The Mammoth Book of Hard Bastards (Mammoth Books)

by Robin Barratt

  Two men were there, one in the driver’s seat of the Honda and the other standing beside it. Will figured the men had seen the lights on in the Paradise Bakery and had assumed it was open. They were probably figuring out what to do next once they realized there was only a service truck parked at the otherwise locked front doors. William had retrieved his cigarettes from the cabin of his truck: now he walked around to the back to start pouring chemicals. The man at the driver’s wheel in the Honda was quiet. The car’s passenger was talking on a cell phone, carried in his left hand, and walking about.

  The man with the phone crossed the short distance between the two vehicles and approached Will.

  “I thought he was going to ask me for cigarettes or directions. He was within two feet of me. He just stared at me for about ten minutes and nothing was said and he kinda walked away so I just went back to doing my thing,” Coss recalls. He measured, he poured. Just when he was screwing the lid back on a bottle of chemicals, he heard it.

  Gunfire.

  “Oooooh, yes,” Coss draws in a long breath when asked if he recognized the sound for what it was, not fireworks or a car muffler. “I was only twelve to fifteen feet away. I knew somebody else was in the car so I knew exactly what had happened: somebody got shot.”

  Who was it?

  “I sidestepped my vehicle and I looked over the top and I saw him with the gun walking away from the car … and I saw the person who was still in the car, too.”

  The one with the gun was the one who had been staring Will down, eye to eye, just moments before. He still had the cell phone in his left hand, but Will immediately spotted the silver barrel, gleaming in the moonlight, in his right.

  The former paratrooper in that moment knew two things: he had heard no arguments between the two men so this had to be both a cold-blooded and a reckless act; and the man with the gun knew full well that he, Will, was just a few feet away.

  Adding these two facts together, Will knew he would be next.

  It was now past 11.30 at night. Other than himself, the man at the wheel and the one with the gun in his hand, the terrain was desolate.

  The 82nd Airborne training came back to Will. It had taught him, he says, to be calm in “live-fire” situations.

  “Not having a weapon to protect myself and definitely wishing I had one I thought, okay, what do you do next? Protect yourself: it’s part of your training. Get away.

  “I was airborne so I was always jumping out of airplanes and you gotta have quick reactions and think on your feet or you’re dead.”

  Will had few options. To the west was wide-open parking lot, acres of it. Although the expansive shopping centre was carefully landscaped, befitting its Scottsdale address, it was still a desert locale. The plants were austere. There were a few spidery mesquite trees, narrow branches dusted with feathery green that was more air than substance; otherwise, there were purple sage bushes, meticulously groomed into cylinders, low to the ground, with fingernail-size silver leaves dotted with small pink purple blossoms. The development was also quite new – the few plants were still immature and small. There was very little to break up the panorama of the parking lot. He would be a clear shot at any angle.

  The Paradise Bakery formed the northern tip of the little strip mall. The interior side road separated it from the Pearle Vision Center strip mall, forming a right angle or broken “L”. But that little side road was wide for a pedestrian – Cass would not only be a clear shot through there but he’d be trapped by the “L”.

  To the south, just a couple of car lengths away, was the man with gun.

  William thought quickly and came up with an immediate target destination. Around the back of the Paradise Bakery was a little bit of forgotten space between the strip mall and the 101 freeway frontage. He could hide there for a moment. He ran around the northern corner of the Paradise Bakery and headed east. He ducked past an electrical transformer and scooted behind the back wall of the building.

  But he could not stay there long. If the man with the gun followed the same path – a space traversed in one or two seconds … he’d be cornered worse than ever as the strip mall building widened out and closed the territory to the freeway.

  He needed to increase the distance between himself and that silver gun.

  As he was running to the hiding place, William had used the electronic devices in his hands. With one hand, he pushed the button to remotely lock the doors on his truck. With the other, he flipped open his cell phone: but he did not dial because he was too close to his pursuer. Will wanted to use the darkness to his advantage. A lit cell phone would reveal his position.

  Will organized his thoughts before he placed the call. He had to leave the shelter of the Paradise Bakery and cross the open space across the broken “L” to the next strip of buildings. “I slipped around back through the buildings then I came back around front so I could observe what he was doing. I did not want to end up in the same spot as him because I wasn’t watching him. But I also did not want him to see my cell phone all lit up.”

  Will made it across the side road that opened on to the 101. The people in the cars that whooshed past in the darkness at 65 or 70 mph had no idea that just outside their rolled up windows a man was running for his life. The footing underneath Coss changed from black asphalt to grey concrete sidewalk and then to the crunchy loose rock of the landscaping as he made his way around the far side of the “L”.

  Behind the Pearle Vision Center, Will finally felt it was dark enough and sheltered enough to risk the phone call. He pushed the buttons. The cell phone connected to a 911 dispatcher at 11.40 p.m.

  “Yeah, there’s just a shooting over here, Raintree and Pima at the Paradise Bakery,” Will says calmly, “The dude’s still walking around in the parking lot with a gun.”

