by G. M. Ford
“You complaining?”
She mulled it over. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
“What about?”
“Loss,” she said. A sudden stiffness in her shoulder told Corso she regretted having said it, so he tried to lighten things up.
“What’d you lose?’ he asked. The minute it passed his lips he knew it was the wrong thing to say. And suddenly it was as if her eyes were floating in space. No face, no boundaries, just a pair of angry eyes, intense and damaged beyond repair.
But she wasn’t listening.
Corso tried to move closer, but she wasn’t having it. She cringed as their shoulders met and got to her feet. “It’s been a long day. I’m about ready to avail myself of that fancy room next door.” She clapped a strong hand on his shoulder. “Thanks for dinner,” she said. “We get a chance, I’ll take you to Pink’s for a couple chili dogs…on me.” She made a circle with her thumb and index finger. “Best in L.A.,” she said. “Hands down.”
Corso got to his feet. He watched in silence as she crossed the room and disappeared out into the hall. After a time, he pushed himself back from the room service table, grabbed it by the edges and rolled it along in her wake, hoping to catch her scent as he pushed the table across the carpet to the door, which he held open with his foot as he eased the table out. Leaving the cart in the hall, he triple-locked the door, snapped off the overhead lights and then, in the darkness, mimed his way over to the bed.
When he bent to take off his shoes, his head began to spin. He sat up slowly, waited a moment and then tried again. Same result. For a second, he felt nauseous. He took several deep breaths, then crawled up onto the bed…one shoe on, one shoe off. The darkness began to fold itself around him just as he heard his mother’s voice say something about…
20
B rown suit turned out to be Warren’s FBI equivalent. Special Agent in Charge Jerry Morales of Zone Nine. L.A. County, and environs. Forty minutes after the victim and the money disappeared, Mr. Morales had pretty much lost his sense of humor.
His face was the color of the stoplight on the corner. He wanted to yell into the handheld radio but didn’t want to be heard, so he had the plastic pressed hard against his lips as he sent admonitions and instructions out over the airways in a raspy whisper.
A brigade of cops and federal agents swarmed the area, emptying the entire ground floor of the Union Bank of California building, clearing the Westin’s lobby and parking garages of civilians, as teams of law enforcement officers went through the hotel’s nearly fourteen hundred rooms one by one, shuffling bewildered guests to the safety of waiting Metro buses, where they were whisked to god-knows-where in a cloud of diesel smoke. ATF had called in a pair of bomb disposal units, yet another enormous van and a lowboy trailer upon whose back a thick-walled detonation chamber rested uneasily. LAPD had cordoned off the cross streets a couple of blocks back from the scene, leaving the intersection black and bare of civilians like the deserted streets of an old science-fiction movie.
“I’m hungry,” Chris Andriatta said for the third time.
“You just had breakfast,” said Corso without looking her way.
“I had half a breakfast two hours ago,” she corrected.
“Here comes Warren,” Corso said.
Warren and Special Agent Morales had spent the better part of forty minutes nose to nose, arguing in a professionally bureaucratic manner common to organization men for whom passive-aggressive behavior has become second nature. Morales had repeatedly reiterated his position that the FBI had no intention of standing idly by while banks were being robbed in broad daylight. He believed that the best way to ensure the safety of the citizenry was to bring these miscreants to justice. Warren, on the other hand, had been more humanely oriented, arguing instead in favor of a hands-off policy, citing the safe return of Constance Valparaiso as witness to the sanity of this approach. Morales had been unmoved, insisting that his army of agents would get the job done and thus save the nation from bankruptcy.
Half an hour ago, they began passing a cell phone back and forth. By the time they’d finished, Morales looked smug. For his part, Warren tried to look calm as he made his way over to the car. From the corner of his eye, he caught Corso’s quizzical expression. “He’s got a lot of clout,” Warren said. “Lots of people…people in the know, think he’s gonna be the next director.” He folded his arms tightly across his chest. “Whatever he wants, he gets.”
Warren heaved an exasperated sigh, bumped himself off the car and headed into the hotel. Corso turned his attention to the unfolding evacuation of the hotel. They came out in ones and twos. Dressed and undressed. Dazed and angry and scared.
