Feigning lighthearted curiosity, Aaron said, “And did you?”
“Of course,” she said, and he could see her smile but didn’t know how to interpret it. “Best affair I’ve had since my divorce.”
And then she glanced sideways at him, smiling even more with that dusky, sloe-eyed way of hers, and he didn’t know if she was kidding him or not. And she didn’t appear to know about the stab he felt in his heart every time she mentioned another man to him, or how it could depress him for hours or even days.
The call that 6-X-66 received seemed benign enough: the ubiquitous “family dispute.” It was at a medium-size shopping center with a large supermarket as its anchor. The premier mall within the boundaries of Hollywood Division was certainly the Hollywood and Highland mall, where the Kodak Centre loomed proudly. This particular shopping center was frequented by many of the people who spoke one of the more than two hundred foreign languages of Los Angeles, and two of them were speaking Spanish heatedly when Aaron and Sheila arrived.
They were a young Latino couple, both natives of Colombia, and there seemed no cause for alarm, nothing to make the cops more cautious than usual. After they saw police, the pair stopped yelling at each other, and the pregnant twenty-year-old mother began fussing with her thirteen-month-old baby in a stroller.
The police never did find out who placed the call and only learned later that it was a female voice speaking Spanish-accented English that had said, “Violence might happen.”
Sheila was first out of the car, and while Aaron was emerging, she approached the young couple, who were standing quietly, awaiting their approach. As was her custom, Sheila spoke in English until she was sure that the citizens did not understand her, before she switched to Spanish.
“Good afternoon,” she said. “We’ve received a call that there’s a problem here.”
The well-groomed and neatly dressed young man, who turned out to be the woman’s occasional boyfriend, had no tatts, nothing that might suggest gang affiliation. The cops weren’t sensing a threat until he reached down and grabbed a semiautomatic handgun concealed under a bag of disposable diapers. He pointed it at the baby.
“Get back or I will kill her!” he said in slightly accented English as the baby began screaming for her mother, who began screaming even louder.
Sheila froze, as did Aaron, who was approaching the couple from an angle to their right.
“Easy, sir!” Sheila said. “Easy! Just take it easy!”
Aaron reached for the nine on his belt, until the young Colombian yelled, “Touch it and I will shoot!”
Nobody moved then, and while the mother of the baby screamed, “Noooooooo, Arturo!” he kept the gun aimed at the baby’s head and pushed the stroller toward the door of the supermarket, all the time turning back toward the cops as he walked forward.
Aaron was the first to grab his rover and make the call for assistance. Like all LAPD cops, he was instinctively reluctant to broadcast an “officer needs help” call-the equivalent of a mayday, and the most desperate call in the street cop’s repertoire-especially since he was not convinced that the gun was real. The code of machismo said that a good cop should be able to take care of business without calling for code 3 backups, which would bring police from everywhere and mark the caller as a pantywaist if the help call turned out to be unnecessary. And nothing was worse for an LAPD male copper than to be labeled a pantywaist.
So he said, “Officers need assistance, man with a gun!” and stated the location.
Sheila Montez, who was not burdened by male machismo, and who was utterly horrified by the threat to the baby whether or not the suspicious-looking gun was real, cried, “Bullshit on assistance!” She grabbed her rover and said, “Six-X-ray-Sixty-six. Officers need help!”
Before they heard the siren of the assigned police unit speeding their way, they were both walking along at a medium pace, deployed wide apart, trailing the Colombian, who was still pushing the crying baby toward the supermarket door without taking his eyes from the cops.
“Stay here and wait for the officers!” Sheila said to the hysterical mother, who was beside her, wailing.
“Look, you’re not in really serious trouble yet!” Aaron yelled to the Colombian. “Put the gun on the ground and let’s talk!”
“So you can shoot me?” the young man shouted.
“Nobody wants to shoot you,” Sheila said, approaching closer. “Put the gun down and let’s talk.”
Without breaking stride until he was only thirty feet from the glass doors of the supermarket, the young man said, “I am not going back to Colombia. They will kill me if I go back. I prefer to die here.”
“Who’s gonna kill you?” Aaron asked.
“There are very bad people in my country who hate me,” the man said. “And they will kill me.”
They had to raise their voices again in order to be heard over louder wails from the baby. The young man was ten feet from the entrance doors to the supermarket when the car that had been assigned the help call roared into the parking lot, siren yowling.
“You don’t wanna hurt that baby,” Sheila said. “Is she your baby?”
“No,” the Colombian said. “She is yours.” And abruptly he stopped and shoved the stroller directly at Sheila, who chased it and caught it just before it tipped over. The young man ran into the supermarket before Aaron’s pistol was clear of the holster.
Within ten minutes, Sergeant Hermann, Sergeant Murillo, and two supervisors from Watch 3 had arrived and got on the air to call a tactical alert. In another seven minutes, there were twenty-two officers, some from neighboring divisions as well as a pair of motor cops surrounding the supermarket, with SWAT on the way. And supermarket shoppers, who had not seen the action taking place outside the market, were baffled when police kept arriving and blocking the exit doors, refusing to let them leave.
Sergeant Hermann’s car was parked near one of the entrances to the market, and she got on the PA to address all officers, saying, “The store stays locked down until patrons can be escorted outside!”
Another five minutes passed as more officers arrived, while angry and frustrated customers worked at triggering the opening device on the glass doors, yelling to the cops outside that they wanted to go home.
When Sergeant Hermann addressed the swell of customers at the door, saying, “Is there a man with a gun inside the store? Are you being threatened?” a dozen voices, both male and female, began shouting in several languages.
Those speaking English were yelling things like “There’s no gunman in here!” and “Let us outta here!” and “My kids are getting scared!” and even “My goddamn ice cream’s melting, you assholes!”
While this was going on, Sergeant Murillo and Sheila Montez were interviewing the mother of the baby in Spanish. After each exchange, Sheila would translate bits and pieces into English for Sergeant Hermann and Aaron Sloane.
Finally, Sheila said, “She’s been dating the guy occasionally for six months. She knows him as Arturo Echeverría. He told her he’s hunted by members of a drug cartel and has to carry a gun for protection, but she claims she didn’t know it was under the diaper bag. He doesn’t work at any job as far as she knows, and he doesn’t have friends. He told her he lives alone in an apartment in Little Armenia, and that’s all she knows about the guy.”
Sergeant Hermann said, “Okay, let’s let the women and kids out, escorted by officers. The men stay inside for now until SWAT arrives. Sloane and Montez, you two stay by each exit door. You’re the only ones who know what he looks like.”
The plan sounded reasonable, especially since nobody in the store was aware that the police were searching for an armed and desperate man in their midst. Both Sheila Montez and Mindy Ling got on the PA, Sheila speaking Spanish and Mindy speaking Mandarin, and told the patrons that women and children would be escorted outside ten at a time, questioned very briefly, and released.