by Don Winslow
Who wouldn’t be happy.
Or go over Villa’s head to Lieutenant Brown, who has already told him to stay off the radar and wouldn’t in any case be happy to see the whole Champ the Chimp fiasco brought back into the public eye.
The other choice, Chris thinks, is to stop it right here and let the whole thing die.
But Lubesnick doesn’t want me to do that.
And you don’t want you to do that either, he thinks.
You started this—you want to see it through.
Not to mention get an armed robber off the streets. Which is, after all, the job they pay you to do.
So at nine-forty-five that night, he rolls into a corner of the zoo parking lot.
Lee drives toward the zoo.
“Tell me,” he says.
“I already told you,” Hollis says.
“Then tell me again.”
Hollis sighs. “I give the Mexican the money. He gives me the gun. I point the gun at him and tell him to give the money back.”
It’s beautiful, Lee thinks, using the gun the gun dealer sold you to rob him of the money you paid him for the gun. Lee doesn’t know the meaning of the word “symmetry” (or, for that matter, “irony”) but unconsciously appreciates the concept.
Hollis isn’t as enthused. “You know this means we can’t go back to him for another gun.”
“It was a mistake to go back to him the second time,” Lee says.
And fuck him anyway, Lee thinks. Charging us four hundred dollars plus points on a piece of shit like an S&W 39. He’s robbing us, he deserves to get robbed back. It’s justice, is what it is.
Lee believes in justice.
And the Golden Rule.
They are simply doing unto the Mexican what he’s doing unto them.
But he can tell that Hollis is scared. For one thing, his foot is tapping like a rabbit on crank. For a second thing, Hollis is always scared.
“Don’t worry,” Lee says. “I’ve got your back.”
“I know.”
He doesn’t sound that sure.
“When haven’t I had your back?” Lee asks, again without the slightest awareness or sense of irony.
This is true, Hollis thinks.
On the yard if anyone except Lee tried to beat the shit out of me, Lee beat him up.
If anyone except Lee tried to make me his baby, Lee beat him up.
Lee has always had my back.
Now Lee is getting positively sanctimonious about it. Emotional to the point of tearing up. “You’re my brother. I love you. No matter what happens, I will always be there for you. If this motherfucker tries something with you, I’ll take care of it.”
How? Hollis wonders. Lee doesn’t have a gun.
He points that out to Lee.
Lee thinks about it for a second, frowns, then brightens and says, “I have a car, don’t I? This guy tries anything, you just step aside and I’ll run him over. Stop worrying. It’ll be fine.”
Hollis doesn’t stop worrying.
I mean, he’s not an idiot.
Chris slumps behind the driver’s wheel and watches Montalbo pull in to the parking lot in a white Toyota pickup.
Montalbo gets out and leans against the driver’s door.
A minute later a green Nissan Sentra with a loose front left fender pulls in to the parking lot about five yards away from Montalbo.
Chris watches Hollis Bamburger get out of the passenger seat and come around the car. Something Chris hadn’t figured on, a second guy driving, and he feels stupid because now he’ll have to bust two guys instead of one, and he has no backup.
It seems, he thinks, that Hollis and I are in a dumb-off.
Not too late to do nothing, he thinks.
Not too late to simply drive away and turn all this over to Robbery or just forget it.
Except he knows that Hollis and his associate are buying a gun for a reason, and that reason is probably another holdup, and this time someone might get hurt.
And you can’t drive away from that, Chris thinks.
You got yourself into this, now you have to see it through.
The only preaching his father gave him: Finish what you start.
So he eases his sidearm into his right hand and lays his left hand on the door handle, ready to go as he sees Hollis walk up to Montalbo.
Hollis hands Montalbo money.
Montalbo reaches back into his truck, comes out with a pistol and hands it to Hollis.
Hollis points the pistol in Montalbo’s face and says something.
Montalbo hits him in the jaw with a left hook.
