Feigning lighthearted curiosity, Aaron said, “And did you?”
“Of course,” she said, and he could see her smile but didn’t know how to interpret it. “Best affair I’ve had since my divorce.”
And then she glanced sideways at him, smiling even more with that dusky, sloe-eyed way of hers, and he didn’t know if she was kidding him or not. And she didn’t appear to know about the stab he felt in his heart every time she mentioned another man to him, or how it could depress him for hours or even days.
The call that 6-X-66 received seemed benign enough: the ubiquitous “family dispute.” It was at a medium-size shopping center with a large supermarket as its anchor. The premier mall within the boundaries of Hollywood Division was certainly the Hollywood and Highland mall, where the Kodak Centre loomed proudly. This particular shopping center was frequented by many of the people who spoke one of the more than two hundred foreign languages of Los Angeles, and two of them were speaking Spanish heatedly when Aaron and Sheila arrived.
They were a young Latino couple, both natives of Colombia, and there seemed no cause for alarm, nothing to make the cops more cautious than usual. After they saw police, the pair stopped yelling at each other, and the pregnant twenty-year-old mother began fussing with her thirteen-month-old baby in a stroller.
The police never did find out who placed the call and only learned later that it was a female voice speaking Spanish-accented English that had said, “Violence might happen.”
Sheila was first out of the car, and while Aaron was emerging, she approached the young couple, who were standing quietly, awaiting their approach. As was her custom, Sheila spoke in English until she was sure that the citizens did not understand her, before she switched to Spanish.
“Good afternoon,” she said. “We’ve received a call that there’s a problem here.”
The well-groomed and neatly dressed young man, who turned out to be the woman’s occasional boyfriend, had no tatts, nothing that might suggest gang affiliation. The cops weren’t sensing a threat until he reached down and grabbed a semiautomatic handgun concealed under a bag of disposable diapers. He pointed it at the baby.
“Get back or I will kill her!” he said in slightly accented English as the baby began screaming for her mother, who began screaming even louder.
Sheila froze, as did Aaron, who was approaching the couple from an angle to their right.
“Easy, sir!” Sheila said. “Easy! Just take it easy!”
Aaron reached for the nine on his belt, until the young Colombian yelled, “Touch it and I will shoot!”
Nobody moved then, and while the mother of the baby screamed, “Noooooooo, Arturo!” he kept the gun aimed at the baby’s head and pushed the stroller toward the door of the supermarket, all the time turning back toward the cops as he walked forward.
Aaron was the first to grab his rover and make the call for assistance. Like all LAPD cops, he was instinctively reluctant to broadcast an “officer needs help” call-the equivalent of a mayday, and the most desperate call in the street cop’s repertoire-especially since he was not convinced that the gun was real. The code of machismo said that a good cop should be able to take care of business without calling for code 3 backups, which would bring police from everywhere and mark the caller as a pantywaist if the help call turned out to be unnecessary. And nothing was worse for an LAPD male copper than to be labeled a pantywaist.
So he said, “Officers need assistance, man with a gun!” and stated the location.
Sheila Montez, who was not burdened by male machismo, and who was utterly horrified by the threat to the baby whether or not the suspicious-looking gun was real, cried, “Bullshit on assistance!” She grabbed her rover and said, “Six-X-ray-Sixty-six. Officers need help!”
Before they heard the siren of the assigned police unit speeding their way, they were both walking along at a medium pace, deployed wide apart, trailing the Colombian, who was still pushing the crying baby toward the supermarket door without taking his eyes from the cops.
“Stay here and wait for the officers!” Sheila said to the hysterical mother, who was beside her, wailing.
“Look, you’re not in really serious trouble yet!” Aaron yelled to the Colombian. “Put the gun on the ground and let’s talk!”
“So you can shoot me?” the young man shouted.
“Nobody wants to shoot you,” Sheila said, approaching closer. “Put the gun down and let’s talk.”
