the specs on ‘em. I just called around and said I was scouting some scenes for the next DeNiro flick, and they rolled out the red carpet. We had access to everything.”

“Everything,” agreed Mike, nodding. “Including roof access and drop ceilings. We used a digital camera, and shot pictures of all the locks and doors, and the personal computers you have to bug.”

“Alright, so what happens when this film doesn’t get made? Aren’t the police going to come around and ask why?”

“Nope, not a bit. Murray says it’s common to scout and set up a lot of scenes that never get shot.”

“That’s right, most scripts go through some major editing before the first piece of film gets shot. And a lot of movies that are scouted fall through and then don’t get shot at all. Don’t worry, everybody in this town is used to it, nobody’s going to be calling back.”

Tom scowled some more, but it was mostly for show. Eventually he and the other two ended up gathered around a table, examining the blue prints and photographs for the ten district police stations in San Francisco, and measuring their suitability for Tom’s particular brand of breaking and entering.

Most of their potential targets were small, just two or three stories in height, as were most of the public buildings in the earthquake plagued city. The one exception was the eight story Southern Police Station, but the presence of a helipad on the roof made it a poor choice. This bothered the trio, on the theory that the smaller a structure the fewer places to hide, but there seemed to be nothing for it.

Other problems arose, further limiting the number of potential targets. Most of those problems centered around the roof access. Mike had remembered how Tom had to wait for a guard to come out for a cigarette break at the Lydecker building in order to enter there, and so he had done some research to better prepare his brother. He had found an underground press website on the net, and had downloaded several pamphlets he thought they would need, including some on the fine art of burglary. Unfortunately most of the methods mentioned either left unmistakable traces, or they involved picking the locks, a talent that required more skill and experience than simply the knowledge of how a lock works. Murray had several sets of lock picks in his collection of movie props, which Tom had started practicing on, but it was obvious that it would take weeks at least until he was able to develop sufficient skill with them to be of any help.

Eventually they had narrowed the field down to three possibles, and over the period of one very nerve wracking week, Tom had broken into all three of them and left his little packages, and then retrieved them a few days later. It had left him with a case of the shakes for a few days but, much to his surprise, it had been every bit as easy as his brother and best friend had said it would be.

Mike had easily retrieved the passwords of all three captains from their keyboard bugs, and had quickly wormed his way into the restricted police databases that they had had access to. His old hacker skills, rusty as they may have been, seemed to come alive readily enough as he cruised through the forbidden network, gleefully downloading file after secret file. And now that Tom was back up to speed physically, as his tussle with Dieter Reisbach had shown, the trio were as anxious and eager as little boys with a new game, ready to try the team out on its first real field test.

*****

Molly Wu had accomplished many firsts in her life. It was true, she was not the first Asian American woman to join the San Francisco Police Department, nor even the first one to make Inspector. But Molly was the first one in her family to be born in America, the first one to graduate from an American college, and the first one to wear a uniform and serve the city that the Wu family had adopted as their own. She was a source of pride for her family, even to her grandparents, who still held stubbornly to many of the old country beliefs about a woman’s place. Her grandfather especially had come around. She remembered how he had held himself so stiffly at her Police Academy graduation, but at the recent party to celebrate her new promotion he had smiled happily all night long, and even kissed her twice. She knew then that he had not wanted her to fail, but he had expected it. Yet his obvious pride at her success had killed any sting that knowledge would have otherwise held.

Molly’s rise through the ranks had been hard, but steady. Three years in uniform in some of the worst parts of San Francisco had left her with both scars and decorations, and a plainclothes assignment to the gang task force. It had been a plum assignment, but two years of watching children killing each other had been more than enough. Her transfer to the Violent Crimes unit may not have seemed like much of an improvement, but at least the mayhem and bloodshed wouldn’t be so damned organized.

Which was how she came to be here, in the Stonestown Galleria Mall parking lot at night, dressed like a seventeen year old Catholic schoolgirl.

