Cold Hit (2005)

by Stephen - Scully 05 Cannell

  I motioned to the room. “This seems pleasant and clean,” sounding like a friendly realtor instead of the traitorous bastard who put him here.

  He wouldn’t look at me.

  “I just talked to your psychiatric evaluator,” I continued. “He says you can work your way out of this, but he wants you to open up to him more.”

  Nothing from Zack.

  “He also said you gotta come to grips with the divorce. Once that happens things are gonna get better, the depression will go away.”

  He hadn’t mentioned any of that, but I was on a roll, here. I waited for Zack to say something like, ‘Gee, that’s swell, Shane,’ or ‘I don’t blame you for ratting me out and ruining my life.’ But he just sat there. Over three hundred pounds of Irish anger stuffed in a too-small hospital gown.

  “It’s hard,” I monologued. “I know how much this is ripping you up … but the thing you gotta know, Zack, is I’m in your corner. A lot of people are.”

  He scooted his plastic chair further away from me, giving me almost his whole back now.

  “Listen, Zack, I know you think I sold you out, but I was only trying to …” His shoulders slumped so I stopped.

  I grabbed a chair and brought it closer. I sat next to him but I couldn’t engage his eyes. I was talking to the side of his head. “Zack … listen to me, Zack. I’m really worried about you. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but this is the best course. You can get help here.”

  He turned his chair even further away.

  “I’ve got a plan, Zack. Will you listen to me?” I was starting to sweat, but I kept going. “This doesn’t have to be as bad as it seems. We’ve got Alexa on our side and I’m about to split Forrest out of the Fingertip case. I think I can fix it so we can work on that murder and get off the task force. I’m pretty sure now that Forrest is a copycat. He was a Mossad agent named Andrazack, in this country illegally. I think he was killed by some foreign agent, not the Fingertip unsub. You’re gonna be getting a clean bill in a few days, but in the meantime, I wanta come by and run some of this stuff by you, get your take on it. That sound like a plan?”

  He just sat there.

  “Zack, don’t give up here, buddy. Zack? Hey, come on man, look at me.”

  Nothing.

  I wondered if I was getting a look at cognitive disassociative disorder.

  When I got home my head ached and my eyes felt grainy. All I wanted was a glass of scotch to wash my treachery away. But getting wasted was my old solution. I’d moved past that now. In a gesture of determined sobriety, I settled for a Coke and a bag of chips and walked out into the backyard where I sat in one of my rusting patio chairs and looked out at the wind-ruffled water on Venice’s narrow canals, thinking you really did need a sense of humor to appreciate its corny charm.

  Every time I have problems I find myself sitting here, drawn to Abbot Kinney’s faded dream, as if some part of my soul will be reborn in the stagnant water of these shallow canals. Sometimes, I feel as if he had designed this strange place with me in mind. I fit right in, a romantic in a fast-food world, lodged hopelessly in a moral cul-de-sac just like the McDonald’s wrappers that collected under the fake Venetian bridges. But there was a sense of past and future here. The throwback architecture, the scaled-down plot plan from the 1400s, all managed to coexist in some kind of insane proximity to the strip malls two blocks away and the Led Zeppelin music that drifted across the narrow canals from my hippie neighbors windows. If only I could find such an easy truce with my disparate emotions.

  Half an hour later I heard the back door open, and then Alexa dropped into the chair beside me and heaved a deep sign. She had a beer in her hand, and I listened while she pulled the tab, the chirp mixing neatly with the sounds of a hundred keening insects.

  She grabbed a handful of chips and said, “I’m fucked with these crime stats. The chief is gonna redeploy at least twenty of my detectives. It’s gonna foul up my whole grid plan.”

  Tony Filosiani was famous for his constant shuffling of manpower after COMSTAT meetings. He had installed a big, electronic map board of the city in the sixth-floor conference room. It was a complex son-ofa-bitch, which almost required a Cal Tech graduate to operate. Different colored lights represented different categories of crime that had occurred in the previous two weeks. One little light for every criminal incident. Murders and Crimes Against People were red; Burglaries—blue; Armed Robberies—green. While car-jacking was technically a CAP, it was also such a growing category it had acquired its own color—yellow.