Without breaking stride until he was only thirty feet from the glass doors of the supermarket, the young man said, “I am not going back to Colombia. They will kill me if I go back. I prefer to die here.”
“Who’s gonna kill you?” Aaron asked.
“There are very bad people in my country who hate me,” the man said. “And they will kill me.”
They had to raise their voices again in order to be heard over louder wails from the baby. The young man was ten feet from the entrance doors to the supermarket when the car that had been assigned the help call roared into the parking lot, siren yowling.
“You don’t wanna hurt that baby,” Sheila said. “Is she your baby?”
“No,” the Colombian said. “She is yours.” And abruptly he stopped and shoved the stroller directly at Sheila, who chased it and caught it just before it tipped over. The young man ran into the supermarket before Aaron’s pistol was clear of the holster.
Within ten minutes, Sergeant Hermann, Sergeant Murillo, and two supervisors from Watch 3 had arrived and got on the air to call a tactical alert. In another seven minutes, there were twenty-two officers, some from neighboring divisions as well as a pair of motor cops surrounding the supermarket, with SWAT on the way. And supermarket shoppers, who had not seen the action taking place outside the market, were baffled when police kept arriving and blocking the exit doors, refusing to let them leave.
Sergeant Hermann’s car was parked near one of the entrances to the market, and she got on the PA to address all officers, saying, “The store stays locked down until patrons can be escorted outside!”
Another five minutes passed as more officers arrived, while angry and frustrated customers worked at triggering the opening device on the glass doors, yelling to the cops outside that they wanted to go home.
When Sergeant Hermann addressed the swell of customers at the door, saying, “Is there a man with a gun inside the store? Are you being threatened?” a dozen voices, both male and female, began shouting in several languages.
Those speaking English were yelling things like “There’s no gunman in here!” and “Let us outta here!” and “My kids are getting scared!” and even “My goddamn ice cream’s melting, you assholes!”
While this was going on, Sergeant Murillo and Sheila Montez were interviewing the mother of the baby in Spanish. After each exchange, Sheila would translate bits and pieces into English for Sergeant Hermann and Aaron Sloane.
Finally, Sheila said, “She’s been dating the guy occasionally for six months. She knows him as Arturo Echeverría. He told her he’s hunted by members of a drug cartel and has to carry a gun for protection, but she claims she didn’t know it was under the diaper bag. He doesn’t work at any job as far as she knows, and he doesn’t have friends. He told her he lives alone in an apartment in Little Armenia, and that’s all she knows about the guy.”
Sergeant Hermann said, “Okay, let’s let the women and kids out, escorted by officers. The men stay inside for now until SWAT arrives. Sloane and Montez, you two stay by each exit door. You’re the only ones who know what he looks like.”
The plan sounded reasonable, especially since nobody in the store was aware that the police were searching for an armed and desperate man in their midst. Both Sheila Montez and Mindy Ling got on the PA, Sheila speaking Spanish and Mindy speaking Mandarin, and told the patrons that women and children would be escorted outside ten at a time, questioned very briefly, and released.
One of the problems was that in Hollywood (called Babelwood by the co
ps who worked there) the police had no officers to make the same announcement in Arabic, Cambodian, Farsi, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Armenian, Thai, or any of the other languages spoken by the customers inside the supermarket at that moment.
Officers escorted outside the first ten women and kids, and none of those who understood their questions had seen a man with a gun. Then another ten were escorted out with the same result. Then all hell broke loose.
The man known as Arturo Echeverría, who had been very busy inside that store scurrying around looking for a way out, eventually finding himself in the storage area behind the meat counters, had decided that it was time to act. And for the first time, Aaron and Sheila and the other cops at the scene learned that the gun was indeed a real one.
Arturo Echeverría stood behind the mobs of customers at the west exit door, who were hollering and complaining, and he began firing! The customers heard five explosions behind them that shattered glass displays and ricocheted off concrete floors, reverberating from one side of the checkout counters to the other.
