What he couldn’t sniff out was any way around it. The invitation was so obvious he couldn’t bring himself to ignore it.
Anyway, he had survived traps before, and worse. This one was so blatant, he was more than a little curious about who wanted him to walk into it, and why. With luck, he would be able to learn something about what had happened to Bobby, and how his bolthole had been compromised, and maybe even get some payback for both. Even if he learned nothing, the payback could still happen.
He was in his own city, and even though his primary identity—the name he’d carried since birth, and the ever-aging face that went with it—was also compromised, he had resources here. He got his hands on a car—okay, stole was the word, and if he started lying to himself, he might as well hang it up—and some hardware and found out where the Sea Vue Motel was, and he walked into the trap.
The motel was quiet. It was late enough that most of the drug dealers and prostitutes who frequented the place were asleep or passed out or otherwise MIA. The office was dark, the door locked. Any tourists rolling into town at this hour would be unlikely to find themselves at the Sea Vue, and even if they did, the fact that they couldn’t get into the office to rent a room would be a favor they’d probably never fully understand. If they were lucky.
But there was one guy smoking a cigarette in the shade of the second-floor walkway. Martin had parked at the edge of the property, and he watched the guy for a few minutes before leaving the beat-up Ford Bronco he had liberated from the long-term parking lot at LAX. The man was scrawny, dirty, and every time he leaned back against the wall, it looked like he might fall asleep there. Using, for sure, Martin judged. He wore a black long-sleeved Tee shirt and jeans that had blown out at the knees from age and use, not because some designer had convinced people to pay extra for the effect.
Martin pulled his FN SCAR from the bag he’d been carrying and slid from the driver’s seat. He preferred the SCAR-H for this kind of work—the H was for heavy, the rest of it for Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle, and he liked the larger load over the L (for light), but he was on the move all the time, on foot a lot, and even those few ounces made a difference. The close quarters variant was fine for this kind of work, and the weight difference meant he could carry a few more twenty-round magazines.
For the smoker, he figured the weapon’s undoubtedly sinister appearance would do the trick. The guy barely seemed to notice him as he approached. He was sucking every last molecule of nicotine out of his smoke. One final flare, then he tossed the remaining fragment out into the parking lot, where it bounced and scattered sparks before dying. He was digging in his pocket, presumably for a key card, when Martin approached.
“Hey,” he said.
The guy almost jumped, as if he’d had no idea that a vehicle had pulled into the lot and its occupant had sat inside it for five long minutes before climbing out with an assault rifle in his hands. Maybe he had been so deep inside his own drug-fueled thoughts, he’d missed the whole thing. He turned now, though, with a look that resembled panic on his face. The paranoia of the junkie, Martin thought. Everything was cool, until it wasn’t.
“What’s up?” the guy mumbled.
“I’m looking for some men. Probably four of them, staying in one room, or maybe two, next to each other. You seen them?”
The guy thought for a minute. Martin was afraid he’d fallen asleep. Then he started nodding, almost frantically. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I seen ’em.”
“Where are they?”
The guy jerked his thumb toward his left. “In, in, uhh, one-seventeen. No, one-nineteen. Or twenty-one, maybe.”
“Which is it?” Martin made sure the junkie saw the gun. “It’s kind of important to get this right.”
“Nineteen, I think. One-nineteen.”
“All four of them?”
“Yeah, four. Four guys. I thought it was something freaky, you know? Four guys in one room like that.”
“Right,” Martin said. “Freaky.”
“You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” Martin said. “You might want to disappear.”
“Don’t have to tell me twice, Jack. You never saw me.”
“Never saw you.”
The guy faded into the shadows under the stairs, and Martin went to study the scene. Room 119 was in the middle of the row on the ground floor. There was nothing especially notable about it, which made it just like the other rooms. Painted doors, numbers on plastic plates, dark windows with curtains drawn. The window air conditioner of 119 was on, dripping water onto the sidewalk. The slick, mildewed spot showed that it was nothing unusual. The night was hot, and the units for other rooms were blowing, too.
