Praise for James Scott Bell
A master of the cliffhanger, creating scene after scene of mounting suspense and revelation . . . Heart-whamming.
Publishers Weekly
A master of suspense.
Library Journal
One of the best writers out there, bar none.
In the Library Review
There'll be no sleeping till after the story is over.
John Gilstrap, NYT bestselling author
James Scott Bell’s series is as sharp as a switchblade.
Meg Gardiner, Edgar Award winning author
One of the top authors in the crowded suspense genre.
Sheldon Siegel, NYT bestselling author
Romeo's Town
A Mike Romeo Thriller
James Scott Bell
Compendium Press
Copyright © 2021 by James Bell
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Compendium Press
Woodland Hills, CA
Contents
ROMEO’S TOWN
Author’s Note
More Thrillers From James Scott Bell
About the Author
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
Puck, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
George Orwell
ROMEO’S TOWN
Two minutes before the knife attack I was sitting on a folding chair outside the Odysseus Bookstore in downtown L.A. Yep, an independent bookstore had managed to survive lockdowns, street riots, arson, and general fear o’ the virus. Wounded though it was, with boards on the windows, it was at long last doing some business again.
I know the owner of Odysseus, a middle-aged bibliophile named Tony. An anonymous donor had given the store a much-needed infusion of cash. That still left it hanging. Even in good times a bookstore is a thin-margin business. A combo new-and-used bookstore is an endangered retail species. I was glad to be giving it what business I could. I’m all for preserving bookstores, pandas, and the blue-footed booby.
So there I was, leafing through a used hardback of Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. I’m always interested in what the scholars say about Iago. The guy has some of the best lines in Shakespeare, and even though he’s a complete turd, he sometimes says wise things like, “If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions.” We see that truth played out every day now. Reason is long gone. Balance and restraint are quaint vestiges of the past. We’re a world of blood and baseness, full of Iagos, a character—Bloom says—with “great intellectual activity, accompanied with a total want of moral principle.”
Welcome to our current politics.
But I digress.
I looked up from the book and saw a guy dressed in a dirty green jacket. He was about my size, six-four, white, wearing a black gaiter mask. I wouldn’t have paid him any attention except for one thing—he pulled a knife out of his jacket pocket. A six-inch blade, at least. He flipped it in his hand so his forearm hid the blade, and headed into the bookstore.
So did I.
The guy made for the counter. Behind it was a young woman named Wanda. She was looking down at something.
Knife Guy was going to cut her. It was the way he held the knife, the tightness of his fist, the purposeful walk. He wasn’t going there to ask where the poetry section was.
In a spot like that you can’t hesitate. I would have taken him down myself but there was a little too much space between us at the critical moment.
In a pinch, an 800-page hardback makes a useful weapon. If you know how to throw it, that is. Fling it haphazardly and it’s liable to fly open and lose all force as the pages riffle in the air. The key is to hold it with the spine facing you, and hurl it so it makes only one revolution, like an ax.
How do I know this? Because I used to throw books across my dorm room at Yale when I found too many stupid utterances in them. But you can be pretty intellectually arrogant when you’re fifteen years old.
I threw Harold Bloom at the side of the guy’s head.
The sharp points of the cover nailed him just above the neck. He went down like a garbage bag tossed in a dumpster.
Wanda looked up.
A man standing at a paperback spinner said, “Whoa!”
Knife Guy rolled on the ground. I put a knee on his back and grabbed his wrist, slammed it on the floor a couple of times. The knife came loose. I pulled his arm behind him and pinned it with my knee. I picked up the knife and put it on the counter.
“Call the police,” I said.
Wanda was already on the phone.
Knife Guy started cursing. I tweaked his skull and told him to shut up. There were children in the store.
A woman watching from the fringe said, “That’s brutality!”
I had no words.
“And where is your mask?” she said. “You’re not wearing a mask!”
I started having bad thoughts.
Tony stepped in and said to the customers, “Come on, now. Let’s back away.”
“This store isn’t safe!” the angry woman said.
“We have two exits, ma’am,” Tony said.
Knife Guy screamed something profane. I grabbed his hair, pulled his head up, and said, “Not another word.”
He gave me another word.
I slammed his head on the floor. Not enough to put him to sleep. I know my own strength. He screamed a few other profanities.
“Stop it!” the angry woman said. “Just stop it right now!”
“Stop what?” I said. “This?”
I slammed his head again. This time Knife Guy didn’t say anything.
“I am going to tell the police what you’ve done!” the woman said.
Bad thoughts returned.
