It was an unfortunate circumstance. Cheng didn’t look down his nose at police officers. He admired them. They had a very difficult job, which required a tremendous amount of courage. Whoever was down there was simply unlucky. They had shown up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or, he wondered, were the authorities on to him?
Did they know he had switched boarding passes and that he had killed two men since arriving in the United States? Were they looking for Bao Deng, or worse, Tai Cheng? Was this random, or was it something more? There was no way to tell.
None of it mattered, though. Not with what was inside the storage unit. No one could be allowed to see that.
He listened as one of the vehicle’s doors was opened. He then waited for a second. It never came. Whoever was down there was alone. Cheng prepared to act.
He visualized the officer’s position by listening to his boots on the asphalt. The officer probably had a flashlight, maybe even one mounted to his weapon. He would have seen that the storage unit door was partially open, but he would check the Navigator first to make sure no one was inside.
Using his forearms, Cheng crept to the edge of the roof and peered over. It was indeed the police. He could see the officer, behind the SUV. He had a flashlight in one hand and his pistol in the other. He had been squatting, shining the light beneath the partially open roll-up door.
Straightening up, he now began to back away. When he reached for the microphone at his shoulder, that’s when Cheng fired.
He depressed the trigger twice in rapid succession. The pistol bucked in his hands, punctuated by two muffled spits. Each of the nine-millimeter hollowpoints found its mark, killing the officer instantly.
Hopping down from the roof, Cheng checked to confirm that the man was dead. He was. The back of his head was blown away and one of the rounds had exited his left eye.
Cheng needed to move quickly. When the officer failed to report back in, backup would be sent, if it wasn’t already on the way.
Climbing down from the roof, he stepped to the police cruiser and popped the trunk. It took him only a second to find what he needed. Returning to the officer, he removed his radio and threw it on the Navigator’s front passenger seat. He then dragged the corpse out of the way and reentered the storage locker.
There wasn’t enough time to load everything, so he made a beeline for the most important item, the one that absolutely could not be left behind.
Picking up the box, he carried it back to the SUV, opened the tailgate, and slid it into the cargo area.
Closing the tailgate, he started the Navigator and pulled it forward. After climbing out, he backed the patrol car into the storage unit, so that the bumper of the cruiser was pressed up against the boxes stacked upon the pallet.
Flipping open the cruiser’s gas tank cover, he unscrewed the cap and, taking the top off one of the flares he had retrieved from the trunk, wrapped it in a rag and shoved it into the opening. Next, he dragged the body of the dead cop into the unit and placed him behind the wheel.
With everything ready to go, he ignited his second flare, tossed it on the backseat of the squad car, and exited the storage locker.
Rolling down the steel door, he replaced the padlock, slid back into the Navigator, and drove away from the storage facility.
CHAPTER 40
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After questioning Wazir Ibrahim’s neighbor, Vasquez, Harvath and Urda followed Hoffman toward his office downtown. Nashville PD had brought the Somali cab driver in for further questioning and Harvath had several of his own he wanted to ask.
They were halfway there when an explosion erupted in the distance behind them and a roiling fireball climbed into the night sky.
“What the hell was that?” Harvath exclaimed as he turned around to look.
Urda watched the blast in his rearview mirror. “I don’t know, but it was big. Gas leak?”
Harvath had no idea, but he didn’t like the timing.
Two minutes later, Hoffman flipped his lights and siren on in front of them.
“Now what?” said Harvath.
Urda shrugged just as his cell phone rang. It was Hoffman, and he put him on speaker: “Did you see that explosion?”
“Affirmative.”
“Radio says it came from a self-storage facility where a Nashville metro cop was