Hollis goes down like he’s been poleaxed.
Chris gets out of the car, carries his gun at his side, holds his shield up and yells, “Police! Stop!”
Montalbo is apparently too resentful at Hollis’s attempted betrayal to listen. He grabs Hollis by the front of his shirt and bitch-slaps him back and forth.
Hollis screams, “Lee! Lee! Help!”
Lee hits the gas.
And races out of the parking lot.
Chris moves forward. “Police! Freeze!”
Montalbo drops Hollis, gets back into his truck and drives away.
Hollis is on all fours.
He looks up, sees Chris coming, staggers to his feet . . .
And does a Bamburger.
He raises the pistol.
Chris stops, points his own gun, and yells, “It’s not loaded, Hollis!”
Hollis looks puzzled as to how this guy knows his name. But if the guy knows his name, he must have other inside knowledge, like that the Mexican son of a bitch sold him an unloaded gun.
He drops it.
And, adrenaline being a wonderful thing . . .
Runs.
Sort of.
More like loops, a pigeon-toed lurch, because Montalbo caught him pretty good. So Hollis doesn’t get far before Chris jumps on top of him and drives him into the asphalt.
“Give me your hands,” Chris says.
Hollis gives up his hands along with the classic lifelong loser response. “I didn’t do nothin’!”
“You’re a felon who just bought an illegal firearm,” Chris says. “You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent, you have the right—”
“I know my rights,” Hollis says as Chris finishes cuffing him and hauls him to his feet. “I was entrapped.”
“You’re also under arrest for armed robbery,” Chris says.
“I didn’t do that either.”
Chris walks him back toward the car. “And Penal Code 2876.”
“What’s that?”
“Leaving a gun where a chimpanzee could get it.”
Hollis goes wide-eyed. “You’re that cop! The Monkey Man!”
“Fuckin’ A,” Chris says. He gets Hollis into the back of his car and asks, “Why did you do that, Hollis?”
Hollis clams up.
“Come on,” Chris says. “We’ve got you. The liquor-store clerk will ID you and the gun. And I’ve got you buying this piece of shit here. Either way you’re looking at a long stint. So why don’t you just tell me what happened that night?”
“Why should I?” Hollis asks.
Chris thinks about this a little, because there really is no reason for Hollis to tell him anything. Then he says, “Hollis, you’ve been around. You know the system. So let me ask you something. Is this a police car? Have I radioed this in? I could take you for a drive in the canyon, I could give you some backseat therapy. . . .”
Then he plays a hunch. “I could even drop you over to Mid City, bring Officers Forsythe and Herrera out to the car, see if they’d like to talk to you. Because right now nobody knows we have you.”
Hollis looks scared. “You’d do that?”
No, he wouldn’t.
Chris would never do any of those things. He just hopes that Hollis doesn’t know that. He says, “Or you can tell me what happened that night, and I’ll take you to my house in Central, where no one is mad at you.”
Hollis tells him the story.
“Okay, I robbed that place,” he says. “The cops came so fast I didn’t have time to get to the car. I just ran. One of the cops, the Spanish guy, got out of his car and chased me. I jumped the fence into the zoo, figuring he wouldn’t follow me, but he did. I was out of breath, so I pointed the gun at him.”
“And?”
“He stopped.” Hollis smirked. “He backed off. So I waited a few seconds and ran some more. I didn’t want the gun on me, so I threw it into that, what do you call it, enclosure.”
So that explains it, Chris thinks.
Herrera got scared, and his old Eastern buddies covered for him.
“Are you telling me the truth, Hollis?” Chris asks, although he already knows he is.
“I swear.”
“I need to know one more thing,” Chris says. “The driver. Who is he, and where do I get him?”
“I’m not telling you that.”
“What, out of loyalty?” Chris asks. “Like he just showed you, running away and leaving you in the lurch?”
“Lee,” Hollis says. “Lee Caswell.”
He gives Chris the name of the motel.
