Now only one of the gunmen remained, and he tried to make it outta there. While the gunmen sprayed the area with bullets, Rain made it to Ed Weather and dragged him out of the middle of the floor. Black kept firing while Jackie made a move to get behind him. With his attention focused on Black, Jackie was able to put her gun to the back of his head and she pulled the trigger.
Happy that the shooting appeared to be over, customers slowly began to get up from the floor and come out from hiding, glad that they’d survived. Some weren’t that lucky.
“How’s Ed?” Black asked as he walked up with Jackie.
Rain looked up at Black. “He’s dead,” she said and Placed her fingers over his eyes to closed them.
Chapter Three
At six-forty-three that morning, Detective Bautista and her new partner, Detective Greg Dickerson arrived at the Pago’s crime scene.
The wounded had long since been taken to hospitals and now laboratory technicians were processing the scene. There was blood just about everywhere the Detectives stepped, and what was once a dance floor was now covered with rows of bodies.
“How many dead?” Bautista asked crime scene Lieutenant Reyes.
“Twenty-eight dead.”
“And that includes seven that we believe were shooters,” Detective Scott explained. “Four of them we positively identified as being part of Mobley’s crew.”
“Were any of the dead Rain’s people?” Bautista asked.
“No, they’re all civilians or Mobley’s
people.”
“Who was first on the scene?” Dickerson asked.
“They’re right over there,” Scott said and pointed at the uniformed officers.
“I wanna talk to them,” Bautista said and walked off.
Dickerson shook his head and followed his new partner, thinking that if he had a choice, Bautista would have been the last person he would have wanted to partner up with. She was too much like his last partner, Detective Richie Fleming.
Cowboys, the both of them.
He and Fleming had responded to a tip of a possible drug deal in progress. When they arrived at the apartment and identified themselves as police, a man came running out of a bedroom and opened fire on the two Detectives and Fleming was shot five times. Dickerson returned fire and hit the man with one fatal shot to his chest. Fortunately, Fleming survived, but Dickerson needed a partner.
As for Bautista, she didn’t like her new partner either. After Kirk went back to Major Case with that bitch, Dawkins, Lieutenant Sanchez called her into his office.
“The off-book operation you’ve been running ends today, Bautista.”
“What off-book operation, Lieutenant?” Bautista asked but she was sure that Kirk told on her and that made her madder than she already was.
“Does the name Jadonna Marin mean anything to you, Detective?”
“Yes, Lieutenant, it does.” Bautista sat quietly fuming while Sanchez tore her a new one, and then she had a question. “How did you find out?” She needed to know.
“Captain Gineconna mentioned that he had given her to you and asked how we were doing with her as a C I. And since I didn’t know how we were doing with her as a C I, I decided to find out. Now, this may surprise you, but I was a pretty damn good Detective in my day, so it didn’t take me that long to figure it out.”
“Kirk didn’t tell you?”
“Are you telling me that Kirk was involved in this with you, Detective Bautista?”
“No, Lieutenant, I am saying that Kirk definitely did not have any involvement in it,” Bautista said. Angry with Kirk or not, she had enough integrity not to drag him into it when he was only involved in it for her.
After that, Bautista was introduced to her new partner, and since his last partner was working that case off-book, Dickerson wasn’t trying to hear it. But Bautista’s wish came true when Sanchez assigned her and Dickerson to investigate the first shooting at The Four Kings. After speaking briefly to Monique, the manager of The Four Kings, Bautista went straight to J.R.'s to talk to Rain about a drive-by she hadn’t even heard about.
And the investigation leading to the perpetrators being known members of Mobley’s crew didn’t deter Bautista from her course of action.