by Jerold Last
"Because there's a lot more going on here that you don't know about yet. Why don't you fly down this afternoon and have dinner with us? We can tell you what we both know and what I suspect, and decide what we should do next."
We made arrangements to meet his flight and I rehearsed Vincent for his big dramatic role as an anonymous informant to the media. Then we left the office for a working lunch to discuss all of our other pending cases, and who would be doing what on each of them.
Our office is on the second floor of a high-rise office building in Century City. As usual, we took the stairs and went out the front door, heading towards our favorite upscale burger restaurant, a block to the south of the building. The first indication that something was wrong was the squeal of brakes as a speeding SUV roared towards us. Vincent acted instinctively, based on decades of training and practice in the spy business. He shoved me back and down violently, as he also dove for cover behind the giant potted plants at the entrance to our building. The squeal of brakes was now accompanied by the chatter of a couple of Uzis spraying the area where we had been standing a few seconds before.
The area a few feet above our sprawled bodies was sprayed with 9mm slugs at a rate of 600 rounds per minute while two shooters emptied two clips at us. The usual clip for an Uzi holds 32 rounds, so it takes a bit less than 3 seconds to shoot a full clip. It felt more like 3 minutes while it was happening. I got a quick look at the SUV and the shooters while all this was going on. Strangely enough, I immediately recognized the weapons as Uzis, a small and terribly efficient submachine pistol designed by Major Uziel Gal in the late 1940s for the Israeli army. It is now the weapon of choice, all over the world, for close-quarters shooting of a whole lot of bullets in a very short time. I didn't recognize either of the shooters, both Anglos in their mid-forties and kind of generic looking. The SUV was dark, probably black, with tinted windows, with California license plates 6CGI something, something, something, and last seen getting the heck out of there as fast as it could. At lunch hour, this street is usually crowded with pedestrians headed for a quick meal at the local restaurants. Fortunately we were early for lunch, so nobody got shot. Vehicular traffic on the avenue and cross streets was heavy though.
Everything happened so suddenly and so fast, there really wasn't enough time to feel scared while the shooting was happening. The part where my hands shook and I suddenly became aware of my own mortality came afterwards. The adrenaline finally started pumping as we stood up and brushed ourselves off. From the outside Vincent looked cool and calm. I suppose I did, too. Speaking for myself, on the inside I was frightened and angry. I made a mental note if I ever had any opportunity to meet either of those two bastards again neither was going to get away with this kind of casual disregard for human life and potential collateral damage. I could sense Vincent was thinking the same thing.
I got up and brushed myself off. "Thanks, Vincent. I owe you one. You just saved my life."
Vincent looked at me and smiled. I can tell when he’s rattled since he tends to sprinkle his sentences with occasional Spanish words. "Claro. De nada. That's what partners do. I think we're safe for now, but we should probably get off the street muy rapido, in case they come back."
We walked quickly over to the restaurant and ordered burgers and beers. I called the cell phone number of a detective I knew from the local police precinct named Hawthorne. We reported the attempted shooting let him know we were OK, where we were now, and where we'd be later for interviewing. He was already en route in response to the first 911-call the police had received from a bystander. He would catch us at the restaurant in 5 minutes, and told me to stay where we were until he had a chance to interview us both.
"What do you think that was all about?" Vincent asked.
"Obviously someone doesn't like one or both of us. Equally obviously we have to start being a lot more careful since there's a good chance we'll see those guys again, probably sooner rather than later. And finally, somebody bad just made a big, big mistake."
Detective Oliver Hawthorne was about my age and height, 6'2", but heavier at about 220 pounds of bone and muscle. He had a soul patch beard and broad sideburns on his otherwise clean shaven, handsome, dark ebony face. Hawthorne had made the rank of Lieutenant fast enough that he was obviously smart and competent. We were not really friends, but knew each other professionally, dating back to when we both started out on the LAPD as rookie cops. I knew him well enough to order a fresh cup of coffee, which was delivered to him as he sat at our table.