Molly had only been with Violent Crimes for two weeks when her Captain received a call from one of his counterparts in the LAPD. The City of Angels had been plagued by a gang of serial rapists, whose MO had been as regular as clockwork. Twice a month a young girl of school age would be snatched from a mall parking lot by three white males with shaved heads driving a brown van, taken to a deserted area, and repeatedly molested. She would be found the next day, bound and gagged with gray duct tape, clothed only in bruises and her own blood.

“The forensic evidence has always been inconclusive,” said John Burke, the Lieutenant in charge of her squad. He had called her into his office and was briefing her on the case from LA, which they had been asked to lend a hand on. She sat across from him on a beige metal chair, the kind that had been standard issue in government offices since the forties. Between them was a scarred wooden desk, behind which sat the Lieutenant in a high backed leather swivel chair that he had probably paid for himself. The floors were covered in yellowed linoleum, and the walls were the same institutional eggshell white as the rest of the squads’ rooms, pockmarked with hundreds of holes made from years of tacked up bulletins and wanted posters. A single window showed a less than inspiring view of the back parking lot and a dirt encrusted brick wall. Apparently, there was little room for frills in the Violent Crimes budget.

“They used condoms, like a lot of sex offenders are doing these days, so there was no DNA trace to check. And with those shaved heads there were no hair samples, either, just a couple of stray pubics without any follicles, so no DNA there either. There are some matching fibers, Crime Lab says they come from an orange shag rug with traces of gasoline and motor oil, which matches the victims description of a scrap of carpet in the back of the van. But other than that and the witnesses vague testimony, they’ve got nothing.”

“Sounds like a tough one. But what does a string of rapes in LA have to do with us?”

“The LAPD has asked for our help because they have three suspects, some skin heads who worked in a body shop in the neighborhood of the first two rapes. They’ve all got arrests for violence or hate crimes, although no convictions, and one of them owns a van that matches the perps’ vehicle. But when the locals started asking questions, the three suspects quit their jobs and moved. And guess where they landed?”

“The Castro district?”

The Lieutenant snorted. “Cute. Actually, they ended up in a three room duplex in Northbeach, four blocks from the body shop that hired them all. They’ve been there over ten days now, and we’ve had them under surveillance for most of it. And we have good reason to believe that they’re going to strike again sometime in the next three nights.”

“Hmmm. Today wouldn’t happen to be their first payday, would it, sir?”

The Lieutenant rewarded her insight with an approving grin. He stroked his chin when he answered, a mannerism she had learned to recognize her first day on the squad. “Good call, Wu. Yeah, that’s been they’re pattern. Within three days of cashing their paychecks, our boys go out to party. They stake out a mall where a lot of teenage kids hang out and wait until closing, and then snatch a victim right out of the parking lot when the place empties out. The van is unremarkable, with muddied over plates, and the perps wear bandanas over their faces. Even the victims never get a good look at them. Dozens of witnesses, and not one of them sees anything worth the ink it takes to write it down.”

“In other words, we know who they are, but we don’t have enough evidence for an arrest,” Molly said, a statement rather than a question.

“We don’t even have enough for a search warrant. The surveillance team reports that the orange shag rug is gone from the back of the van, so they probably ditched it somewhere between here and LA. If they’re smart enough to do that, they’re probably smart enough to scour the entire vehicle, too. So even if we did get a warrant, chances are pretty slim it’ll do us any good.”

“And that would let them know we’re on to them. They either lie low until we can’t afford the manpower for surveillance, or they pick up shop and it starts all over again someplace else. So our only alternative is to catch them in the act.” Molly smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes, which held a touch of grimness in there depths. “So tell me something, Lieutenant. Do these boys like Chinese girls?”

“Actually, they seem to go for any minority that happens to come along. Targets of opportunity. They’ve assaulted Asians, Hispanics, African Americans, and one girl of Arabic descent. Not a single Barbie doll in the lot. The only other qualification is that they’re young, usually minors, and innocent looking. No provocative clothing, piercings, or obvious tattoos. Every single one of these girls looks like a likely candidate for virginity, which is what the LA profiler thinks is the whole idea.