Between those and the incessant trill of crickets, Martin almost didn’t hear the pad of the junkie’s sneaker on the pavement behind him.
But he did. He threw himself down and to the side. The first round tore into the stucco. Martin rolled and came up firing. The junkie—no junkie at all, Martin knew now—had ducked behind a car, and Martin didn’t have time to force him out. Another car had pulled into the lot, and a man who looked like a legitimate tourist stared at him for a moment before trying to throw the vehicle in reverse. Instead, he killed the engine.
There wasn’t going to be any conversation. He’d been right about the trap, but even knowing it was there, he’d stepped in it. Now there was a guy with a gun somewhere behind him, and an innocent civilian in the line of fire. And the distant wail of approaching sirens. More upright citizens in this neighborhood than he’d expected.
He took cover behind a car, at what he hoped was a safe distance from the civilian who’d driven into the middle of trouble, and waited for the door to 119 to open.
He didn’t have to wait long.
8
The parking lot was nearly deserted. Tall lampposts threw circles of light on the ground, and the wagon sat just outside one of those. A scrap of newspaper had blown up against one of the tires. An LAPD cruiser was parked nearby, and two bored officers stood outside it.
“Anyone paying attention to the vehicle?” Callen asked them.
“Not really,” one said. “I doubt anyone gave it a second look until we showed up.”
“Probably right,” Sam said. “Not much to look at.”
It wasn’t. It was a sun-bleached brown color, the paint so oxidized that it looked like it had been driven through salt ponds. Given its intended purpose, as functional transportation for Kelly Martin’s Bostic identity, it made perfect sense. He would have wanted a vehicle that would not call attention to itself, and he’d have wanted something that a Navy SEAL would never be caught dead driving. This car met both of those criteria.
“You guys touch it?” he asked the officers.
“No, sir.”
“Good. We’ll need a complete workup. Fingerprints, DNA, hair and fiber. Everything. And stat.”
“There’s a tow truck on the way. We’ll take it in and check it out.”
“Get a team out here, too. This parking lot’s a crime scene, now.”
The cop who had answered before looked resentful. “Got it,” he said.
“I don’t mean to come off like a jerk,” Sam said. “I appreciate what you guys have done, and are going to do. But this car was involved in the shooting of a cop, and I want to make sure everything’s done by the book. We find who’s been using this car, I want to be able to get a conviction.”
“Is this connected to that bank job?” the other officer asked.
“Yes. So no shortcuts, okay? Make sure we get what we need.”
“You got it, sir.”
Sam wanted to take a look inside the wagon himself, but he didn’t want to risk smearing any existing prints, or leaving any clues that would point the wrong way. Locard’s exchange principle held true for good guys as well as bad—every contact made with another person, place, or thing resulted in the transfer of physical materials. Touching the vehicle would leave traces of Sam Hanna on it—and
in the process, might remove some trace of whoever had last been inside it.
So he would leave that up to the professionals, who could invest more time in it than he could.
“Let’s take a drive, G. See if we can spot any other cameras in the area that might have caught them driving away,” he said.
“Works for me,” Callen agreed.
They were heading back to the Challenger when Sam’s phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen. “Text from Eric. He’s routing a live feed to our phones.”
“Feed of what?” Callen asked.
“Let’s find out.”
At once, both phones were filled with a dark image, primarily illuminated by bright, intermittent flashes. Sam recognized them as muzzle bursts. Both men watched on Sam’s phone as Callen made a call.
A moment later, he said, “This is streaming on Periscope, from the Sea Vue Motel in Culver City. A tactical team’s on the way but they’re not on scene yet.”
The video was poor quality, and shaky. Hanna guessed that someone was shooting it on a mobile phone, from hiding, legitimately worried about being hit by a stray round. “What’s it got to do with us?” he asked.
