The 6th Target (Women's Murder Club 6)

A patrolman called out, “This way, Lieu,” and waved me down the south driveway leading to the dock.

I drove past the police prowlers, ambulances, and fire rigs, and parked outside the terminal. I opened my door and stepped out into the sixty-degree haze. About a twenty-knot breeze had whipped up a stiff chop on the bay, making the Del Norte rock at her mooring.

The police activity had excited the crowd, and a thousand people shifted between the Ferry Building and the farmer’s market, taking pictures, asking cops what had happened. It was as if they could smell gunpowder and blood in the air.

I ducked under the barrier tape cordoning off the dock, nodded to cops I knew, looked up when I heard Tracchio call my name.

The chief was standing at the mouth of the Del Norte.

He was wearing a leather blazer and Dockers, and sporting his signature Vitalis comb-over. He signaled to me to come aboard. Said the spider to the fly.

I headed toward him, but before I got five feet up the gangway, I had to back up and let two paramedics pass with a rolling stretcher bouncing between them.

I dropped my eyes to the victim, a large African American woman, her face mostly covered with an oxygen mask, an IV line running into her arm. Blood soaked the sheet tucked tightly over her body.

I felt a pain in my chest, my heart catching on a full second before my brain put it together.

The victim was Claire Washburn!

My best friend had been shot on the ferry!

I grabbed the gurney, stopping its forward motion and causing the brassy blond paramedic bringing up the rear to bark at me, “Lady, out of the way!”

“I’m a cop,” I said to the paramedic, pulling open my jacket to show her my badge.

“I don’t care if you’re God,” said the blonde. “We’re getting her to the ER.”

My mouth was hanging open and my heart was pounding in my ears.

“Claire,” I called out, walking quickly now alongside the stretcher as the gurney rumbled over the gangway and onto the asphalt. “Claire, it’s Lindsay. Can you hear me?”

No answer.

“What’s her condition?” I asked the paramedic.

“Do you understand that we have to get her to the hospital?”

“Answer me, goddamn it!”

“I don’t freaking know!”

I stood helplessly by as the paramedics opened the ambulance doors.

More than ten minutes had passed since I’d gotten Tracchio’s call. Claire had been lying on the deck of the ferry all that time, losing blood, trying to breathe with a bullet hole ripped into her chest.

I gripped her hand, and tears immediately filled my eyes.

My friend turned her face to me, her eyelids fluttering as she forced them open.

“Linds,” she mouthed. I moved her mask aside. “Where’s Willie?” she asked me.

I remembered then — Claire’s youngest son, Willie, was working for the ferry line on the weekends. That’s probably why Claire had been on the Del Norte.

“We got separated,” Claire gasped. “I think he went after the shooter.”

Chapter 5

CLAIRE’S EYES ROLLED UP, and she slipped away from me. The knees of the gurney buckled, and the paramedics slid the stretcher out of my grasp and into the ambulance.