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“Very good,” said Lieutenant Martin. “Hold down the button and you’re shooting a video. If you see something, saysomething. We’ll hear you and you’ll hear me. The bot knows the way.”
I told Lieutenant Martin, “Copy all of that,” and my partner and I got back into the car. Rich was at the wheel and I had robot controls on my lap.
I was sweating. My blood was hot. Feeling that Blackout and Cindy could be yards away inside the bookstore was making me hyper. What Rich was feeling must be incalculable. But Martin was right not to take us into the bookstore. We weren’t SWAT trained, not geared up for an out-of-control firefight.
Martin handed me a small construction-grade flip phone.
“If you need to tell me something in private, press Call. I’ll answer.”
I pressed the Call button. Martin grinned, picked up, and put his phone to his ear.
I said, “Lieutenant. Get Cindy Thomas the hell outta there. Do it now.”
“We will damned well do our best,” he said. “And that’s a promise.”
CHAPTER 91
THE SUN WAS just an orange streak on the horizon as I gripped the protective case with the bot control panel inside. Lieutenant Martin deployed Mastiff across the asphalt lot, with his team in a line behind him. They passed the gray car and jogged up the stairs to the elevated loading dock. A tac team officer lobbed a stun grenade overhand through the open door that appeared to lead into the warehouse.
He closed the door.
A second later, I saw the blinding flash through the transom window. The bang was muffled, but my car’s window frame vibrated. As I watched, Lieutenant Martin opened the door so that Mastiff could move onto the warehouse floor. It was black inside, black on my screen, then the robot’s LED lights came on.
Martin’s voice came through my speaker. “We’re a go. Copy?”
I said “Copy. I hear you loud and clear.”
As I watched, Mastiff’s four lights cut a swath about sixtydegrees to each side of center. The laptop screen broke into a quadrant of four views. I saw familiar objects: cartons and odd bits of furniture. I heard muffled sounds of footfalls, and someone calling out that, as expected, there was no electric power in the store.
In the upper right quad I recognized the section of floor where Blackout had dragged Cindy by the wrists, yanked the tape from her mouth, and told her to stop screaming. Or else. Richie seemed paralyzed as he stared at the images, looking for a mad dog killer and his girl. We saw SWAT legs, boots, and camo, but I didn’t see Blackout. And I didn’t see Cindy. I’d begun to doubt that they were there when the bot’s lights focused on a closed wooden door.
Martin called out, “Mr. Catton! Come to the door with your hands up. At the count of ten, we’re coming in. Need I say, we’re armed? To the teeth?”
Sitting in the car with Rich beside me, only yards away from the action, I counted to ten while staring at the image of a standard hollow-core wooden door. I touched the stick and rolled Mastiff up to the door. A member of the tac team was ready with a flash-bang when a voice, not Martin’s, came over the audio on the laptop.
“Hate to tell you but she’s nothere,” the voice said.
It was Blackout’s voice. Even in one short sentence, I recognized the cadence, the emphasis on the last syllable.
I pressed the call button on the phone. Martin said, “Yes?”
“That’s Catton. Out.”
Martin shouted at the door, “I’d like to take your word for it, Mr. Catton, but that’s not how we do things.”
It was eerie to hear Blackout’s loud, steady voice comingfrom the controls in my lap. He shouted, “I said, she’s not here! She’s. Not. Here.”
Martin’s voice: “Seven, six, five, four. Last chance to open the door.”
A tac team commando stepped in front of the robot, kicked in the door and chucked in another flash-bang. Mastiff rolled into what had to be the bookstore’s main room, the storefront rounding Hayes and Gough. The commando closed the door behind the bang and the bot. I braced for an explosion of sound and light. But nothing happened. I heard a man’s voice curse the dud.
A second stun grenade was lobbed into the main room. My screen bleached to white from the blast, and when it cleared, “I” was with the robot as it searched the room, north to south, east to west, around the bookshelves and sparse furnishings in the main room. I was mesmerized until Conklin broke the spell.
“Lindsay.Look. Overthere.”
He was pointing, not at the screen, but to the parking lot fronting the loading dock. A man was crossing the asphalt toward the gray sedan. He was wearing black everything and barely visible against the setting sun and pale moon rising in the sky. But I recognized him. He looked to be just under six feet and was keeping his head down as he walked.
I phoned Lieutenant Martin, told him that the suspect was on foot in the parking lot and we needed backup.
