“Gilbert.”
“Yeah, the little prick.”
Floyd glanced back at me and paused. “Doesn’t explain why he shot at us though, Dickie.”
“That’s the part that doesn’t make sense,” I admitted.
“Then he’s got the balls to steal my car. How’s he even know where I live? Did you figure that part out yet?”
“We’re missing something; that’s for sure.”
Floyd said, “Yeah, like who the hell is doing all this crazy shit? We might be off on the whole thing, Dickie.”
The acceleration silenced us both and we looked straight ahead as the 727 roared down the runway and lifted slowly from the ground with a couple bumps and a little shaking. Moments later we were banking to the right, still climbing, and I looked across Floyd again to see the ground fading away.
Floyd looked at me, just a corner of his mouth turned up in a grin, and he said, “You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.”
I frowned at him.
“Davey Crockett, Dickie . . . a legend like ourselves.”
We arrived just an hour after departing Texas, according to my watch, having gained two hours with the change of time zone. The two of us walked down the center of a wide terminal hallway, each with a carry-on slung over a shoulder, each scanning the opposing foot traffic the way cops do, and each noticing a brunette flight attendant with long legs and getting just a hint of a smile in return. Just enough to say she noticed us noticing.
Probably headed for Texas.
Floyd brought his head around just in time to steer us to the right, avoiding an oncoming cart. The Cushman pilot, a gray-haired black man with bulging forearms, his huge hands wrapped around the steering wheel, swept by without slowing or swerving to avoid us. His eye contact told me he wasn’t all that impressed with our swagger.
We picked up our bags and were able to navigate through the airport quickly and find our county car awaiting us in the concrete maze called a parking structure. We loaded up and hit the road but our rapid pace quickly came to a stop.
“Rush-hour,” Floyd said, glancing at his Rolex Submariner. “With this traffic, it’ll take us two hours to get to Donna’s.”
“You got a better idea?”
“Yeah, you can buy us dinner, let traffic die down.”
A cold beer sounded good and my stomach growled from hunger. One or two beers wouldn’t kill us before finding Donna, maybe put us in a better mood after a long couple of days. I started to agree it might be a good idea, but also thinking maybe I’d ask whose turn it was to buy, just to give us something to argue about.
My thoughts were interrupted by a page to call the office. When I did, Floyd and I learned our team had been called up early, meaning we were now officially on call, ahead of schedule.
It also meant we shared a destiny with an unsuspecting, maybe yet-to-be-determined soul. A chance meeting wherein someone, somewhere, would soon come to the ultimate realization—if only for an instant—of his or her mortality. Or maybe their life would flash before them in their final moment, a transition into the afterlife, and they would recognize it as Karma. I would ponder this at times and then wonder what he or she was doing right now that was about to get them killed.
19
FLOYD LOOKED UP as he bit into a juicy cheeseburger, his eyes wide with anticipation. I set down a frosted mug of Coors Light and watched an icicle slide down its side and soak into a coaster advertising Corona beer. I stared at the amber-colored liquid, frustrated, thinking of the hours we had put into this case that seemed to be running off course. It didn’t help to think of my phone conversation with the lieutenant, the notice that we were up early for murders. Knowing the cases never stopped coming, that you were never caught up or finished, that there would always be more work than you could manage no matter how devoted you were, brought a level of stress, pressure, fatigue, and eventual burnout that only those who worked the assignment could ever understand.
I lifted the mug for another gulp and glanced at Floyd, watching him cock his head to the side as he chomped into the now half-eaten burger.
“What?” he said through a mouthful of meat, cheese, and bread.
I lowered the mug and reached for the untouched burger in front of me. “Just thinking.”
“About?”
I retreated from the burger, leaving it on the plate. “About how ridiculous this job is at times. How the hell do they expect us to solve any of these murders when they pile new ones on us every seven, eight days? When’s the last time we had a day off anyway?”
Floyd picked up an onion ring, dragged it through some ketchup at the edge of his plate, then paused just before it reached his mouth. “Since when do you care about days off? It’s not like you have a life, Dickie.”
I looked away, the untouched burger resting on the plate next to a pile of fries. A blonde-haired child hung over the back of an adjacent booth, looking over Floyd’s shoulder. Her chocolate-covered smile and sparkling eyes revealed the playful innocence of her youth. Her mother pulled her back, and told her to behave.
“Maybe that’s my problem,” I said, looking back at Floyd now. “Maybe I’ve cared too much for too many years, too many victims. The families are taking a toll. I get one more call from Bethel Casey, I swear I’ll eat my gun.”
“She’s still calling?”
“Every couple of weeks. To keep me on my toes, make sure I’m still working the case. Then on Tawny’s birthday, just a couple weeks ago—”
“March 30th, same day Jenkins was killed.”
