Floyd glanced back toward Lanh’s, then at the hot tub. Back to me and asked, “You done here?”
I had another look around the patio, the yard, the adjacent properties from where we stood. “I guess. Doesn’t really look like anything happened here. No blood anyway, or any other evidence of foul play.”
“At least nothing we can see.”
The pager vibrated on my belt as I pulled into my driveway at 10:30 p.m. I sighed, seeing the display held the number for my office.
I sat in my driveway, the Crown Vic idling as Frank Lewandowski, a homicide dick with less than a year to go before retirement, told me how the phones were driving him nuts: “The Chinaman guy from the training bureau, the one who translates for you guys, needs you to call him. The irritating little bastard called three times in an hour—for Christ’s sake—asking if you or Floyd were in the office. I told him nobody’s in the fucking office but me, and all I’m doing is answering the goddamned phone, thank you very much.”
All this, Lewandowski said, while dealing with an attorney on one line and his girlfriend on the other, the broad on his ass telling him he needs to take the ex-wife back to court, get her off the retirement, and asking where they are in their relationship, for the love of God. Frank saying he didn’t have time for all this shit and then have to deal with these goddamned foreigners on the job too, people he could barely understand on the phone, for Christ’s sake.
When Lanh answered the phone I said, “Frank Lewandowski said next time he sees you, he’s going to strangle you with those cheesy epaulets you wear on your uniform.”
“The guy at the desk? He’s upset with me calling?”
“Settle down, Lanh, he’s just riled up over having to take his feet off the desk. Don’t worry about that old grouch. What’d you need, anyway?”
“After you guys left, I got to thinking. The night the black girl was in the Jacuzzi with the Spanish man, and the two hookers were there—”
“Yeah?”
“—it was Friday, I know it for sure.”
I searched my brain for the day of the murder. Today was what, Tuesday? No, Monday. The murder was Saturday, early in the morning, still considered Friday night for most.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I keep track of my workouts in a journal.”
“You don’t say—”
“I log what exercises I do, how many sets, how much weight—”
“Me and Floyd do that with beers.”
“You do?”
“No, Lanh, we don’t.” Jesus, this guy. “You were saying?”
“Well, I remembered doing curls, standing near the window with thirty-pound dumbbells, one in each hand, doing sets of eight.”
I wanted to ask if he grabbed the binos between sets. “And you know that was Friday?”
“It’s right here in my journal: Friday night, curls, six sets of eight with thirty pounds. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier, maybe I was too nervous when you guys were here questioning me. But I thought of it after you left.”
“You’re a stud, Lanh, and a big help.”
“Thank you, sir. Also, I just wanted to make sure—”
“Yes?”
“Well, my wife, she won’t know about this, right?”
“Your dirty little secret is safe with us, Lanh.”
Valerie Jones, the tall, slender, good-looking brunette with whom I took a blind swing and hit it out of the park, playing way out of my league, looked up from the couch as I dragged myself through the front door, my briefcase in one hand, my jacket and hat in the other.
“Rough day?”
I kicked the door closed behind me. “Not terribly. Just tired from the weekend, mostly. Maybe I’m getting too old for these all-nighters. Why do you ask?”
“You have that look. The one you get when you’re ready to kill something.”
“Not at all, babe. Maybe just a little frustrated over this case. Plus I was anxious to get home but had to deal with two more phone calls right when I pulled up.”
“I figured. I saw you sitting out there in your car. Need a beer?”
“A cold beer sounds great. You going to join me?”
Valerie set her book on the end table and stood from the couch, her long tanned legs straightening beneath loose-fitting pink shorts. “Tell you what, why don’t you put your stuff down and get out of that suit. I’ll make us a couple drinks and meet you on the deck.”
“Jacuzzi?”
“You up for it?”
“You kidding?” I thought about my horoscope: Get your chores done early, have a little time to play tonight . . . Maybe Floyd was on to something with this voodoo shit.
The problem with being a homicide dick—or more accurately, one of the problems with being a homicide dick—is the brain never takes a break. I wouldn’t know if shoe salesmen think about new styles and stinky feet while enjoying an adult beverage with their significant other, or if a carpenter thinks about door frames and right angles while sitting in a hot tub with his best gal. Maybe the guy at the market dreams about fresh produce coming in, or has nightmares about merchandise falling from the top shelf, I honestly wouldn’t know. But I do know that when the neighbor kids play out front unattended, I see them as vulnerable and I worry. When my wife drives alone at night, I fret about predators and remind her of all the precautions she should take to avoid being a victim. I can’t go to bed or leave the house without checking all the doors and windows, and for some reason, I seem to allow all of the cases, their victims and the suspects, rent-free space in my head, 24-7.
And now, while having a cold beer with my hot wife, my mind drifted back to Donna Edwards and her Jacuzzi parties. Seeing it through Lanh’s perspective in my mind, through his binoculars, the victims at Donna’s house, Donna and the Mexican in the hot tub. I was thinking about the what and the why and then back to Susie, my latest victim, the transsexual lying on the sidewalk in a sequined skirt and red pumps, her lifeless eyes gazing up at the stars. Thinking about all of this and hearing my wife saying her book, by J.D. Robb, who, she said, is really Nora Roberts, has this chick detective, a lieutenant who is being stalked by the killer she’s investigating . . .
