Montecito Heights

by Colin Campbell

  Headlights came on full beam in the turnaround and the engine roared. Grant realized the other two gunmen had stopped targeting the house. He braced himself for a final assault on his position. One bullet left. Free hand searching in vain for the dead guy’s magazine.

  Two shots came from downhill.

  Grant didn’t dive for cover. From their position they’d have to be marksmen to hit him. Diving to one side could just as easily throw him into a bullet’s path as out of it. Both shots went wide. The gunmen were covering their retreat. Grant had been right. This wasn’t a kill mission. It was a warning. They hadn’t reckoned on losing one of their own in the process, though.

  Grant found the magazine and slammed it home.

  Car doors slammed, and the headlights swept along the drive. They disappeared beyond the sharp bend as the driveway curved around the wooded hilltop. Grant was up and running with a gun in each hand. The trees slowed his progress. Even though he was cutting the corner by going over the top, he was no match for the speeding car. He had no shot. They were gone.

  Grant stuffed a gun in each pocket of his windcheater and took out his phone, still moving through the woods. He flipped it open and selected Citrin’s number. He felt slow and awkward. Grant wasn’t a mobile phone kind of guy. He pressed call and held his breath. There was only one way into the drive of 1042 Montecito Drive. Right past the minivan parked at the overlook. If Grant had let Citrin bring the cameraman along, then things might have turned out different, but he hadn’t. There was no point crying over spilt milk.

  The phone kept ringing.

  Nobody answered.

  He was down the hill now, approaching the footpath where he’d first entered the grounds. He cut across the narrow strip of land and came out on the driveway near the front gate. The electronic gate had been smashed off its runners and lay in a twisted heap beside the road.

  The phone kept ringing.

  Nobody answered.

  Grant wasn’t out of breath when he jogged through the gateway. He wasn’t winded and he wasn’t tired. What he was, was anxious. He couldn’t help it. He’d been in this position before. Twice. Supposedly protecting a woman in his care but failing miserably. Both times had turned out bad. The woman in Boston he’d shot in the head. The woman with the stethoscope he’d…

  The phone stopped ringing.

  Nobody answered but Grant could hear breathing in his ear. Another sound, the gentle purr of a powerful engine. The big American car. He turned left out of the gate toward the overlook. The minivan was still there, facing away from him as if staring at the view. The city of angels. It didn’t feel like there were any angels around tonight.

  Grant kept the phone to his ear but didn’t speak.

  He listened, knowing the cell wasn’t in the parked minivan.

  He circled Robin Citrin’s car, expecting the worst, telling himself all the time this wasn’t a kill mission, it was a warning. The driver’s door was open. This would make one helluva warning. Grant kept his distance in case it was a trap and took the stolen gun out of his pocket. With the phone held to his ear and gun arm outstretched, he angled toward the opening.

  The front seat was empty.

  His eyes cycled through all the visible openings. The passenger footwell. The gap between the seats. The space behind them. He reached for the sliding door and yanked it open. Using manual instead of electric there was no familiar pffft hiss. The rear passenger compartment was empty.

  He moved toward the front of the car.

  A voice he recognized sounded in his ear.

  “Now I have something you want more than to protect the senator. Yes?”

  Rodrigo Dominguez sounded like he was ordering pizza. Grant stepped in front of the minivan and saw the bullet holes stitched across the top of the windshield. Aimed high. Not kill shots. Grant breathed a sigh of relief, but not a big one.

  “You gave me three days.”

  “I did. But I thought you needed added incentive.”

  “Well, you didn’t. So you can drop her at the bus stop.”

  “This fine lady does not look like she belongs on a bus.”

  “I agree. So get her a cab.”

  Grant put the gun back in his jacket pocket and stared at his reflection in the windshield. A tall dark silhouette against the starfield of twinkling downtown lights. He looked like a man adrift. A man who had lost everything. Dominguez spoke in a calm voice.

  “Do you remember what I said about her working without hands?”

  Grant felt a cold shiver run up his neck.

