“You asking me? I’m just backup. Do whatcha want.”

They walked to the unmarked car, Stemple easing into the driver’s seat. The big Dodge bobbed under the weight. The women too got in. He fired up the engine and they squealed out of the lot toward the highway.

A half hour later Stemple turned onto surface streets in Seaside and eased the cruiser along a crumbling asphalt road, bordered by grasses, dusty brush, rusting wire fences. A hundred yards along they came to a development, probably fifty years old, bungalows and Cape-style houses, tiny, all of them.

“That’s it,” Allerton said, pointing to the scabbiest house here, a lopsided one-story structure that had last been painted a long, long time ago. White originally. Now, gray. The yard was half sand, half yellowing grass. Thirsty, Stemple thought. Everything was thirsty. This drought. Worst he could remember.

He shut the engine off. Everyone climbed out.

Stemple scanned the perimeter while the agents, looking around, headed toward the front door. Allerton knocked. No response. Dance pointed to the side, where there was a patio. She and Allerton disappeared that way.

Stemple walked around the property, looked at the houses nearby, wondered why somebody had taped a massive poster of a daisy in a window. Was it a sunscreen? Wouldn’t a sunflower’ve made more sense?

Mostly, though, he was looking for threats.

This wasn’t a cul-de-sac but it wasn’t highly traveled. He counted four cars pass by, all seeming to contain families or individuals on their way to or from school, work or errands. That didn’t mean there weren’t gangbangers inside, of course, with MAC-10s, Uzis or M4s. Gone were the days when crews conveniently piled into gangmobiles, pimped-out low-rider Buicks with jacked-up suspensions. Now they tooled around in Acuras, Nissans and the occasional Beemer or Cayenne, depending on how the drug and arms trade had been lately.

But no one, driver or passenger, paid him any mind.

He walked back to the cracked sidewalk and was looking down at some vibrant purple plant, when there was from inside the bungalow a crash of something containing glass, a lot of glass.

Followed by a woman’s scream.

Chapter 24

An hour later, back at CBI headquarters, Al Stemple was leaning back in a Guzman Connection task force conference room chair. It groaned under his weight.

The others were here too, the whole crew. The two Steves—Lu and Foster—along with Jimmy Gomez. Allerton, as well, was back from the Seaside bungalow mission.

“What happened to you?” Gomez asked her. She had a bandage on her arm.

“That lead to Serrano? He had a big-ass Doberman in the back bedroom. Sleeping dogs, and all that. He woke up. Didn’t like visitors.”

“You get bit?”

“Just scratched getting out of the way. Knocked over a table of crappy glass and china. Serves him right.”

“Al, you didn’t shoot any dogs, did you?” Gomez feigned horror.

“Reasoned with it.”

Foster was on the phone, saying to a CHP trooper, “Those’re your procedures, not my procedures, and it’s my procedures you’re going to be following. Are we transparent on that?… I asked you a question… Are we transparent?… Good. No more of this shit.”