Hood followed his autoloader into the kitchen where Angel lay nearly decapitated by a shotgun. The blasts had also torn the stove hood open and flung a storm of flesh and blood against the wall. The machine pistol was gone and the tortilla lay, shriveled, black and smoking, on the griddle.

In the living room Ray and Johnnie had taken multiple rounds and they lay in ribbons on the floor. Johnnie had gotten his gun up, or at least a gun lay next to him. It was one of the silenced.32 machine pistols that no one at ATF had ever seen until late last year. The Halo game had gone into sleep mode, its Gregorian chant soundtrack swelling across the room.

Hood and Morris moved through the house as a team. Hood had that nobody-alive-here feeling but his stomach and nerves were stretched tight. Like Anbar, door-to-door, he thought. Like a drug tunnel he'd once found himself trapped in by unhappy gunmen. They covered the empty house quickly, then backtracked to the living room where Hood shut off the video game and the chanting stopped.

He peeked through the blinds and looked outside at Bly and Velasquez. The two agents were helping the Buenavista cops seal the scene against the public. The agents looked cooperative enough right now, but Hood knew that in just a few minutes they would seal the scene against the Buenavista cops and bad feelings would arise. That's how it went down when the feds were in town.

Hood found another of the strange machine pistols in Ray's bedroom. He stood in front of a bedroom window and let the strong morning sunlight illuminate the weapon. The stainless steel planes threw off the light like the facets of a gemstone. He unscrewed the noise suppressor and retracted the telescoping handles and set aside the curving fifty-round magazine. Now the gun looked very much like the ones that he had seen being packed for shipment at the Pace Arms factory in Costa Mesa. He read the engraving on the frame: LOVE 32. That was it. No serial numbers, no manufacturer grip marks, nothing else.