Hard-Boiled- Box Set

by Danny R. Smith

  Sometimes she would make love to him, but other times she’d go into her room and lock the door and sleep with her gun at her side, the way she had when she was a teenaged girl living with a sexually abusive father and four brothers who at times forgot she was their sister. The longer they were together, the less she felt for Travis and the more she realized what a terrible mistake she had made. But now she was trapped, with no way out of the deep hole the two of them had dug for themselves.

  They had been on the run for a couple of years, hiding their identities and living off of the grid because of the intense search that had continued for them both. She didn’t know, maybe they were still looking for them. To make matters worse, now they had become murderers, which meant there was a whole other collaborative effort underway to identify and locate the two outlaws. Maybe this handsome cop and his friend with the hat, the one that looked mean and wouldn’t fall for her smile the way the other would, were the ones heading up that effort. She wondered if that was the case.

  The cops were back at the car, but now someone was getting out of the back seat. Jesus, it was the kid, the little black kid with the green eyes who saw it all that night. He had run off through the alley, and Travis had told her to take the shot. She had purposely waited until he was nearly around the corner, and even then, she aimed wide to the left and missed the kid completely. How could she kill a little boy?

  She and Travis had driven behind the market and down a couple of alleys but had not been able to find the little boy. Tina had been relieved that they didn’t. Travis said they needed to go since the cops were likely coming, and she had been happy to hear him say it.

  And this was him, right here in front of her again. He was with the cops now and was likely telling them all about the robbery and the shooting. Maybe their vehicle too. How much did he know?

  The boy was returned to the back seat of the sedan, and the detectives gathered once more with the storeowners at the rear of their car. There was conversation and then the group gravitated toward the front door of the building, the man bringing up the rear, hopping on his crutches. Light spilled onto the sidewalk once again as the door swung open and the group crowded through the doorway. A moment later, darkness replaced the light and the cops and storeowners were out of view.

  “We have to find that green-eyed little bastard, and kill him.”

  Travis’s words echoed in her mind as she stared at the boy alone in the backseat of a detective’s car, parked in a dark parking lot in Compton. This was the time and place to do it. Travis would insist on it.

  Tina started the car and sped into the night. She made a right on the first street she came to, and halfway down that block she flipped on her headlights. She knew to leave the lights off so that nobody could see her license plate, at least until she got away from a crime scene. Tina turned the car left and right, alternating at each intersection until she came out of the neighborhood and back onto a major street. She glanced in her mirror and settled down once she was comfortable that nobody had followed her.

  As she headed south to Long Beach, she powered up her phone, scrolled through her favorites past Carlos and Dre and Emmy and so on until the entry labeled only as ‘T’ was highlighted. She pushed the phone button and waited to tell him the news. Part of it, anyway.

  9

  Cedric the Entertainer seemed certain this was the place. A little neighborhood market in Compton, five miles south of where he lived. Floyd turned to look into the back seat; I found Cedric’s eyes in my rearview. Floyd said, “How sure are you?”

  “This is it.”

  We had taken a shot at heading south from Watts toward Compton, eyeballing the various markets and liquor stores on the main drags along the way. We were driving past this one that appeared abandoned or closed, all the lights off in the early evening. Cedric startled us both by yelling, “There!”

  I slowed to nearly a stop in the southbound lanes. “Hey partner, there’s someone in that car.” A sedan stood alone in the parking lot. I had caught a glimpse of movement inside.

  I glanced over to see Floyd leaned forward, looking past me toward the parking lot. “Let’s talk to them,” he said.

  We pulled in behind the parked car. Floyd was out quickly. As I exited, I looked back at the excited kid in our back seat, and told Cedric to stay put.

  An older silver Mercedes sat idling not far from the front doors to the market. Walking up, I saw there were two occupants. I had approached on the driver’s side, Floyd on the passenger’s. I motioned for the woman who sat in the driver’s seat to roll down her window.

  “Hi, how are you?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  She was Asian, forty to fifty, rather petite and dressed nicely in business-casual attire.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “We own the store,” she said, and glanced toward the man sitting in the passenger’s seat. “We just closed for the night. Can I help you with something?”

  It occurred to me she might not know we were the cops. In the ghetto, we were accustomed to everyone knowing who we were, no matter how we presented. I was convinced I could walk through the projects in drag and get the “Hi Po-lice” from half of the kids, and the “Five-oh” warning from all of the adults. But some of the foreigners-turned-entrepreneurs would surprise you at how unaware they were of the life outside of their immediate little worlds. It amazed me they weren’t killed more often. Killed for their Mercedes or payroll that probably sat between them on the front seat.

  “I’m a detective with the sheriff’s department, ma’am.”

  “Oh?”

  As if I could be anything other, a white guy standing in a dark parking lot in the middle of Compton wearing a suit and dress hat. Not to mention I had walked up on a stranger’s car.

  “My partner and I are investigating a robbery, maybe a shooting that might have happened here a few nights ago.”

  She shook her head and looked away.

  “Nothing like that happened here?” I asked.

  “No, you have wrong store, I’m sorry. We have to go now, okay?”

