by Don Winslow
“What about Mid City?” he asks Schneider.
Schneider sighs the sigh of the put-upon and gets him the data from Mid City.
And there it is.
Well, there it could be, Chris thinks. A liquor store on Thirtieth and Utah was robbed at gunpoint an hour and a half before Chris got the Champ call. Just eight blocks from the eastern edge of the park.
The record shows that two officers responded—Herrera and Forsythe—but by the time they rolled up, the suspect was gone.
So the case is open.
Robbery would have taken it over, but so far there’s been no arrest.
The radio record won’t show what has been done on it since—that information would only be in Robbery, and Chris doesn’t have the balls to go back there yet and ask. But it’s curious that no one seems to be working on the gun.
No one went in to look at prints.
Chris thinks he gets it—the whole Champ thing was an enormous embarrassment to the department, which would probably just hope to let the story fade out.
But Lubesnick is nudging me into it, Chris thinks.
Why not his own guys?
He’s off-duty the next day, so he waits for the night shift and goes over to Mid City.
Chris finds Forsythe by his locker, getting suited up to go on shift.
“Officer Forsythe, Chris Shea. Central Division.”
“I know who you are,” Forsythe says. “You’re that monkey guy. What can I do for you?”
“You answered a robbery call on Thirtieth the other night.”
“What about it?” Forsythe says.
“Can I ask what happened?”
“Nothing much,” Forsythe says. “I responded. Herrera rolled up a second later. The perp threatened the clerk with a knife, the clerk handed over the cash. We did an area search, didn’t come up with the guy. Turned it over to Robbery.”
“It was a knife?” Chris asks. “The radio call said it was a gun.”
“No, that’s right,” Forsythe says. “The clerk thought we’d get there faster if he said gun. You know how it is.”
Chris does. People overbid their calls all the time, thinking the cops will come quicker.
“Why are you asking?” Forsythe says. “You have a lead on the guy, a related case?”
“No.”
“I mean, you’re on radio patrol, right?” Forsythe asks. “You have some sort of personal interest?”
Forsythe is pushing pretty hard on an open door, Chris thinks. “No, I live in the neighborhood. I was just curious.”
It’s bullshit, and Forsythe knows it’s bullshit. “Do everyone including yourself a favor. Don’t be curious.”
“No?”
“No,” Forsythe says. “Go back to Central, chase apes, whatever you guys do over there, but don’t be coming around Mid City poking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. No offense, huh, Shea?”
“None taken.”
No offense taken, but Chris drives over to the liquor store to talk to the clerk.
“Hell yes, it was a gun,” the clerk says. He’s a sandy-haired guy in his fifties. “You think I wouldn’t know a knife from a gun?”
“No, I—”
“I’ll tell you what else,” the clerk says. “It was a .38 Colt Cobra Special.”
Exactly the gun that Champ was waving around.
“An automatic, right?” Chris asks.
The clerk looks at him with contempt. “What the hell kind of cop are you? A .38 Colt Cobra Special is a revolver. Double-action. Two-inch barrel, Hogue Overmold grip. I own guns.”
“I figured.”
“I have one right under the shelf here,” the clerk says. “A Glock 9. So do you think I’d let some guy rob me with a knife? The only reason I didn’t pull it was he had the drop on me.”
“Can you describe the suspect?”
“Suspect?” the clerk asks. “It was no ‘suspect.’ He did it.”
“Can you describe him?”
“I already did to the detectives,” the clerk says. “Don’t you guys talk to each other?”
Apparently not, Chris thinks.
“White guy,” the clerk says. “Around five-six. Brown hair cut real short. One of those Hawaiian-print shirts, jeans and Keds. Do you want to know about distinguishing marks?”
“Sure.”
“A tattoo on his neck. H-O-L.”
“‘Hol’?” Chris asks.
“That’s all I saw over his collar.”
“And you told this to the detectives,” Chris says.