It took the better part of an hour before Warren reappeared, hurried across the circular drive, took Morales by the elbow and pulled him across the pavement and out onto the sky bridge, where he began to whisper in his ear.
The sound of an electric motor pulled Corso’s attention from the cops in the bushes back out into the porticoed driveway. Corso held his breath and winced as Paul Short’s wheelchair bounced down over the curb, teetering dangerously for a moment before righting itself and rolling over to where Corso and Andriatta stood at the rear of the unmarked Chevy. He swung the chair in a quarter circle, keeping the unmarked side of his face toward Corso and Andriatta. He watched the whispering cops passing the cell phone back and forth for a few moments, then shook his head in disgust.
“They found her,” he announced. “Handcuffed, hand and foot, up on the twenty-fifth floor.” He anticipated the next question. “No bomb. No note. No nothing.” He spread what used to be a pair of hands in resignation.
“Is she…” Andriatta began.
“She’s scared shitless is what she is.”
“Any idea how much they got?”
“It’s not official…but the preliminary figure is about 2.3 mil.”
Andriatta whistled. “Serious money.”
“All in hundred-dollar bills. She says the note was specific about it.”
“Same MO?”
“Mostly. They got her as she left the office last night. Two of them, this time. Ski masks. Stuck a gun in her ear and a needle in her arm. She woke up this morning with a bomb wired around her neck and a radio receiver in her ear. Most everything right out of the Valparaiso incident. Same description of the device. Same complicated instructions. She gets back to the room, finds a black bag on the bed. The voice tells her to put it over her head. She does as she’s told. They stuff a ball gag in her mouth, handcuff her hands and feet simultaneously and leave with the bomb, the radio and the money. No muss, no fuss, no bother.”
“Any word on the Malibu robbery?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
“This is quite a little growth industry these guys have got going on here,” Andriatta said. “Working on three million in three days. Nice work if you can get it.”
“These guys know what they’re doing,” Short said. “It may be quite a while before they make a mistake.”
“Then the Bureau may be right,” Corso said. “Maybe its time to ‘just say no.’ Let them blow up a few innocent folk without getting any money and hope that puts an end to it.”
“Depends on what you think is more valuable…people or money.”
“There’s no sanctity of life,” Andriatta said. “Never was, never will be.”
Short barked a short, dry laugh. “Aren’t we just ‘cynics anonymous,’” he said with a sardonic smile. “Nary a romantic in the house.”
“Realists, not cynics,” Andriatta corrected.
“Same people who oppose abortion favor the death penalty,” Corso said.
“I was in Rwanda,” Andriatta offered. “The Hutus cut the hands off Tutsi men and the breasts off the women. They left them lying in the dirt, bleeding to death over nothing more important than tribal affiliation.” She threw an angry hand into the air. “Something like eight hundred thousand people slaughtered while the rest of the so-called civilized world
turned its back.” She slapped her side and shook her head. “Don’t talk to me about the sanctity of life.”
“Dying there in the dirt might have been better,” Short said.
“Better than what?” Corso asked.
Short opened his mouth to speak but changed his mind. Instead, he twirled the joystick, sending the chair in a tight arc until the mangled side of his face was visible.
“Better than some of the alternatives,” he said.
Corso folded his arms across his chest. “Nietzsche said the only thing the dead know for sure is that it was better being alive.”
“Nietzsche was wrong,” Short said. “There are worse things than being dead.” He fixed Corso and Andriatta with his single blue eye. “Trust me,” he said.
“You seem to be doing okay,” Corso commented.
“For a freak.”
For a while, the great outdoors seemed to be devoid of oxygen. Andriatta finally broke the spell. “There’s a lot of people worse off than you are.”
The working half of Short’s upper lip curled into a sneer. “So I should be grateful,” he said. He nodded a couple of times. “That’s what they tell you over and over in the hospital. How lucky you are to be alive. How grateful you should be.”
“What happened?” Corso asked. “I mean, how did you lose your…”
Short cut him off. “First Bush war. Kuwait. I ran an ordnance-removal company. Coupla weeks after the war ended, we were checking the royal palace at Rabat for booby traps.” He ran his glistening eye over them again. “I found one.”
