The blood trail went up some stairs. A perfect red handprint was in the middle of the half-open door at the top of the inside stairway. Kurtz used the pistol to swing the door open wider. A kitchen. Dirty dishes. Garbage stinking. More blood on the cheap table and chipped tile floor. One of the chairs had been knocked over.
Breathing through his mouth, Kurtz followed the blood trail through a living roomfilthy shag carpet with blobs of dried blood, sprung couch covered by a filthy sheet, big color television. The blood trail went up a narrow flight of stairs in the narrow central hall, but Kurtz checked the other two downstairs rooms first. Clear.
Yasein Goba was sprawled half across the grimy tub in the little bathroom at the head of the stairs. The blood trail led there and ended there. Goba had been hit high in the right ribcagethe wound looked consistent with the nine-millimeter slugs O'Toole had loaded in her Sig Pro that Kurtz had been firingand the man had poured his life's blood half into the tub and half onto the bathroom floor. The bottom of the tub was solid brown with dried blood. There was blood all over the sink and blood on the mirrored door of the medicine chest. Bottles of pills, rubbing alcohol, and Mercurachrome were scattered on the floor and broken in the bloody sink. It looked as if Goba had tried to find something to stop the bleeding, or at least something to dull the pain, before he fainted onto the tub rim and bled out.
O'Toole's file said that Yasein Goba was twenty-six years old and from Yemen. Making sure not to step in the dried pools and rivulets on the floor, Kurtz crouched next to the corpse. The young man may have been an Arab, but the loss of blood added a paleness under
the brown skin and tiny black mustache. His lips were white, his mouth and eyes open. Kurtz was no medical examiner, but he'd seen enough corpses to know that rigor mortis had come and gone and that this guy had probably been dead about forty-eight hourssince a few hours after Kurtz and O'Toole had been shot.
Lying in the tub was a Ruger Mark II Standard.22-caliber long-barreled target pistol. The checkered grip was mottled with blood. Kurtz lifted it carefully, letting his gloves touch only the end of the barrel where there was no blood. He held it up into the light, but the serial number had been burned off with acid. He knew it had a ten-shot magazine and he imagined that the mag would be empty, or near so. Kurtz set the gun back in the tub where the grip had been outlined in dried blood.
He stood and walked into Yasein Goba's bedroom. On a high bureau was a sort of altarblack candles, worry beads, and a blown-up photograph of Parole Officer Margaret O'Toole with the words DIE, BITCH written across it in red Magic Marker.
On a cheap desk by the front window was a spiral notebook. Kurtz flipped the pages, noted the dated entries and the Arabic writing, but some passages were in scrawled English"she contenus to prossecute me!! " and "purhsed fine pistol today" and "the Zionist bitch must die if I am to live! " The last page had been torn out of the notebook.
Some sense made Kurtz look up, pull open the filthy curtain a bit with the barrel of his.38.
Kemper's and King's unmarked car had stopped half a block away on the next street over. They were approaching Goba's house the same way Kurtz had, and if it hadn't been for the bare trees and the angle on the alley, Kurtz couldn't have seen them even from this high up. Stopping behind the unmarked detectives' car were two black Chevy Suburbans. Eight black-garbed and helmeted SWAT team members carrying automatic weapons boiled out of the Suburbans.
Detectives Kemper and King deployed the SWAT teams, sending them toward the house through alleys, backyards, and along the salvage yard fence. King talked into a hand radio, and Kurtz assumed that there would be more SWAT squads coming from the next block over to the south.
Kurtz folded up the spiral notebook and slipped it into the cargo pocket of his jacket. Then he left the bedroom, went down the stairs, through the kitchen, down more stairs, and out the back door. Because of the slight angle of the backyard and the heavy rain falling, the first of the SWAT guys weren't visible yet.
There was a rusted and abandoned Mercury at the back of this weedy strip, abutting the salvage yard fence and Kurtz ran at it full tilt through the rain and mud. He leaped to the hood, jumped to the roof, heaved himself up and over the fence, and dropped into the salvage yard about five seconds before the first SWAT team loped into sight, the black-vested gunmen covering each other as they ran, automatic weapons trained on the windows of the late Yasein Goba's house.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Arlene was at work, arranging weddings, receptions, wedding dress fittings, and wedding cake designs with happy brides all over the eastern and central United States, but she wiped all that from the screen, lit another Marlboro, and looked at Kurtz when he came in, hung up his leather jacket, and leaned back in his swivel chair. He pulled the pistol out of his belt in the back to keep it from digging into him, and set it in the lower right drawer next to the bottle of Sheep Dip scotch.