  The division commanders would walk into the darkened COMSTAT meeting and see the board twinkling like a desert sky at midnight. Then Chief Filosiani would flip a switch and white lights would appear all over the map in clusters. The white lights indicated our deployed police presence. In one glance you could see if you had your troops in the right place. If a street gang like the Rolling Sixties went hot and started jacking cars and houses, you could see if there were enough cops at Sixtieth Street and MLK Boulevard to handle it. If there were too many white lights where nothing was happening Tony would move people around. Just like that, cops got transferred to new divisions.

  At the end of this light show, the chief would extinguish all of the cleared cases and embarrass any commander who still had too many colored lights burning in his area.

  It was Alexa’s job to move detectives and balance caseloads. The short-term problem for her was handing off old cases to new detectives and all of the confusion this produced.

  “I need to cover some business,” I finally said, setting my Coke on the table next to us. “I’ve got a couple of things to discuss.”

  “Look, baby, I’m sorry about this afternoon and Zack. I understand what you’re feeling, I just don’t agree, that’s all. Can’t we leave it at that?”

  “I went by the hospital to see him after work.”

  “How’d you get in? He’s supposed to be incommunicado.”

  “I told the psychiatrist I was his brother.”

  I waited while she sipped her beer. Finally, she responded. “I keep forgetting how stubborn and resourceful you are.”

  “I don’t usually get slammed and complimented in the same sentence.”

  “You’re also an asshole who’s kinda cute,” she said, doing it again.

  “I give.” I didn’t have to look over to see that she was smiling.

  “Okay,” she said. “Gimme the second chorus.”

  “Zack’s really screwed up. Wouldn’t look at me. Wouldn’t even talk. I was there ten, fifteen minutes, and he didn’t say one word.”

  “Unless he’s gone completely over the falls, he’ll get over it.”

  “I don’t think so. His psychiatric evaluator thinks he has a narcissistic personality with cognitive disassociative disorder, whatever the hell that is. I thought it was BS until I saw him. He’s beaten, and he hates me.”

  “He doesn’t hate you,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, you weren’t there.”

  She thought for a moment before she turned to face me. “A while back, when I was in patrol, I caught a payback hit in Compton. This was two, three years before we met. The mother of one of the dead boys was this big, floppy soul with drooping eyes. I’m trying to take her statement, she’s crying because she lost a son, and I say to her, ‘These kids must really hate one another.’ It was just nervous chatter. But she turns to me and says, ‘Where you been, child? It takes powerful love to do a thing like this.’ Then she said, ‘Hate needs love to burn.’

  Alexa stopped and put her beer down. “At the time, I thought that was nuts, but you know something? Working murders all day long, I’ve come to realize that she was mostly right. Hate is just a few degrees past love on the dial. Hate and love feed on each other.”

  “And all of this tells me what?” I said, frustrated.

  “That Zack loves you. He’s stressed and feels abandoned, so yes, right now there’s some hate, but it’s built on love, Shane. Right now, y
ou both have the volume up too high. Turn it down and see what happens.”

  I sat next to her and tried not to argue. I remembered what Zack said to me in the bar. “Everything I say, people hear too loud.” But I also remembered the psychiatrist’s words: “His personality type doesn’t treasure relationships.” I was too confused to sort it out, so I just said “Okay” and moved on.

  “You said there were a couple of things,” Alexa pressed. “What’s the other?”

  So I told her about Rowdy and Snitch, and the strange guest list at the funeral.

  “Sounds interesting,” she said, softly.

  “Whatta I do?” I asked. “I’ve got Deputy Chief Mike Ramsey on one side and Deputy Chief Talmadge Burke on the other. Broadway and Perry are gonna try and get me conferenced in, but they have to clear it with their lieutenant.”

  “And since John Doe Four turned out to be an Israeli spy, the case falls into some kinda no-man’s-land between CTB and the Fingertip task force,” she said. “So what do you want?”

  “I want off the Fingertip case. I want to work this homicide out of CTB with Broadway and Perry. I really can’t stand that task force. I’m not doing any good. The boss doesn’t like me. He’s gonna backwater all my leads anyway.”

