The door banged open behind him, and he turned.
Flames burst in the darkness. Fiery lead whistled through the smoke-filled, dingy room. The killer jerked and staggered as he fired toward the door, his back now to me. I took careful aim. The patrons had all disappeared, dropping low and ducking beneath the bar. It was only him and me, and someone outside the front door. I squeezed the trigger twice, and then twice again, and I watched him flinch as my bullets struck his back. A brilliant flash of light filled the doorway, sending the killer stumbling backward. He fell and crumpled onto the floor. His body twitched—but only a couple of times—and then his eyes fixed on something seemingly intangible, something far beyond his reach. Then it was gone. Whatever it had been, he let it go.
I thought about Lisa Williams, a girl who seemed to have lost her direction at birth. I wondered if she had felt whole after discovering her twin sister, all of these years later. Marilynn Chaney had been the more evil of the two, as it turns out. She had been willing to murder the one with whom she had shared a womb, all for money. It would have been the perfect crime had Williams’s DNA profile not been in CODIS; we would likely never have discovered the truth since the two had identical DNA profiles. Mr. Chaney had been smart to not offer items containing his wife’s DNA for comparison. He knew we would come up with something on our own or eventually ask him for her toothbrush. The DNA would have matched perfectly, the missing person case would be closed, and Chaney would have been smiling all the way to the bank.
Another gin and tonic arrived without being ordered. Zhong: loyal, steadfast. He collected the empty glass and swiped his towel where it had sat. He paused a moment, appearing deep in thought. But then he looked me in the eyes and only nodded, subtly, as if to say it would be okay. He knew. We exchanged smiles before he turned away, and it was then I realized the demons had quieted and retreated into the darkness.
For now.
As Zhong meandered to the other end of the bar, I lifted my glass and softly said to the small man’s back, “Everything’s going to be good, partner. You watch and see.”
Every day a special breed of men and women throughout this great country place themselves in harm’s way for the greater good of our society. They are the peacekeepers, and this is for them.
I would like to extend a special thanks to Scott Helbing, a longtime friend and former colleague who now flies helicopters for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The cover of this book was created from a night vision photograph he took while flying over the City of Angels.
Foreword
A young foster child in South Central Los Angeles witnesses a thrill kill and then steals a puppy—or did he? As a team of investigators hunt for the killers, the killers hunt the child. Make certain your lap belt is tight and your seat is in the full upright position, as you are in for a ride. This is the third, and in my opinion the best, of a series of crime novels by Danny Smith.
Danny Smith is a retired Los Angeles County deputy sheriff. During his early career he worked exclusively in South Central Los Angeles as a patrol deputy, field training officer, and detective. For much of his time there, I was his watch commander. He was selected to work at the prestigious Major Crimes Bureau, one of only 25 personnel who handled every “in progress” crime investigation in Los Angeles County, including kidnaps for ransom, embezzlements, murders for hire, escapes from custody, threats against public officials, and “specials”—those crimes involving political or law enforcement personnel that required discretion and a critical expertise. I headed that unit.
I know well and have worked with both of the men characterized in Echo Killers. Dickie and Floyd worked for me as patrol deputies in the inner city as well as in Major Crimes. Their real history is as colorful as the one portrayed in these books. Their dark humor and dogged determination always set them apart in units that were themselves set apart. The relationships these men and women maintained with the people they served in South Central Los Angeles are not well known but a very real part of their success.
Danny and his partner, Floyd, were selected to go to the Homicide Bureau, considered by many to be the absolute pinnacle of any investigative position. Homicide only takes the very best, and they were considered a couple of the best among them.
All cops have stories: tales of human evil and depravity that, thankfully, most sane people cannot even imagine. Many cops have tried to capture these horrors and adventures in books. Most, unfortunately, fail. Danny Smith is a rarity. He combines believable stories in a fluid, compelling manner and with dialogue that is spot on. His works are on par with Connelly, Wambaugh, and Leonard.