  “Don’t worry. That is a last resort. We won’t start with her hands. Fingers. One at a time. Here is one on account.”

  The scream coming through the phone was agonizing. Grant almost crushed the cell in his hand. His silhouette against the twinkling lights expanded. Dominguez had just made the biggest mistake of his life.

  FORTY-THREE

  Dawn was already breaking by the time Grant parked Citrin’s minivan down the side of the Mayfair Hotel. The Seventh Street Dollar Store wasn’t open. He wasn’t thinking of buying any fruit today anyway. Twelve stories up, on the east face of the Historic Mayfair, Grant’s hotel room stood with its window open. Same as always. Only today it felt different. Life felt different.

  One of Grant’s strengths was his ability to deal with life’s adversities. His ability to remain calm under pressure. To think clearly and act decisively. Since the scream over the phone, he had been busy making a few calls of his own. As was often the case with him, all the pieces came together in a blinding flash of inspiration. One of his army training officers had said it was sometimes better to be lucky than good. Grant was both. Regularly. But the secret is recognizing your good fortune and shaping it into a plan of action. Grant had already selected his plan of action.

  Two of the calls he’d made were obvious. The call he didn’t make was no surprise either. But it was the final call that would prove to be the most important one of all.

  The black car was parked in its usual spot opposite the front of the hotel. Grant crossed the road in plain sight, hands in the open. He didn’t want these guys getting nervous so close to the prize. He doubted they were among the shooters at Montecito Heights, but they would certainly have heard about the shooting. Might have even been friends with the guy that got shot. Grant didn’t want this thing going off half-cocked.

  He walked around the front of the car with his arms held out, palms upwards. Not full Resurrection Man pose, more like flags at half-mast. If the Hawaiians knew about the shooting, then they knew that Grant now had two guns. He wanted them to see he wasn’t holding either of them.

  The passenger window slid down as Grant climbed the curb onto the sidewalk. Not for the first time he wondered why Americans felt the need to make the curbs so high. There were black scrape marks all along it where cars had parked too close and scarred their tires. The depth of the curb gave Grant extra height. Even though the big American car was tall, he was looking down into the square blank face from a position of advantage.

  The gun pointing at his chest negated that advantage.

  These guys were taking no chances.

  Grant lowered his arms and bent at the waist so his face was level with the gunman’s. He rested one hand on the roof of the car. The driver glanced up at the sound of it. The passenger twitched his gun hand. They were nervous. After the scream over the phone, they had reason to be. They might not have been at the house, but these two were part of the team. That made them legitimate targets.

  The streetlamps blinked off.

  Daylight of the final day had arrived.

  Grant leaned his head forward and spoke in low, measured tones. There was no small talk. No witty asides. He didn’t offer the gift of fruit and they didn’t talk back. They just listened to what he had to say.

  “Tell him I’ll get his m
oney out of the bank today. He can meet me there. In a public place. Bring the woman. Eleven o’clock.”

  He gave the address. The Hawaiians didn’t react. The passenger just nodded. The driver started the engine. The window slid shut. Message delivered in person, not over the phone. Grant stepped back from the car as it set off along West Seventh, then crossed the road to the hotel. He needed a shower.

  Grant finished drying himself and wrapped the towel around his waist. He examined the two guns that were laid on the bed. The chrome finish snub nose .38 and the ugly black .45 automatic. One bullet left in the first and a full magazine in the other. Neither would be any use today. Go wandering into a bank carrying firearms and you were in deep shit.

  Grant was already in deep shit.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and quickly stripped both guns down to their component parts. Using a fresh handkerchief, he cleaned each component as best he could. He unloaded the magazine and cleaned each bullet, then reloaded the clip. Expert fingers rebuilt the .38, spinning the cylinder one notch at a time until the live round was one chamber away from the hammer. Cocking action would bring it into line should he need it. One bullet wasn’t much use in a gunfight, but if it came down to him and Dominguez, one shot was all he’d need. The .45 fit back together easily. He didn’t rack the slide, leaving the chamber empty.