Lee is probably too smart to go back there, but Chris has the license plate. And now he has the story he can bring to Lubesnick. It might take some time to get it punched, but he has his ticket into Robbery.
He says, “That story you just told me? Don’t you tell that to anyone, ever again. You robbed that store with a knife, do you understand?”
“Sure,” Hollis says, happy to oblige. A knife gets him considerably less time than a gun.
Chris drives to Central Division and walks Hollis in.
“What you got, Shea?” the desk sergeant asks. “I didn’t think you were on duty tonight.”
“I’m not,” Chris says. “Can you keep an eye on this guy? I need to talk to Villa for a minute.”
He goes in to find his sergeant.
When she sees the caller ID, Carolyn thinks about letting the call go to voice mail.
Chris Shea has let more than the statutory three days go by without calling her, and she’s convinced herself that if he’s not interested, she’s not either.
But if he’s not interested, why is he calling?
She picks up and says professionally, “Dr. Voight.”
“Officer Shea.”
“Oh, hi, Chris.” In that tone like, Whatever would you be calling about? But I don’t really care. I’m a little surprised after five days. A lot to get done in three syllables, but she manages.
All good cops are connoisseurs of verbal nuance, and Chris is impressed. She hears that in his tone as he asks, “Do you like baseball?”
“I guess.” Perfect. Noncommittal, unenthusiastic, yet leaving the door open.
“My lieutenant had a couple of really good seats to the Padres tomorrow afternoon,” Chris says. “The Diamondbacks. I was wondering if you’d like to go.”
She can’t resist. “With your lieutenant?”
“No, with me,” he says quickly. “He gave them to me.”
“You mean, like a date?” she asks.
She’s going to make him do this right. The door might be unlocked, but he still has to ring the bell.
“Like a date,” Chris says. “I’m asking you out. Would you like to go to a baseball game with me?”
“I am off tomorrow afternoon.”
“Great,” Chris says. “So would you like to?”
She’d like to. In fact, she’s a little surprised how much she’d like to. “Should I meet you there?”
“No,” Chris says. “It’s a date. I’ll pick you up. If that’s all right.”
It is.
He picks her up the next afternoon, and he’s cute—dressed a little formal for a ball game. Khakis, a nice shirt, tucked in, and a Padres ball cap. She’s a little overdressed, too—an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse atop a pair of True Religion jeans she knows do nice things for her butt.
He’s prepaid for parking at the Omni Hotel, just a short walk from Petco Park, but goes over to a CVS first.
“You’re going to need sunblock for your shoulders,” he says.
“Did I dress wrong?” she asks.
“No, you look beautiful,” he says. “I just don’t want you to get sunburned.”
He buys a tube of SPF50, and they walk to the ballpark.
“Have you been here before?” Chris asks.
“No,” she says. Professor Asshole was always going on about baseball as a metaphor and owned a faux-vintage Brooklyn Dodgers jersey, and he used to talk about visiting every ballpark in the country, but they had never gone to an actual game.
The ballpark is beautiful.
The green of the field, so lovingly tended, is like an emerald. An old redbrick factory building, Western Metal Supply, makes up part of what even she knows is the left-field wall. Behind the stadium are high-rise office and condo buildings and, beyond them, San Diego Harbor.
“Wow,” she says.
He sees the enjoyment in her eyes and is charmed by it. “We need to get you a cap.”
“You think so?”
“Absolutely.”
He walks her to a vendor stand and picks out a blue cap with SD on it. She ties her hair into a ponytail, puts it on and even though there’s no mirror to look into, she knows she looks damn cute.
She can see it in his eyes.
He looks happy and proud.
“Our seats are along the first-base line,” he says with what she finds to be boyish enthusiasm. “Just a few rows up.”
“Great.”
They go to their seats: Section 109, Row 12.
“Wow,” she says, “these are great seats.”
“I’m usually up in the bleachers,” he says.