In Echo Killers, the author toggles back and forth from the killers to the cops, illustrating the deadly game of chess they have all begun. Cancel your plans for the afternoon when you begin this book, as the story will keep you glued to your seat turning pages. It is truly a fast ride.
Danny’s characterization of those tasked with solving these crimes and dealing with the most vicious and depraved criminals—while trying to maintain a normal private life—provides a rare window into the private conversations, thoughts, and minds of these men and women. Their interaction with one another is raw, terse, and honest. Their self-doubt is real, yet well hidden from the public. Danny exposes these things, and with this unmasking, reveals the human toll these cases take on those whose lives are forever altered by them.
Echo Killers shares those experiences and relationships and lets the reader ride alongside during this fast-moving read.
Dennis “Deac” Slocumb, Detective Lieutenant, Ret.
Director of Legislative Affairs
International Union of Police Associations
Washington, D.C.
The dead never leave. Their spirits take refuge in the minds and souls of those who have both the honor and the burden of seeking justice for them. Their presence evokes a range of emotions: frustration, heartbreak, anger, resolve. Of these, it is the resolve that matters.
1
THE KILLERS WALKED in dressed in black boots, pants, turtleneck sweaters, and ski masks. Only their eyes were visible to the witness, but he insisted both were Caucasian. “You could just tell.”
The larger of the two carried a “machine gun,” the young witness said, which hung from a sling over the man’s right shoulder. The other cradled a sawed-off shotgun, the barrel resting in the crook of his right arm, his left hand holding the grip. This second man appeared small next to the other, the two of them filling the doorway as the glass doors closed behind them. The big man swung the rifle up and fired. “Pop-pop-pop!”
The witness, Cedric, continued: “The other one pointed his shotgun at the chino, and shot. Bam, bam!”
Floyd turned to look at his partner, Mongo, who stood silently against the wall behind them, his shirt collar unbuttoned and his tie hanging low. He offered a noncommittal shrug.
Turning back to face the kid, Floyd tossed his pen onto the table next to his notebook. He leaned back in his chair, frustrated, and waited. Staring into the sparkling hazel eyes of the young boy, he asked, “And you saw all of this, little man?”
The boy licked his lips. “Yessir.”
“You said, ‘chino’ . . . they shot the chino. What did you mean by that?”
“You know, chino.” The boy then placed his index fingers at the outside corners of his eyes and pulled the skin back, making both eyes slanted. “The people who own the liquor stores.”
“Did they see you, these two men with the guns?”
Cedric straightened in his chair. “Sure they did. I kicked the big one in the nuts on my way out the door.”
Floyd glanced at his partner again, the big Hawaiian-looking Mexican named Diaz whom Floyd and now everyone else at the Homicide Bureau just called “Mongo.” Always one to limit the expenditure of unnecessary words, Mongo only smiled.
Back to Cedric: “You’re telling me that while these two guys are shooting the place up, you kick one of ’em in the nuts.
I hate to say it, young man, but I think you might be stretching the truth a bit.”
Cedric rubbed a hand back and forth over his short-cropped natural hair and ran his tongue across chapped lips. “I’m tellin’ ya, mista, it happened. All of it, just the way I said it did. When I tried to run out, the big one grabbed me, got hold of my shirt, and I kicked him in the nuts. He cursed, said something to the other’n about gettin’ me. I ran out, and when I was goin’ ’round the corner of the building, BAM!, another blast from the shotgun.”
“They shot at you?”
“Yup, the littler one did.”
Mongo sighed.
“I ran up the alley till I heard ’em peeling out, and then I jumped over a fence and hid in a yard, under a boat.”
“Underneath a boat?”
“One of them metal ones. It was upside-down on the grass, and there was like an opening at the back, a part of the metal that’s cut away where I think a motor goes. Anyway, there was plenty of room to crawl through there, so I did. Stayed there for a couple hours, me and Snuggles.”