The moment was rescued when Morales and Warren started their way. Morales directed his attention to Corso and Andriatta. “Soon as I get a couple of debriefing specialists free, I want you two to sit down and tell us everything you can remember about what happened back East.” He looked from one to the other. “There’s got to be something. I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“We don’t disagree…” Corso said, “…but we’ll be damned if we can figure out what it is.”
“Something you don’t even know you know,” Warren said. “Something obscure and seemingly meaningless.”
Warren must have had his cell phone on vibrate. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a phone. Flipped it open and held it tightly against the side of his head.
“Warren,” he said. He listened and then closed the phone.
“We’ve got a silent alarm from a U.S. Bank on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Dayton Way.”
21
“M ale. Thirty-five or so. Wearing a bulky red sweater and blue jeans. She says he looks like an Arab of some sort.” The cop looked around, saw the faces of confusion on Warren, Corso and Andriatta. “We got a teller on the other end of the line. She was in the break room when it started. She’s peeping out through the door.”
They were crowded together in the front window of the El Torito Grille, diagonally across Dayton Way from the Wilshire Boulevard branch of the U.S. Bank. According to the officers on the scene, the suspect had been inside for nearly eleven minutes, nearly all of which had been chronicled by a teller, whose call to 911 had been transferred to the scene by LAPD Emergency Services.
El Torito’s crew of chefs and waiters had been rounded up and banished to the bar. Morales was seated at a table in the rear corner of the dining room working his cell phone like a telemarketer. Warren and Corso had shouldered their way up to the window. Warren had shoved the café curtains aside and now had his nose pressed to the glass like a waif at a bakery window. Chris Andriatta was standing on a chair looking out over their heads.
The restaurant was two blocks east of Rodeo Drive. No more than five minutes from the scene at Fifth and Figueroa. On one side of the bank, Louis Vuitton offered a colorful line of upscale luggage and women’s accessories; on the other side, Barneys of New York sought to set the style, then a Burberry and a café and Saks Fifth Avenue and a bistro and Niketown. You name it and it was here at the very epicenter of West Coast retail grazing. You had some money burning a hole in your pocket, this was just the neighborhood to help you put out the fire.
The streets teemed with tricked-out shoppers, the beautiful people seeing and being seen, focused inward, oblivious to the drama unfolding inside the bank, as the ripples of well-heeled humanity flowed this way and that, eddying here and there to gaze at the wares in the windows before moving on to deeper water, to one of those little salons and boutiques dotting the streets at regular intervals, places that played odd electronic music, places with trendy French names like Mal Maison, where a haircut or a sweatshirt would likely cost you five hundred bucks. Probably the last place in this part of the country where any politically savvy cop wanted a bomb going off.
“He’s on his way out,” the officer announced.
Morales left the table and hustled up to the front of the room just in time to see the victim shrug himself into the red backpack, negotiate the two steps down to sidewalk level, turn right and melt into the unsuspecting crowd on the sidewalk. Morales whispered into the phone.
“Moving west on Wilshire.”
Soon as he was out of sight, Morales hurried over to the front door and let himself out. As he jogged across the street, Corso looked over at Warren, who shrugged. “The protocol is that the Bureau takes the lead.” He looked away in embarrassment. “LAPD provides backup as necessary.”
“What do you guys do?” Corso asked.
Warren ran a hand through his hair. “We wait.”
Andriatta climbed down from the chair. She hooked a thumb at the bar. “I’m going to see if I can’t rustle up something to eat,” she said.
Corso grinned and shook his head. She dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “Sheeesh…it’s a restaurant, isn’t it?” She peeled off from the crowd at the window and picked her way through the closely arranged tables toward the buzz of conversation coming from the lounge area.
“Any idea what’s going on in Malibu?” Corso asked as they stared out into the street. “It’s over,” Warren said. “Vic was an older guy named Louis Erbach. Lives in the Colony. They took him out of his home about two hours before the robbery. Wired him up and sent him on his way. He walked out of the bank with $450,000…give or take.” He paused to swallow. “A guy named Prichert, calls himself a professional astrologer, found Erbach lying in the middle of a dirt road way up in Topanga State Park. The techs think he had a heart attack. Took him back to Santa Monica to the hospital. Bureau’s got a team on hand, in case he wakes up.”