  The dispatcher looks at her screen and determines the exact address. While she does so, Will is describing the man with the gun – he’s “short”, wearing a black shirt, maybe around 185 pounds and is possibly Hispanic. He’s also told her about the vehicle where the shot had taken place – a silver Honda.

  “Okay, is it right in front of Paradise Bakery?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” he says, “right next to my Eco truck.”

  “Okay, now I’ve got …” she begins to say.

  But she is cut off by the sound of a loud boom.

  “Uh, there’s another shot right there … two shots,” Will breaks in. “Get somebody here quick, please.”

  Will is on the move. He is slipping in the shadows between buildings. He has watched the second shot. The unknown man has calmly returned to the car and pointed inside. Will has watched him do it. Will has seen the flash in the darkness.

  “Okay, they’re coming to you. Talking to me is not slowing my officers down,” the dispatcher says. She wants to ask more questions and Will keeps feeding her information but no one is arriving yet. He is staying to the shadows, shielding the light of the phone and trying to keep an eye on his unpredictable enemy. Will has more than enough time to describe the silver car and the clothing worn and the size and complexion of the man shooting. But the dispatcher wants more description of the man. “You said he was short?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” Will responds but quickly moves on to the most compelling item to describe: “He has a revolver with a nine-inch barrel. It sounds like it’s probably a .380 or a little bigger.”

  Now she wants a description of Will’s own vehicle. His tension at last surfaces as he struggles for the make and model of the truck he drives every day “It’s a white silver … uh, uh, what do you call it? Shit, ‘Colorado’ and it says ‘Eco’ on the side. It has that, uh, cover on the back …”

  She starts to cut him off. She has bad news, “The officers …”

  “It’s backed up to the Paradise Bakery,” Will finishes.

  “… are saying,” she delivers the stroke of disaster, “they don’t see a vehicle. Are we sure this is the correct address?”

  The fact is offi
cers are now at a Paradise Bakery. They’ve got no silver Honda, no man with a gun, no bleeding victim.

  The success of Paradise Bakery, building ten new stores in the area in the last six months, is on the verge of costing the young single father his life.

  Officers are at the Paradise Bakery on Doubletree not Raintree. The Doubletree store is on Scottsdale Road, not the freeway. The two locations are six congested, urban miles apart.

  “I don’t know if you heard that or not,” Will says, as he hears the devastating news.

  “I heard it,” says the operator.

  A third shot.

  “And the pop sounded like it was right there. It’s pretty close,” he tells her.

  Will has kept on the move, ducking into dumpster shelters and behind walls to keep the lit phone from giving away his position as much as possible, but also trying to keep the man in view, “If not, then there’s somebody else in this parking lot. But I saw that dude with the freaking silver revolver.”

  The third shot occurs at four minutes and four seconds into Will’s 911 call. He has stood face to face with a murderer. He has seen a man be killed. He is in a cat-and-mouse game for his life. He has watched two more shots be discharged.

  And now officers have gone to the wrong address.

  Without panicking, he switches from street names, which have failed him, and gives her detailed directions to “turn first right”, “after heading west” and so forth. Will looks around the far-reaching shopping centre and begins to name off any building other than Paradise Bakery. There’s New York Pizza Department, he tells her, there’s a Teri’s Consignment Furnishings … “I’m trying to see what else is in the parking lot … Sport Chalet …”

  “Okay, yeah I know where you’re at now. That, that address I read to you, that was the wrong one so …”

  “I’m sorry,” Will apologizes.

  “All the officers are on the way so just stay safe and just stay on the line with me.

  Will wants to stay safe, too, but it’s getting more difficult.

  “Now the dude’s running.”

  “Okay, uh, do you see the officer?”

  Will sees no officers. “Um, no, which way did he come in?”

  “What direction?”

  But he sees the man with the gun.

  “He’s running. He ran towards my truck, he’s gone behind Paradise Bakery or he’s in my truck. I don’t know. He ran towards the freeway like right between Paradise Bakery and the Pearle Vision between the freeway.”

  Will is describing the small side street of the broken “L”, the same space he himself had to cross. The Pearle Vision Center is in the lateral strip mall, across from where Paradise Bakery caps the north/south strip mall.

  “Okay.”

  “He’s on foot and I’ll tell you if I see him running to the left. I still don’t see an officer – no, he’s walking back to the car.”

  Will keeps scanning in the darkness, balancing his position between monitoring his pursuer, keeping hidden and scanning for the arrival of any help at all.

  At last, “Okay, the officer is … here.”

  Scottsdale PD Patrolman Alex Dyer has arrived in a patrol car from the north. He’s been told shots are fired. He sees the Eco Pest Control truck. But with the confusion from the other bakery location, Dyer is not sure what he’ll find here and at first does not see any men on foot, not one with a cell phone and not one with a gun.

  From the shadows, Will begins to issue play by play directions:

  “I’m standing right here on the left. Tell him to go straight … go straight, keep driving, keep driving, keep driving … Now tell him to take a left. Tell him to take his left and the dude’s right there.”

  “So he’s back at the vehicle?”

  “Yeah, oh, he’s walking towards us right now.”

  “The, uh, suspect?”