  “Shane … I can’ t take you off the Fingertip killings and I can’t reassign you to the Andrazack case.”

  “Why not?”

  “Armando Cubio runs a tight operation at CTB. He won’t want you in the mix.”

  “I think you’re wrong. He’ll want to work it, but he’d also just as soon keep Andrazack in the Fingertip case. Strange as it seems, it’s lower profile if it stays there, lost in the mix with five others. I had to tell Underwood what’s going on and he’s agreed not to make Andrazack’s name public. CTB doesn’t want a news story on how some black ops Mossad agent in the U. S. without permission got murdered.”

  Alexa looked beautiful, her black hair picking up fleeting specks of moonlight, her mouth soft and inviting. But she wasn’t about to answer, she was mulling it over.

  “Okay, then here’s another plan,” I said. “How ‘bout we skip dinner and get naked. Maybe I can change your mind in the bedroom.”

  “You mean sexually entertain your division commander in an attempt to affect a duty assignment?” “Something like that.”

  So we went into our bedroom, took off our clothes, and lay on the bed holding each other. She nuzzled my neck.

  “This is beginning to make my Southwest crime problem seem irrelevant,” she said, reaching for me.

  I was already breathing hard when she stopped suddenly and looked into my eyes.

  “Sometimes we’re going to be on opposite sides of things.”

  “I understand,” I said softly.

  “But I want you to know I respect where you’re coming from. What I treasure most are your complexities.”

  Chapter 25

  The next morning I drove down Abbot Kinney Boulevard heading toward IHOP for a stack of cakes and some coffee, before going into the office. As I pulled into a parking space in the adjoining lot, a tan Fairlane that looked like it had been painted with spray cans from the drugstore, screeched into the space next to me. The doors flew open and Rowdy and Snitch got out.

  “This is nice down here,” Broadway said. “Smell the ocean and everything.”

  “I’m assuming this ambush is because your lieutenant signed off on me,” I replied.

  “You buy the grits; we’ll see how it goes,” Emdee said and turned to lock the door of the car. It had to be force of habit, because there was nothing worth stealing on that wreck. It didn’t even have hubcaps.

  The IHOP was strangely quiet for 7 A. M. We found a booth in the back and settled in. Broadway and I ordered pancakes, bacon, and coffee. Emdee Perry had what he called a hillbilly breakfast. Pork sausage, oatmeal, and Red Bull.

  “Alright,” I said, taking out my spiral pad and pen. “No notes,” Broadway said.

  “Why not?”

  “In this game we don’t put stuff on paper. Nobody wants t’ face a bunch a subpoenaed notes we can’t explain in federal court.”

  I put the pad away.

  Emdee said, “We done some background checking and it seems you’re okay, but we also found out Detective Farrell’s bread ain’t quite out of the oven. Frankly, you bein’ hooked up with him makes us wonder how loose your shit is. The Loot says you been in some tight scrapes and didn’t leak, but what we’re gonna tell you’s gotta stay with you. You can’t go blabbin’ none a this to the task force, or yer partner, or anybody else and that includes your wife.”

  Roger Broadway leaned forward. “Most a this shit won’t stand up under a policy review. That’s why we need your word.”

  “You got it.”

  The food came and everybody dug in.

  “Okay,” I said between bites. “Why don’t you start by telling me why half the L. A. intelligence community was at Andrazack’s funeral?”

  “That wasn’t half,” Roger Broadway said. “That was just Russians, Jews, CIA, us, and two guys from the French embassy. You didn’t get no pictures, so you musta clean missed the Frogs. They were up on the roof of the main building.”

  “I can’t believe this dead Mossad agent was that popular.”

  “Classified information is getting out,” Emdee Perry said. “Even our shop is leaking. The embassy players in town are freaking. All we got in this business is our secrets, and all of a sudden, it’s like nobody’s data is secure. We think Davide Andrazack was over here to help the Israelis find out who and how.” He pushed his plate away. “We’re getting fucked worse than sheep at an Appalachian barn dance.”

  “Andrazack must have found out something,” Broadway added. “We think whoever is bugging these embassies caught Andrazack and whacked him to keep it quiet.”