"Tell me about it," he said looking directly at me as he picked up his coffee and nodded his thanks.
I introduced Hawthorne to Vincent then answered his question. "There's not much to tell. Two white guys, both mid-forties, and two Uzis, in a black SUV, California license 6CGI something, something, something, doing a drive-by shooting that was obviously aimed at us. It was very professional, very quick. I'm alive and talking to you, because Vincent reacted more quickly than I could and saved us both."
Detective Hawthorne looked at Vincent. "Do you have anything to add to Roger's succinct summary?"
"Yes, I do. The SUV was General Motors manufacture, a Cadillac Escalade I think. The license plate was 6CGI436."
Hawthorne smiled, grabbed his cell phone, speed dialed a number, and requested an APB for the car.
He looked back at me. "I thought you were cool under stress, Roger. Your colleague here makes you look like a rank amateur. OK, I know you well enough to fill out the reports. Your colleague here needs to tell me a bit more about himself."
Vincent described himself as my partner in the detective agency, gave his PI license number plus his business and home addresses, and sat back to wait for additional questions. There weren't any for him.
Hawthorne finished sipping his coffee and looked back at me. "Are you working on any cases that might have gotten somebody upset enough to want you killed?"
This was almost certainly neither the time nor the place for the truth. "Not that I know of, but who knows what it takes to get a criminal scared enough to overreact like this?"
He stood and shook hands with both of us. "I doubt if we're going to find that SUV with people or forensic evidence in it, but we'll try. In the meantime be careful and call me if anything else I should know about happens."
And that was that for the moment. We headed back to the office.
Chapter24.Dinner with "Dirty Steve"
The phone call I was expecting came on my office line at about 3 PM. It was a potential client named John Smith, who wanted to see me immediately. I told him I was available and to come by. He promised to be there in the next half hour. I hung up, noting the strong smell of fish, or maybe fishy manure, coming through the telephone line.
I called Vincent into my office and told him what just happened. "I think it’s show time shortly. That call was from a new potential client with urgent business, named John Smith. How do you think we should handle this?"
"If there aren't any guns showing as they come in, let's just beat the crap out of them, inflict some severe pain, and see what we can find out. If they come in with guns blazing I think we should just take them out and not waste a lot of time talking about it."
He checked his pistol, a 9mm Glock, made sure the magazine was full, and racked a cartridge into the chamber. I took my own 9mm Glock pistol out of the gun safe, hidden behind a cleverly hollowed out filing cabinet, and did the same. I slipped the gun into a cross-draw belt holster, which was completely concealed by my sport jacket. Then we waited, me at my desk facing the open door leading from my office into our tiny client's waiting room and Vincent in his office, strategically invisible behind the half-opened door.
About twenty minutes later, there was a knock on the outside door to the waiting room. "Come in," I called out as I stood up behind my desk to be polite. Standing also facilitated drawing my pistol from its holster on my belt and/or diving for cover if it looked like I had to.
The same two men from the
SUV walked in, stopping just outside my office doorway. The one in the lead was medium height, medium weight, short dark hair, wearing a sport jacket over a clean shirt and tie with nice slacks. The second man was similarly dressed and similarly unremarkable physically with lighter hair, worn somewhat longer. The two could be told apart mainly by the different colors of their slacks and hair. No guns were showing, but both wore jackets that could easily conceal a weapon. "Are y’all alone here?" asked the one in the front.
"I have a partner, but he's out on a case. I expect him back in less than a half-hour," I replied helpfully. It was a little disconcerting to realize how convincing I could be when I was trying to sound really, really dumb.
The two continued into my office. The one in the lead extended his hand toward me in the universal handshake gesture, saying in a soft voice, with a slight residue of inflections from a Texas upbringing, "Ah called you earlier Mr. Bowman. Ah'm John Smith."
