Never Street by Loren D. Estleman Page B

here to identify?”
    “These officers were cruising the block when they heard shots.” She indicated the Adam-and-Eve team. “They couldn’t tell which house the shots came from, so they started pounding on doors. This one was open. It looks like the perp exited out the back. If he had a car it wasn’t parked on this street. Two hits?” She lifted her eyebrows at Chung.
    He nodded. “Maybe three, but I’m betting one’s an exit wound. I’ll know more when I get inside.”
    “The officers heard six shots,” she said. “We found three holes in the walls and a freshly broken window, broken from the inside. If it was a professional hit, the pro was either in a hurry or blind or trying to make it look homemade. I vote for genuine homemade. A buy went bad.”
    “Drugs?”
    “Hot merch. Let’s take a look.”
    I followed her through an open door into a kitchen the same size as the living room, that hadn’t been done over since Nixon. The cabinets and countertops were avocado to match the refrigerator and four-burner stove. A flycatcher of an imitation Tiffany ceiling fixture shed greasy light onto worn linoleum, stacks of electronic equipment, and Brian Elwood, Gay Catalin’s kid brother.
    He lay half on his back on the linoleum with his knees drawn into his stomach and his head resting on a baseboard, staring up through the ceiling, the rafters above that, and beyond them the roof, trying hard for the stars. Three of the four bulbs in the fixture weren’t working; the one remaining cast shadows from the leading between the panes, etching a spiderweb pattern across the gray bloodless face. There was an angry red hole in his tank top where the pectorals met, frozen pink bubbles on his lips.
    “Lung shot,” Mary Ann Thaler said. “Drowned in his own blood, probably. You can see he tried to crawl through the side door. Left a track like a snail. His black Jeep’s parked next to the door; that’s where we got his name, from the registration in the glove compartment. He was trying to get to his wheels.”
    I bent over him, keeping my lips tight. His shaved head was as gray as a stone. There was blood clotted in his goatee. I tried to make eye contact and gave up. He was seeing something the rest of us would have to wait for.
    Straightening, I turned and looked at the equipment piled in the corner. I identified four large video cameras, a laser disc player, a rectangular black box that might have been a seven-channel equalizer, and several thirty-six-inch speakers encased in ebony. There were coils of copper wire and a number of fiberboard cartons with stenciling on them I didn’t bother to read.
    Thaler said, “We’re checking the hot sheets now. There must be ten, fifteen thousand bucks’ worth of toys here.”
    “Twenty,” I said. “Wholesale.”
    “Really. I thought you were still listening to eight-track tapes.”
    The room smelled of old meals and something much more acrid that didn’t belong in a kitchen. “When?”
    “Squad car team heard the shots a little after ten. They were another fifteen minutes locating the source; time enough for Little Brother to give up the ghost. He was still plenty warm. The hatch is open on the Cherokee. Either he’d just finished unloading the stuff or he was getting set to cart it away. A few shots wouldn’t have drawn much interest in this neighborhood. It was the perp’s bad luck the cops were within earshot.”
    “If he was planning to cap him anyway, why didn’t he do it when the stuff was still in the Jeep? He could’ve just driven it away.”
    “Maybe the perp wasn’t buying. Maybe he was selling, and decided to keep the cash and the merch.”
    “Then he should’ve waited until it was loaded.”
    “It could have been spur-of-the-moment. He wasn’t used to it or he wouldn’t have missed four times. Then he heard the officers banging on doors and bugged out.”
    “Maybe he didn’t care about the merchandise or the money. Maybe he just wanted