Demolition Angel

by Robert Crais

  Leyton found it within himself to nod. They had weathered that pounding three years ago, and both of them knew that the LAPD Personnel Unit would never allow it.

  “You were always a tough girl. But you were lucky, too.”

  “Sure. I shit luck in the morning.”

  “You shouldn’t curse like that, Carol. It’s not attractive.”

  “You’re right, Boss. I’ll straighten out as soon as I kick the smokes.”

  She smiled at him, and Leyton smiled back, because they both knew that she would do neither.

  Starkey watched him walk away to join the press conference, then noticed Marzik and Santos talking to a uniformed sergeant amid a group of people outside one of the apartment buildings across the street. Marzik was looking over at her, but Starkey walked around to the front of the Suburban and examined it. The Suburban had faced the blast at about sixty-five yards away. The telex cables and security line that Riggio had pulled out with him still trailed from the rear of the Suburban to Riggio’s armored suit, tangled now from the explosion.

  The Suburban appeared undamaged, but on closer inspection she saw that the front right headlight was cracked. She squatted to look more closely. A piece of black metal shaped like the letter E was wedged in the glass. Starkey did not touch it. She stared until she recognized that it was part of a metal buckle from the straps that had held Riggio’s armor suit. She sighed deep and long, then stood and looked back at his body.

  The coroner’s people were placing him into a body bag. John Chen had outlined the body’s location on the tarmac with white chalk and now stood back, watching with an expression of profound disinterest.

  Starkey wiped her palms on her hips and forced herself to take deep breaths, stretching her ribs and her lungs. Doing this hurt because of the scars. Marzik, still across the street, was waving. Santos looked over, maybe wondering why Starkey was just standing there.

  Starkey waved back, the wave saying that she would join them in a moment.

  The mall was a small strip of discount clothing shops, a used-book store, a dentist who advertised “family prices” in Spanish, and a Cuban restaurant, all of which had been evacuated before Riggio approached the bomb.

  Starkey forced herself toward the restaurant, moving on legs that were suddenly weak, as if she’d found herself on a tightrope and the only way off was that singular door. Marzik was forgotten. Charlie Riggio was forgotten. Starkey felt nothing but her own hammering heart; and knew that if she lost control of it now, and of herself, she would certainly fall to her death.

  When Starkey stepped into the restaurant, she began to shake with a rage beyond all hope of control. She had to grip the counter to keep her feet. If Leyton or Kelso walked in now, her career would be finished. Kelso would order her in to the bank for sure, she would be forced to retire with the medical, and all that would be left of Carol Starkey’s life would be fear, and emptiness.

  Starkey clawed open her purse for the silver flask, feeling the gin cut into her throat in the same moment she cursed her own weakness, and felt ashamed. She breathed deep, refusing to sit because she knew she would not be able to rise. She took a second long pull on the flask, and slowly the shaking subsided.

  Starkey fought down the memories and the fear, telling herself she was only doing what she needed to do and that everything would be all right. She was too tough for it. She would beat it. She would win.

  After a while, she had herself together.

  Starkey put away the flask, sprayed her mouth with Binaca, then went back out to the crime scene.

  She was always a tough girl.

  Starkey found the two Adam car officers, who gave her the log time of their original dispatch call. She used her cell phone to call the day manager at Emergency Services, identified herself, provided an approximate time, and requested a tape of the call as well as an address of origin. What most people didn’t know was that all calls to 911 were automatically taped and recorded with the originating phone number and that phone number’s address. It had to be this way because people in an emergency situation, especially when threatened or dying, couldn’t be expected to provide their location. So the system took that into account and provided the address for them.

  Starkey left her office number, and asked the manager to provide the information as quickly as she had it.

  When Starkey was finished with Emergency Services, she walked across to the apartment buildings where Marzik and Santos were questioning the few residents who had been let back into the area. They saw her coming, and walked out to meet her by the street.