“Snuggles?”
“He’s my puppy. I found him under the boat, and he followed me when I left.”
Mongo surprised Floyd when he said, “You stole the puppy?”
“He di’nt have no food or water in there and he was on a chain. He snuggled with me while I was hiding out from them killers. He likes me, so I kept him.”
Floyd shrugged, no big deal. “Okay, so you kept Snuggles.”
“Yeah. You want, I can show ya him.”
Floyd stood and Mongo and Cedric followed suit. They stepped out of the interview room into a tiled hallway where a steady stream of uniformed deputies passed in both directions, their police radios crackling, leather squeaking. Floyd put his arm around Cedric and led him toward the public lobby where a woman waited to take him home.
Floyd, guiding him through the door, said, “Alright, little buddy, I’m going to look into all of this, and then I’ll be coming down to your house to see you. Deal?”
Cedric smiled, and Floyd raised his hand for a high-five.
“Will you come tomorrow?”
Floyd chuckled. “Maybe, buddy. We’ll see. Okay?”
The boy stepped next to the woman and turned to make eye contact with Floyd once more. His head sagged and his eyes seemed less bright now. “Okay, sir.”
Floyd retreated into the station hallway, pulling the lobby door closed behind him. Mongo stood grinning.
“The fuck are you grinning at?”
Across town a big man sat deep in the cushions of a worn sofa chair blowing smoke rings at the dim light above him. But gusts of air from its whirling fan blades turned the puffy circles into a stretch of thick haze that hung in the flickering light of a television.
“We have to find that green-eyed little bastard, and kill him.”
His partner glanced over but didn’t respond.
The big man stabbed his cigarette out in an overfilled ashtray while searching his partner’s eyes, waiting for an answer. None came. He only saw apprehension, reluctance. The pussy.
The big man grunted as he rose from his chair. Turning toward the kitchen, he said over his shoulder, “Do you want a beer?”
I was working late, which never surprised anyone, especially Floyd, who walked to my desk with his suit coat slung over his shoulder and a weary look on his face.
“New suit?”
“Do you like it? Cindy picked it up for me at the Rack. Nice, huh? Four bills. Would’ve been eight or better at Nordstrom’s.”
He could have modeled it, my former partner who maintained his athletic build—a small waist and broad shoulders—by running, crossfitting, and training in mixed martial arts. Though part of the effort would be offset by the consumption of massive quantities of beer, he approached middle age gracefully. Twenty years ago, I had named him “Pretty Boy Floyd.”
“Yeah, it looks good with the pastel tie.”
“Well yeah, Dickie, it’s the summertime look. How’s the doc?”
I felt myself smile, unable to contain my delight when thinking of Katherine. Katherine James, M.D., my former shrink with whom I was intimately involved, negotiating the gray areas of doctor-patient relations.
“She’s great. We went up to Bridgeport for the weekend, and I think we’re going back next week. We like it up there, and we’ve started looking at some properties and talking about maybe making an investment. Maybe a vacation place or retirement.”
“Where the hell is Bridgeport?”
“Hour and a half north of Bishop, up in the mountains near Mono Lake. Nice and cool up there.”
“Wow, serious shit, Dickie. Are you two shacked up now? Is that why I never hear from you anymore?”
I chuckled. “Not shacked up, but we spend most nights together, her place or mine. The reason you never see my ass anymore is because me and Ray can’t catch a break. We’ve picked up a case in each of the last four rotations. We’re buried. How about you guys? I haven’t noticed your name on the board lately. Do you still work here?”
He pulled a chair from the adjacent desk and made himself at home, propping a foot on my partner’s unoccupied desk. “Are you kidding me? Shit, I’m working Firestone again. Seems like the last six cases I’ve picked up are Firestone, Lynwood, or Compton. And as much as I love Compton, I’ve got to say, I’d give anything for a real murder about now. All I get are these dead gangsters with no witnesses and nobody knows nothin’. I don’t think I’ve solved a case since that serial killer case I solved for you.”
