He startled a laugh out of Gabe, who said, “Now that you mention it, so am I. But that’s not what I was thinking of. Naw—what we need on these fuckers is a light bar and a siren so people will know we’re cops.”
“You don’t figure maybe they suspect?” Colin said dryly, and Gabe laughed again. Many, many bicycles were on the streets. Except during commuters’ hours, hardly any of them were ridden by middle-aged men in suits. If you looked closely at Gabe, you could see the bulge under his left shoulder. If you look at me, you’ll see the same goddamn thing, Colin thought. Designers had talked about the invisible shoulder holster for more than a hundred years. The next guy who actually made one would be the first.
They both turned right from Hesperus onto Reynoso Drive. That was San Atanasio’s most important street for businesses and shops. In the early days of the city, San Atanasio Boulevard, farther south, had filled that niche—which was why the city hall and the police station and the library were all either on or near San Atanasio Boulevard.
“If it wasn’t for all the work I’m doing, though, I wouldn’t mind this so much, you know?” Sanchez said. “You see the town better on a bike than you do from a car.”
“You see it slower, that’s for sure,” Colin said. People on the sidewalk weren’t just blurs. You noticed faces, clothes, attitudes. But you did take longer to get where you were going. With cell phones so unreliable, Colin and Gabe also carried little two-way radios in an inside jacket pocket. If they needed backup, they could call the station.
The bicycles were straight out of 1910. The radios were twenty-first-century gadgets. The mix, and using the one to make the other more effective, was a small part of the report Colin had done for Malik Williams. The new chief liked the report, or said he did. How much he’d use… Colin didn’t worry about too much. Some of it struck him as plain, obvious common sense. Some was his own more left-handed thinking.
What Williams would make of that, Colin didn’t worry about too much, either. The absolute worst thing the new chief could do was drive him into retirement. Colin didn’t want that to happen, but it wouldn’t be nearly so bad as if he’d had to quit because Mike Pitcavage killed himself. He’d go home, he’d enjoy his wife and his tiny daughter, and he’d cultivate his garden. You could do worse.
Meanwhile, he pedaled past the big B of A near Sword Beach. The gas stations at the corner of Sword Beach and Reynoso all flew the red flags that meant they had no fuel. Those flags were ragged and faded—they flew most of the time.
Past Sword Beach to the east was a shopping center a bit spiffier than a strip mall. The anchor store, such as it was, was a Vons supermarket that had been there since dirt. Colin and Louise and now Kelly all got their groceries there. The Vons was the place that had been knocked over. The armed robber had blown a plate-glass window to hell and gone; sparkling shards littered the concrete walk out front. A middle-aged woman who could only be the manager waited there for the cops to show up.
She gave her name as Rudabeh Barazani—Iranian, Colin guessed. One more ingredient in the SoCal ethnic stew. Her English had a ghost of an accent, no more. “Anybody get hurt?” Colin asked.
“No, thank heaven,” she said.
“Okay, that’s good,” he said, both because it was true and to calm her down—although she didn’t seem too flustered. “Tell me what happened, then.”
“A man filled one of our hand-carry baskets with cans of hash and chicken and tuna. He filled it as full as he could. When he got to a checker, he did not take the items out. He tried to set the basket in front of her instead. When she asked him to take the cans out so she could see how many there were, he pulled a gun instead and told her to put all the money in the register into a bag. Since we have no bags any more, she just handed it to him. He left with the money and the canned goods, and fired a shot through the window to make sure no one would try to chase him.”
“You have a description, ma’am?” Gabe Sanchez asked.
“A white man, or maybe Hispanic, in his fifties,” Ms. Barazani said. “Medium-sized. Gray hair, getting thin here and here”—she sketched hair drawing back at the temples on her own forehead—“and a gray mustache and chin beard.”
“Clothes?” Colin asked.
“Denim jacket. Khakis. Nikes.”
Colin sighed to himself. You couldn’t get more ordinary than that. He said, “I wouldn’t want to lug a basket full of cans real far, not on foot I wouldn’t. What kind of getaway vehicle did he use?”
“He had a tricycle with a wire basket big enough to hold our plastic one,” the store manager replied. “A woman said she saw him turn from Reynoso north onto Sword Beach. I didn’t see that. I was trying to take care of poor Carmela. She was the checker, and she was very upset.”
“Somebody sticks a gun in your face, you usually are,” Colin agreed. “We’ll need to talk to her, though, and to the woman who saw which way the robber went. Gabe, radio the station and let ’em know what we have. I’ll interview the witnesses.”
“You got it.” Sanchez drew the walkie-talkie out of his jacket pocket.
The checker had pulled herself together. Her story wasn’t much different from the one Rudabeh Barazani had told. Colin discovered he couldn’t talk to the gal who’d watched the getaway—she’d already gone home. But she was a regular at that Vons. The manager gave him her name and address. It wasn’t far. He wondered whether he ought to go over there after he and Gabe finished up here.
Virtue triumphed over laziness. He was heading toward the witness’ house, with Gabe puffing along beside him in more than one sense of the word, when his inside-pocket, not-quite-wrist radio squawked for attention. He took it out. “Ferguson,” he said as he eased to a stop. “What’s going on?”
“We just nabbed your armed-robbery suspect,” answered the dispatcher back at the station.
“Oh, yeah? That’s what I call service,” Colin said. “How’d it happen?”
“A patrolman on a bicycle on Hesperus north of Braxton Bragg spotted an individual matching the description we sent out on a trike with canned goods in a basket in back. He made the arrest after a short pursuit.”
“I bet it was short.” Colin wouldn’t have wanted to try to outspeed a bike on a trike, especially when the trike was weighted down with loot. “Any trouble with the suspect? I know he was armed.”
“No, Captain, no trouble,” the dispatcher replied. “Our man had the drop on the perp. The guy didn’t try anything stupid.”
“Roger that. Good,” Colin said. “Okay, Gabe and I will come back to the station to question him. The witness I was going to talk to can wait. Out.”
“We turn around?” Gabe said.
“We turn around.” Colin nodded.
“Well, shit.” Gabe ground out his cigarette under the sole of his shoe. “If we’d headed straight back from Vons, we’d be a lot closer than we are now.”
“Piss and moan, piss and moan,” Colin said. They grinned at each other. Then they rode back to the police station.
The suspect was already there. The dispatcher had sent out a black-and-white to bring him—and the canned goods, and the cash—in. His name was Victor Jennings. He was fifty-nine years old. He lived only a couple of blocks from where he’d been caught. Another five minutes, and he would have made a clean getaway. He had no previous criminal record.
In the interrogation room, he looked angry and embarrassed and hopeless, all at the same time. Colin had seen variations of those expressions on too many faces in that room. After Jennings waived his Miranda rights, Colin asked him, “Why’d you do it, Mr. Jennings?”