  Jorge Santos was a short man with a quizzical expression who always looked as if he was trying to remember something that he’d forgotten. His name was pronounced “whore-hey,” which had earned him the dubious nickname of Hooker. Beth Marzik was divorced, with two kids who stayed with her mother when she was on the job. She sold Amway products for the extra money, but she pushed it so hard that half the detectives at Spring Street would duck when they saw her approaching.

  Starkey said, “Good news. Leyton says the call-out was responding to a 911.”

  Marzik smirked.

  “This good citizen happen to leave a name?”

  “I already put in a call to Emergency Services. They’ll run the tapes and have something for us as soon as they can.”

  Marzik nudged Santos.

  “Bet you a dollar to a blow job there’s no name.”

  Santos darkened. He was a religious man, married with four children, and hated it when she talked like that.

  Starkey interrupted her.

  “I’ve gotta get the uniforms set up for the sweep. Dick says the Rampart detectives offered to help with the door-to-door.”

  Marzik frowned as if she didn’t like that idea.

  “Well, we’re not going to get to most of these people tonight. What I’m hearing is that a lot of the people who were evacuated went to relatives or friends after the damned thing blew.”

  “You’re getting a list of residents from the managers, right?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  Marzik looked suspicious. Her attitude made Starkey tired.

  “Get the managers to pull the rental apps, too. They should be on file. Most of the rental applications I used to fill out wanted the name of a relative or somebody to vouch for you. That’s probably where those people went.”

  “Shit, that’ll take forever. I used to have a date tonight.”

  Santos’s face grew longer than ever.

  “I’ll do it, Carol.”

  Starkey glanced toward the Dumpster, where Chen was now picking at something on the ground. She gestured back toward the apartment buildings behind them.

  “Look, Beth, I’m not saying do everybody on the goddamned block. Just ask if they saw something. Ask if they’re the one who called 911. If they say they didn’t see anything, tell’m to think about it and we’ll get back to them in the next few days.”

  Marzik still wasn’t happy, but Starkey didn’t give a damn.

  She went back across the street to the Dumpster, leaving Marzik and Santos with the apartments. Chen was examining the wall behind the Dumpster for bomb fragments. Out in the parking lot, two of the Bomb Squad technicians were adjusting radial metal detectors that they would use when they walked the lawns out front of the surrounding apartment buildings. Two more off-duty bomb techs had arrived, and pretty soon everyone would be standing around with their thumbs up their asses, waiting for her to tell them what to do.

  Starkey ignored all of them and went to the crater. It was about three feet across and one foot deep, the black tarmac scorched white by the heat. Starkey wanted to place her hand on the surface, but didn’t because the explosive residue might be toxic.

  She considered the chalk outline where Riggio’s body had fallen, then paced it off. Almost forty paces. The energy to kick him this far must have been incredible.

  Starkey impulsively stepped into Riggio’s outline, standing exactly where his b
ody had fallen, and gazed back at the crater.

  She imagined a slow-motion flash that stretched through three years. She saw her own death as if it had been filmed and later shown to her on instant replay. Her shrink, Dana, had called these “manufactured memories.” She had taken the facts as they had later been presented to her, imagined the rest, then saw the events as if she remembered them. Dana believed that this was her mind’s way of trying to deal with what had happened, her mind’s way of removing her from the actual event by letting her step outside the moment, her mind’s way of giving the evil a face so that it could be dealt with.

  Starkey sucked deep on the cigarette, then blew smoke angrily at the ground. If this was her mind’s way of making peace with what happened, it was doing a damned shitty job.

  She went back across the street to find Marzik.

  “Beth? I got another idea. Try to locate the people who own all these shops and see if anyone was threatened, or owed money, or whatever.”

  Marzik nodded, still squinting at her.

  “Carol, what is that?”

  “What is what?”

  Marzik stepped closer and sniffed.

  “Is that Binaca?”