“Of course I did.”
“And about the gun?”
He already knows the answer. This guy couldn’t wait to share his knowledge about guns.
“Sure did.”
“So the two officers who responded,” Chris says, “they took a report—”
“When they came back,” the clerk says.
“Came back?”
“From chasing the guy,” the clerk says. “I mean, he had just made it out the door when they came. Took off running. They took off running after him. Tell you the truth, I thought they’d catch him.”
Yeah, so did they, Chris thinks.
So the gun that wound up in Champ’s hand (paw?) clearly came from the liquor-store holdup.
The question is how it ended up with Champ.
The other question is why Forsythe is lying that it was a knife.
Next shift Chris is walking out to his radio car when Sergeant Villa comes up to him.
And asks, “What the fuck were you doing over in Mid City?”
“Forsythe reached out to you?”
“Herrera did,” Villa says. “We were in Eastern together. He’s good people. So is Forsythe.”
“Sarge—”
“Whatever you’re about to tell me,” Villa says, “don’t. Whatever you were about to say, don’t say to anybody.”
Chris’s sergeant just told him to keep his mouth shut, so he keeps it shut.
“You’re a decent guy,” Villa says. “A good cop. Don’t be a dick.”
Great, Chris thinks as he gets into his car. My sergeant is telling me to do one thing, a lieutenant telling me to do another. Villa has the ability to make my life miserable at my present job. Lubesnick has the ability to see that I never get a new one.
But the fact is that he hasn’t really connected the dots about what happened with the gun, and he’s not likely to. The Robbery detectives aren’t offering any information and don’t seem to care. Herrera and Forsythe aren’t going to come forward, the suspect is in the wind, and Champ isn’t saying anything.
And the department would seem to prefer to let it lie.
So let it lie, Chris thinks.
Except he can’t seem to do that.
Lubesnick answers his eighth phone message. “Why are you bothering me, Monkey Man?”
“I need to see Robbery’s file on a liquor store hold-up.”
“Why?”
“You were wondering about a gun?” He tells Lubesnick the address.
A silence, and then Lubesnick says, “I’ll call you back.”
To Chris’s mild surprise, he does, about five minutes later. “That’s Detective Geary’s case. He’s a fine investigator.”
“I’m sure he is, sir, but . . .”
“Every word you say after ‘but’ means every word you said before it is bullshit,” Lubesnick says. “But . . . if you want to come in and have a look—”
“I think it would be better if I could see the file without Detective Geary and the others knowing about it,” Chris says.
“So you want me to screw my own team,” Lubesnick says.
“I want to answer your questions about the gun.”
Another silence, then, “You remember my receptionist, Ellen? Meet her at the Starbucks on Broadway and Kettner in an hour. Don’t keep her waiting.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me,” Lubesnick says. “Because if you fuck me on this, I’ll sink yo
ur career so deep that James Cameron couldn’t find it.”
Chris hustles to the Starbucks. Is there and waiting when Ellen comes in, sees him, and hands him a manila file folder.
“Sit there and read it,” she says.
“Then what?”
“Then give it back to me,” Ellen says. “You have ten minutes.”
She goes up to the counter and orders a latte. She doesn’t ask Chris if he wants anything.
It doesn’t take him ten minutes. The file is thin, and it says pretty much what Chris thought it would say. It quoted Forsythe’s report about arriving on the scene and the clerk saying he’d been held up at knifepoint. It said that the suspect had already fled, that Forsythe and Herrera had done an area search but didn’t see the suspect.
Detective Geary had no further leads.
So, Chris thinks as he hands the file back to Ellen, Geary conspired with the two Mid City cops to cover up what really happened. And Lubesnick wants me to answer questions he can’t ask his own people.
“You do know that this didn’t happen,” Ellen says.
“I do,” Chris says. Then, “Can I ask you a question?”
“You can ask.”
“Where was Geary before he came to Robbery?”
“Eastern, I think,” she says.