  “Yes, that’s right. He’s walking in front of a moving van.”

  The goods-moving van, parked for the night, is in front of the Pearle Vision Center. Will is hiding in dumpsters behind Pearle.

  Officer Dyer has entered the giant shopping centre from the north. His plan was to take a defensive position and then wait for back up. But Dyer now sees a man matching the suspect’s description emerge from a dumpster enclosure near Pearle. The suspect is heading north. The officer doesn’t know it, but at this location so far from the Honda the suspect can be doing only one thing: looking for Will.

  “I immediately drew my weapon and began issuing commands,” Dyer wrote in his report.

  Will sees the man’s hands go up. The dispatcher wants to know if he sees the officers with him. Will corrects her … he only sees one officer. He himself is still in hiding.

  “He told him to get on the ground, he’s laying down,” Will narrates for her, “Well, he’s half up, half down.”

  The dispatcher begins to ask Will his name and phone number, she thinks he is safe now. But Will knows better. He has kept to the shadows even though a police cruiser is on the scene. He has seen his pursuer put his hands up in the air. He has seen the officer order him to the ground. But knowing what was waiting in the silver Honda at the kerb, Will knows what this assassin is capable of. He thinks neither he nor the officer on the scene are safe.

  Will is right.

  “He’s running now. The guy just ran.”

  Astonished, the dispatcher again enlists Will’s secret direction: “Okay, what direction is he going?”

  He tells her he’s running east, he’s running towards the freeway.

  Officer Dyer records that he fell in hot pursuit: “I chased him on foot for approximately fifty to seventy-five feet while keeping him at gunpoint.” Officer Dyer can’t talk to dispatch. He’s all alone on scene.

  Except for his secret ally, still in the shadows.

  Because Will is giving real-time information on the suspect’s actions, dispatch is able to relay the information to other squad cars. One comes screeching in from the south and pulls into the west end of the side street between Pearl and Paradise. Another comes screeching in from the 101 frontage road on the east. The squad car from the 101 had been monitoring the radio dispatches for the last seven minutes but had not deployed because it was too far from the Doubletree bakery. It had been on routine patrol near the Raintree location the whole time. The other squad car has already been to the first bakery, in vain. But they are here now, lights flashing, wheels squealing. Both patrolmen jump from their cars with weapons drawn.

  Now the suspect is trapped.

  He goes back down to the asphalt but he’s fighting and screaming. One of the officers turns on a tape recorder to capture the ravings: “I fuckin’ merked him, I’m gonna fucking kill all of you, I smoked him, fool, you guys are all gonna die.” It takes four patrolmen to control the suspect. Officer Dyer even sustains injuries and the suspect will be charged with assaulting an officer. The officers ask him what “merked” means. The suspect explains it means to shoot people. He continues to thrash and struggle and yell threats. When the paddy wagon comes, the suspect is still so combative, even though he is already handcuffed, he is strapped into a restraining seat.

  Will later described the situation, “I was off in a corner in the dark watching him, observing him so I could run if I had to run. I knew she sent them to the wrong place when she said ‘they’re on site’ and I said ‘no, they’re not’ cuz I pretty much could see both directions down the parking lot.

  “It was a big relief when they came,” Will says with a soft giggle. “Finally there was enough cop cars there I knew they would they get him so I could come out into the open.”

  With the suspect finally in custody, the next officers to arrive surrounded the Honda. With weapons drawn, they called upon the man at the wheel to show his hands. He did not respond. They cautiously crept nearer. When they got close enough to see, they dropped their weapons. With one foot drooping out the door, the man’s upper body stretched toward the passenger side, his head facing
toward the open door. Behind that passenger door, on the south side of the Honda, was where the suspect had been standing when William heard the first shot. The man at the wheel, lifeless foot dangling out the door, had been shot from behind.

  The man’s brains and skull pieces were blasted all over the interior of the cabin.

  As officers looked inside, a cell phone began to ring.

  Rami Merza had placed a calm and innocent call asking for directions at 11.30 p.m. At 11.40, Will’s phone had connected to 911. The person calling now, as officers gazed upon his spattered remains, had no way of knowing yet that big grinning Rami would never pick up.

  Homicide Detective Hugh Lockerby arrived on the scene and took over the case. “William Coss’s cool demeanour played a huge role in this case,” he says. “He stayed on the move in case he needed to escape more, he made his way around buildings, always keeping an eye on the suspect. He must have had an elevated heart rate, a fear for his life, probably scared shitless, any person would be, hearing a gunshot and being that close yet he was still calm enough and cognizant enough to get on the phone, keep himself alive and actually direct officers to the scene and even during that time observed the suspect going back and shooting the victim again. It was huge. It was massive.”

  When Ramsen Dadesho was finally taken into custody – nine minutes into Will’s call – the weapon Coss had described was no longer on his person. William continued to help.

  “He walked back by the silver car,” he had told the dispatcher during the confusion. “He didn’t get to the car but he walked back toward the parking lot … a little north of that behind the car. But I don’t know if he walked and hid the gun and then came back out or not but that’s about right when all the cruisers showed up.”