Page 2 of Return of the Spider

Sampson put a bubble on the roof, lit it up, and hit the siren.

2

Sampson shut down thesiren and the bubble a good four blocks back from the small brick house with double dormers and a bare-grass lawn where the Alphonso brothers had grown up.

We reached the perimeter and parked behind the SWAT van, the rear of which was open. A Black female officer with a headset sat in the back talking to someone as we got out.

“Good, it’s Knight,” Sampson said.

“The best of the bunch,” I said.

Captain Nyla Knight saw us come to the rear of the van, nodded, and pulled her headset to one side. “We have four snipers in position. The breach team is on its way. You can watch it all here.”

We climbed into the van and saw a small bank of screens showing feeds from various members of the SWAT team. “How many total SWAT on scene?” I asked.

“Twelve,” she said. “Taking no chances with these two.”

The plan was for the eight-man breaching team to get flash-bang grenades into the little house from the sides and then use the battering rams on the front and rear doors. We watched the team break into two groups of four. One man from each sub team darted across the lawn to the scraggly bushes below the side windows, where lights glowed behind drawn shades.

“Someone’s home,” I said.

“Four someones,” Knight said. “We ran infrared and—”

The shade on the east side of the house flew up. The window sash was already raised. The muzzle of an automatic weapon stuck out and someone fired, hitting the officer running in to deliver the flash-bang. He fell.

A second gunman opened fire from a window on the opposite side of the house, but the targeted officer managed to take cover.

“Officer down!” Captain Knight bellowed into her headset.

The breach team’s commander came back over the radio: “Affirmative, Belmont down! Belmont down!”

A sniper positioned on the roof of a house a block away said over the comms, “Got Trevor, Cap. Permission to fire?”

“Take him,” Knight said.

It was hard to see from our angle, but the sniper shot through the open window and hit Trevor Alphonso in the chest, killing him instantly. Members of the breach team raced forward to retrieve the fallen Officer Belmont.

“Once he’s clear, put a flash-bang in that open window!” Knight said.

“Roger that, Cap.”

The shooting paused. The SWAT captain changed frequencies and called to a support helicopter circling overhead, “Give me infrared on that house.”

“Two in the west front room. Another moving to the rear exit.”

She switched back to SWAT comms and called her snipers. “Aubrey, watch that back door now.”

“On it, Cap,” Officer Aubrey said a second before the rear door of the house flew open and Nicky Alphonso surged out, gun up, spraying bullets in an arc and screaming in rage, “This is my house! Welcome to my house!”

Knight said, “Take him, Aubrey.”

Amid the bursts of rapid fire from the younger Alphonso brother, I didn’t hear the single shot exit Officer Aubrey’s rifle, but I saw Nicky crumple, shot through the throat. Lights out.

Frantic radio traffic ensued as the breaching teams readied to attack the house again. The front door opened. Two terrified, sobbing young women stepped out with their arms held high.

Captain Knight breathed a sigh of relief, then looked at us. “That could have gone a whole lot better.”

I said, “Not like you had a lot of choice. They went all Scarface on you.”