  Starkey glared at Marzik, then went back across the street and spent the rest of the evening helping the search team look for pieces of the bomb.

  In the dream, she dies.

  She opens her eyes on the hard-packed trailer-park earth as the paramedics work over her, their latex hands red with blood. The hum in her ears makes her think of a Mixmaster set to a slow speed. Above her, the thin branches of winter gum trees overlap in a delicate lace still swaying from the pressure wave. A paramedic pushes on her chest, trying to restart her heart. Another inserts a long needle. Cold silver paddles press to her flesh.

  A thousand miles beyond the hum, a voice yells, “Clear!” Her body lurches from the jolt of current.

  Starkey finds the strength to say his name.

  “Sugar?”

  She is never certain if she says his name or only thinks that she says it.

  Her head lolls, and she sees him. David “Sugar” Boudreaux, a Cajun long out of Louisiana but still with the soft French accent that she finds so sexy. Her sergeant-supervisor. Her secret lover. The man to whom she’s given her heart.

  “Sugar?”

  The faraway voices shout. “No pulse!” “Clear!” The horrible electric spasm.

  She reaches toward Sugar, but he is too far away. It is not fair that he is so far. Two hearts that beat as one should not be so far apart. The distance saddens her.

  “Shug?”

  Two hearts that no longer beat.

  The paramedics working on Sugar step away. He is gone.

  Her body jolts again, but it does no good, and she is at peace with it.

  She closes her eyes, and feels herself rise through the branches into the sky, and all she knows is relief.

  Starkey woke from the dream just after three that morning, knowing that sleep was beyond her. She lit a cigarette, then lay in the dark, smoking. She had finished at the crime scene just before midnight, but didn’t get home until almost one. There, she showered, ate scrambled eggs, then drank a tumbler of Bombay Sapphire gin to knock herself out. Yet here she was, wide awake two hours later.

  After another twenty minutes of blowing smoke at the ceiling, she got out of bed, then went through the house, turning on every light.

  The bomb that took Starkey had been a package bomb delivered by a meth dealer to murder the family of an informant. It had been placed behind heavy bushes on the side of the informant’s double-wide, which meant Sugar and Starkey couldn’t use the robot to wheel in the X-ray or the de-armer. It was a dirty bomb, made of a paint can packed with smokeless powder and roofing tacks. Whoever had made the bomb was a mean sonofabitch who wanted to make sure he got the informant’s three children.

  Because of the bushes, Starkey and Sugar both had to work the bomb, Starkey holding aside the brush so that Sugar could get close with the Real Time. When two uniformed patrol officers had called in the suspicious package, they had reported that the package was ticking. It was such a cliché that Starkey and Sugar had burst out laughing, though they weren’t laughing now because the package had stopped ticking. The Real Time showed them that the timer had malfunctioned; the builder had used a hand-wound alarm clock as his timing device, but for some inexplicable reason, the minute hand had frozen at one minute before reaching the lead that would detonate the bomb. It had just stopped.

  Sugar made a joke of it.

  “Guess he forgot to wind the damned thing.”

  She was grinning at his joke when the earthquake struck. An event every bomb tech working in Southern California feared. It would later be reported as 3.2 on the Richter scale, hardly noticeable to the average Angeleno, but the minute hand released, contact was made, and the bomb went off.

  The old techs had always told Starkey that the suit would not save her from the frag, and they were right. Sugar saved her. He leaned in front of her just as the bomb went off, so his body caught most of the tacks. But the Real Time was blown out of his hands, and that’s what got her. Two heavy, jagged pieces sliced through the suit, ripped along her right side, and dug a gaping furrow through her right breast. Sugar was knocked back into her, microseconds behind the Real Time. The force of him impacting into her felt as if she had been kicked by God. The shock was so enormous that her heart stopped.

  For two minutes and forty seconds, Carol Starkey was dead.