I stood and put my foot on Knife Guy’s back. Wanda had finished her call and her arms were crossed in front of her. She was shaking.
“You okay?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Wanda said. She was around twenty-five, went to Cal State Northridge. We’d had some friendly conversations before.
Tony went behind the counter and put his arm around Wanda. “Come sit down, wait for the police. I’ll get you some water.”
The angry woman took out her phone and pointed it at me. The phone as weapon. I’ll show you! I can take your picture and show it to the police or put it on the internet forever! And I hope it ruins your life!
This is what the long, slow crawl to civilization has come to. The great unraveling is here, and it seems unstoppable.
Five or six minutes later a pair of cops arrived. A man and a woman. The woman’s name plate said Ortega. Through her mask she asked me what I was doing, since I was sitting on Knife Guy.
I said, “This guy came at Ms. Young.” I nodded toward Wanda, who was sitting behind the counter. “He had a knife. I stopped him. The knife is on the counter.”
The officer asked Wanda if what I said was accurate. Wanda nodded.
Then that woman stepped in. “He was hitting this man’s head on the ground! You should arrest him.”
Officer Ortega seemed to have a natural nutcase meter, and put her hands out. “All right, everyone, just calm down.”
She leaned over Knife Guy
. “Sir, I’m going to ask you to come with us until this is straightened out.”
Knife Guy let her know what he thought of that idea. Also that he knew his rights, and that he was going to sue the police. This did not endear him to the officers. The male officer attempted to place handcuffs on Knife Guy. Knife Guy fought him from the ground. The officer seemed reluctant to apply any force. That’s how it is these days, especially with camera phones all around.
So I grabbed Knife Guy’s hair and gave his head a healthy pound on the floor.
“It helps if you do that,” I said.
After they got the woozy attacker in the car, Officer Ortega interviewed me by the biography section.
“You were the one who subdued the suspect?”
“Yes.”
“What made you do it?”
“His knife.”
“You saw it?”
“He was going to cut the woman at the counter.”
“And you knew this how?”
“The cut of his jib.”
“The what?”
“I could tell by his body language what he intended to do. You don’t approach someone with a knife held against your forearm unless you mean to use it.”
“You were taking an awful chance.”
“On the scale of awful, I err on the side of keeping someone alive.”
“If you don’t mind, a detective will be here soon and I know he’ll want to talk to you.”
“Would it matter if I do mind?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll be over in the mystery section.”
The lead detective’s name was Coltrane Smith. He was in his forties, medium height, wearing a mask, coat, open-collared shirt, and a shield on his belt. His partner was a woman named Jenson. Smith handled my statement. I went over the same ground as I did with the officer.
“I get it,” Smith said. “But it’s going to be hard to make out assault with a deadly when there wasn’t any assault.”
“You don’t call walking up to someone with a knife an assault?” I said.
“You’re the only one who saw it, looks like. The intended victim, if she was that, didn’t see him coming.”
“Then charge him with an about-to-be-an-assault,” I said.
I think Smith may have smiled. “If only.”
“You should at least get him on the knife.”
Smith nodded. “If he’s got a record, maybe ex-felon with a weapon. If we need you, you’ll testify, yes?”
“Sure.”
“The only other thing…”
“Is?”
“What’s this about you pounding his head on the ground?”
“I believe that’s called subduing a dangerous suspect.”
“Wasn’t he under your control when you did that?”
“He was assaulting the customers, including children, with words.”
“Words?”
“Bad words. I put a stop to it.”
“You pounded this guy’s head because he was cursing?”
“I’m a sensitive sort.”
Smith shook his head. “That’s a new one.”
“I gave him one more when he was fighting your officers trying to cuff him.”
After a couple of eye blinks, Detective Coltrane Smith said, “Here’s my card. What’s the best way to get in touch with you?”
I pulled out one of Ira’s cards and gave it to him. “Through my lawyer-employer.”
Smith scratched the back of his head. “We’ll have to see how this plays out. These days it’s, well, not a good move to go too rough on an arrestee.”
“I didn’t arrest him,” I said.
“It may complicate a prosecution.”
“What’s life without complications?”
“Stuff happens,” Smith said.
“Fate,” I said.
“I don’t believe in fate.”
“Neither do I,” I said.
That’s when fate entered the bookstore.
The Greeks attributed everything that happens to three goddesses who create the warp and woof of our lives. Clotho works on a spinning wheel. Lachesis measures out thread. But it is Atropos who has the ultimate power. She holds the shears and can cut wherever she pleases.