“Look, Molly. I know you’ve only been with Violent Crimes a short time, and that you’ve never done decoy work before, but time is getting down to the wire on this. Surveillance reports say that the suspects were cruising the parking lot at the Stonestown Galleria last night. You know that place is huge, and it’s right across the street from San Francisco State University, which means every night at closing that parking lot becomes a predators’ grocery store.

“We had to pull female officers from some other squads to get decoys who fit the profile, and with you we’ve still only got three, which isn’t nearly enough to cover that place. But we’ll have three teams of our people, plus a three-man SWAT team for backup. That’s twelve officers and four vehicles, so you and the other decoys should be adequately covered, no matter what direction they come from.”

Molly pursed her lips and raised one delicately arched eyebrow in surprise. Twelve officers on one stakeout was almost unheard of, especially for crimes that so far hadn’t resulted in a single death.

“That’s an awful lot of personnel, sir. How did you spring so much manpower for this? Or should I ask?”

For a moment a grim shadow fell across the Lieutenants’ eyes. There was a hint of that same grimness in his voice when he answered Molly’s question.

“These punks have been operating in LA for at least five months now, and they’ve left twelve teenage girls that we know about, lying in the dirt like so much garbage. Captain Sanchez has a daughter who goes to SFU, and she hangs out a lot at Stonestown. And for that matter, my own kid is going there in two years.”

Burke leaned forward at his desk, as his gaze speared Molly Wu where she sat in the uncomfortable government chair. All trace of banter was gone from his voice, and his intensity made her feel like squirming.

“Look, Molly, even with the Captains’ backing, we can’t have all of these officers on this for more than one night. After that you’re going to be on your own, with just our three guys in the surveillance van for backup. And that place is just too damned big to be covered by so few people. Hell, it’s too big to be covered by what we’ve got tonight, but it’s going to be our best shot at getting these guys.

“Leo Hoskins is the best cover man we’ve got, he’ll be in charge of this operation. You listen to him, do whatever he says when he says it, and you’ll do fine. Keep your eyes open, and cover your area. Don’t just look for brown vans, these guys are in a new territory, the change might make them vary their M.O. And watch out for other potential victims too, it’s more important to prevent another rape than it is to take these creeps down.

“Stonestown closes at nine, so we want all teams to set up no later than eight. Briefing is at seven in the conference room. Take the rest of the day off, go home and get some sleep, you’ll need it for tonight. Any questions?”

Molly straightened in her chair, as she felt something basic inside her shift. A change in attitude perhaps, maybe a different point of reference for looking at the world. She thought of it as a focus, a sharpening of an edge that had more than once saved her in the past. It was a change that she felt whenever a case got serious, and the potential for violence became real, or imminent.

The change inside was major, but she knew that outside it shown only as a tightening around the corners of her almond shaped eyes.

“Yes sir. Where do I go to get one of those schoolgirl outfits?”

It turned out that she went to Sgt. Leo Hoskins. Hoskins in turn took her to an inconspicuous storeroom she hadn’t noticed since she’d been in the squad, whose door was locked by a key Leo kept in his desk. Inside were shelves stocked with boxes and bags of the paraphernalia needed to turn a highly trained police officer into ‘street bait’. The ragged and tattered clothing of the homeless shared the same space as the revealing outfits of corner prostitutes. Mailbags and postal uniforms, bowling shirts and shop aprons, hats and jackets and whiskey bottles filled with dark tea. If it could make you look like anything other than a cop, it could be found in Sgt. Hoskins cluttered little closet.

Molly had picked a demure white blouse and a plaid skirt, knee high white socks with black patent leather shoes, and a navy blue sweater she tied around her neck and hung over her shoulders. Her hair had been pulled back with two plastic butterfly berets, and around her throat hung a delicate gold chain and cross. Gazing at herself in the bathroom mirror of her apartment, she decided with grim satisfaction that she did indeed look like the perfect eye candy for a band of child raping neo-Nazis.

