Hard-Boiled- Box Set

by Danny R. Smith

  The wino headed into the store and the three of us stood silent for a moment. Abram lingered, watching us with great interest. I said to my partners, “What do you suppose she was doing with that?”

  Floyd shook his head. Josie said, “I have some ideas, but let’s talk about it in the car.”

  It was her way of politely finishing our business with the nosy storeowner. Josie seemed to know he shouldn’t be trusted to keep to himself any of our discussion he might hear. She was right. We needed to conclude what we had here and, as soon as a radio car arrived to take the report, continue on with our quest to warn the army investigators about the recent developments.

  After a moment, Josie asked, “Do you guys have any other questions for pops?”

  Floyd said, “Do they carry Copenhagen?”

  Curiously, the cholos followed Travis and Tina without putting pressure on them. When Travis stopped at a red light, their pursuers stopped far behind, and waited. Were they holding back, waiting for the right time and place? Travis didn’t know, but he was definitely looking for just the right spot. His training had taught him to think tactically, and to consider the many possibilities before engaging an enemy, when possible. In this case, he knew there were three in the car. Was each of them armed? He didn’t know. The cadence of the gunfire indicated to him that a revolver had been used when they came under fire. That told him that he and Tina had the superior firepower. He had to assume that he also had far more ammunition than a couple of cholos rolling around in their low rider. Travis was confident that once he opened up with the AR, the cholos would lose their desire to fight. He guessed they would rapidly retreat, if able. He hoped they wouldn’t be able. The Mexicans had fired on him and he planned to make them pay for it.

  Travis turned onto a side street that led them into a quiet neighborhood, and he drove slowly as he watched for a park, a playground, the parking lot of a church. Someplace he could bring them in, off of the street, so that their flight would not be so easy once the shooting started.

  The Oldsmobile followed at a distance.

  “I wonder if they’re waiting for backup.”

  Tina watched the headlights in the mirror on her door. “Calling up some homies?”

  “Could be.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Find a spot and get to it. We need to get the hell out of this town. Plus, I don’t need two more carloads of gangsters coming to their aid with more firepower.”

  “We still need to go by the house and pick up the rest of our stuff.”

  Travis shook his head. “No way. Too risky now. They’ll have Carlos identified by now and his picture will be all over the news. Some goddamn do-gooder neighbor will call it in, tell the cops where he lived and then describe us too. No, we’re fucked now, Tina. We need to kill these wetbacks behind us and get the hell out of here. I don’t think we can even take the chance of going by your grandma’s now.”

  “We’re stopping by Nana’s, if only for a second. I have to tell her about my brother, and I have to say my goodbyes. I know we’re never coming back.”

  We pulled out of the liquor store parking lot and headed south on Atlantic. I glanced at my rearview mirror to see Josie in the backseat. Floyd sat next to me. We were each scanning the streets for a gold compact car and a white Oldsmobile with chrome rims. A gangster ride. “Honestly, the last thing we need is to spot those two cars right now, with all we have going on. Hopefully a black and white will spot them first, or at least be close by if we run into them.”

  “Do you guys realize we’re less than a mile from the Ortiz family’s home?”

  I saw her in the mirror again. “No, I guess I hadn’t realized that.”

  Floyd shrugged.

  “If her brother was killed in the armored car robbery, and there were three—”

  “I see where you’re going with this,” Floyd said.

  “—a larger man and what we now know was a woman, who happened to use a sawed-off shotgun—”

  “Twenty-gauge,” I added. “Same as the one we just received.”

  “What do you think the odds are that the Ortiz girl and her boyfriend are our killers?”

  I looked in the mirror again and saw her waiting for a reply. “I think the odds are pretty good.”

  “Then I say head straight to grandma’s house. Turn left up here at the light.”

