“Why mine?”
“Panel vans in the county.”
“Go ahead.”
But Merci had already gone ahead. She rounded the front of the van behind Castor, walked past him to check the right rear. She shook her head. Hess could see that the two right-side tires were not new.
“We need a look inside,” said Merci.
“Nice to meet you, too,” said Castor. “Go for it. It’s unlocked.”
Hess looked at the fisherman while Merci swung open the back door. A moment later she slammed it shut.
“Nix.”
Hess thanked Castor and apologized for interrupting his evening.
“Whatever, man. See you later, sweetheart.”
“Dream on, fish eyes,” said Merci, already moving toward the car.
Castor looked at Hess and smiled. “Spicy.”
A few minutes later Hess heard the words that he had learned to dread when he was twenty-two years old, just starting off, and had dreaded more with every passing year.
“Deputy down, eighteen-twelve Orangewood, El Modena off Chapman! Deputy down and it’s bad. Suspect down, too. Need paramedics and need ’em now.”
The words shot through Hess’s body like electricity. He realized they were half a mile away, told Merci the quickest way in.
Thirty-Two
She gunned the big four-door down the avenue and made the right onto Warren, another onto Hale, then a quick skidding left at Orangewood. The back tires let go, the car swung sideways into the curb and Hess felt his head rattle. Up ahead he saw the flashing lights of a Sheriff’s unit and a group of people gathered to one side of it. Then he saw a silver van parked in a driveway and he thought, good God we got him. He fingered open his holster catch and jumped out as soon as Merci had braked the car to a stop beside the prowl car.
He looked at the faces in the flashing light and saw their stunned resentment. He walked toward the van, toward the lit garage, the lights slapping red and blue and yellow against the scene: a uniformed deputy face up on the driveway between the van and the garage, another uniform bent over him with his arms stiff and hands locked pumping at his chest. And past them, lying in the garage doorway leading to the house, a big man not moving but a young woman screaming and shaking him. Halfway between the two down men was a stainless automatic handgun that Hess picked up by the barrel and moved away from the screaming woman, who had just begun crawling over the prostrate man on her way to the gun.
“No,” he ordered her. “Go back to him.”
Hess set the gun high up on a shelf and went to the big man in the doorway. He could hear Merci behind him, outside the patrol car, talking on the radio, then the rising pitch of distant sirens. He knelt. The guy looked fifty, maybe, balding and powerfully built. Jeans and boots, no shirt. Black tattoos up both arms, one of the central county gangs Hess recognized. He had two holes in his bare chest, close together at the heart. Hess felt the neck for a pulse and when the girl saw his expression she attacked, coming over the body at him, her nails raking at his face. He moved sideways and used her motion to take her lengthwise onto the garage floor and get her wrists back. He snugged the plastic tie tight and walked her at arm’s length to Merci’s car with one hand on her arm and one in her hair while she snapped her head back trying to bite him.
Merci pumped at the deputy and Hess got the look he didn’t want: chest covered with blood and a pool of it under him, his head nodding back and forth with Merci’s efforts, eyes open and feet splayed as only dead feet splay. Merci was talking while she did the chest compressions, demanding that the deputy respond, refusing to let him check out.
“You hang in here with us, Jerry,” Hess heard her say, not much more than a hoarse whisper. “You stay here with me... you just keep breathing... I’m giving you the power to do that, so do that... just do it, Jerry...”
The kid looked about twenty-five. His gun was still in his holster. His partner was maybe forty, blood on him as he leaned down and kept talking to the kid, we’re with you now, Jerold, come on Jerry, we gotta get you back to Cathy in good shape or she’s gonna have my hide... come on, Jerry, I’m gonna keep talking and you just keep listening, we’re going to get you out of this, partner, don’t you fade on me now, kid, I need you here...
Merci kept pumping but she looked up at Hess with a devastated expression and shook her head. Her forearms were heavy with blood and she was kneeling in a pool of it. Hess checked the van tires — an older but uniform set — then looked over at the crowd. He saw their fear of him. It was one of those moments — Hess had experienced them before — when the killing was done and lives suddenly gone and all you could do was nothing at all.
He went back to Merci.
“I can take over there,” he said to her.
“I got him, man, move over,” said the partner. His name plate said Dunbar. “All right, Jerry, I’m back now...”
The sirens whooped and stopped behind him. Two city units and one Sheriff, Hess saw. The paramedic van came tilting around the corner where Merci had almost lost it. The sound and the new flashing lights and the slamming doors and weapons-drawn officers all seemed to reanimate the tragedy, or to make possible a new one. Dunbar was blubbering and pumping too fast. Merci walked slowly toward the arriving troops, her hands out from her sides, as if unsure of how to carry them or herself.
Hess opened the back van doors and looked in. It was carpeted and had a small table and two bench chairs instead of seats. On the table was a freezer bag half filled with light brown powder. A pound at the most, probably less. Hess poked it with his finger — heroin — Mexican by the color. There was a scale, a box of smaller plastic bags, a couple of teaspoons, two open beers and a bag of some kind of powder to plump up the smack and create profit.
They had walked straight into the cutting and packaging, he thought. Like stepping on a scorpion in the dark. Jerry’s life for a pound of poppy dust. The Purse Snatcher’s seventh victim.
He made sure the arriving crime scene investigators knew where the stainless automatic was stashed.
Then he walked the inside of the house, touching nothing, just looking. It was predictable and soulless, heavy on black leather, chrome and electronics. A new computer in boxes. Plenty of guns. He came into the kitchen just as Merci turned from the sink with her hands clean and wet, looking for a paper towel. Finding none, she dried her hands on a cotton one folded on the countertop.
“Jerry Kirby’s dead,” she said quietly, “and so’s the creep. Let’s get the bitch out of my car and get out of here.”
She tossed the towel into the sink and walked out.
They sat in silence outside Colesceau’s apartment on 12 Meadowlark. Hess leaned back in the seat and peered out between heavy eyelids. He could feel the blood surging inside him and it felt hot. The rads? His brain felt sluggish.
It was after ten and he counted only six protesters. The CNB van was still there — ‘round the clock coverage for “Rape Watch, Irvine” — but Lauren Diamond was nowhere to be seen. The neighbors sat in lawn chairs with their signs on the ground and votive candles burning in holders beside them. Hess looked at the south-facing kitchen window and knew with certainty that nobody could get in and out of it without being seen.
“It was worth checking,” he said. “But there’s no way he could get in and out of that window. None whatsoever.”
“I told you.”
“I needed to see it.”
“Tim, this pathetic little troll isn’t our guy. He looks wrong, the parole officers have been on him for three years, his own neighbors won’t let him fart without taking his picture. I mean, we’ve got actual photographs of him at home taken while Ronnie Stevens bought it. It just isn’t him. But I respect your instincts. I absolutely do.”