They stood and watched the passing parade in silence. A sign reading CLOSED appeared in the bank window. A swirling breeze rippled the café umbrellas along the sidewalk.
“Much as I hate to belabor the obvious…” Corso started, “…whoever’s doing this…there’s sure as hell more than one of them.”
“That’s a whole new paradigm.”
“Hey,” a voice called. Corso and Warren turned toward the sound. Andriatta was holding something on rye in both hands. She tilted her head toward the doorway behind her. “I think you boys better come in here,” she said.
They slalomed their way through the tables over to where she stood. She held up the sandwich. “Want a bite?” she asked Corso. “Pastrami and provolone.”
Corso smiled and shook his head.
“The newshounds are on it,” she said. Again she motioned with her head. She led them into the cool darkness of the bar. Half a dozen waiters and half as many cooks lounged around the bar area. Above the bar a new flat-screen plasma TV was tuned to the news. Aerial shot. No narration at the moment, only the whop, whop, whop of the chopper’s rotor blades slapping the dirty air just above the rooftops.
The center of the screen was filled with a white Toyota Tundra. Over in the right lane, driving like an old lady. As the camera zoomed out to a wide-angle shot of downtown Beverly Hills, the truck put on its blinker and turned right onto Santa Monica Boulevard, heading west toward the San Diego Freeway and the ocean.
“This i
s Barry Logan in the Action News chopper high above an unfolding bank robbery in Beverly Hills.”
“It was inevitable,” Warren said.
“…the same type of robbery we’ve reported for the past three days. The victim enters the bank…”
Two blocks down Santa Monica, a nondescript van pulled into the line of traffic behind the Toyota. Warren pointed. “The Bureau,” he said.
“They don’t get rid of that news jockey, the guy in the Toyota’s gonna be in a world of hurt,” Corso said.
As if on cue, another helicopter swooped into the picture. “Whoa, baby…” the newsman said. “Looks like we’ve attracted some official attention.” The passenger in the second copter could clearly be seen motioning for the news chopper to leave the area…to go down. The bright yellow FBI letters were visible on the sleeve of his dark blue jacket.
The newshound, however, was having none of it. “This is unrestricted airspace,” he shouted above the slap of the rotors. “We’ve got every bit as much right to be here as you do,” he shouted, as if the cops in the other chopper could somehow hear him. The station’s logo flashed on the screen. “This is Barry Logan, Action News Four. Once again safeguarding the public’s right to know.”
The news copter peeled off to the west, moving lower and slower, hovering just to the rear of the fleeing pickup truck. The camera jiggled slightly as it refocused on the white Toyota, which had stopped at a traffic light at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Manning Avenue. The Toyota was in the center lane, third in line behind a flatbed truck carrying lumber and a bright blue PT Cruiser.
“I don’t believe this,” Warren said.
And then it happened. A bright yellow flash and, in an instant, the busy intersection disappeared. The News Four helicopter shook so violently it seemed about to join the pile of smoking rubble on the ground. By the time the camera was repositioned and steady, most of the torrent of flaming metal and broken glass had found its way back to earth; the smoke had cleared, leaving the carnage on the street visible to the camera’s unblinking eye. Both the cab and the bed of the Toyota pickup had been vaporized. Nothing but a twisted frame and four blown-out tires remained. From the sky, the remains looked more like the unearthed skeleton of some ancient beast than anything vaguely mechanical. The adjacent vehicles and their occupants had been left in various stages of destruction. Those nearest the victim’s vehicle, even from a distance, revealed little hope of survival. Those farther removed from ground zero were without windows and pocked by falling debris but seemed otherwise intact. As the camera rolled, the bleeding and the uninjured poured out of their cars and trucks and SUVs, stepping around and over twisted, smoking chunks of debris as they made their way forward, hoping to help those less fortunate than themselves. “See dat?” Somebody asked from the back of the bar. “Look at dem people comin’ out to help. We got spirit here, man.” A couple of other somebodies agreed.