How could I forget? I reached for my beer, the appetite still not there and the thirst seemingly unquenchable. Jenkins was yet another toll-taking memory, the 28-year-old patrol deputy getting shot by a gang-banger on a routine stop. Jenkins had seen the gangster exiting a vehicle and noticed he appeared nervous when he looked toward the patrol car. As Jenkins exited his vehicle, the gang-banger spun toward him with a gun in his hand, the muzzle coming up on the deputy. Jenkins had bent at the waist, trying to get low as he drew his gun from its holster, but before he could get a round off he was struck just above the vest by a .357 Magnum hollow-point round. The round missed the Kevlar protective vest by millimeters, and due to Jenkins’ body position when struck, the bullet traveled in a downward trajectory, essentially traversing his entire torso before coming to stop against his hip. It had penetrated a lung, the heart, and the young deputy’s liver. He died quickly, bleeding out on the filthy pavement of a filthy, gang-infested street, in a filthy, gang-infested neighborhood, of a filthy, gang-infested city. And for what?
I took a long pull from the frosty mug, the cold liquid going down nicely and having just the right effect. Anything to help drown the laughing kids in the adjacent booth and dull the memory of Jenkins’ autopsy, the first I had attended where I personally knew the decedent.
“We’re never going to solve that one, Dickie,” Floyd had continued. “You have to move on, worry about what’s in front of us. Don’t let those unsolved cases get you down.”
“That’s the problem with dead kids,” I said. “They tend to do just that, get you down.”
While finishing his last bite, chewing around the words, Floyd said, “Change your pager. Stop returning her calls. What’s the worst that can happen, she starts calling Jordan? Let him deal with her; that’s why they pay him the big bucks.”
I glanced back at the little girl as she peeked over again. I guessed her to be about the same age as was Tawny Casey at the time of her death, probably three or four. Innocent, sweet, vulnerable.
“You still have that case file under your desk?” Floyd asked.
“Yeah, I’ve got it.”
“Get rid of it. Send it up to the library and put it behind you. You don’t, Dickie, I will. I’m not kidding either.”
“I’m not ready to give up.”
“Big surprise,” he said. “What the hell more can we do with it? Everything’s been a dead end. We just about killed ourselv
es working that case. Something comes up, a new lead, we’ll bring it back from the library. Meantime, we move on. Nothing else we can do. You’re not going to last, buddy, you don’t start letting some of this shit go.”
I nodded, knowing he was right, but thinking, not yet . . .
Floyd took a gulp of beer. “You gonna eat that burger?”
“Jesus,” Floyd said as he pulled his cell phone from his ear, looked at it, and then pushed a button to disconnect. “They’re giving us an officer-involved shooting in Hawthorne.”
“We’ve got the handle on it?”
“Yep.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror. “Who’s assisting?”
“No idea. I didn’t bother to ask. I’m not even sure I care.”
“Maybe we should have stayed for that seven o’clock flight,” I said.
I glanced over my shoulder and then changed lanes, veering toward the next off-ramp to turn around and head west toward Hawthorne. Floyd sat silent. Once we were safely turned around and headed for the South Bay, I continued: “We could’ve hung out in the airport bar all day drinking gin and tonics, lying to barmaids and flight attendants about what we do for a living. What’s the story on this piece of shit, anyway?”
“And I could have had a shower. That would have been nice. I don’t know much, sounds like another suicide by cop. Those seem to be all the rage now.”
“That’s it? That’s all you know?”
“I guess some asshole tried to rob a bank and got smoked when he walked out, the cops outside waiting for him. What else do you need to know?”
“Jesus.”
“That’s what I said.”
We didn’t need another case, but it seemed that was never part of the equation that equaled more cases. And since it seemed to be the norm, not the exception, that the cases stacked up faster than we could handle them, we had become accustomed to allocating tasks and utilizing available resources whenever possible.
In this instance, we decided to put Donna Edwards under surveillance until we had an opportunity to get back on track with the Susie Q investigation. This would allow us to know where to find her when we did have the chance to call on her again, and more importantly, it might provide evidence to corroborate Gilbert’s statement about her illegal activities.
The sheriff’s department consists of various divisions such as Patrol, Custody, Court Services, Administrative and Detective Divisions, for the purposes of command. Such structure is necessary in a department of more than 10,000 sworn personnel and another 5,000 civilian professional staff. Each of these divisions is commanded by a chief, who is only outranked by the sheriff, his undersheriff, and two assistant sheriffs. Each division has its own budget, and throughout the history of the department, the Detective Division has always been the stepchild when it came to allocated funds. Homicide Bureau is in the Detective Division, as is Major Crimes Bureau, which among other responsibilities maintains several highly trained, experienced, and properly equipped surveillance teams. Homicide Bureau utilizes the surveillance teams on a regular basis, which of course results in administrative disagreements about funding, and Homicide usually picks up the tab. Especially when the investigation requires overtime. Of course, the detectives assigned to these respective units couldn’t care less about any of the financial considerations or woes of the administrators, and we were no exception.
Floyd called Dwight Campbell, a sergeant in charge of one of the two Detective Division surveillance teams, bypassing the standard protocol for requesting their services. He told Sergeant Campbell we were working a fresh murder and asked if his team was available to set up on a possible suspect. Floyd told him the suspect, Donna Edwards, was not only a person of interest in our murder investigation, but that we believe she is trafficking cocaine. Then he thanked the sergeant and told him we’d be in touch.