I smiled.
“And you should see the shit I’ve gotten myself into now.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s the typical luck of Floyd. I’m working the desk when some goddamn fireman out of 16 calls. This hose-jockey starts telling me all about where he works, and I interrupt him and say, ‘Yeah, buddy, I know where the hell Station 16 is, I worked patrol down there when you were still riding your skateboard to school.’ Anyway, you remember there was that lady who lived a couple doors north of their firehouse when it was still on Holmes? Always had a bunch of foster kids.”
“Yeah, of course I do. We handled a runaway or two there over the years.”
“Well, she’s got a kid now who has spun this wild tale about a murder he witnessed. She loads his ass up and takes him over to Firestone to talk to a deputy, and sees the station is now a community center. She didn’t know they closed it down fifteen years ago, apparently. But she sees the idiot firemen out in front of their brand new firehouse across the street, washing their little red firetruck. So she stops in and asks what happened to the sheriff’s station across the street, Firestone, and who should this boy talk to about a murder he saw.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah, no shit. So that’s when they call here—how they got our number, I have no idea—and I tell Biff the Fireman to send them to Century Station, and we would meet them there. So me and Mongo go down to Century and pull this kid into an interview room and he tells us this big whopper.”
“You’re not buying it, this kid’s story?”
Floyd shook his head. “It’s a wild-ass tale, and here’s the kicker: the kid had run away from his two previous foster homes, so this is his last chance before they throw his little ass in juvie and lock him up as an incorrigible. So he can’t afford to catch any more beefs; know what I mean? He’d be a three-strike foster kid with one more incident, and if you remember old Mrs. Nathan, the foster mom, she doesn’t play games with these kids. She’ll whoop their asses once or twice, but then she ships them out and says send me a new one.”
“She’s a tough cookie, I remember. Drags those kids to church every Sunday too, I remember that.”
Floyd nodded. “Yeah, so that’s my point.”
“Well, what’s his story?”
“He comes home with a puppy and Mrs. Nathan has a fit, wants to know where he got it. He says he found it on the way home from school. Because that’s where he was s
upposed to be that day when this murder happens.”
“This murder is during the day?”
“In the morning. But anyway, Mrs. Nathan, God bless her pointed head, is all upset about the goddamn dog. She says someone out there somewhere has lost their puppy and it’s their civic duty to find its rightful home. She tells the kid that some other little boy is probably crying because his puppy’s been lost. So they start looking all over town, trying to find Snuggles’ rightful owners.”
“Snuggles?”
“That’s what he named the puppy. Snuggles.”
He dropped his foot to the floor and sat up in the chair. I waited while he sipped his coffee.
“This goes on for a week, them looking for the puppy’s owner by going around the neighborhood knocking on doors, checking the local markets. Have you been down there lately? They’ve put a strip mall on Firestone Boulevard where that liquor store used to be, Griff’s Liquor, where winos and gangsters congregated day and night back when we were there. Now there’s clothes stores, fast food, and a toy store, what else? . . .”
“Ruining a perfectly good ghetto.”
“Exactly. Where was I going with that?”
“The puppy.”
“Yeah, so they check all the stores and after a few days with no luck, they make fliers and put those up. Still no luck. So, Mrs. Nathan has just about had it, and she’s convinced the little bastard’s lying. She probably marched him by the ear down to his room and whooped on him for half an hour trying to get to the truth. Then junior comes up with this wild-ass story about two white guys with ski masks doing a murder right in front of him—”
I raised a brow. “In the ghetto, two white guys.”
“—and he kicks one of the two in the nuts while trying to escape. Then, they try to kill him. The one with a shotgun blasts at him while he’s running away. But they miss, and he runs down an alley and hops into someone’s yard to hide. Under a boat, he says. And that’s where he finds the puppy.”
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