Before Callen could respond—if he even knew the answer—the screen brightened as a barrage of gunfire came from an open door and a window that had once had glass in it. In the foreground, the apparent target of all that lead threw himself to the ground behind a parked car. The people inside the room burst through the doorway and, still laying down covering fire, scrambled into a dark SUV. It looked like three men, and though the light was bad and the image tiny on his screen, Sam watched closely, trying to identify the model or see a license plate. But the camera angle was wrong. The men were still shooting out the vehicle’s open windows as the SUV raced past.
Then Sam heard a pained grunt, and the image flipped around several times before coming to rest. Only now, it was facing toward the sky.
“He’s hit,” he said. “Whoever was shooting that video.”
Callen listened to his phone. “Tac team’s only a minute out, if that. There’s a bus on the way, too.”
“I hope it gets there in time,” Sam said. Then he added, “Wait, look.”
A shadow fell across the camera, then a hand reached down and picked it up. For a few seconds, a man’s face was visible. Then he dropped the phone again. The last thing that could be seen before the feed went black was the sole of a boot rushing toward it.
“Did you see that?” Sam asked.
“Yeah,” Callen said. “I think that was Kelly Martin.”
* * *
Its name notwithstanding, the ocean couldn’t be seen from the Sea Vue Motel. Not much could, Callen observed, except spent shell casings, broken glass, and blood. By the time he and Sam made it to Culver City, the shooting was long since over. The LAPD tactical team had arrived too late—the men were gone, the guy who looked like Kelly Martin was gone, and the citizen who had captured it on cellphone video was dead. The phone was found beside his corpse, turned off and wiped of fingerprints.
“His name was Morris Eubanks,” the desk clerk who’d checked him in said. He was a wiry, rat-faced guy with three days’ growth on his cheeks and chin, and tattoo sleeves decorating both skinny arms. “He didn’t look like one of our regular type of clientele, so I asked him what he was doing here. He had an Oregon driver’s license—Portland, I think. Said he was in town doing some sales calls, and just needed a place to put his head down for a few hours.”
“What’s the usual clientele?” Callen asked.
“You know, hookers and junkies, mostly. And their customers, I guess. We don’t pretend to be anything we’re not.”
And apparently bank robbers, Callen thought.
“You pretend to have an ocean view,” Sam observed.
“That’s just a name. It don’t mean anything. Anybody who can see the sign can see that it’s crap.”
“Refreshingly honest,” Callen said.
“I got no reason to lie to you.”
“What about the four guys in room one-nineteen?” Sam said. “What was their story?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t on when they came in. I didn’t even know there was four guys in there. There’s only one name down on it.”
“Let’s see,” Callen said.
The clerk dug around behind the counter for a minute, then brought up a sheet of paper on which the guest’s name had been typed and a signature scrawled.
It came as no surprise that the name was Mitchell Bostic.
“That’s all you got?” Sam asked. “Don’t you scan ID? Imprint a credit card?”
“We mostly deal in cash,” the clerk said. “I told you who we cater to. If we did take a card, it’d probably be a stolen one.”
“Do you look at driver’s licenses?”
“If somebody wants to show me one, that’s cool. I’ll look at it. Like that dude from Portland, the dead guy. I looked at his. Had his picture on it, and the name matched what he gave me when he checked in.”
Callen showed the clerk a photograph of Kelly Martin he had on his phone. “Was this guy a guest here?”
The clerk looked at it for a few seconds, then shrugged. “I ain’t seen him. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t. Just I didn’t check him in or nothin’.”
Callen started to ask another question, but the motel phone rang, cutting him off. “Sea Vue,” the clerk said. He listened for a minute or so, then said, “Yeah, okay.”
As he hung up the receiver, he looked at the agents with an expression of weary resignation. “That was the owner,” he said. “He wants to know who’s going to pay for the damage. You guys?”