And it occurred to me, this is exactly why they send us to the shrink, free of charge.
Floyd and I had just arrived at Donna Edwards’s house Tuesday morning, idling out front as we finished up the morning discussion as to whether or not we truly were nuts or could we maybe be normal after all, or perhaps relatively normal, all things considered. We had concluded there were guys much worse, like Bob Richards, who had been recently terminated due to a fistfight-turned-gunfight with a neighbor in his middle-class neighborhood. Or Jimmy Gross, who still plays ice hockey at 45 years old as a hobby, not that great of a player but makes the amateur team every year as an enforcer, a guy who is sent out on the ice when someone needs taken out. Then there was Nate Hollyfield, a former Marine Recon guy who recently took up skydiving from buildings in downtown Los Angeles—at night, since it is completely illegal—because being a cop in L.A. didn’t offer enough excitement for him. We were discussing these guys and a few of the bad drunks in the bureau when suddenly our windshield shattered with the sound of a thud and a sonic crack.
The second impact immediately followed with a gunshot at about the same time, maybe just after, confirming to me that we were under fire.
By the third shot I had crawled across the seat and out the passenger’s door, piling up with Floyd somewhere along the way and landing together at the side of the car. Though we hadn’t confirmed the direction of gunfire, we had both instinctively identified the house across the street as our primary threat.
“You okay?” I asked, my speech rapid, my heart pounding in my chest.
“Yeah, you?”
I glanced down for a quick inspection and found my gun in my hand, though I didn’t recall drawing it from its holster.
“I’m good, I think. Where the hell’s it coming from?�
�
“Across the street, Fudd’s house.”
I scooted closer as Floyd crouched ahead of the door. We huddled together behind the right front tire, keeping the engine block between us and the asshole with the gun.
“Have you seen him?”
“No,” he said.
“You sure that’s where it’s coming from?”
Floyd looked over at me. “Who else you think it might be?”
“You’re probably right. Why don’t you call nine-one-one, get us some help.”
Floyd nodded toward the adjacent yard. “I lost it getting out, must’ve flown off my lap or something.”
I looked to see his phone in the grass about ten feet from the car, out in the kill zone.
I said, “Looks like you tossed it out there. Guess you figured we wouldn’t want to call for help.”
“Where’s yours, asshole?” he asked.
“In the car, where I keep it.”
“Well good thinking there, partner.”
Another bullet struck the car near our heads, and then the sound of a projectile tearing through metal forced us lower yet. Another impact shattered glass somewhere behind us near the back of the car.
“He’s not sure where we are,” I said, “that one hit in the back.”
The next gunshot accompanied a heavy thud near our position. Moments later, a warm fluid was soaking my pants. For a moment, I wondered if I had wet myself.
Floyd glanced at the ground and asked, “Radiator?”
“Maybe. That or the transmission, or I pissed myself.”
“We’ve got to do something, Dickie. Sitting here doesn’t seem to be a good option.”
“You got a plan?”
“Maybe put some rounds down range and move, get to the back of that house,” he said, nodding the direction. “And I’d strongly recommend we move fast, none of that lallygagging shit from you this time.”
“That’s your plan?”
“Make it to that wall,” Floyd said and nodded toward a wall dividing Donna’s house and her neighbor’s, “duck behind it and low-crawl to the backyard.”
“Then what, we come out on the next block?”
“No, we double back and kill this son-of-a-bitch.”
I winced when another projectile peeled through the metal of the hood, not far from where we huddled. I thought about my partner’s so-called plan, then thought about the fact that the car was being torn to shreds, gunshots echoing through the otherwise still morning. I had yet to hear sirens, not even in the far-off distance. It also occurred to me that when help did arrive, they wouldn’t be able to come directly to our location, not with an active shooter using a high-powered rifle. Not until a SWAT team arrived, and that could be hours.
I thought about Valerie and pictured her sitting at her desk, the perfect posture and a pleasant smile, the occasional sip of coffee from a mauve-colored mug with flowers, no idea about her husband’s dreadful situation. Probably thinking he and his best friend were having a dandy time together at what they called work, maybe pictured us enjoying a cup at the office while talking about our gals or maybe someone else’s.
Just hours before, she and I had enjoyed an evening under the stars, relaxing in the Jacuzzi with a couple of drinks. Now I sat in this gutter, the morning sun warming my back, the acrid smell of transmission fluid mingling with Floyd’s aftershave, and bullets piercing the metal and glass around me.
We were pinned down, huddled together for concealment and cover. Both knowing the risk of trying to make it through the kill zone, and also knowing we couldn’t stay where we were, our cover only affording us so much protection. We were not the type to hope for a good outcome; rather, we were the type to make something happen. And if we were to fall, it wouldn’t be without a fight.
I looked Floyd directly in his Ray-Bans and said, “Say when.”