And then, pandemonium! Some customers crouched or hit the floor, women with children shielded their young ones with their bodies, and the masses decided, the hell with Sergeant Hermann’s reasonable plan. They charged both exit doors. People screamed, people fell, people were trampled. And the cops stood helplessly while men, women, and children, shouting in languages the cops could not understand, stampeded from the store, shoving officers back as they ran from the gunfire. Aaron Sloane and Sheila Montez tried to visually examine each young man who ran from the supermarket, but it was hopeless.
Many of the men who fled were store employees in white shirts and dark trousers, some wearing aprons and badges, some black baseball caps with the store’s logo on the front. And some others wore meat-stained white aprons as well as the black baseball caps. There were half a dozen of them, as panicked as everyone else, and, like everyone else, they scattered when they got past the first line of cops, running far enough to stop and gather in groups or to duck behind cars in the parking lot or simply to say in Spanish or Tagolog, “Screw this. I don’t get paid to get shot.” These last few raced for their cars in the parking lot.
As it turned out, one of those who fled toward the cars was Arturo Echeverría, dressed as a butcher in a long white coat, a meat-stained apron, and a black baseball cap with the store’s logo on the front. He ran to a car, following behind one of the store’s butchers, and as soon as the butcher unlocked his car, Arturo Echeverría said to him, “I need a ride, compadre.”
When the butcher looked at him and said, “I ain’t never seen you in the store before,” Arturo Echeverría drew the gun from under his apron and said, “You see me now. Vámonos. And do not cry out.”
The terrified butcher drove away with Arturo Echeverría behind him on the floor of the car, promising not to kill the man if he obeyed orders. The butcher was released at the corner of Beverly Boulevard and Vermont Avenue and was not robbed of his money or cell phone. The stolen car was later found in a parking lot near LAX, where the hunted man had no doubt flown out of Los Angeles and possibly the country.
Among the many officers who had responded to the help call that afternoon were Flotsam and Jetsam, who aided in the search of the building after the stampede of customers and market employees had ended. It was determined that nobody was hiding in the store and that none of the customers had been hit by gunfire. Some clothing belonging to the night-shift butchers was missing from a locker, but that was all. And after paramedics had treated several with minor injuries incurred in the stampede, the surfer cops were standing by their car, chatting with Hollywood Nate and Dana Vaughn, who had also responded to the help call.
Flotsam said to them, “You know, that was, like, a way cooleo escape. That dude? He deserved his freedom.”
Sergeant Miriam Hermann, who was sweating and tired and feeling her age, was enormously frustrated that the man with a gun had escaped while she was in charge of the tac alert. And she happened to be walking past the unsuspecting surfer cops at that precise moment.
Sergeant Hermann froze in her tracks. “What… did… you… say? Repeat that.”
Caught unawares, Flotsam turned. “Oh, hi, Sarge! I was only, like… I was sorta… I was just… just…”
“He was just leaving, Sarge,” Jetsam said, grabbing his partner by the arm as they scurried to their black-and-white.
Watching the events at the shopping center along with hundreds of other spectators was Malcolm Rojas, who’d recently finished his workday at the home improvement center warehouse. He found it exciting when the SWAT team showed up with all their equipment. This was like reality TV, and he got so involved in the show that he almost forgot his meeting coming up with Bernie Graham. Malcolm had decided for sure that either he made some money with Bernie Graham tonight or he was through letting the man string him along. Part of him didn’t care one way or the other because part of him wanted to quell the feelings that had been growing inside him all day, feelings that scared and excited him and demanded release.
Something that he’d been realizing more and more was that the stalking of those women was more exciting than the time he had them in his power. He always thought that the sex was what he wanted, but now he wasn’t so sure. He hadn’t gotten any sex yet, because the bitches were so… so… he didn’t know what they were, other than clever and tricky. Stalking them was way better than jerking off, that was for sure. He loved the stalking part. But he knew he’d have to have sex with one of them sooner or later. Just so he’d know. But what would he know? It was all so confusing and frustrating that the rage began to stir within him.