“Do you come here a lot?”
“Well, I work nights,” he says, “when most of the games are. But I come when I can.”
He pauses for a second and then says, “It might be my favorite place in the world.”
Carolyn feels that he’s told her something important, something intimate.
“Would you like a hot dog and a beer?” Chris asks.
“I would love a hot dog and a beer,” she says. Then she laughs at herself. “Not very ladylike, I’m afraid.”
“No, it’s great,” he says. “I’ll be right back. Mustard? Ketchup? Relish? Onions?”
“Hold the ketchup.”
She sits and takes in the field, the stadium filling with people, the general sense of . . . what is it? . . . gladness that pervades the place. Then Chris comes back clutching two plastic cups of foamy beer and two hot dogs.
“Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
She studied up last night and learned that the Padres are firmly in last place with little chance of escaping “the cellar,” but it doesn’t diminish Chris’s pleasure in being there.
“We should get that sunblock on you,” he says when they finish eating. Then he gets all shy and says, “I mean, you should, you know. . . .”
“No,” she says, turning so her back is toward him. “Would you mind?”
He’s so gentle, so . . . respectful . . . and at the same time so . . . thorough. She loves the feel of the lotion warming onto her skin, the feel of his hands. . . .
“Turn around,” he says. “Let me get your nose.”
She turns to him and tilts her chin up. He squeezes a drop of the lotion onto his index finger and carefully runs it down the bridge of her nose.
Then he gently smears it in. “There.”
There indeed, she thinks.
It might be the sexiest she’s ever felt.
Then he says, “Uh-oh.”
“What?”
He subtly points to three men with beers in their hands, edging their way to their seats just two rows below them.
“Who are they?” Carolyn asks.
“The first one is Lieutenant Lubesnick,” Chris says. “I hope he doesn’t see m
e.”
“Why?”
“I just really disappointed him on something,” Chris says.
“Oh.”
“You know the guy next to him.”
“I do?” She looks at the big, florid, middle-aged guy with curly brown hair.
“Sure, his face is on TV all the time,” Chris says. “It’ll probably be up on the screen at some time today. That’s Duke Kasmajian, the bail-bonds king. ‘Call the Duke’?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I don’t know the other guy.”
The other guy turns around, and Carolyn says, “I do. That’s Professor Carey. I had a class from him. Eighteenth-century English lit.”
“How did you do?”
“Aced it, of course.”
Carey spots her, recognizes her, and waves.
Kasmajian and Lubesnick look up to see who he’s waving at.
The lieutenant sees Chris, frowns and turns his back.
Carolyn sees the look on Chris’s face.
He’s devastated.
Which makes it all the more awkward when Chris hits the men’s room to offload the beer and Lieutenant Lubesnick is standing there doing the same thing.
Chris doesn’t know what to do.
Say something?
Don’t say something?
Nod?
Don’t nod.
Chris thinks that he should acknowledge the man somehow.
Or does he?
Lubesnick breaks the ice, so to speak. “So, Monkey Man, I talked to your lieutenant about you.”
Shit, Chris thinks. He’d like nothing better than to get out of there, but he’s in midstream (so to speak). So he says, “Oh.”
“He’s agreed, starting next month, to loan you to me for sixty days.” Lubesnick shakes, zips up and walks over to wash his hands. “Call it a tryout. You do okay, and I think you will, we’ll make it permanent. You good with that?”
Chris is shocked. “Yes. I mean, yes, sir.”
“Pay attention to what you’re doing there.” Lubesnick cranks down a paper towel and wipes his hands. “You did the right thing, kid. You could have stepped on a brother officer to get a leg up, and you didn’t. That showed me something. You start next week. Buy a sport coat and a tie.”
He tosses the towel into the trash and walks out.
It was a test, Chris thinks.
Lubesnick was testing me to see what I’d do.
And I passed.
Top of the seventh, Padres up 4–2. Craig Stammen taking the mound.