  Grant left the ugly black gun on the bed and tucked the .38 into the rolled-up hood that formed the collar of his orange windcheater. The pistol was small but still bulged inside the cloth. He took a pair of clean socks out of the drawer and padded the rest of the collar until it matched the bulge. The Velcro fastening held the entire thing together. He slipped the automatic in the pocket and zipped it shut.

  The scent of shower gel overpowered the smell of gun oil, but he washed his hands again anyway. Body spray and aftershave completed the job. He felt fresh and clean and ready for anything. Still wearing the bath towel, he laid a clean pair of jeans and a black T-shirt on the bed, then looked out of the window. The view of downtown hadn’t changed. He could still see the glass and concrete towers of the business district, but now those businesses carried more weight. Somewhere among the skyscrapers was a bank waiting for him to make a withdrawal.

  Grant replayed the phone calls in his head.

  The first one had been to Chuck Tanburro and the second to L. Q. Patton. Then he considered the call he hadn’t made. Considering what was about to go down, calling the police was the sensible option. The only trouble was the police were compromised, and although Grant would trust his life with any cop on the beat, he had never trusted the bosses. It had been a running joke back in Yorkshire that you were more likely to get stabbed in the back from the senior management team than in the front by a street crook. And that was without the chief of police being caught on camera getting his cock sucked. Look what happened to Bill Clinton.

  Grant didn’t dwell on the past, and he rarely looked to the future. The exception to that rule was when he was planning ahead. He had been planning ahead when he made the third call. He smiled at the irony of it all and wondered if Dominguez would see the funny side. If Grant had his way, Dominguez wouldn’t see anything ever again. With a little nod of satisfaction, Grant whipped off the towel and began to get dressed.

  FORTY-FOUR

  There are 794 banks in central Los Angeles; 115 of those are in downtown LA. At first, Stuart Ziff’s choice of film location had seemed like a happy accident to Grant, but when he thought about it, Los Pueblo Trust and Banking was a perfect target. It was widely known that only the most powerful banks had any kind of decent security, and Grant had already witnessed how easy it was to rob one of them. The Bank of America must rank as one of the largest in the country, and yet two hayseed crooks had walked out with a bagful of money using a shotgun and a few harsh words. What possible threat could a small Mexican bank pose?

  The sun was already high in a clear blue sky by the time Grant crossed the Harbor Freeway on foot. Constant traffic sped both ways on ten lanes of cracked gray tarmac beneath the bridge. A helicopter hovered over the Staples Center. A low-flying airliner circled low on its approach to LAX. The daily grind of California’s biggest city continued as if nothing was wrong. In the flatlands of South Los Angeles, petty crimes continued to be committed. In West Hollywood, movies and TV shows continued to be made. And at West Sixth and South Olive, opposite Pershing Square, a film crew from Zed Productions prepared to execute the most expensive shoot in porn movie history.

  Los Pueblo Trust and Banking was a gray three-story building between the Millennium Biltmore Hotel and Domino’s Pizza on South Olive. There was an underground parking garage next to the bank.

  Grant came around the corner and half expected to be transported back to New York again, but there was no sign of Gary Sinise today. There were no NYPD patrol cars or FDNY ambulances. Today was pure LA. Hot and sunny and busy as hell. Grant found a bench in a shaded area of Pershing Square Park and settled down to watch the show. It wasn’t time for him to make his entrance yet.

  Nothing much was happening at the moment. There was a lot of milling around and not very much getting done. This wasn’t the professional location shoot of CSI: NY or the movie bank robbery round the back of Hollywood Boulevard. This was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It was only supposed to look like they were making a movie.

