Tropical Depression (4 page)

I could see where that might not make sense to someone like Jennifer. She was a resolutely Good Person. She was tough, strong, but she hadn’t seen what I had and so she still believed in the basic goodness of human beings.

I never tried to disillusion her. That sweet inner core of hers was my anchor to the fake Real World that most people live in. I came home from work in my world and gladly stepped into the loving order of hers. I could leave it all at work: the whores ripped up by their pimp’s knives because they blew their money on crack, the shit-bums who drowned because they were so wracked by wine and TB they couldn’t even roll up onto the sidewalk when it rained, the day-old babies fished out of dumpsters in several pieces—all the grisly, nightmare pieces of reality that swept me along every time I went on duty. I could walk away from it and into sanity in a way that most cops can’t, and it was only because of Jennifer. She kept that bright, wonderful, silly version of How Things Are alive and well, and I let her, grateful that it could include me, somebody who knew better.

I could see now that was a mistake.

I lived in both worlds, understood both sides. She never did, never could understand what it meant to be a cop. She thought of it as a career, the kind of thing you could change if it wasn’t working out. Everything I tried to tell her about how it really was just made her all the more convinced that it wasn’t working out, that the sooner she got me out of it and into something sane, like selling real estate, the better for all of us.

And so now Jennifer’s Real World was getting ugly, too, and I had no place to hide from it except in my work, and of course that just made it all worse on both ends, until the whirlpool got so overpowering I didn’t know where I was anymore.

Days like this one weren’t helping much. After two and a half hours of paperwork I had a court appearance. In court I learned that I was just this side of Adolf Hitler and only twelve years of demented Republican power-brokering and the consequent dismantling of the Bill of Rights kept me from a long-overdue prison sentence for my crimes. That took me through to lunch time.

I started back to the station thinking I’d had a rough morning. I wasn’t even halfway to my car before it got a lot worse.

I had just turned the corner on the top floor of the parking garage when my beeper started yipping at me. It was a long way down to the telephones, and almost as long to the far end of the garage where my car was parked. I sprinted for my car.

My head was pounding from the smog by the time I got the door opened. I slid onto the front seat, snatched up the radio, and called in.

Maybe you’ve never heard police radio traffic. There’s a very rigid structure to it. There’s an order, a rhythm, and a way things are done.

Let’s put it this way: If there had been a nuclear attack on Universal Studios I would expect Central to tell me in a calm, unemotional voice using the correct call codes. If Long Beach Harbor were under attack by Japanese war planes, Central would tell me where to go and what to do in a flat tone, with clear dispatch numbers.

So when the dispatcher stuttered at me and couldn’t seem to think of the right thing to say, that set off all the little alarms. I got a Code Three 10–19, which didn’t make too much sense: Emergency, return to station. When I asked for a repeat, I got a 10–23, stand by, and a hiss of dead air.

A long moment later my radio crackled again and gave me a 911–B for a 10–35, followed by an address on Boyd Street: Contact the officer there for a confidential message.

I didn’t get it at all. “Central, is this Code Three?” I asked.

Nothing. Then, “Lincoln Tango Two-oh, Ten–Twenty-three,” again.

More nothing. I was already rolling. Boyd Street was five minutes away. As I turned onto Los Angeles Street I tried again. “Central—”

I was cut off by the dispatcher. “Lincoln Tango Two-oh, that is a Code Three. We have a Two-oh-seven in progress.”

I hit the siren and stepped on the gas. Two-oh-seven is kidnapping, and like all cops, I hated it like poison. I didn’t know why they wanted me for it, but they’d have a reason.

And they did. They did have a reason. Oh boy, did they have a reason. One of the all-time great reasons.

Boyd Street is in a depressed downtown area. It’s full of flophouses, sweatshops, and Korean toy warehouses. The address I had took me to a flop near Sixth Street, only a few blocks from the Greyhound station on Fifth Street, known as the Nickel, the center of downtown L.A.’s Skid Row. It’s the kind of area that’s so scummy you want to burn your shoes after you step on the sidewalk.

