When the sheriff's van pulled away with the four Mongols, it was almost dark. Shane and Chooch said good-bye to Emo and Darren then walked back to their borrowed bikes. As Chooch turned to get on his Fat Boy, Shane saw that he had a cut on his eyebrow trickling blood. His lip was also beginning to swell.
"Your mom's gonna kill us," he said.
"We didn't run, Dad," Chooch said proudly.
"Yep. We hung solid," Shane agreed. As he started his Harley he thought this boy had surely been sent to him by God.
Chapter 1
VERTICAL COFFINIt was mid-september, hot and dry, the kind of hot that makes you think of frosty cans of Coors and long swims in the ocean. I was standing in a small, burned-out shack ten miles east of Palmdale in the high desert. There wasn't much left-a rock chimney and some blackened footings. My shoes were already covered with soot from kicking at scorched rocks and the remnants of charred furniture. It was ten on a Tuesday morning and the lizards had already abandoned their flat rocks to slither into the shady crevices between granite outcroppings.
This had been a Palmdale P. D. crime scene a month ago. Now it was mine. I'd driven out here in a primered Ford Bronco along with Sonny Lopez. The truck was his privately owned vehicle, known in police circles as a POV. Sonny was a sheriff's deputy working L. A. Impact, a multi-jurisdictional law-enforcement task force located in Los Angeles County, in Lancaster. The TF was a bad pork stew made up of LAPD and state cops, LASD, and a smattering of feds from the FBI, Customs, and ATF. All of them pretending to be a kick-ass unit, while at the same time trying to get past their deep jurisdictional prejudices.
Sonny Lopez was in his mid-thirties, tall, and movie-star handsome.