“Above our pay grade,” Sam said.
“Way above,” Callen added.
9
“That’s definitely Kelly,” Julianne Mercer said. “Where is he?”
“This came from the scene of a firefight at a cheap motel in Culver City,” Kensi said. “A salesman from Oregon was unfortunate enough to be on the scene, and was streaming it on his phone, until he took a bullet in the head. Kelly picked up his phone while it was still streaming. By the time the police arrived, he was gone.”
Mercer’s mouth fell open and rows of lines formed on her forehead. “A firefight? But he’s okay?”
“As far as we know, he wasn’t hit.”
Kensi and Deeks had tracked Mercer down through her agent. She was doing an early-morning shoot for a department store commercial—“Mostly walking in the background,” she said, “in my own clothes. But with one good closeup.” They were shooting in a park in Santa Monica, with the Pacific Ocean as a natural backdrop. A few production trailers were parked nearby, just out of the shot.
“Was he part of the fight?”
“He appeared to be a significant part of it,” Deeks said. “Maybe the most significant part.”
“Who was he fighting?”
“It’s a little hard to tell, but every indication is that it was the bank robbers who were using his car. They had checked into the motel using the Mitchell Bostic name.”
“He hasn’t been in touch with you?” Kensi asked.
“No. I’ve called and called, but I think he’s probably tossed his phone.”
“That would make sense if you wanted to disappear,” Deeks said.
“Do you have any idea how he would have found the crew that hit the bank?” Kensi asked.
“No clue,” Mercer said. “I don’t know about these things. I guess, you know, he’s a SEAL. They know all kinds of tricks, right?”
“They do indeed,” Kensi said, thinking of some of the things she’d learned from Sam. “But I don’t know if they include magical locating abilities. The room was rented for cash, no credit card or ID used. Do you think it’s possible that he really is connected to them in some way? Maybe the fight was a falling out between thieves?”
“No. I told you before, he’s not like that. There’s no way he’d be hooked up with crooks.”
Kensi nodded. �
�I know you said that. I’m just saying, sometimes people can surprise you. How long have you known him?”
“About four years, I guess.”
“But you travel a lot. And he was deployed a few times in that time, right?”
“Yes. But—I don’t know if you believe in soulmates.”
“She totally does,” Deeks said, wearing a smug smile.
“Don’t listen to Deeks. Go on.”
“Well, I do. And Kelly’s mine. We’re as close as two people have ever been. I would know if he was capable of something like that.”
Kensi wasn’t sure they were as close as Mercer thought, given that Martin was back in Los Angeles and hadn’t reached out to let her know. He might have been trying to protect her, worried that if he got in touch, it would somehow blow back on her. But the more likely scenario, if somebody had it in for him, was that they’d be watching her, expecting him to contact her. If he thought that, then keeping away might have been more out of concern for his own safety than for hers.
A production assistant wearing a dark blue Tee shirt, faded jeans, high top Converse sneakers, and a Paramount Pictures ball cap walked to the group with an anxious look on her face. “Sorry, Ms. Mercer,” she said nervously. “Sorry. They’re waiting for you on set. I’m sorry.”
“Look, are we done here?” Mercer asked. “I have to go.”
“Yes,” Kensi said. “I think we’re done. Just… get in touch if you think of anything.”
“I will.”
She started off with the PA, who glanced over her shoulder before she’d taken four steps. “Sorry!” she called back.
“If she wants to direct, she’s gonna have to get a lot more forceful,” Deeks said.
“Maybe she wants to work for a studio head,” Kensi replied. “In which case, all she has to brush up on is her groveling.”
“Ouch. What did a studio head ever do to you, Kensi Marie?”
“Have you seen some of the movies they’ve greenlit? I think some of them are deliberately trying to whittle down America’s collective IQ.”
“That sounds positively criminal,” Deeks said with a grin. “A little out of our jurisdiction, though.”
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