I wasn't sure what the rules of the game Mr. Smith was playing were supposed to be, but it seemed the perfect time to rewrite them. I took a stride towards him with my left leg, as I extended my right hand and grasped the hand Smith had offered as a manly handshake of greeting. Continuing my forward movement and shifting my weight, I pulled hard on his hand, pivoted on my left leg, and launched the hardest sidekick I could generate, directly into his solar plexus. As he doubled up in pain and astonishment, as well as in a serious attempt to breathe, I pulled him towards me in case he needed a hand strike as a calming influence.
In the meantime Vincent screwed his pistol into the second man's ear to encourage him to relax and stand still. Smith was too engrossed in trying to breathe to present any problems. I let go of his hand and tweaked his jacket open. Surprise! The butt of his Uzi was tucked into his belt. I relieved him of the extra weight, carefully avoiding leaving any fingerprints, frisked him for other weapons (there weren't any), and took his wallet, handling just the edges to avoid leaving my fingerprints on it either. A short hard chop to his right shoulder temporarily paralyzed the nerve plexus on that side. A second chop to the left shoulder replicated the injury on the other side. I shoved Smith to the floor, as he moaned pitifully, and gave him a warning.
"Stay right there and don't try to get up or make any noise unless you want me to inflict some permanent damage and really hurt you. Just nod yes if you understand."
He nodded. Vincent hit the second guy directly behind the ear, as hard as he could with the edge of his rigid hand. The second gunman dropped in his tracks like a pole-axed steer. No bump, no telltale bruise, but he was unconscious for the foreseeable future. Vincent removed the second Uzi from his belt using a handkerchief to avoid telltale fingerprints. No other weapons showed up when he was frisked, except for a nasty switchblade knife, which Vincent admired and kept. Another wallet joined the collection on my desk, also handled carefully to avoid fingerprints.
I sat down at my desk while Vincent remained standing on alert. These two might have picked up some friends since this morning that might show up unexpectedly. Or either of them could have remarkable recuperative powers. You can never be too careful in situations like this. "Let's see who Mr. Smith and his nameless friend are when they show their I.D.," I suggested, donning a pair of latex gloves from a convenient desk drawer.
The first wallet was brown leather and well worn. It contained a treasure or two. "Guess what, Vincent? John Smith isn’t his real name! He’s Elliot Harkins, a DEA agent with a Texas driver's license and a home address in one of the border towns near San Francisco de Texas. It looks like he kept the Harkins family tradition of crooked law enforcement alive for another generation. What would you like to bet sleeping beauty over there is his partner?"
The second wallet was black leather, containing a second set of DEA I.D. and a Texas drivers license in the name of James Corley, home address San Francisco de Texas.
"What next, el jefe?" Vincent asked. "I think we'll be a whole lot safer if neither of these guys is in a position to harm us."
"We completely agree. Please stand over here, directly behind me." I double gloved with another pair of tight latex gloves, pulled out of my desk drawer. Lifting Harkins up to a standing position, I leaned his limp body against the wall facing towards Corley, balancing it carefully so he remained upright. From the pile on the desk, I took Corley's Uzi, checked the safety lever, and carefully placed the machine pistol in Corley's right hand. It took all my strength to lift Corley’s limp body up into a standing position to get the angle right, press tightly enough on the grip to override the grip safety, and carefully fire a burst from across the room. The bullets hit directly into Harkins’ upper torso, centered on his heart. With my help, the unconscious Corley also sprayed bullets in a random pattern around the office, consistent with the relative positions of Corley and Harkins. Then, I picked up the other Uzi from my desk, admiring it while not putting a set of my own fingerprints on it, and tucked it back into Harkins' belt. I placed it carefully where it wouldn't interfere with the nice pattern of 9mm bullet holes I had created earlier in Mr. Harkins upper body.
Finally I took the Uzi out of Corley's hand, stood him up again and leaned his limp body against the opposite wall. I removed the gloves from my right hand, pulled out my own Glock, and shot Corley three times. I fired the classic two taps to the chest and one to the head, as I stood in front of him. The trajectory would be consistent for all three shots to have hit him as if both of us were standing. I stood far enough away to ensure there wouldn’t be any gunpowder residue on his clothes or his body, which fell forward from the wall onto the floor.
