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lawn. His 9mm Glock pistol palmed, Injun Joe advanced warily toward the house.
    He came upon the first body ten feet in, at least what was left of it. Cooling blood and entrails steamed upward into the night. The smell made him gag. The guard’s midsection had been shredded. He had been virtually disemboweled. His face was frozen in agony.
    Rainwater came upon the remains of two additional men before he reached the mansion’s entrance. There might have been more, but for the last stretch his attention was focused on the empty hole where the front door used to be. Wooden shards of it lay all over the porch. Injun Joe had to step over larger fragments as he crossed the threshold. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of gunpowder. Its telltale smoke still hung in the air. Around him bullets had shattered virtually every visible window—bullets fired from the inside by Oliveras’s guards toward whatever was killing them.
    Another trio of bodies lay at absurd angles at various levels of the curving staircase. The blood of the lowermost one oozed to the marble foyer and formed a pool. Injun Joe did his best to avoid it as he mounted the spiraling steps toward the mansion’s second floor.
    Jesus Christ …
    Like the guards outside and on the stairs, the men on the second floor had been torn apart. Two lay facedown at the head of the hallway in widening pools of their own blood. Rainwater could hear the wail of approaching sirens now and debated whether to go on alone. The chance that whoever had done all this was still within the mansion was quite real, and the thought of facing them with only the Glock did not strike Rainwater’s fancy. Then again, he was a cop who was looking at the upshot of eight months’ work that might have cost him a marriage. The cop in him made a mental note that the walls on this floor, like those of the first, had been peppered by bullets. Oliveras’s guards hadn’t gone without a fight, then, but there was no evidence that they had scored a single hit on whatever had killed them.
    The sirens were really screaming now, and Rainwater proceeded on down the second-floor hallway. He took a long step across one body lying crosswise in the hall and leapt over a second that had been turned into little more than butcher meat. A third corpse’s eyes were cocked right on him as he skirted it and headed toward Oliveras’s bedroom.
    The drug lord’s door resembled the front one downstairs except that there was even less remaining. Part of it still stood attached by the hinges, but the result was almost comic. The inside of Oliveras’s bedchamber was anything but.
    Joe Rainwater tried to tell himself it was for the best, that justice had been served perversely, though appropriately. But there was nothing even remotely pleasing about the coppery, musty smell or the sight of red splashed across the floor and walls. Only a single reading lamp was on, and the lack of light spared Rainwater the full brunt of the sight. In three tours in ’Nam and fifteen years on the force, Injun Joe had never seen anything like this.
    The remains of Ruben Oliveras were … everywhere !
    He could hear the police cars rolling onto the property now, more sirens already blazing in their wake, as he backed out of Oliveras’s bedroom. Outside in the hallway Injun Joe leaned over and inspected the guns of the nearest corpses. The clips of two automatic weapons had been nearly drained. A pump-action shotgun had been emptied of all six shells. Again, though, there was no evidence to suggest that they had hit a damn thing. A dozen heavily armed men, professional men, plus Oliveras, cut down in two minutes tops without taking one of the attackers with them.
    Joe Rainwater gazed one more time at the impossible and then headed for the stairs to greet the arriving officers.

Chapter 4
    “ MAY I HELP you, sir?”
    “Yes, I think you can,” Blaine McCracken said to the proprietor of Collectibles, who was standing near a display of