10
NOW!” I POKED my pistol over the warm hood of the Crown Vic, held it sideways and started blasting in the general direction of Elmer Fudd’s house. The thought occurred to me that after years of ranting about movies and video games where the gangsters and sometimes even cops shot their guns sideways—to look cool—here I was doing the same thing. But not to look cool, only to keep as much of my body behind metal as possible.
Floyd spun and ran to the wall, hunched at the waist, making it over the wall and out of view in an instant. I wondered if Fudd even saw him move.
When the slide of my weapon locked to the rear, I reached for a second magazine.
Floyd yelled, “Ready, dickhead?”
“No!”
“Go!”
Shit!
Floyd started shooting from behind the wall. I pushed off the fender of the now leaking and ventilated cop car with the only thought being, this could be it. I ran crouched toward the wall, reloading my weapon on the move, the way I had been trained to do during Advanced Officer Training courses. I recalled complaining about the exercise, telling the instructor as long as I’d been a cop, I’d never even heard of anyone reloading on the run; that shit was for T.V.
The twenty yards to the wall looked more like three football fields as I left the cover of my car, waiting to take a bullet to the back of my head. Floyd continued shooting until I tumbled onto his side of the concrete wall, my right elbow and then my body plowing into the turf like a lawn dart. I had envisioned a graceful tuck and roll, but this wasn’t it.
The sulfuric odor of burnt gunpowder lingered as my partner and I huddled behind a mass of cinderblock, the moist turf beneath us and the warm, morning sun above. Two grown men in suits lying in the grass on an otherwise lazy SoCal morning.
Floyd said, “Cover me,” and started fast-crawling toward the back of the house before I could protest or inquire as to his plan. The instant he left, I felt isolated, but also afraid for his safety as he entered the kill zone.
I peeked over the wall—just long enough to see that my gunsights were pointed in the general direction of our enemy—and began firing, shooting double taps, two shots at a time, in a steady, controlled pace. The way I had been trained.
That training staff may have been onto something after all.
Floyd reached the end of the wall and scrambled around the corner of the house. He came back around, looking over the barrel of his pistol through dark shades, and began firing over my head. “Move, Dickie!”
I rolled onto my belly and headed his direction, surprising myself with how quickly I could move on my hands and knees in a suit. A bullet strike on the block wall suggested I move a little faster, and I did. I flattened out and increased the speed of my crawl, now worried about Fudd and my partner, both of them shooting over my head. I hit the corner and scurried around the back of the house, rolling onto my back as I came to a stop. I flipped around and crawled alongside Floyd.
“Where is he?” I asked, breathing heavily.
“No idea,” Floyd answered, his breathing now controlled. “Pick a window.”
After taking several deep breaths to calm myself, I took careful aim and placed a couple of shots to the side of each window, picturing the assailant standing to the sides of a port. I shot until my second magazine was empty, then sat up behind the house and reloaded.
“No shots from him for a while now,” Floyd said, also reloading.
“Maybe we got him.”
“Maybe. This is my last magazine, what about you?”
“Same here,” I said, tapping the bottom of the magazine and releasing the slide, driving a live round into the chamber. “We better make these last.”
“Just make ‘em count, Dickie.”
The faint sound of distant sirens broke the moment of relative silence. “Hear that?”
“Yeah,” Floyd said, his eyes scanning the two-story across the street, a determined look on his face now red and drenched with sweat.
“We need to get to a phone, let someone know what they’re rolling into.”
“Elmer Fudd with a high-powered rifle?”
Floyd crouched and moved quickly but deliberately toward the back door of the house, peeking through windows along the back wall. I figured he was looking for the residents, likely prone on the floor by now. He checked the rear door, then looked at me and shook his head. It was locked.
I shrugged.
He responded with a shrug of his own, and then he kicked the door open and stepped inside.
Moments later, Floyd reappeared on the back patio holding a cordless landline, saying into the mouthpiece, “He’s probably wearing gray sweatpants and a dirty t-shirt, same thing he’s been wearing all week . . . No, we don’t know the address, but it’s a two-story with an ugly brown van in the driveway . . . The guy answers to Elmer Fudd.”
I noticed a helicopter approaching. “Give them the Crown Vic for reference,” I said. “We’re behind the house south of it, Fudd’s in the one directly north. We got a bird coming in.”
Floyd nodded to me, then relayed the information into the phone, doing his best to describe our position and that of the sniper. Reiterating not to roll in too close, the shooter is using a high-powered rifle.
There had been worse days in my career, though at the moment I had difficulty recalling them. I leaned back in a leather office chair, chugging my Diet Coke in the air-conditioned conference room of the Homicide Bureau as I waited in my green- and brown-stained suit pants, both knees torn, exposing grass-stained knees beneath. My shirt was missing several buttons and it too was soiled by grass and dirt and was darkened by sweat. I’d have to give a statement before going home to clean up.
I thought about the day Adam Youngblood was killed in a shooting during a traffic stop back in ’87. Kenny Goldhammer had been killed during a pursuit, his patrol car broadsided by a city bus in the intersection of Central and Martin Luther King. That must have been a year or so later. Then there was Mike Farley, shot to death during a Narcotics raid in Lynwood, a few years after that . . .
Hard-Boiled- Box Set Page 10