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Then everything went quiet, just for a moment, and Letty screamed, “Armed man on the roof. Armed man on the roof.” She screamed twice, then remembered her phone, and called Jackson, who picked up on the second ring, and she shouted, “Armed man on the roof, he’s got a pistol.”
Jackson said, “Thanks,” and hung up.
Twenty seconds passed, then a helmeted head popped out frombehind the stairway housing on the roof of the garage, and Letty shouted, “He’s behind the air conditioner on the garage roof... He’s wounded. I can see him. Should I shoot him again?”
“Can you?”
“Yes, he’s right there.”
The wounded man was looking in her direction and heard the exchange, and he shouted, “Fuck you, fuck.”
Then another helmeted man stuck his head up through the hatchway from the deli and called, “Can he see me?”
“Not if you stay low,” Letty called back, “but the parapets are rotten and the slugs pop right through.”
The man, dressed in black combat fatigues and armor, slid over the edge of the hatchway and low-crawled toward her, a black rifle riding on his arms. He was good-looking in the swaggering, square-jawed SWAT way. She pointed in the direction of the man on the garage roof, and the new arrival peeked between two crenellations, then got on a radio and said, “I can take him if you give me the green light.”
Jackson, on the other end of the call, said, “We’re gonna talk to him.”
“Let me know.” The new arrival turned to Letty and asked, “He’s wounded?”
“I shot him in the hip,” she said. “I thought we might want to interrogate him.”
“Good call.”
“What happened out back?” Letty asked.
“One of our guys was wounded, not bad, mostly small cuts, he might need stitches. Two of theirs are dead. They were waiting for the grenades to go off, they were hoping to get all three of ours,but after you screamed at them, our guys got behind enough cover and far enough away that they got through it. Then their two guys came crashing out thinking that maybe all of ours were dead or hurt, and they got cut down before they could do more damage.”
“Just the three guys so far?” Letty asked.
“Yeah, just the three, as far as I know.”
They both peeked between crenellations and saw the wounded man still behind the air conditioner housing, lying in a spreading puddle of blood. Somebody was talking to him from the stairwell, but they couldn’t make out what was being said.
The man with Letty rolled over on his side, keeping the barrel of his M4 pointing between crenellations, and said, “Pretty nice day, huh?”
“Cooler than I thought California would be,” Letty said. They were self-consciously laconic, like in the movies.
“Well, itisFebruary,” the fed said.
“True. I could be freezing my ass off in Washington.”
“Talk about a tragedy,” the man said.
Made her smile. “There it is. You get a girl hiding behind a parapet and the first thing you do, you try to take advantage.”
“I do it every time I get a girl behind a parapet, whatever a parapet is,” the man said. He got on the radio: “What’s up, boss?”
“We’re talking. He’s gonna quit.”
And after a while, he did.
Delores Nowak had been trackingthe conflict in Los Angeles, and when the man on the garage roof gave himself up to the FBI, she was on the phone to Letty within a minute, while Letty was still on the deli roof.
“I’m on my way to National. Senator Colles will meet me there. We’ve got a flight out to LAX, but we’re probably seven or eight hours away. We need to meet.”
“Okay.”