So the Eastern Division old boys’ network has circled the wagons to protect whatever Herrera did or didn’t do that night, Chris thinks. And the only shot that Chris has to find out what that was is to find a guy with H-O-L tattooed on his neck.
But how the hell, he wonders, am I going to do that?
Richard Holder, unconsciously happy to be back behind bars, is consciously happy that he has a visitor.
Until he finds out it’s a cop.
“What do you want?” he asks Chris.
“I want to help you.”
“That’s what cops always say,” Richard replies. “Help me how?”
“Who sold you the gun?” Chris asks. “The little .22 AMT.”
“Good gun,” Richard says.
“I guess if you’re robbing a pigeon,” Chris says. “Where did you get it?”
Richard shakes his head. “‘Snitches get stitches.’”
Chris has heard that one a hundred times and has a ready answer. Normally he would answer, Snitches get time off their sentences, but with a recidivist like Richard he goes with, “Snitches maybe get to choose where they do their stints.”
This does get Richard’s interest.
“You could do that?” he asks. “Could you get me Donovan?”
So Richard has buddies and maybe a boyfriend in Donovan, in which case going there would be like going home.
“Here’s what I could do,” Chris says. “I could write a cooperation memo to the sentencing judge with a recommendation that you do your time in Donovan. Or . . . I could write a different letter requesting that a repeat offender like you should be in the Q.”
San Quentin.
Chris sees the flash of anxiety go across Richard’s face.
“You get me Donovan,” Richard says, “I’ll give you the gun dealer.”
“No, I need it now.”
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“I gave you that vodka, didn’t I?” Chris asks. He senses he’s near closing, so he pushes a little. “Look, we both know you’re going to plead out, because you already confessed, we have the gun with your prints on it. You’re going, so you might as well go where you want.”
“I don’t know the guy’s name.”
“Give me a location and a description,” Chris says.
Vacant lot off Thirty-second, Richard tells him. Tall, thick Mexican guy in his thirties with a goatee, gang tats on his arms, wears a Raiders ball cap.
“The Raiders,” Richard says with a snort.
“Hey, the Chargers left.”
“Broke my heart.”
“Mine, too,” Chris says. “One other thing. In your travels through the system, did you ever run across a white guy, about five-six, with H-O-L tattooed on his neck?”
“You mean Hollis.”
Chris shrugs. “Maybe.”
“No, that’s him,” Richard says. “Hollis Bamburger. Sure, I knew him at Chino.”
“Is that b-e-r-g-e-r or b-u-r-g-e-r?” Chris asks.
“U, I think,” Richard says.
“Would Bamburger know your guy on Thirty-second?” Chris asks.
“Everyone knows the guy on Thirty-second,” Richard says.
Okaaaay, Chris thinks. Then he asks, “What else can you tell me about Hollis Bamburger?”
Richard laughs. “He’s an idiot.”
Low praise indeed, Chris thinks, from Richard “I Was Wearing a Mask” Holder.
You have to love these guys.
Chris takes his own car to the vacant lot off Thirty-second and sees a bunch of Latino gangbangers hanging there.
They see him, too.
Never mind he’s in plain clothes in his own car, they make him for a cop right away.
Practice, practice, practice.
They all eye-fuck him, especially a tall, thick guy with a goatee, Raiders cap and tats on his arms.
Chris gets out of the car, holds his hands up by his shoulders like, I don’t mean any harm, and walks up to the guy. “I just want to talk.”
“Talk about what?” the guy asks. “The weather? It sucks. The Padres? They suck. Your sister? She sucks my dick.”
“How about a guy with H-O-L tatted on his neck?”
It lands.
The guy has a smart mouth but dumb eyes. They give him right away.
And he knows it. “What about him?”
“Did you sell him a gun?” Chris asks. “A Colt Special?”
“Like I’m going to tell you that.”
