Total Immunity (29 page)

Karl had everything Tommy needed. They'd probably both be armed and dangerous.

Except there was only one of them.

Jesus, he couldn't believe his luck!

He'd just pulled up past the Hollywood YMCA, was stuck behind a freaking Hummer with about twenty rappers inside of it playing their moronic music at decibel levels previously unknown to mankind, when he saw Karl Steinbach racing out of the side alley behind the Mark Twain Hotel, a revolver in his hand.

Steinbach ran up the street toward a car, opened it, and got in on the driver's side. For a second, Jack thought he was waiting for Tommy to come out as well, but there was no Tommy, and now the car was pulling out, headed up to Hollywood Boulevard.

Jack hit his horn, but the Hummer just stood there blocking the middle of the street.

He started to get out of the car when the driver of the Hummer, a huge black kid, got out first and walked back to Jack.

He looked in the window, a huge, beefy face with spaced-out
Dawn of the Dead
eyes.

He then rapped hard enough on the window to shake the car.

Jack opened it, and the massive rap fan stuck his face in the window.

“You got a beef with me, muthafucker?” the big man said.

“Absolutely not,” Jack said. Then he whacked the man on the end of his nose with his gun butt.

The man howled and fell backward on the street. His nose was bleeding, and his dead eyes watering.

Two other men got out of the car. Their bodies were also huge and beefy, their clothes black, and Jack had the weird feeling that they were all one organism, just chopped into humongous steaks and then clothed with tents.

He flashed his badge and aimed his gun at the Hummer's tires.

“Three seconds,” he announced. “That's how much time you got to get that freaking tank around the corner. Then I start shooting.”

The two Beastie Guys leaped into the Hummer and quickly moved it out of the way.

Jack looked at the fat man, got back into his car, and roared up Schraeder toward Hollywood Boulevard.

He turned right at Hollywood and saw Steinbach roaring down the boulevard, passing cars on the wrong side of the street. When he got to Cahuenga, he made an impossible left turn and headed north.

Jack followed him, almost hitting a guy dressed like Spider- Man who was having his picture taken with two young girls.

The guy screamed at him and gave him the finger.

“Cocksucker!” the kid yelled. “Spider-Man hates you!”

Jack drove off the curb, back onto the street, and hit a yellow light at Cahuenga. He sped through it, his tires screaming as he followed Steinbach up past the Yo Yo Korean Doughnut Shop and Solarz's Red Noodle Heaven.

Steinbach was caught in the on-ramp at the 101 Freeway. The car in front of him was a roach coach called Pepe's Taco World. It had colorful Day of the Dead mannequins all over it, skeletons eating tacos and smiling with huge, dead-men's teeth.

The light said one car per green, and the Taco World driver was taking the light literally.

“Fucking moron Mexican asshole,” Steinbach said. “Move, you asshole!”

The Mexican man stuck his head out the window, and yelled, “Eat shit,
gringo
fuckface!”

Steinbach reached for his gun. To be held back by a chubby Mexican in his death trap made him sick to his stomach. He could only imagine the roaches crawling over the three-day-old goat meat.

He thought briefly about shooting at the Mexican, but that would attract attention. Anyway, now the guy was pulling out into the traffic and giving him the finger again in the rearview.

Fifteen seconds later, Jack pulled up to the same on-ramp stoplight and completely ignored it, jammed the car into second gear, and careered crazily into the northbound 101 traffic.

He could see — anyway, he thought he could see — Steinbach up ahead of him, zigzagging through the afternoon traffic, almost hitting several other cars and causing pandemonium as he switched lanes maniacally.

Jack started after him, but after successfully maneuvering his way between two cars, he found himself stuck behind a school bus filled with raving rich kids from Harvard Westlake. They looked out the window and gave him the finger, while one boy mooned him and looked at him with his tongue out between his legs.

Jack crept along, unable to see around them.

Five miles up the road from the on-ramp is the Bruce T. Hinman Exchange. As Jack watched up ahead, he saw Steinbach bounce off a red Corvette and then bear left at the “Bruce,” which is what police officers called it. That meant he was going for the 170, heading west.