There was quite a party going by the time I got there. There were two paramedic trucks standing by, six patrol cars, another four unmarkeds, a fire truck, and the big truck I knew belonged to the bomb squad. It was all I could do to find a parking place. I finally pulled onto the sidewalk two doors down, in front of a rolling steel door. As I got out, a Korean man stuck his head out the door I was blocking, looked at me, and spat carefully about four and a half inches from the toe of my left shoe.

On the rooftops all around, through a poisonous yellow L.A. haze, I could see that the SWAT team was already deployed. They lay or kneeled motionless in their positions, already sited in and hoping for a quick shot.

The SWAT guys always want to shoot fast. Not because they think they’re so good, although most of them do. Not because they want any glory or excitement or because they are ravening beasts consumed by bloodlust. They want to shoot to get the job done and go home. They want to sit in their easy chairs with a can of beer and watch game shows. The dullest, most unimaginative guys in the world are the hired killers. Maybe they have to be.

Below the SWAT team on the sidewalk, on both sides of the street, a line of blue uniforms straggled across the street in an arc in front of the place, behind their cars or whatever other impromptu cover they could find. They all had weapons out, too, but very few of them were as nerveless about it as the SWAT team. So far I didn’t see any press.

The place everybody was paying attention to was one of the old flops that are all around the area. For twenty bucks you got a week in a room with no door and a mattress so flimsy you could feel the fleas moving inside it. You generally find a family of eight or ten in each room, working in the sweatshops and saving up for a green card. This place was called the Rossmore, according to the faded spidery red letters above the door.

My precinct commanding officer was already striding toward me. His name was Captain Spaulding, and nobody kidded him about it. He had a flat nose and a big mustache. He was a hard guy, even for a downtown cop. About fifty years old, he’d run the PAL boxing program for fifteen years and would still go three rounds with anybody stupid enough to offer. In his younger days some wise guys had coshed him and thrown him in the trunk of a Cadillac. Captain Spaulding punched his way out of the trunk, bending the sheet metal into a piece of abstract art, and killed two of the wise guys with blows from his bare hands. The other one ran for his life.

“Billy,” he said, and that was a bad sign. Like a high-school football coach, Captain Spaulding never used first names. I could see beads of sweat rolling into his thick black mustache. The day was hot and smelled like hell was leaking up through the pavement.

“Captain?” I was starting to feel a cold trickle of sweat myself. Since this morning, when I got the working-over in court, reality had been about fifteen degrees off. Now, seeing the captain’s face, it turned a little further, and even though I had no idea what he was about to tell me, I knew now it wouldn’t be on my wish list for Christmas.

“Billy,” he repeated, and put a hand on my shoulder. I could feel his stone-hard fingers through my jacket. He jerked his head at the Rossmore. “Your wife and kid are in there.”

Just like that. That was the captain’s style.

I blinked. I didn’t know if I was going to throw up or laugh. What he had said was so wildly improbable I couldn’t take it at face value. There had to be something else, some strange metaphor he was trying to make.

“Excuse me, sir?”

He nodded and looked even grimmer, never breaking eye contact with me. “They came down to the station to see you. You were in court and they left.” He ground his teeth. “We’re not real sure of what happened. We think the perps were hanging around outside the station. Maybe they figured they’d grab a cop. Maybe figured your wife and kid would work better.”

I found myself shaking my head, as if I could keep it from being true. “What do they want?”

“They want a trade. Your wife and daughter for a buddy of theirs.”

I heard myself breathing. I was panting, on the verge of fainting from hyperventilation. Everything was flip-flopping between horrible slow motion and fast-forward. I felt like Wile E. Coyote. I opened my mouth; Captain Spaulding was already shaking his head.

“We can’t do it, Billy. The guy they want is gone. We had to let him go about two hours ago. Two feds showed up with extradition papers and we had to ship him back east on a homicide charge.”

The last sentence dropped several octaves down as things slowed down again. I’d heard people describe the LSD experience, and that’s what this felt like. Spaulding’s words were terrible slow globs and his face looked like a Cubist painting. I couldn’t remember how to breathe.

Captain Spaulding slapped my face. It hurt a lot. Normal time returned.

