“Holy Jesus. ”
Andy Diviny’s body swayed and trembled. Black drool trickled from his mouth. Dez remembered that same ooze coming from the lips of the Russian cleaning lady. She didn’t know what it was, but just the sight of it filled her with an atavistic dread.
“Be careful!” yelled Dez. “Don’t let him spit on you. ”
Everyone was yelling at him. “Andy! Get down on the ground. Arms out to your sides. Do it now! Do it!”
If the young officer was able to understand the shouts there was no sign of it on his snarling face. He suddenly rushed at Chief Goss, reaching for him with clawlike fingers.
JT and Sheldon raised their shotguns and fired. The Mossbergs were loaded with small fabric pouches filled with #9 lead shot weighing about an ounce and a half. They were nonlethal but each one kicked like a mule and the rounds caught Diviny on both sides of his chest. He was plucked backward like he’d been pulled from behind by a chain and crashed to the ground. By all rights he should have been dazed, coughing, and nauseous; instead he immediately rolled onto his stomach and got up again.
“No fucking way…” breathed Chief Goss.
Someone yelled, “Pepper him!” But Dez already had her pepper spray in her hand. She slapped Diviny’s reaching arm aside and blasted him in the eyes.
He did not cough or choke or even blink. Instead he tried to spit at her.
Dez hit him again and again, but now she was backpedaling away from those bloody fingers, away from that black mucus.
“Christ!” she cried. “Somebody drop this crazy son of a—”
Five officers fired their Glocks at once, the bullets punching into Diviny, slamming into the Kevlar and shattering bones beneath the vest, making the officer dance and judder like a puppet. The barrage sent him sprawling backward against a tree trunk, and he hit it with enough force to knock pinecones from the branches. But even a
s they rained down, Diviny rebounded from the trunk and made another run at Goss.
“Andy, for the love of God, stop!” cried JT, but the officer flew at the chief, bloody spit flying from his mouth. JT pointed his gun at Diviny’s head.
“Hold your fire!” bellowed Dez. She threw down the pepper spray, whipped out her baton, stepped forward and smashed Diviny across the shins with it. The shock vibrated a line of hot needles up her arm, but the blow swept Diviny’s legs out from under him and he crashed onto his chest. Before he could roll over, JT was there, dropping his knee down hard between Diviny’s shoulder blades, and then six pairs of hands were at work, grabbing Diviny’s hair to hold his head down and his snapping mouth toward the dirt, fishing for the flailing arms, twisting them behind the young man’s back, snapping cuffs around the wrists. His weapons were removed and his utility belt unbuckled. JT kept his weight in place. They didn’t have leg shackles.
“Christ, what’s wrong with him?” Goss asked over and over again, but no one had an answer.
Dez looked around. “Anyone have a spit hood?”
“I got one,” said an officer from Martinville. He opened a small pouch on his belt and removed a disposable spit sock hood. Dez shook it out and pulled it over Diviny’s head. The elastic throat band would keep it in place but wouldn’t choke the officer. There were better devices, including plastic bite masks, but none of them carried one on them or in their cars.
“Got to do something about that throat,” advised JT. He fished in his pocket and produced an Izzy, tore open the plastic cover and handed it to Dez, who had the best angle to apply it.
She quickly wound the bandage around Diviny’s throat. The dressing—formally called an Israeli bandage as a nod to where it was developed—had a built-in plastic tension bar that applied continuous pressure to a wound, allowing the bandage to act as a stand-alone field dressing. All soldiers carried them and they had become very common in domestic law enforcement. Diviny spit at Dez as she worked, but the spit hood caught the spray of black blood.
“Careful not to make it too tight,” JT cautioned.
“Ought to strangle the cocksucker,” muttered Sheldon.
They ignored him. Dez tested the tension and nodded.
“If he’s going to live,” said Dez, “that should hold him. ” Dez directed two officers to keep him pinned down.
The other officers stood in a ragged circle around Diviny. As Dez got to her feet, she studied their faces and saw each of them take quick, frightened looks over at what was left of Mike Schneider and Jeff Strauss.
“What the hell’s going on?” someone asked in a hollow voice.
Dez realized with a sick jolt that the voice had been hers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
OFFICE OF OSCAR PRICE
DEPARTMENT TEN, FEDERAL BUILDING