“He said no problem,” Floyd said when he finished the call, “they’re available and can set up on her within the hour, if they’re able to locate her. I told him to keep us posted, we’d be out all night on this officer-involved shooting case. I’d like to give a course, maybe even set up a hotline, How to Kill Yourself Without Involving the Cops. What’s this, the third one this year?”
“Something like that,” I answered, but still thinking about Donna and the surveillance. “What’d you tell him about Lieutenant Jordan? You mentioned his name.”
“Dwight said his team was out of hours—”
“Seems they always are.”
“—asked who’d pay the overtime. So I took the liberty of telling him Homicide would pick up the tab. Told him Jordan had already approved it.”
“He’ll never know the difference.”
The only officer on scene who hadn’t shot the would-be bank robber gave us a synopsis of the events, the best he could from what he had gathered from the involved officers and civilian witnesses. I copied the information into a new notebook:
At 4:55 p.m., just minutes before the bank was due to close, the suspect/decedent entered through the doors located on the south side of the building, adjacent to the parking lot. He appeared to be of Asian descent, wearing a black windbreaker, blue jeans, and dark-framed sunglasses with green lenses. He approached the first teller on the left, stepping in front of a female customer at the counter, and brandished a pistol as he announced it was a robbery. He then moved to the next teller, and the one after that, repeating his intent to rob the bank.
The manager, who has personally been present during seven robbery attempts during her twelve-year banking career, said there was something very different about this robbery. The man never actually demanded money; he seemed more interested in the activity outside.
When the cops arrived, the sirens announcing their presence, the Asian man walked to the glass doors and paused. He turned to face the tellers and customers and said, “Have a nice day.” Then he walked outside and pointed his gun toward the cops.
“Anything else?” I asked, hovering a pen over the opened notebook.
“It’s all on video.”
Having finished the crime scene walkthrough, we relinquished the task of documenting and collecting evidence to one of our assisting teams. We departed and drove to the Hawthorne Police Station where four officers, six bank employees, and four civilian witnesses waited to be interviewed.
We arrived and met with four additional detectives from our bureau, each assigned to assist in the interviews. I told them Floyd and I would handle the cops, they could divide up the employees and civilians.
Floyd’s cell phone rang as we walked into an interview room where the first of the four cops we intended to interview waited.
“Hello?” he said into the phone. “Yeah? . . . Really? . . . Okay, hold on a second.”
Floyd covered the mouthpiece and said to me, “They’ve got Donna on the move, just left Downey and heading west.” Then he thanked the sergeant on the other end of the conversation and asked that he continue to keep us posted.
I waited for him to slide the phone into his suit pocket. “You ready?”
“Sure.”
We sat at the table across from the officer and I pushed the record button on the digital recorder. “I’m Detective Richard Jones, my partner here is Matthew Tyler. We’re from Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau, investigating the officer-involved shooting incident occurring at the First National Bank in the city of Hawthorne. Officer, would you please state your name for the record?”
The young man dressed in a dark blue uniform leaned toward the recorder and said, “I would like to have an attorney present.”
Down the hall, past the secretariat, past the locker rooms, restrooms and an old gray metal drinking fountain, Floyd and I stood next to a coffee vending machine. Almost nothing surprised us anymore, we agreed, waiting for the paper cup to fill with fresh brewed coffee. Certainly not an asshole pointing a pellet gun at four cops armed with forty-fives and shotguns, and not even cops asking for attorneys before providing statements when t
hey killed some dipshit who pointed a pellet gun at them. But homicide detectives having to buy a cup of coffee from a vending machine at a police station, while assisting them on their case, seemed to put Floyd over the edge.
“They can take their shooting and their coffee and shove both up their asses,” he said, facing the vending machine with his hands on his hips, ready to fight it should the opportunity present itself.
I pulled a cup with playing cards printed on the side from the metal rack and handed it to my disgruntled partner. Then I dropped two more quarters in the machine and waited while the fresh brew slowly dripped into a second cup.
I said, “Doesn’t smell too bad, how’s it taste?”
“This punk and his lawyer—”
“It’s a new breed, partner. It’s just the way these kids are now.”
“Back in our day, you dropped the hammer on someone, you pulled up your big-girl panties, sat down with Homicide and told them what happened.”
“We could fire up a Grand Jury, see how they like that. Maybe that’s something the bureau needs to consider in these changing times. I think they’d see before long, it was better the old way.”
I watched as the second cup finished filling, steam rising from the paper cup with a pair of jacks on the side. I glanced at Floyd’s cup: king of clubs, seven of hearts.
Floyd jerked his cell phone from his pocket and barked into the mouthpiece: “Hello?”
I could hear Dwight’s voice coming through the speaker, but not clear enough to understand the words.
Floyd’s eyes narrowed. “The airport?”
“They’re at the airport?” I asked.
He held his hand up for me to wait, saying into the phone now, “Hang on . . . hold on a second, D, let me see what my partner thinks.”
Floyd lowered the phone and said, “She’s at the airport, checking in. No luggage, just a carry-on. What do we want them to do?”
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