  I looked across the top of their car. Floyd’s brows told me all I needed to know; he had the same gut feeling I had, that something wasn’t right.

  “I’m going to have to ask that you turn off your car, ma’am, and step out for me.”

  “Why?” she asked, now in a very unfriendly tone, “I tell you already, nothing happen.”

  Floyd opened the passenger’s door and began speaking to the man seated there. The woman exited the driver’s door, and expressed her displeasure. “I talk to Mayor. She set you straight.”

  “Can we have a look inside?” I nodded toward the market.

  It had crossed my mind we were in the wrong place, but then her demeanor told me we weren’t. It wasn’t unheard of to have uncooperative victims—especially in the ghettos—and it had been my experience that some of the foreigners were distrustful of the police. Many of them had learned to handle matters as they might in the countries from where they came. Koreans had a reputation throughout Los Angeles to be quick to resort to gunplay when protecting their property. Like everything else, there was some truth to it, but it was also an overgeneralization. The inner-city residents felt the Koreans were rude. Many of the markets were set up similarly to high-end jewelry stores and low-end pawn shops, fortified with bullet-proof glass and configured for impersonal transactions. Some of the citizens were resentful of the attitudes and the prices, and over the years, the tensions had grown between some of the entrepreneurs and their customers. There were no cultural sensitivity classes for the citizens of Los Angeles who were unaccustomed to the ways of some of these storeowners. Although some of them could be abrupt, maybe unfriendly, the truth was that many of them had been victimized many times and had grown fearful of a large sector of the communities they served. Storeowners had killed and been killed. The media would generally exploit such tragedies in a one-sided fashion, favoring the victim class and
seldom giving an honest reporting of facts. During the riots, most of the Korean-owned markets were looted and burned to the ground, for all of these reasons and for sport. Or in the name of “justice.”

  Other than Ho’s. His market had stood untouched while the city burned around him. In part, because of the relationships he had with many of the residents, and in part, because of his relationship with the local cops.

  Floyd had now asked the man to exit the vehicle as well, and when our eyes met again, we were still on the same page.

  “What do you say we have a quick word with Cedric, partner?”

  “Good idea,” Floyd said.

  We left the two storeowners standing at the back of their car. We returned to our vehicle to find an excited witness perched against the back of the front seat, closely watching the action.

  Floyd asked if he recognized either of the two who stood in the glow of our headlights.

  “Yes ma’am, that’s the chino I told you about.”

  Floyd saw me grinning and said, “Ma’am?”

  “Sorry, sir. Yes, sir, that’s the chino they killed, that man right there on his crutches.”

  I burst into laughter and Floyd followed suit. It was one of the problems we had never been able to overcome in our partnership: untimely fits of sick, twisted humor.

  Once we were meeting with another detective and the family of a missing person who was presumed murdered. The detective was bringing us up to speed on the case, explaining that the last person to see the woman alive was a man she had only recently met and to whose apartment she had gone. The detective then, for reasons still inexplicable, said he could only imagine what they had been doing in there, and as he said it, he pumped his fist and made a grunting sound. This detective was much older than we were, and he had worked at the Homicide bureau for a very long time. Which meant he had many more years of experience than we did, along with much more wear and tear and the toll of the job. One could easily argue, based on those facts alone, that he was crazier than us too. To strengthen that premise, it should be known that the detective in question had actually experienced a mental breakdown due to the stresses of the job. In other words, he was a certified nutcase, and everyone knew it. Not that anyone at the bureau was completely sane, but even grading on the curve, this guy was off the charts. I had immediately begun emergency attempts to suppress the laughter I could feel boiling over inside me. The critical part would be to avoid eye contact with Floyd. I knew if I looked across the conference room table at him, we both would lose it. Don’t look at your partner. Don’t look at your partner. The room had stood silent for what seemed an eternity, and suddenly, in the silence, Floyd made a tiny snorting noise as he too fought to suppress his laughter. When he did, I completely lost it, and I began laughing so hard I started crying, which of course made Floyd start laughing out loud as well. I looked up to see tears in his eyes. I glanced over to see the detective in question chomping his gum with a smirk on his face, as if wondering what the hell was so funny. The family members were all stone-faced. Once I was able to get control of myself, I apologized profusely, but it was a moment I could never forget nor forgive myself for either. But I also still laugh until I cry when I recall it.

  Now standing in this parking lot in Compton, I again found myself with tears in my eyes. I said to Floyd, “You want to ask the dead guy if we can look inside his market?” and we both lost our composure.

  When we came outside neither of us was laughing. The two storeowners continued to insist that no crime had occurred. When we pointed out bullet holes in the wall behind the counter, they said those had been there a long time, longer than they had owned the store. When asked about the injury to the man’s leg, the storeowner said he had hurt himself playing golf. When pressed, he said he fell out of a golf cart. Floyd and I nodded at that, both having firsthand experience with similar experiences.

  “What do you think?” I asked on the way to our car.