  I settled into the left-hand turn lane and waited for the light, only because there was a car in front of me impeding my travel and single-handily enforcing the traffic laws, unknowingly. The ticking of the blinker was the only sound in the car. Floyd and I each had our windows down, which was a custom from our days in patrol. We always kept the windows down so that we could hear what we might not see and have no obstruction if we needed to shoot.

  The silence was broken by the sounds of gunfire nearby.

  “Did that sound like it came from over there?” I asked, nodding the direction we had planned to turn, which was the direction of the Ortiz home. Sometimes it was hard to tell the direction of gunfire when heard from inside a car.

  Floyd said, “Yeah, go!”

  I had left room between our car and the one stopped ahead of us, another practice learned early in a cop’s career. If you needed to get out in a hurry, you didn’t want to have to rely on others to move out of the way. The law-abiding motorist in front of us continued to wait for a green light while gunfire erupted around us. I yanked the wheel and veered into the on-coming lane of traffic to go around him. He honked and flipped us off as we did, disgusted by our disregard for traffic laws and public safety.

  Floyd returned the gesture.

  30

  Chief Warrant Officer 3 Charles Farley and the lone woman in his squad, Chief Warrant Officer 2, Paulina Lazarevic, had blacked out—shut their lights down—as they turned onto the street where James P. Morgan sat alone in a dark sedan. They eased up behind him and killed the motor. When they got out of their car, they closed their doors carefully so that only two slight clicks were heard. Morgan did the same, and the three of them met on the dark, uneven sidewalk adjacent to their cars.

  Morgan’s restrained demeanor matched the concerns he had voiced to Lazarevic over the radio earlier. Farley, on the other hand, knew the odds were that this was all for naught. Ninety-some percent of all operations lacked action. Especially stateside. He had often complained that being an investigator was the most boring job he’d ever had, and he joked with his team that he was trying to finagle them back to the sandbox. Tonight, he tried to lighten Morgan’s mood by good-natured ribbing. “What are the spirits telling you now, Morg? Because honestly, I asked Siri and she didn’t know anything about bad juju coming our way.”

  But Morgan was all business. “I don’t know, boss. There’s just something that doesn’t feel right to me. And I’m more confident now than ever that she’s alive. I feel her.”

  “Ortiz.”

  Morgan nodded.

  Farley allowed that to marinate for a moment as the three stood in silence. The night was so still that Farley could hear the buzz of electricity snaking through overhead wires. He looked up and saw nothing beyond the yellow glow of a nearby street light—not a star or a hint of the moon anywhere—though he knew it was a cloudless sky above them. Morgan stood soberly in the shadows, his eyes dark and troubled. Farley had just begun to feel anxious himself when gunshots cracked the silence.

  “That’s close by,” Lazarevic said, excitedly. “A block or two over.”

  Morgan went to the nearby passenger door and reached in to get his M4 carbine that sat on the seat. Farley walked quickly to the vehicle he and Lazarevic had driven, and retrieved a shotgun and a carbine identical to Morgan’s from the trunk. He came back and offered both to Lazarevic; she took the carbine. They each remained in the shadows but moved closer to the trunk of the old tree that offered cover and concealment on the other side of their cars. And they waited.

  We turned into the neighborhood and drove in the d
irection of the gunfire. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. And it never really crossed our minds that the act of doing so was counterintuitive for most of mankind. The streets appeared empty, so I blacked out and accelerated from one intersection to the next, where we would quickly scan the cross streets before moving on. At the third intersection, Floyd said, “On the right!”

  I looked and saw movement toward the end of the block. “What is it?”

  “Blacked out car just pulled onto the street. Let’s get it.”

  I floored it. “Who has a radio?”

  Over the roaring motor, Josie said, “I’ll call it in on my cell.”

  “Where did it go?”

  “I think it turned left up ahead,” Floyd said.

  As we passed the area where the car had first appeared, Floyd yelled, “Wait!”

  I hit the brakes and looked to my right, following Floyd’s gaze. There in a dark parking lot sat the Oldsmobile with its small tires and chrome wheels. The doors stood open and an interior light glowed against the darkness. There appeared to be a body on the pavement outside of the driver’s door. “Shit!”