  Two teams of emergency medical personnel rushed forward even as pieces of the trailer and torn azalea bushes fell around them. The team that reached Starkey found her without a pulse, peeled away her suit, and injected epinephrine directly into her heart as they administered CPR. They worked for almost three minutes around the blood and gore that had been her chest, and finally—heroically—restarted her heart.

  Her heart had started again; Dave “Sugar” Boudreaux’s had not.

  Starkey sat at her dinette table, thinking about the dream, and Sugar, and smoking more cigarettes. Only three years, and the memories of Sugar were fading. It was harder to see his face, and harder still to hear his soft Cajun accent. More often than not, now, she returned to their pictures to refresh her memories, and hated herself for having to do that. As if she was betraying him by forgetting. As if the permanence she had once felt about their passion and love had all been a lie told by someone else to a woman who no longer lived.

  Everything had changed.

  Starkey had started drinking almost as soon as she got out of the hospital. One of her shrinks—she thought it was number two—had said that her issue was survivor’s guilt. Guilt that her heart had started, and Sugar’s had not; guilt that she had lived, and he had not; guilt that, down deep, down in the center of herself where our secret creatures live, she was thankful that she had lived, even at the price of Sugar’s life. Starkey had walked out of the therapist’s office that day and never went back. She had gone to a cop bar called the Shortstop, and drank until two Wilshire Division robbery detectives carried her out of the place.

  Everything had changed.

  Starkey pulled away from people. She grew cold. She protected herself with sarcasm and distance and the single-minded pursuit of her job until the job was all that she had. Another shrink—she thought it was number three—suggested that she had traded one armored suit for another, then asked if she thought she would ever be able to take it off.

  Starkey did not return to answer.

  Tired of thinking, Starkey finished her cigarette, then returned to her bedroom to shower. She pulled off her T-shirt and looked at herself with an absence of feeling.

  The right half of her abdomen from her breast to her hip was rilled and cratered from the sixteen bits of metal that had punched into her. Two long furrows roped along her side following her lower ribs. Once tanned a walnut brown, her skin was now as white as a table plate because Starkey hadn’t worn a bathing suit since it hap
pened.

  The worst of it was her breast. A two-inch piece of the Real Time had impacted on the front of her right breast just beneath the nipple, gouging out a furrow of tissue as it followed the line of her ribs before exiting her back. It had laid her open as if a river valley had been carved in her chest, and that is the way it healed. Her doctors had discussed removing the breast, but decided to save it. They had, but even after the reconstruction, it looked like a misshapen avocado. Her doctors had told her that further cosmetic surgeries could, in time, improve her appearance, but after four operations, Starkey had decided that enough was enough.

  She had not been with another man since Sugar had left her bed that morning.

  Starkey showered, dressed for the day, then called her office and found two messages.

  “It’s me, Starkey, John Chen. I got a pretty good swab from the blast crater. I’ll set it up in the cooker, but that means I won’t be out of here until after three. We should have the chrom around nine. Gimme a call. You owe me.”

  The Emergency Services manager had left the second message, saying that she’d duped the tape of the 911 call reporting the suspicious device.

  “I left the tape at the security desk, so you can pick it up anytime you want. The call was placed from a pay phone on Sunset Boulevard at one-fourteen, that would be yesterday afternoon. I’ve got a street address here.”

  Starkey copied the information into a spiral casebook, then made a cup of instant coffee. She swallowed two Tagamet, then lit a cigarette before letting herself out into the sultry night air.

  It was not quite five, and the world was quiet. A kid in a beat-up red hatchback was delivering the L.A. Times, weaving from side to side in the street as he tossed out the papers. An Alta-Dena dairy truck rumbled past.

  Starkey decided to drive back to Silver Lake and walk the blast site again. It was better than listening to the silence in her still-beating heart.

  Starkey parked in front of the Cuban restaurant next to a Rampart radio car watching over the scene. The mall’s parking lot was otherwise deserted, except for three civilian vehicles that she remembered from the night before.