“You okay, Billy?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I’m not okay at all.” I concentrated on getting some air in and felt it steady me. I turned to look at the flop. “I’m going in there.”

His fingers gripped me tight enough to break the skin. “No you’re not, son. Listen to me. Lesley Bishop is already on the line with these guys. She says she’s getting somewhere and I’m going to let her run with it for now. Lieutenant Mendez has his SWAT guys all lined up and you know they’re good. We can do this, Billy, you know that. We can take care of this with our own people and do it right. We take care of our own.”

It was true. Lesley Bishop was our negotiator and she really believed she could sell shit to a dog. The SWAT guys were top-notch too—the whole crisis team was. Most often the precinct cops are better at these situations than the feds or anybody else that might get thrown in.

There are two simple reasons for that. First, the precinct knows its own turf. Second, its people get more practice. There are more snatches, stand-offs, blow-ups and fuck-ups every day in every precinct in L.A. than the FBI’s local office handles in a year.

That also explained why there was nobody from the press here yet. If the TV cameras showed up, so would the FBI; and about two dozen more county, state, and federal agencies. Captain Spaulding was keeping it quiet. He’d even made sure the call I got wouldn’t tip anybody monitoring that something newsworthy was going down. By keeping the press away he kept control. It was my wife and my daughter, and I was one of Spaulding’s men. Every guy on the watch would drop whatever he had going and come help if it was necessary. Like the captain said, we take care of our own.

One side of me could appreciate that. The other side wanted to grab a twelve-gauge and kick down the door.

Of course, Spaulding knew that. That’s why he was meeting me personally, clamping his steel-spring hand on my elbow, leading me back to his improvised command center, and sitting me down in the front seat of his car. “This is going to work out fine, Billy,” he said. “It’s going very well.”

“Very well,” agreed Lesley Bishop. She had a cellular phone beside her and one of those electronic travel alarms. She used the phone to talk to the perps and the clock to time herself, so when she said she’d call back in five minutes, she’d watch the clock, wait carefully for ten minutes to pass, and call back. It was her favorite negotiating technique.

“Where are we, Lesley?” Captain Spaulding asked her, clearly for my benefit.

She smiled. She was obviously pleased with herself, but that didn’t mean much. She usually was. “Right on target, Captain. Nothing oddball about any of this, straight out of the book. They want their buddy released, half a million bucks, and a chopper to LAX. We have to have a jet waiting to take them all to Mexico.” Her smile got bigger. “I got them going on the money. I told them we could do it but that much took time.” She nodded at me. “It’s one of my tricks. I get them thinking just about the money. That gets their greed going and they start mentally counting the haul. They forget about everything else.”

I just looked at her. She looked briefly puzzled that I didn’t congratulate her on her brilliance, then looked very startled as she realized why. “Oh!” she said. The smile returned. “Your wife and daughter are fine. One of them says he has a daughter the same age. He’s playing with her.”

Her travel alarm beeped and she turned away to pick up the telephone.

Captain Spaulding leaned over me and re-inserted his fingers into my flesh. I was starting to feel like I’d have to have them surgically removed. “Okay, Billy? We got two guys in there and it’s all under control. Our reading is, they’re just gangbangers who went a little further than usual. These guys are not that good. We can take them. We can do this one. Lookit—” He pointed at the Rossmore. “Second floor. They got a corner room.” He chuckled. “That’s what I mean, these guys are D-U-M-B. They got two windows at right angles. See? So SWAT can get about eight shots into both of them in under two seconds.” He kneaded my shoulder. I managed not to scream in pain. “We’re going to take them, Billy. As soon as I get the word from Mendez, I’ll give him the go. We can do this. You just take it easy. Your family will be fine, Billy. You stay put.”

He turned away. I stayed on the seat; the habit of discipline is strong, and anyway, I wasn’t sure what my legs would do if I tried to stand.

The radio spat. “Mendez.”

Spaulding spoke back, staring up at the Rossmore. “Spaulding.”

“Blue ready. Red ready.”

“Stand by,” said Spaulding and put down the radio. He turned to me. “They’re in place. Clear shots on both guys. We worked it out ahead so even if the perps can monitor they can’t know what we’re doing.”