  I looked forward and then back at the Oldsmobile. “Damnit!”

  “Quick check, come on,” Floyd instructed.

  He was right, but as I jammed the car in reverse and then wheeled into the parking lot, I envisioned the killers getting away while we checked on the victims. A quick glance and we’d report it to the desk, ask for radio car assistance and an ambulance and be back in the chase. Those were my thoughts until we stopped and saw a young teenaged boy in the back seat holding his hand to his neck, trying to slow the spurting blood.

  Floyd pulled the kid from the back seat and squatted next to him. He removed his silk tie and used it to compress the boy’s neck wound. Sanchez stood next to him, speaking urgently into her cell phone, updating the report of “shots fired” to request paramedics and additional units to respond to a shooting scene with multiple victims.

  The driver was dead on the ground just outside of the car, a bloody pistol near his hand. His gaze was fixed only on the darkness that had befallen him, and his lifeblood slowly oozed across the pavement below him. His passenger was slumped across the front seat. Blood was smeared over his bald head and caked to his heavy mustache, and his eyes were partly open. Slowly, he blinked. He tried to speak but a throaty gurgle was all I heard. There were no guns in the vicinity of the passenger, so I encouraged him to remain where he was seated and told him to hang on, paramedics were on their way.

  A bloody revolver lay on the back seat near where the kid had been before Floyd pulled him out. It changed my feeling about his age, and his plight. The hole in his neck was just the way it turned out. A lesser opponent, and it might have been he who did the killing.

  The white Oldsmobile had been perforated by gunfire. The strikes to the hood and windshield were evidence that they had rolled into an ambush, head first. The shooter, or shooters, had been efficient, deadly, and committed. These were no amateurs. I looked around the dark parking lot, and for the first time noticed it was an elementary school. The killers had somehow lured their victims into the lot where they would only be able to get out of the kill zone by backing up. Trained shooters and hunters alike know that tracking a target going away from you is simple, compared to shooting at something fleeing across your field of view or coming at you. It is instinctive to flee, and all untrained people would do just that in this situation. The counterintuitive but appropriate response would have been to floor it and drive directly at their attackers. Put the pressure on them and only allow them an instant to fire before the fight is upon them. I noticed the car was in park. It made sense with the driver being outside. He had decided to stay and fight. He had better instinct than most who would try to back out, but he lacked professional training and didn’t know to advance on his enemy. He had been outgunned and had died at the hands of a more committed and prepared opponent. This had military written all over it. The dots had connected to reveal a solid line from Fort Hood to Los Angeles.

  Using the small light of my cell phone, I walked forward, careful not to step on evidence. Expended shell casings were scattered on the ground twenty-five feet forward of the victims. I estimated twenty or so and pictured a thirty-round magazine for an AR-15. The casings were small, and I assumed they were .223 caliber. It was likely that one of the shooters was armed with an AR-15 style rifle, as had been the killer at Ho’s Liquor. The bigger of the two. His smaller companion had used a 20-gauge shotgun. I panned across the lot, imagining the width of a car that no longer stood where the killers had stopped. After several moments of searching, I saw additional shell casings on the ground. These were small, probably 9mm handgun casings, and few. I spotted only four. If the passenger stood outside of the door, shooting toward the victims directly behind them, the spent casings would have ejected toward the car. Many more rounds had probably been fired, and the casings were likely inside or on the suspect’s car, gathered in the cavity beneath the windshield. Having lost the shotgun in the parking lot, the passenger had apparently armed himself—or, more than likely, herself—with a pistol.

  Satisfied, I drifted back to the Oldsmobile as sirens drew near. Floyd continued to compress the boy’s neck, and encouraged him to hang on. Josie finished her phone call and stood silently taking in the scene. Our eyes met. “This is the work of our killers,” I said.