Suddenly he had another idea. The name Bruce T. Hinman had dislodged something in his foggy brain. Hinman had helped him in something a long time ago. He was sure of it. The name had stuck in his memory. Bruce T. Hinman, a Valley motorcycle cop who had been killed chasing a drunken driver. Yeah, Jack remembered it all now. He'd even gone to Hinman's funeral. He knew him for sure . . . but how?

He turned left, got into the outside lane, and nearly ran into the concrete wall which divided the 101.

He saw Steinbach move up, then get cut off as he tried to get over to the left lane.

Jack stomped on the gas and cut over to the middle lane.

Bruce T. Hinman was rolling around in his mind.

Now
he remembered. The Valley bank robberies. He and Hinman had run down one of the robbers.

He remembered it now.

The Adam Moore case. And there was the name he'd thought about at the play again — the little hustler Billy Chase.

He blinked, felt a panic, thought suddenly of Kevin, his son. He imagined someone stepping out of a shadow, shooting Kevin in the head.

“Bullshit,” he told himself. “That's just fear talking.”

And yet he couldn't get it out of his head.

Bruce T. Hinman, the officer who helped run down Chase.

Awww, Jesus, he couldn't believe it.

He saw it all in his head now.

The bank robberies, seven in a row in the Valley alone, and everyone knew it was Moore.

But how to get him? You couldn't get undercover, not with Moore. He used only guys he'd been tight with for fifteen or twenty years.

How to deal with him?

Jack looked out the window and realized that he'd almost lost sight of Steinbach. He had to get his shit together.

He saw Steinbach's car head to the far left, and for the first time, there was an empty stretch of cars between them.

Jack smiled.

Now he'd be able to take him. No trouble.

He gunned his car and, as the speedometer topped 125, he narrowed the distance between them.

He saw the next exit up ahead. Sherman Way.

Steinbach was going to try to take it, but Jack knew that he was moving much too fast. The turn there was a half circle, and steep . . .

Steinbach cursed himself for taking the 170. All the traffic on the 101 was his friend. He could keep a good line of cars between himself and Harper.

But once they went past the interchange . . . the traffic headed out to the West Valley disappeared. Eighty percent of it went to the right, out to the 101.

Yes, he could go faster on the 170, but unfortunately so could Jack.

And now the crazy bastard was gaining on him. God knew what he would do to him once he caught him.

He had to get off the freeway and onto Sherman Way, where the traffic would be heavy enough to get him lost again. Eventually he could take a side street, hide in the approaching dark, and make his escape.

It all depended on making this turn. If he could pull it off , he'd leave Agent Jack Harper far behind.

He hit the brakes and turned the car right, onto the approach road to Sherman Way Boulevard.

Jack watched Steinbach turn Tommy Wilson's Crown Vic right, onto the approach road.

He saw the car hit the turn at what must have been 100 miles per hour.

At first it looked as though he was going to make it. The car went up the ramp smoothly enough.

But then came the turn, a forty-degree angle and an upgrade which it just couldn't make.

Jack throttled down and watched in horror as Steinbach's car launched off the approach road and sailed through the air like a guided missile.

Only it was a guided missile that had turned sideways and that had never quite made it into full liftoff mode.

Instead, the car sailed over the rooftop of a warehouse which bore the words not to public on it, and then disappeared from Jack's view.

But not from his ears.

Jack heard a tremendous crash and saw a flash of light come from the other side of the warehouse.

As Jack made it around the cloverleaf, he could barely believe his own eyes.

There in front of him was an In and Out Burger Restaurant on fire, with people screaming and racing to their cars.

In the window of the In and Out was Karl Steinbach's getaway car, the hood inside the restaurant, nose down, like a fallen rocket ship.

The rest of the car was outside the restaurant, part of the trunk and back wheels resting on the hoods of two other cars parked outside while their owners went in for a burger and fries.

In the background, Jack could already hear the fire alarms and the sirens blasting.

