Page 33 of Dirty Cops Next Door

I got to the station and found my way to the chief’s office.

“He’s holed up in his house. We have the warrant, and now we have you. We’ve been waiting for you to show up.”

“I couldn’t leave, not until he’d woken up. I had to know he was alright before I could leave.”

“I hear you, son. This is what we have planned…”

The chief led me into a room they used for group meetings and I saw a crudely drawn map of the house with its entry points marked.

“We’re going to go in hard and fast, boys. But you don’t go in until I give the go ahead, you understand? I don’t want to see any accidental discharging of weapons or any of you knuckleheads jumping the gun. We do this right, we do it to the letter of the warrant, and nobody else gets hurt today, understand?” He gazed out at the gathered force, moving on when he got the nod of acceptance from each one.

“Now, get your gear, and let’s move out.” The chief moved to gather up his protective equipment and came to me. “You’re coming with me, David.”

“Yes, sir.”

I followed him out to a waiting van, the others all piled into another van or into ours. There were twenty-two of us altogether. The fire department and ambulance services were waiting on standby.

It took twelve minutes to go from the station to the gaudy, white castle of a house Avery had built with his drug money. A mixture of gothic romance, Victorian charm, and modernism crashed together to form what Avery obviously thought of as the modern mansion. White gingerbread cutouts on the wraparound porch clashed with large white columns along a brick wall. A bay window on the first floor was topped by a glass wall on the second. None of it really made sense to anyone but the man who’d designed it. I’d always hated it.

“Right, we knock, we go in, we take him out, nobody gets shot, right?” The chief didn’t bother to check this time. “David, come with me.”

The chief had a file of papers tucked under his arm as we parked across the street from the open gate of Avery’s mansion. Thoughts plagued me as we walked up to the house.

The memory of Grant’s body juddering when he was shot, the way he twisted as he fell, caused a lance of pain to slice into my heart. The beam falling and the way his body jerked on impact made my fists clench.

The sensation of the hot spray from Grant’s blood across my face, blood I had yet to wash away totally, almost took me to my knees but I kept walking, trying to blink it all away. My mind wouldn’t give me peace.

I remembered Toni as she exited her car, the way her knees had given out on her. I’d run to her, held her up until she found her strength, but I’d been on the verge of falling myself. The tears she’d cried in her sleep had stung me, as if each tear was a drop of acid burning my face instead of hers.

My hand twitched over my holster but I kept my cool. Don’t lose it, I repeated as a mantra, don’t lose it.

“Wait!” I called out, my hand reaching for the chief to stop him moving forward.

I’d tried to distract myself by scanning the area around the house and the house itself. Movement in a window caught my eye. Horror filled me and I hunkered down behind a tree, the chief right behind me.

“He has a hostage!” I whispered to the man beside me and pointed to the window.

I looked up at the spotlight lit window, the only one with such a light, and knew this day was far from over.

Eric stood in the window, a gun to his head, held there by a maniacally grinning Avery.

How was I going to tell Toni?