  Two sheriff’s radio cars skidded to a stop on the street adjacent to our location, abruptly turned, and came toward us, tires barking against the pavement. Paramedics were close behind, wheeling into the lot with their red lights flashing. I pointed out the obvious scene area and beyond it where the casings were found, to give the deputies an idea of where evidence lay. Floyd stood after being relieved of his life-saving efforts by two paramedics, one male and one female. A helicopter flooded the area with brilliant light as it orbited in a tight circle above us, its blades chopping violently through the heavy night air. But as the bird faded to the far side of its orbit, and the sounds of its propellers were but a far-off whooshing in the dark, similar chopping sounds came from another direction. I looked up and across the horizon, but I didn’t see any other birds. I looked over to see Floyd meet my gaze with a frown.

  He said, “Gunshots?”

  31

  A compact sedan came around the corner and slowed as it approached where the three CID investigators stood in the shadows, their firearms readied.

  Morgan saw her in the passenger’s seat. “Tina,” he breathed.

  Her eyes met his and he saw panic on her face. Quickly, she averted her eyes, and the vehicle sped off. Morgan ran to his car. Lazarevic and Farley scrambled to theirs. Morgan peeled away from the curb with tires squealing and his motor revved high. The compact car was turning ahead of him. He glanced in his mirror and saw his partners were on his tail.

  The car ahead of him shot through the residential district, blacked out. Morgan saw the car race around another corner, this time to the left. He followed, and checked again to see that his partners were with him. They too were blacked out, driving by the streetlights, careful not to silhouette Morgan.

  He could still see Tina’s face as the car had passed by and their eyes had met, and they had recognized each other. What had she thought? What had she turned and said to the driver? Morgan didn’t get a look at the driver but saw enough to know it was a large-framed man. Hollingsworth, no doubt. Morgan’s romantic ideas were now all but erased as the lady soldier who had stolen his heart fled. She was, as he had suspected, alive and well. Fleeing from the army, from justice, from civility. What had she become? They screeched around another corner.

  Morgan’s thoughts moved from those of romance to his earlier premonitions of her presence, and the feeling that something bad was about to happen. Hollingsworth was unhinged; Morgan had always known that. Now it was quite evident he was a killer as well. They had heard the gunfire, and Morgan had recognized it as semi-automatic smal
l arms. Probably a .223 caliber. He knew the two wanted soldiers would be heavily armed, and he feared this two year pursuit of them would end violently.

  The fugitives made an abrupt turn into an alley, vanishing behind a wall of dust. Morgan followed, but his bright lights reflected back as if he were in a thick fog. Suddenly, he could see the vehicle ahead of him had come to a stop. Ambush!

  Morgan slammed on his brakes and shoved the shifter into park. He grabbed his M4 carbine while stepping out of the car. Rapid popping sounds, flashes in the darkness, and the sounds of bullets whizzing past him confirmed he had been set up by his adversary. He aimed his weapon at the peppering flames and pulled his trigger, first toward one side of the suspect’s car, and then the other. There were two shooters. Both were shooting at him. She was shooting at him, he realized.

  Morgan squatted in the door opening for cover. As he focused on the shooters downrange, his vehicle was suddenly struck from behind. The jolt knocked him to the ground and away from the cover of his car. More gunfire erupted. It came from both directions now, his partners behind him and the fugitives ahead of him. Morgan was stuck in the middle. He tried to stand and realized he had lost feeling in his legs. Looking down, he saw that his pants were soaked in blood. Using his hands and elbows, Morgan pulled himself away from his car and propped himself against a fence that ran the length of the alley. He heard a door slam, an engine cranked, and the fugitives sped away down the alley. Morgan emptied his gun toward the sounds of a racing motor fading into the darkness.

  “He’s hit,” Lazarevic cried as she ran to Morgan. She set her weapon on the ground and wedged her body behind his, picking his torso up slightly to cradle him. She called out on her radio for assistance.