At the briefing that night she got to meet the other members of her team, including her two fellow decoys, who had both picked school outfits almost identical to the one she now wore. Millie Hawkins of the Violent Crimes’ surveillance unit helped fit all three of them with their communications gear, a boxlike transmitter taped to the small of each officers’ back, and the attached microphone that ran around to the front where it would be pinned to the center of the woman’s bra. A flesh-colored earpiece receiver that was so small it was almost invisible rounded out the last of it. As she fitted it into her ear Molly couldn’t help thinking that it made for an awfully slender lifeline, especially for a girl who went swimming with the sharks.

The mission briefing took place in the one conference room located within the halls of the Violent Crimes unit, which was barely large enough to hold the small crowd of police officers from so many different squads. Several folding chairs had been brought in, and a map of the Stonestown Galleria and its enormous parking lot had been tacked to the front wall. As the ranking officer present Lieutenant Burke called the meeting to order, as he stepped to the front of the room and perched himself on the edge of the table in front of the Stonestown map. He was the only one there wearing a suit and tie, but Molly noticed that it didn’t seem to separate him in the slightest from this bunch of grizzled veterans. Molly, who along with the other two decoys was probably the youngest and most inexperienced officer in the room, could only envy the easy way her superior not only fit in, but also took charge.

He began by introducing all the officers in the room, and then giving a brief but thorough recap of that nights mission. As in his meeting with Molly earlier that day, he pointed out the time constraints they would be working under, and the fact that this would be their best shot at catching the perpetrators before they went to ground again for another two weeks. He also stressed the importance of preventing another kidnapping, even if it meant letting the suspects get away. Molly noticed a few frowns at this, but nobody raised any outward objections. Despite what the press often claimed, San Francisco cops were usually pretty good at keeping their priorities straight.

The Lieutenant ended his briefing by asking if there were any questions. Janice Kwan, the other Asian decoy, raised her hand to be noticed, which Molly thought was probably the whole idea. Although she had met the boisterous girl from Burglary for the first time that night, it hadn’t taken her long to decide that Janice liked to be the center of attention.

“Sir, can you explain the reason for the presence of the SWAT team? Not that I’m objecting to having some extra firepower watching my back, but isn’t it a case of overkill? I mean, other than a couple of folding knifes, these guys haven’t even shown any weapons yet.”

“Good question,” Burke replied, nodding. “And the answer lies in something that the last two victims reported to the LA cops. One of the perps brandished and threatened both victims with a firearm, which one vic described as ‘a box shaped black machine gun’. They have now positively identified it as an Ingram, Mac 10 or 11.”

A somber silence met the Lieutenants’ pronouncement, as its meaning sank into the minds of the gathered police officers. Ingram Macs were the ultimate ‘room broom’, a fully automatic weapon that could spit an almost solid stream of leaden death. With a rate of fire of up to 1600 rounds per minute, it could empty a thirty-two round magazine in about a second and a half. Accuracy with such a weapon was almost nonexistent, but in the close confines of a firefight it was the equivalent of a sack full of hand grenades. And tonight, they now knew, they would probably have to face one.

“That’s right, people,” the Lieutenant continued, as his audience exchanged sober glances. “And now you know how we were able to rate so much personnel for this little exercise. The thought of what one of those things could do to a crowd of SFU teenyboppers was enough to give the powers that be nightmares. And if we don’t take these guys down neat and clean, that’s just what we’ll be looking at. Sgt. Popiel?”

With that last the Lieutenant exchanged a nod with the leader of the three-man SWAT team, a balding man in his forties of medium height, but with the hard bodied look that all the SWAT members Molly had ever met seemed to wear like a second badge. Sgt. Popiel stepped up to the table and exchanged places with Lt. Burke, where he picked up a long yellow pencil to use as a pointer. With economical gestures and clipped sentences, the grizzled man with the hard eyes quickly laid out the strategy and placements of the twelve officers who would be participating in that night’s stakeout.