They checked the circuit breaker panel and the relay boxes and the splitters and the transformers for the coax and the telephone landlines, and all of these Velasquez said were fine.

"The problem is at the Den," he said. "Unless some fine citizen plowed a car through a phone company switch box between here and there."

"What did you see on monitor six?"

"I don't know, Charlie. It happened too fast."

"It'll be on the tape."

"Monitor six is the side yard," said Velasquez.

"Where the control box is," said Hood.

They exchanged looks and went back inside.

The screens were still dead. Hood could tell by the forced calm of her voice that Bly was talking to Soriana out in San Diego. Bly was impulsive and Soriana was deliberate, and this tried her patience sorely.

She rang off and lowered her cell phone. "Soriana says give it five."

"I'd go right now," said Hood.

"I would, too," said Bly. She was a stout woman whose sweet round face the years with ATF had started to harden. "He's afraid the narcos will make us if we drive by looking like tourists. But we'll give it five, all right? Because he's the boss. Yes. Five seconds, that is. You guys ready?"

Dyman Morris, once a point guard for NYU, made it to the door first, swinging an armored vest off the coatrack like a kid going out to play in the cold.

A few minutes later Hood was guiding his Durango down Agate Street, looking at the little crowd of people standing outside the Den in the dawn's early light.

3

The neighbors greeted them with tales of gunshots and screams and a guy smoking off in a black Range Rover, so the Blowdown team went in through the wide-open front door.