hour, I too am very interested in getting answers to these very same questions, and I have a badge.”
“It’s an all access pass.”
“Damn right it is, at least around here,” Mac answered seriously.
A patrol unit arrived on the scene. Mac issued instructions to the patrol officers, who began securing the scene. Another minute later, two fire trucks arrived on the scene and there were another two dead bodies in St. Paul, making it five on the night.
“We need to get back to the Judge,” Wire said.
“Yeah, and I’m going to have a very pissed off partner and extremely anxious girlfriend,” Mac answered as they jumped back into her shot-up Acadia. As she turned around, Mac took in the scene of the burning Suburban, knowing there were two dead bodies inside and then thought of the missing one from McCormick’s. “Riddle me this, Dara Wire. If you were willing to blow up two of your own men without a second’s thought back there, why would you go to the effort and the risk, I might add, of removing the body from McCormick’s?”
Wire considered the question as she turned right back onto West Seventh. “Because you might identify the shooter and that ties him back to whoever hired him.”
“Right,” Mac replied. “So you get the body out of there and … do what? Dump it somewhere else?” There was a questioning skeptical tone to his voice. “If you were going to dump that body, then why do you leave the two behind in the Suburban?” Mac’s tone said he wasn’t buying the body dump theory.
Wire caught the tone and where he was heading. “There’s another scenario worth considering, isn’t there?”
Mac nodded. “He was alive and maybe he meant enough to someone that he needed to be saved.”
Wire considered that for a moment. “Hypothetically, if that was the case, they couldn’t risk taking him to an emergency room here. I’m sure you’ll check all of them to be sure.”
“We will and they wouldn’t go there. If that was your only option, you’d leave him to die at McCormick’s or heck, you’d finish the job off, put a bullet in his head to make sure he wasn’t saved. No. They would have to have a doctor willing to handle something like this off the books.”
“How many people in this town do that kind of work?” Wire asked. “There can’t be many, the town’s not big enough.”
“It’s an area of over three million people so it’s bigger than you think. However, to the larger question of who does this kind of work off the books, I know of a couple who’ve helped us on occasion when we’ve had a CI get injured but needed to avoid the hospital. But you said this guy has three holes in his chest, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then that requires a whole different level of care. We’re going to have to do some work on that.”
The crime scene tape was already up and West Seventh was blocked from Kellogg two blocks to the north to two blocks south of the pub. A patrol cop recognized Mac in the passenger seat and pulled up the crime scene tape to allow them through. The area looked like a war zone and his family’s business looked worse for the wear, with bullet holes in the building’s red brick facade and shattered bar and car window glass everywhere. It was something of a miracle that more people weren’t injured. Three ambulances had arrived and various people were being treated for scrapes and bruises but only one person was actually shot—Lich. In the opening of the third ambulance, Mac saw his partner lying on a stretcher, propped up, an IV already in his arm and an extremely pissed off look on his face. It made Mac smile. If Dick was pissed, he would survive.
“Tell me you caught the bastards,” Lich growled.
Mac shook his head as he jumped up into the ambulance and sat next to his partner, “Negative. But I am glad to see you’re okay.”
“I’m not fuckin’ okay. I got shot,” Dick pointed to his left shoulder and the wound in his shoulder socket. “A first for me.”
“Looks like they grazed you is all,” Mac said casually, inspecting the wound. His partner wasn’t grazed. The wound was a through and through. It looked painful as hell so he expressed some sympathy. “See you inside in a few minutes so we can keep working. We’ve got three bodies now, or five if you count the two that just