L.A. Gang War by Stephen Mertz

Author:Stephen Mertz [Mertz, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Action & Adventure
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Back at the safe house Stone stood at the window, looking out and down at the parking area filling up steadily with the first returning tenants commuting back from their jobs. Smog hung in the distance, but warm, brassy sunlight washed the scene with a cheeriness he did not feel inside.

He felt the urge to be out there in the world doing something instead of being cooped up inside waiting for the next break in a big, invisible wall that somehow seemed to have him and his team temporarily stopped cold in their tracks.

The shootout at Sylvio’s had been nothing but a dead end. One of several. Temporary, sure, but a dead end just the same.

A call to Rick Chavez’s hospital room upon their return to the condo had yielded only the information that Mr. Chavez was resting and the nurses’ station refused to rouse him. A call to Chug Brown’s office had yielded no better results, but that was to be expected, Stone told himself; Chug was assigned to the drug-gang problem and the firefight at Sylvio’s probably had him down on the scene of its aftermath.

The first thing Stone had done when they returned to the condo was to hit the shower. He hadn’t even slowed down since the flight up from Central America, before the team’s deployment to San Clemente the night before, and a weariness of the body and spirit seemed to want to tug him into its grasp.

He had not fought off Carol’s mother-henning him to catch some shut-eye. He wished, as he often did at such times, that he could somehow push on without sleep, without rest. When there was a job that needed doing, he always resented what he regarded as one of his body’s major shortcomings: the occasional need to rest, to recharge the batteries. But he had learned in Nam how to fall immediately into a deep sleep when the opportunity afforded itself. Over there you also never knew when the next chance might come to catch some shut-eye. So while Loughlin and Wiley briefed Carol on the afternoon’s events, he had taken a shower and stretched out for some much needed recharging. Three hours later he awoke to the bedside alarm feeling instantly refreshed, the need to do something already building.

At the moment Loughlin was curled up in stocking feet on a couch across the living room, reading a John le Carré spy thriller in absorbed silence.

Hog Wiley, rarely silent except in commando situations when lives depended on it, was engrossed in an episode of The Dating Game on TV, crudely appraising the physical attributes of each of the present bachelorettes.

“Man, if a bird flew across that set, ever’ one of them babes would point,” he grunted. “Television is just no goddamn place to meet a gal with meat on her bones.”

The others pretty much ignored Hog for the moment, which seemed to suit him fine.

Stone knew his men were just killing time the same way he was. It

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