  “So who’s planting the bugs?” I asked. “Russians or Israelis?”

  “Them two ain’t the ones doin’ it,” Emdee said. “You sound pretty sure.”

  “Behavior indicates result,” Roger explained.

  “I love when Joe Bob talks pretty like that,” Emdee drawled. “But he’s right. If they’s the ones planting bugs, they wouldn’t be running around like their hair’s on fire.”

  “Andrazack had Cyrillic symbols tattooed on his eyelids,” I said. “Translation: ‘Don’t wake up.’ I got a call from a friend on the Russian gang squad this morning. He says that’s a Ukranian hitman’s curse. Sounds like Andrazack was more a Russian than a Jew.”

  “He was both,” Broadway said. “Russian Jew. He repatriated from Moscow to Israel when he was nine. Joined the Israeli Army when he turned nineteen, then he joined the Mossad. He was fluent in Balkan dialects, so they sent the boy back to Moscow when he was twenty-five. His specialty was assassinations. Close kills behind the Iron Curtain. In the early eighties he botched a hit in Moscow and was sentenced to twenty years in Lefortovo Prison. Since Andrazack’s criminal specialty was murder, he used his skills on the inside to stay alive. He was whackin’ enemies of the Odessa mob for smokes. Ended up being the most feared killer in that prison. That’s why he had the Russian tatts on his eyelids. After the Soviet Union fell, somebody in the Mossad paid off a Russian commissar and he got released, went back to Israel. By then he was almost blind and became a computer geek.”

  “With a history like that, sounds to me like he would’ve had a lot of Russian enemies,” I said.

  “Bam-Barn Stan wouldn’t have been at that funeral if his Black Ops guys did the hit,” Broadway answered.

  “Who the hell is Bam-Barn Stan?”

  “The whale wearing the burlap tent. Stanislov Bambarak. Ex-KGB. ‘Course nobody cops to being a KGB agent anymore. Stan says he works for the Russian ballet and symphony, but according to our intelligence file he wouldn’t know an oboe from a skin flute. He went to the Russian language and culture schools in the Balkans in the early sixties. He came out and mostly worked infiltrating MI-5 until they moved him back to Mos
cow. Guy speaks English like a Saville Row faggot. Putting the cultural stuff aside, the fact is, he’s still a frontline Kremlin operator. Back in the eighties, before his ankles started swelling, that bad boy was an fire-breathing sack of trouble. Still wouldn’t want to go up against him.”

  “And the guy from the Israeli Embassy?” I asked.

  “Jeez, you sure want a lot for a crummy stack of cakes,” Broadway complained. “Maybe you got something to tell us about the Andrazack murder first.”

  I gave it a moment’s thought. “Okay. The bullet we dug out of Andrazack’s head was a five-forty-five caliber. We think it came from a PSM Automatic.”

  “The best damn piece ever for close kills,” Emdee said. “You get a ballistics match?”

  “Still waiting. I’ll let you know if the slug ties up to any old cases.”

  They both nodded.

  “This gun was issued to KGB agents, but you still say the Reds didn’t pop him?”

  “Theoretically, anything’s possible,” Roger conceded. “But Bambarak was at that funeral to make sure Andrazack was really on the Ark. He’s too hands-on for one of his agents to have done it and him not know.”

  “So who’s the Israeli with the bald head who left in their embassy car?”

  “The guy ain’t no Israeli,” Emdee said. “He’s a U. S. citizen of the Jewish persuasion—a retired LAPD sergeant named Eddie Ringerman. Worked Homicide before nine-eleven. He pulled the pin two years ago. Now he’s a consultant for the Israelis. Helps them get favors and information out of the Glass House. Not a bad guy. He just forgot which flag he’s supposed to salute.”

  “I think we need to talk to Ringerman and Bambarak,” I said. “Can you get them to open up?”

  “We’re tricky bastards who have good relations all over town,” Emdee said. “In the spy business, a guy does you a favor, you owe him. Reds, Ruskies, CIA, Frogs, Germans, us—everybody keeps track of old debts and pays off. The people who owe us will pay us back. We’ll get something.”