Jetsam touched the power button and shut off that raging sound. Both he and his partner drew a breath of relief as though bobbing to the surface from deep water. There was another room at the far end of the hallway, but it was dark. The only other light came from a bathroom that served this two-bedroom unit.
Flotsam stepped to the bathroom doorway first and found her. She was naked, half in, half out of the bathtub, long pale legs hanging over the side of the tub. She had no doubt been a pretty girl in life, but now she was staring, eyes open in slits, lips drawn back in that familiar snarl of violent death he’d seen on others: Don’t take me away! I’ll fight to stay here! Alive! I want to stay alive!
Jetsam drew his rover, keyed it, and prepared to make the call. His partner stayed and stared at the corpse of the young woman. For a few seconds Flotsam had the panicky idea that she might still be alive, that maybe a rescue ambulance would have a chance. Then he moved one step closer to the tub and peeked behind the shower curtain.
There were arterial spurts all over the blue tile of the wall even to the ceiling. The floor of the tub was a blackening vat of viscosity and from here he could see at least three chest wounds and a gaping gash across her throat. At that second but not before, the acrid smell of blood and urine almost overwhelmed him, and he stepped out into the hallway to await the detectives from Hollywood Station and from Scientific Investigation Division.
The second bedroom, apparently belonging to a male roommate, was tidy and unoccupied at the moment, or so they thought. Jetsam had shined his light in there in a cursory check while talking on the rover, and Flotsam had glanced in, but neither had bothered to enter the bedroom and look inside the small closet, its door ajar.
While the two cops were back in the living room making a few notes, careful not to disturb anything, even turning on the wall switch with a pencil, a young man entered from the darkened hallway behind them.
His voice was a piercing rasp. He said, “I love her.”
Flotsam dropped his notebook, Jetsam the rover. Both cops wheeled and drew their nines.
“Freeze, motherfucker!” Flotsam screamed.
“Freeze!” Jetsam added redundantly.
He was frozen already. As pale and naked as the young woman he’d murdered, the young man stood motionless, palms up, freshly slashed wrists extended like an offering. Of what? Contrition? The gaping wrists were spurting, splashing fountains onto the carpet and onto his bare feet.
“Jesus Christ!” Flotsam screamed.
“Jesus!” Jetsam screamed redundantly.
Then both cops holstered their pistols, but when they lunged toward him the young man turned and ran to the bathroom, leaping into the tub with the woman he loved. And the cops gaped in horror as he curled himself fetally and moaned into her unhearing ear.
Flotsam got one latex glove onto his hand but dropped the other glove. Jetsam yelled into the rover for paramedics and dropped both latex gloves. Then they jumped onto him and tried to drag him up, but all the blood made his thin arms slip through their hands, and both cops cursed and swore while the young man moaned. Twice, three times he pulled free and plopped onto the bloody corpse with a splat.
Jetsam got his handcuff around one wrist, but when he cinched it tight the bracelet sunk into the gaping flesh and he saw a tendon flail around the ratchet and he yelled, “Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!” And he felt ice from his tailbone to his brain stem and for a second he felt like bolting.
Flotsam was bigger and stronger than Jetsam, and he muscled the rigid left arm out from under the chest of the moaning young man and forced it up behind his back and got the dangling bracelet around the wrist. And then he got to see it sink into the red maw of tendon and tissue and he almost puked.
They each got him by a handcuffed arm and they lifted him but now all three were dripping and slimy from his spurting blood and her thickening blood and they dropped him, his head hitting the side of the tub. But he was past pain and only moaned more softly. They lifted again and got him out of the tub and dragged him out into the hallway, where Flotsam slipped and fell down, the bleeding man on top of him still moaning.
A neighbor on her balcony screamed when the two panting cops dragged the young man down the outside stairway, his naked blood-slimed body bumping against the plastered steps in a muted plop that made the woman scream louder. The three young men fell in a pile onto the sidewalk under a street lamp, and Flotsam got up and began ransacking the car trunk for the first-aid kit, not knowing for sure what the hell was in it but pretty sure there was no tourniquet. Jetsam knelt by the bleeding man, jerked his Sam Browne free, and was trying to tie off one arm with an improvised tourniquet made from his trouser belt when the rescue ambulance came squealing around the corner onto Cherokee, lights flashing and siren yelping.
The first patrol unit to arrive belonged to the sergeant known as the Oracle, who double-parked half a block away, leaving the immediate area to RA paramedics, Hollywood detectives, evidence collectors from Scientific Investigation Division, and the coroner’s team. There was no mistaking the very old patrol sergeant, even in the darkness. As his burly figure approached, they could see those pale service stripes on his left sleeve, rising almost to his elbow. Forty-six years on the Job rated nine hash marks and made him one of the longest-serving cops on the entire police department.
“The Oracle has more hash marks than a football field,” everybody said.
But the Oracle always said, “I’m only staying because the divorce settlement gives my ex half my pension. I’ll be on the Job till that bitch dies or I do, whichever comes first.”
The bleeding man was unmoving and going gray when he was blanketed and belted to the gurney and lifted into the rescue ambulance, both paramedics working to stem the now oozing blood but shaking their heads at the Oracle, indicating that the young man had probably bled out and was beyond saving.
Even though a Santa Ana wind had blown into Los Angeles from the desert on this May evening, both Flotsam and Jetsam were shivering and wearily gathering their equipment which was scattered on the sidewalk next to a concrete planter containing some hopeful pansies and forget-me-nots.
The Oracle looked at the blood-drenched cops and said, “Are you hurt? Any injuries at all?”
Flotsam shook his head and said, “Boss, I think we just had a tactical situation they never covered in any class I’ve taken at the academy. Or if they did, I fucking missed it.”
“Get yourselves to Cedars for medical treatment whether you need it or not,” the Oracle said. “Then clean up real good. Might as well burn those uniforms from the looks of them.”
“If that guy has hepatitis, we’re in trouble, Sarge,” Jetsam said.
“If that guy has AIDS, we’re dead,” Flotsam said.
“This doesn’t look like that kind of situation,” the Oracle said, his retro gray crew cut seeming to sparkle under the streetlight. Then he noticed Jetsam’s handcuffs lying on the sidewalk. He flashed his beam on the cuffs and said to the exhausted cop, “Drop those cuffs in some bleach, son. I can see chunks of meat jammed in the ratchets.”
“I need to go surfing,” Jetsam said.
“Me too,” Flotsam said.
The Oracle had acquired his sobriquet by virtue of seniority and his penchant for dispensing words of wisdom, but not on this night. He just looked at his bloody, hollow-eyed, shivering young cops and said, “Now, you boys get right to Cedars ER and let a doc have a look at you.”
It was then that D2 Charlie Gilford arrived on the scene, a gum-chewing, lazy night-watch detective with a penchant for bad neckties who was not a case-carrying investigator, his job being only to assist. But with more than twenty years at Hollywood Station, he didn’t like to miss anything sensational that was going down and loved to offer pithy commentary on whatever had transpired. For his assessments they called him Compassionate Charlie.