  There were two handheld cameras carried loosely over the operators’ shoulders. Not quality Steadicam equipment but the sort of cameras that were more at home getting close-up sex shots while not disturbing the performers. From Grant’s experience with Geneva Espinoza, he doubted if porn stars were ever disturbed by intrusive camera angles. Big Dick Swelling would still be swelling if they dropped a nuclear bomb on his dick. Arc lights and reflectors completed the picture, giving the scene being shot an authentic feel. South Olive was blocked to traffic at the intersection with West Sixth and halfway along the Millennium Biltmore. The hotel doors were still accessible. Closing a downtown thoroughfare was one thing; closing a major hotel, something else entirely. This was a recession. Business was tight.

  Retired traffic cops manned yellow trestles at either end of the cordon. Two at each barrier. Chuck Tanburro stood chatting to one of them outside the hotel. Grant didn’t know how the ex-cop had managed to get his own guys attached to the shoot, but Tanburro’s stock just rose a few points. On the frontline you had to trust your partner. Grant trusted Tanburro. It was a good feeling. He hoped L. Q. Patton had been equally successful. The helicopter drifted over from the Staples Center. It was difficult to read the markings in the glare but its position suggested Patton had at least done part of his job.

  The camera operators were talking to a man with a goatee beard and a flowered shirt. Stuart Ziff was nowhere in sight. The producer had learned from his previous robbery outings to be nowhere near the scene of the crime. After the shooting at Montecito Heights last night he was understandably nervous, but at least he only thought Grant was after the incriminating DVD. Grant had taken it. Nothing more had been said about the location shoot. Events had overtaken them, and that suited Grant just fine. He wished he hadn’t mentioned it at all, but it appeared that the job was still on for this morning.

  A group of fake cops dressed in LAPD uniforms crossed the street, checking their sidearms. Four heavyset guys wearing long coats slipped past the Millennium Biltmore and disappeared into the underground garage. Grant felt the short hairs bristle on the back of his neck. The four guys weren’t part of the movie shoot. He glanced along South Olive in both directions. There was no sign of Dominguez yet. He checked his watch.

  Quarter to eleven.

  The helicopter hovered above the jewelry district east of Pershing Square. The traffic cops diverted traffic around either ends of the cordon. Tanburro kept to one side, just past Domino’s Pizza. The arc lights were turned up and the reflectors deployed. The guy with the goatee beard and the flowered shirt shouted into a
megaphone for everyone to take their positions.

  Grant stood up and walked down the steps from the park.

  Ten to eleven.

  He crossed South Olive opposite the Millennium Biltmore. Height and confidence got him past the film crew. This wasn’t an official SAG shoot. The crew didn’t know who the hell anybody was. Grant stopped for a moment in Los Pueblo Trust and Banking’s front door.

  Five to eleven.

  A big American car pulled up outside the hotel, and the traffic cops removed the trestle to let it through. The car went down the ramp, into the parking garage. Grant watched it disappear without a nod or a smile. He showed no emotion at all. It was showtime.

  The guy with the megaphone shouted, “Action.”

  The fake cops played out the scene on the street.

  Grant walked into the bank.

  There were no security guards inside. Grant would have been surprised if there had been. He stood just inside the doorway and scanned the room. Los Pueblo Trust and Banking had more in common with the Bank of America’s East Cesar branch than the one at MacArthur Park. He doubted it had ever been a PLS Check Cashers, but it shared the same dark and dingy interior, with wood-paneled walls and a full-length bank tellers’ counter. The counter had wired glass barriers to prevent robbers climbing over, but they were only three feet high. Two large ceiling fans twirled slowly, shifting warm air around the waiting area.

  First order of business: familiarize yourself with the battleground. Grant ran his eyes over the high-ceiling room with practiced ease. Within sixty seconds he knew where all the exits were, how many staff manned the bank tellers’ positions, and which customers were possible threats. The customers he discounted immediately. None looked out of place, and all were either female or too old to cause problems. The bank staff were all Latinos. They were slightly built and nervy types. Typical bank tellers. Money mathematicians, not protective services. The exits were obvious and clearly marked. The one behind him led into the street. One on the far side had an arrow pointing down to the parking garage. There was a wood-paneled door next to the counter for staff and two more doors beyond the counter, one into the manager’s office and one into the side alley.