So all the terrible outcomes of life could be attributed to these spin sisters, the Three Fates. It was a way of explaining the bad stuff. But they tossed in a bone of goodness now and again, just to keep things sporting. When fate happens, you don’t always know if it will be for ultimate good, ultimate evil, or something in between.
We don’t buy into the myth anymore, of course. But when certain things happen I wonder if I hear the creak of a spinning wheel in some dark corner of the cosmos. Or sense the noiseless hand of God. As the Hebrews put it in their holy book: The lot is cast into the lap. But the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord.
Whatever the attribution of stuff that happens—in Detective Coltrane Smith’s words—I was gobsmacked when Sophie Montag walked into the Odysseus Bookstore.
The only woman I ever loved looked as beautiful as ever, even with a mask on her face. Tall, sunset-red hair, intelligent eyes behind black-frame glasses, dressed in jeans and a white sweatshirt with Constantine Academy stenciled on the front. The orchestra in me that had been sitting around for months suddenly sat up and began a Beethoven symphony.
“Mike!” she said.
“Sophie,” I said.
“What …” She looked around. “What’s happened here?”
“We had a little commotion.”
She looked knowingly at me.
“It always seems to happen when I read Harold Bloom,” I said.
“You’re going to have to explain that one to me.”
“You want me to?”
After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “Yes.”
We decided to take a walk. Which is to take a risk in downtown L.A. Four blocks from the store was Skid Row. Not your grandfather’s Skid Row, where derelicts and winos and transients would sleep in doorways and curbsides until rousted by cops and taken to a facility for a 72-hour hold.
No more rousting. No more holds.
It’s a haven for meth and heroin addicts living in tents and boxes, undisturbed by a police force that’s been told to stand down. If you can avoid the rats you’ll see men smoking meth in the afternoon sun, women selling bootleg cigs on top of cardboard boxes or trading sex for money. Men flashing dope to passing cars. That old man slumped in the doorway of an abandoned garment business? He’s shooting heroin into his cracked, bare feet.
Take a wide swath around the Row, and you’ll find boarded-up buildings, the wounds of the looting and riots that choked the city last summer while the fat cats in City Hall preened for the cameras.
We headed toward Pershing Square, weaving our way past the pedestrians on Broadway and the cars on Hill. We found a bench where we had a view of the classic Biltmore Hotel, the last place the famous Black Dahlia was seen alive. Los Angeles is a city of ghosts, some in black and white, some in color. Pershing Square itself is like that. Designed to be the city’s “Central Park,” it is now mostly a slab of concrete with multi-colored protuberances, sitting on top of an underground parking garage.
It wouldn’t be a place I’d spend ten seconds, but with Sophie I didn’t care about time. She took off her mask. Perfect lips to go with those eyes. The Beethoven symphony in my chest swelled into allegro con brío.
I quickly came up with something original to say. “What are you doing these days?”
“Teaching,” Sophie said. “Seventh grade English.”
“At The Constantine Academy?”
She looked astonished. “How did you know that?”
I tapped my head. “There are not many things in this town I don’t know about. Plus, it’s on your sweatshirt.”
She looked down and laughed. “I forgot all about it. And here I was starting to think you were truly gifted.”
It was good to hear that from her, the ea
sy banter, the way it had once been with us.
I said, “It sounds pricey and private.”
“It is,” she said. “But you’ll like this, it’s a classical curriculum.”
“A classical school in Los Angeles? I’m stunned.”
“I know.”
“They’ll be coming after you, you know.”
“Who?”
“The torches and pitchforks crowd.”
A fleeting look of sadness came to her then.
“Which makes you a hero in my book,” I said. “Don’t give up the fight.”
“You ought to stop by sometime,” she said.
“You’re meeting onsite?”
“Just starting to. And the kids would love to hear what a real, live private eye does.”
“Not PI,” I said. “You need a license for that. I’m an investigator for a lawyer.”
“That’s just as cool.”
“Then there’s hope for the future,” I said.
“Are you up to it?”
Before we went on, something needed to be cleared up. “As I recall,” I said, “you weren’t too thrilled that I put the hurt on your boyfriend.”
She looked at her hands. “Ex-boyfriend.”
“Right,” I said.
“I’ve thought a lot about what happened,” she said.
“If it helps, I’m sorry it did.”
“No,” she said. “I understand why you did it. I told you about my father, how he used to hit my mother. How I tried to stop him once and got hit myself. He left us after that. But I remember at that moment, I did want to stop him, using any means I could.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” I said. “Not in my philosophy, anyway.”
“I guess I’m still trying to work it all out.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Not many people are interested in working things out anymore. Philosophically speaking.”
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