  “I think Ballson Chin is a lying bastard. That’s what I think, Dickie.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  We stopped at the front of my sedan and each turned back to study the building and its surroundings. There was an alley that ran behind it, and it would be accessible from either side of the store. But on the far side, the storeowners’ car sat parked to the side, twenty feet away from the opening that led to the alley. The owners had just entered the vehicle again and were preparing to depart.

  Without speaking, I walked over to the Mercedes and shined my light at the back of it. There were two small holes—one in the trunk lid and another through the right rear taillight. Both appeared consistent with 20-gauge shotgun pellets. I turned and shined my light on the front door of the market and estimated the distance to be twenty-five feet.

  Floyd watched as I walked back.

  “Well?”

  “Didn’t you say he told you the one with the shotgun took a shot at him as he ran toward the alley?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think a couple pellets hit that car. My guess is they park in the same spot every day.”

  Floyd nodded and then looked around the lot once again. “If she was parked there, and Cedric was running around the corner of that building, the shooter is either a terrible shot, or they have a hell of a scatter on that shotgun.”

  I considered it for a moment. “Or the shooter didn’t want to hit the kid.”

  Floyd squinted, deep in thought. “What would make them want to miss? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I don’t know, maybe because he’s a kid. Even killers have standards.”

  “Some do, maybe. If these are the same people who did your murder, killing Ho and then gunning down that harmless grape, I’d argue that these two assholes have neither standards nor consciences.”

  I silently agreed, though the thought lingered as I took my time walking back to my car. The Mercedes backed out and began to pull away. I stood appraising the outside scene of an apparently unreported attempted robbery and shooting, maybe a murder.

  We settled into my Crown Vic where an anxious Cedric waited with adventure in his eyes. “Did you see what happened in there? Is there blood everywhere?”

  Floyd turned in his seat. “You’re a hundred percent sure this is where it happened, right?”

  “And that Asian man on the crutches is the one you saw get shot, right?” I added.

  “Yup. I seen the whole thing. I can even show you where I hid behind the store, down that alley. I’ll show you where it was I stole that dog from underneath the boat.”

  The office was deserted late at night and Josie took the opportunity to walk about and look at the various desks of her new colleagues. She enjoyed seeing the family photos, the various news clippings, cartoons, and gimmicks that littered the desktops and defined personalities. Some desks were cluttered beyond belief and had the appearance of having been in a hurricane. Others were organized and tidy and clean with all the photos aligned and arranged so that they were square to the angles of the desk and their other trimmings. Her partner’s desk was of the latter classification, indicating he was an A-type, tightly-wound old soul with a bad case of OCD. It was just as he had been described. She pulled his chair out and sat at his desk as she continued to study it. The blotter on the desk was free of clutter and dust and family photos too. There was a photo of a bulldog that appeared to have been taken in a driveway next to a trailer that held a boat. The only other photo was of his old partner, Matt Tyler, the one he and almost everyone else called Floyd. In the picture Floyd stood shirtless at a barbecue with a beer in one hand, tongs in the other, and a wide smile and dark sunglasses on his face. There was a phone list of the 23 sheriff’s stations spread throughout the county, the various custody facilities, all detective divisions and bureaus, and all of the other pertinent department functions including Special Enforcement Bureau, Aero Bureau, and the various sections of the crime lab. Another list had all local law enforcement agencies, fire departments, and hos
pitals. There was a Homicide Bureau roster with all of the detectives’ cell phone numbers listed alphabetically. She wondered why anyone would have printed copies of all this material when everything was now at the touch of a few keys on your mobile devices.

  She looked around the office to be certain she was still alone. Convinced, she began checking the desk drawers. She knew a lot could be learned by routine integrity checks, as she liked to call them. She hadn’t coined the phrase, and in fact, it was a phrase she heard from cops quite often, usually in reference to their spouses or lieutenants. She knew it was probably because cops don’t trust anyone without verification. That’s all she was doing, verifying she could trust her new partner. Did he have a bottle concealed in the desk? What about a secret phone book with phone numbers of wild women and bookies and strippers?

  Josie’s ex was a bit of a player and it was just this type of routine integrity check that had ruined her best shot at being married—thus far—while at the same time saved her from a lifetime of grief and likely health issues. The macho, body-building jail deputy she had dated for a year turned out to be bisexual and had since been diagnosed HIV positive. Josie tested for the next five years to be certain she was free of infection, and for many of those years she had all but avoided romantic interludes. Instead, she focused on her career and her family: two sisters, two brothers, and an aging mother whose body was worn from a lifetime of labor. Josie didn’t need a man in her life. Most of the time, anyway.

  Satisfied there was no evidence to be found in the desk, she carefully lined the chair back into its position with the arms perpendicular to the front edge, just as she had found it. She double-checked each drawer to make sure she hadn’t left anything open half an inch, and she adjusted the desktop blotter a sixteenth of an inch to make sure it was square and that everything would be in order when Dickie returned. Then she decided to slip out before he did return, so that he wouldn’t know how much time she put in at the office today. On her way out, she stopped at the desk and signed out, listing her hours as nine to five for an eight-hour day. She glanced at her watch as she walked away. 10:45.