“When was the last time you had a square job?” Tristan wanted to know as he drove to the duplex/office for their meeting.
“I was a hod carrier in El Monte for a couple months,” Jerzy said after he opened his eyes to see if they were getting close to the east Hollywood neighborhood.
“When was that?”
“I don’t know. Two, three, years ago. What the fuck difference does it make?”
“I worked at a Hollywood dance studio for almost three years,” Tristan said. “I did the books and made all the appointments and I was learnin’ to become an instructor. I even got all kinds of promises about becomin’ a partner in the business. And then one day the boss and his wife were gone and the dance studio was taken over by the landlord, and all the promises were like the shit your momma told you when you were little. About how good life was gonna be. I ain’t had a square job since.”
Jerzy smirked and said, “Yeah, well, you can take your half of the money we’re gonna make and go home to New Orleans and show your momma what a success her Creole boy is.”
“My momma ain’t in New Orleans,” Tristan said. “And I ain’t no Creole.”
“And you ain’t never been to college like you said, right?”
“Right,” Tristan said.
“I figgered as much,” Jerzy said. “Jist another refugee from Watts. Come to Hollywood after the fuckin’ greaseballs took over your ghetto.”
“I’m only a thief like you,” Tristan said and then added, “but when we pull off this gag, I’m gettin’ outta the game so I don’t end up like you.”
“You can never be like me,” Jerzy said. “I’m a white man.”
Tristan and Jerzy rode in silence and arrived at the duplex thirty minutes before their boss was due to arrive. They tried to slip the front door lock with a credit card but were unsuccessful. Then they walked along the driveway that led to rear carports and tried to open the bedroom window, finding that it was an old aluminum slider and could be pried open with little trouble.
Tristan got a screwdriver from the trunk of his car and gave it to Jerzy, who first pried off the screen with his buck knife and then used the screwdriver to pop open the slider. Then he boosted Tristan up and through the window, and Tristan opened the door for him. They brought in the six-pack of beer that Jerzy had insisted they buy on this
hot summer day and were having a brew when a black-and-white, fresh from the siege at the supermarket, parked on the street in front.
Tristan peeked out the window and saw two cops, a tall one and another one, both with streaky blond hair, walking toward the apartment, as though they were expecting trouble.
“Cops!” Tristan said to Jerzy. “Get rid of the buck knife! Sit on the kitchen chair and stay cool, fool!”
Jerzy said, “Fuck! We can’t get away from them! They’re everywhere!” And he shoved the knife inside his boot under the leg of his Levi’s jeans as Tristan opened the door before the cops reached the front step.
“Hi, Officers,” Tristan said with a smile.
Both cops looked wary, and Flotsam said, “We got a call from a neighbor that somebody climbed in the window here. Was it you?”
“Sure was,” Tristan said brightly. “We lost our key. Come on in. We appreciate that you’re watchin’ out for us.”
Flotsam entered with Jetsam following behind. Tristan noticed that each cop had a hand very close to his pistol, and he said, “This here is my friend Jerzy. He boosted me in the window. Our friend Mr. Kessler is expectin’ us here.”
“Wait a minute,” Jetsam said. “You mean you don’t live here?”
“Take a look around,” Tristan said. “Nobody lives here. There’s a fridge in the kitchen and a table and two chairs and a fleabag chair in the livin’ room, but that’s it. There ain’t no more.”
The cops moved their hands away from their pistols but still were looking very cautiously at both men. Jetsam said, “All we know is you two climbed in the window.”
“Him,” Jerzy said. “My ass is too big to climb in windows.”
“Okay,” Jetsam said, “but until we figure out what’s going on, we’d like to make sure you’re not burglars.” Then he said to Jerzy, “Stand up.”
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