I removed the second set of latex gloves carefully and handed all four of them to Vincent. "You're not going to be here when the cops come. Your job is to make these gloves disappear so they can't ever reappear in a CSI lab. Get going now; I'll call Hawthorne in five minutes. Take your Glock. They're going to confiscate any guns they find here as evidence. I think you'll have to meet Callahan's flight and bring him to the house. I'm going to be tied up down here for a few hours."
I described Callahan to him, so he'd know whom to meet, and gave him the flight information.
Five minutes later, I called Hawthorne and told him there had been a couple of killings, one by me in self-defense, and the two dead guys were almost certainly the two men who shot at Vincent and me earlier.
“Stay put,” he told me, “there'll be a lot of police in your office very soon.” His prediction was perfectly accurate.
I told my story a dozen or two times to a dozen or two police persons. Hawthorne was very unhappy that I was involved with the death of two DEA officers. He was ready to arrest me, but the preliminary forensic evidence supported my version of the story. The local patrol cars found the black SUV parked on the next block, exactly as we had described it, but with a new set of license plates. Hawthorne bagged and tagged all three guns, my Glock and the two Uzis, and kicked me out of my office. It was now officially a crime scene. Eventually he cut me loose, with dire warnings of the consequences if I was involved in any more gunplay in his precinct. I arrived back home just in time to meet Vincent and Steve Callahan arriving for supper. We agreed not to talk business until everyone was settled at the dinner table.
We all sat down to discuss the case at one of Bruce's better dinners. Over roasted rack of lamb, mint jelly, roasted garlic, garlic toast, quinoa with a great sauce, dessert, and a very nice California Zinfandel, we updated each other about the case.
"You first, Steve, and remember, I haven't had a chance to update Suzanne and Bruce yet."
Callahan finished chewing on a large chunk of lamb. "OK. As I told Roger earlier, we arrested the Schaefers this morning at a dog show in Bakersfield. The local police CSI unit did find forensic evidence tying their RV to the two dog show murder victims. We can at least prove both of the dead judges had been in the RV and the Schaefers owned show leads identical to those used to murder the two judges. That's a good start on proving our case. They'll have a preliminary
hearing in front of a judge tomorrow afternoon in San Francisco. The DA will charge them with first-degree murder and ask they be kept in jail because they are a flight risk. That should get them held over without bail, at least until they get a high priced lawyer to start shopping for judges that might be willing to issue a writ of habeas corpus.
"Meanwhile, back at the DEA, former San Francisco agent-in-charge Nappeli was arrested by federal marshals in Washington, DC. He is currently in jail, charged with aiding and abetting, as well as criminal conspiracy. Rumor has it he’s trying to make a deal in return for his testimony. If that’s true, I’m really disappointed in him----it seems like just yesterday he was 100% in favor of law and order. The FBI put together a task force out of El Paso, to investigate municipal and federal law enforcement agency corruption in West Texas. They've already arrested Sheriff Harkins and Deputy Hawks, who are in jail charged with criminal conspiracy, accessory before and after the fact to several murders, and drug dealing. Neither of them is going anywhere for a long time."
Callahan sipped some wine. "That's pretty much all of what I told Roger and Vincent this morning, except I've updated the story a bit. The rest of this has happened since then. With Vincent's help, we participated this afternoon over the phone in a bit of investigative journalism. The story broke in the local newspaper, detailing all he found out in West Texas, which establishes life-long links between the two murder victims and the Schaefers. That's another nail in the coffin for the defense, when this case comes to trial. It wouldn't surprise me too much if our former DEA agent-in-charge for San Francisco also has roots in West Texas. That's going to be up to the FBI to investigate. It's out of my hands now. How about you guys? Anything new from your end, Roger?"