Jack parked a half block away and started running toward the disaster. People were screaming. A woman walked away dazed, blood running down her face. A man crawled over what at first looked like frozen cigarettes to Jack. But upon closer inspection he realized they were piles of uncooked French fries. Jack made his way around the cars, over a field of broken glass, and climbed through the shattered window.

There was Karl Steinbach behind the wheel, his body mashed by an air bag. His left arm flopped out of the window.

Jack started to pull Steinbach out of the wreck, but suddenly the smuggler's eyes opened and he looked at Jack with a terrifying clarity.

He tried to speak, but a gob of blood shot from his mouth, like a melting red ball.

“Jackie, help.”

“Okay,” Jack said, trying to pry open the smashed door. “I gotcha.”

But Steinbach shook his head slowly.

“Dead, Jack. All crushed inside.”

Jack tried to open the door. But somehow Karl gathered his strength and put a finger on Jack's lips.

“Help,” he said again. “Need you to . . .”

His words were interrupted by a terrible hacking cough, and more blood poured from his mouth.

“C'mon Karl. We can still get you help.”

“No, no, you don't unnerstan'. You think . . . but . . . sons . . . and your kid . . .”

He looked as though he wanted to say more but his words were again cut short by a terrible, rasping cough, and then a seizing up of his body, as though it was trying to expel something inside it, but the very act itself would be his last.

He looked at Jack, tears rolling down his face, made a terrible sound from somewhere deep in his chest, and died.

Jack looked at him, at the imploring look in his eyes. Was he trying to tell Jack something? Or was he just in shock, senseless?

Now he would never know.

Jack turned and hurried away.

When he'd made it to the end of the parking lot, Wilson's car exploded, blasting Karl Steinbach and a thousand hamburger patties throughout the purple sky, all the way across Burbank Boulevard.

36

JACK AND OSCAR sat in the warmth of Charlie Breen's Deck- house as the rain came down and the ocean waves crashed on the beach.

Oscar held up his glass of Cuervo Gold.

“Well, personally, though maybe we haven't solved the case yet, here's to the passing of Karl Steinbach, supreme creep and all-around bad guy.”

Behind the bar, Charlie Breen lifted his usual celebratory glass of Newcastle.

“Yeah, fuck that creep . . . Steinbach . . . Here's to the good guys!”

He clinked glasses with Oscar and both of them waited for Jack to join them. But Jack was slow in picking up his own glass of Sierra Nevada.

“Maybe we ought to wait a bit to toast this one,” he said.

Oscar gave him a skeptical look and put his arm around Jack's shoulders.

“I still don't know why Steinbach wanted to get arrested. And when he was dying, he said something about his kids. It was like he was trying to tell me something. And Kevin. He mentioned my son.”

Oscar shook his head in disbelief.

“We'll check on his kids. But maybe he just wanted to say good-bye to them. I mean, even Karl was human enough for that.”

“I guess,” Jack said.

“He was desperate,” Oscar said. “He was dying and he knew it. Didn't he say, ‘I'm all broken up inside'?”

Jack sighed and opened his palms in a gesture of helplessness.

“Yeah, but he mentioned Kevin, too. I don't know . . .”

Behind the bar, Charlie took a swig of his Newcastle. And shook his head.

“Well, it's none of my business, but I tend to believe Oscar here. Look, the guy is dying. In shock. Probably has no idea what he's saying. And as far as Kevin goes, what the fuck can they do to him?”

“Yeah,” Oscar said. “He just wanted to fuck with you one last time. And what better way than to bring up your son? ‘My reach extends beyond the grave!'”

Jack laughed at Oscar's Bela Lugosi impersonation.

“All right. You're both probably right. Still . . . There are a lot of unanswered questions.”

He thought to himself once again of smiling, blond-haired Billy Chase. The case from so long ago . . . but still didn't see how it could add up.

And there was still Agent William Forrester.

Though he still wasn't sure why.

“Okay,” Oscar said. “I can see you're not convinced, so I'm going to give you the Oscar Hidalgo bread-and-butter fucking psychological test, used by all police headshrinkers in the known world.”

Jack looked at Charlie and smiled.