“Look, I already have a line on him,” Chris says. “If I find him without your help, I make him give you up and I jam the baseball bat all the way up your ass, thick end first. But if I catch him with your help, maybe you slip my mind.”
“I’m no dedo,” the guy says.
No snitch.
Chris can see that the guy means it. The threat isn’t going to work.
“What’s your name?” Chris asks. When the guy balks, Chris says, “Come on, can’t we do this the easy way? Or do I find some sleazy excuse to bust you and then I get it anyway?”
“Fucking cops.”
“Right?”
“Montalbo. Ric.”
“I’m Chris Shea. Officer Christopher Shea.”
“You ain’t no detective?” Montalbo asks.
“Not yet,” Chris says. “So, Ric, can we do some business?”
Montalbo stares at him for a few seconds, then says, “Every morning I get up, I ask myself the same question. You know what it is?”
“I can’t wait to find out.”
“‘What can other people do for me?’” Montalbo says. “What can you do for me, Christopher?”
“I’m open to ideas.”
Actually, Montalbo has one.
It hits him like a bright, shining light.
A solution to all his problems.
“There’s this guy Lopez?” he says. “If you pop him in his car, he’ll have felony weight hierba in the trunk.”
“Do you owe him money,” Chris says, “or did he fuck your girlfriend?”
“Money,” Montalbo says. “My girlfriend is the happiest woman in America.”
“You have a location on Hollis Bamburger?”
“Oh, I got better than that.”
Chris takes down the info on Lopez.
Then Montalbo is looking at him funny. “Hey, I know you.”
“I don’t think so.”
Montalbo grins. “You’re the cop with the chimp.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes, you are,” Montalbo says. “You’re the monkey guy.”
Chris might be the monkey guy, but he’s not stupid. He isn’t going to commit the same error twice by making a bust out o
f his lane.
He calls a high-school friend—a senior when Chris was a freshman—he played baseball with who’s now in the Narcotics Division. “Could you use a bust?”
“Could I ever,” his friend says. “My boss is up my ass.”
Chris gives him the details on Victor Lopez, make of his car, plates, whereabouts—the whole nine. This would be Lopez’s fifth arrest, so he isn’t going to make an affordable bail, which is doubtless what Montalbo is counting on.
“Thanks, Chris,” the friend says. “Anything I can do for you?”
“Just call me when you’ve booked him.”
“You got it.”
Not yet, Chris thinks.
But I might be on my way.
Hollis gets a text.
I HAVE YOUR MERCH. MEET ME AT TEN TONIGHT.
He answers. GRATE. SAME PLACE?
It comes back. NO. ZOO PARKING LOT.
OK.
Montalbo turns to Chris. “Happy?”
“Not yet,” Chris says.
Chris is ambivalent.
He knows that what he should do is walk his ass into Robbery and turn this potential bust over to them.
A sting like this, involving a gun sale with armed career criminals normally demands real manpower—undercovers, backups, maybe even SWAT. It’s against every procedure to go ahead with this solo, without command’s permission and a tactical plan.
But there are problems with that approach.
For one, he’d have to admit that he’s been doing exactly what he was told not to do—work a Robbery case. He’s looked at files he wasn’t supposed to see, interviewed witnesses he wasn’t supposed to talk to, made an offer to a convict he wasn’t authorized to make (or, for that matter, even talk to the skell in the first place), then made a deal with a criminal to arrange the arrest of another criminal in exchange for setting up the original criminal for a sting that he shouldn’t be doing.
So there’s that.
The other thing is that he’d have to take it all to Detective Geary, who’s in on a cover-up that Chris is trying to uncover.
So that wouldn’t go well.
His other option would be to take it to Lieutenant Lubesnick, who could override Geary and bring in any manpower he wanted to do the sting on Hollis, but Chris isn’t sure the man wants any part of this unless or until it’s brought to him all tied up with a bow.
Another possibility is to keep it inside Central.
But then he’d have to go to Villa.
