Cold Hit

by Stephen J. Cannell

  “I’m still not buying this,” I said. “A foreign intelligence agent with a record of hacking Pentagon data gets a visa from our State Department to come over and hack embassy computers? Not in the post nine-eleven world I live in.”

  “You’re overcookin’ the grits here, Joe Bob. Just accept what we’re tellin’ ya and move along,” Emdee said.

  “You guys haven’t heard the last of me. See ya up on six.”

  I started to leave, but Emdee grabbed my arm.

  “He was over here off the books. When they can’t get a visa, the Israelis have been known to drop one a these hog callers in a rubber boat from a mother ship three or four miles offshore and run the man in. Not just the Mossad. Everybody does it. Any given day we got enough unidentified illegal spooks in this town to haunt a house. Idea is, they only stay here long enough to do one quick job, then it’s back to the beach and adios.”

  “INS never knows they were here,” Broadway said. “Only this time, looks like Davide didn’t move quite fast enough and somebody skagged him. Whoever did that piece a work knew it was gonna stir up trouble, so they dressed Davide in homeless clothes and tried to ditch him in your Fingertip case.”

  “End of story,” Emdee said firmly, and glanced at his partner. Neither of them wanted this to progress any further.

  I didn’t mention that we had held back the symbol carved on the chest and that there was no way the espionage community could have dumped Andrazack into our serial murder without knowing about that. Instead, I asked, “If Andrazack’s dead, why are you guys still involved?”

  They looked at each other, and I could see they were through with me.

  “I guess you can just take it up with Great White Mike then,” I said.

  “Tell you what,” Broadway replied. “Why don’t you leave all these pictures with us? We’ll run it past Lieutenant Cubio and if he signs off on you, we’ll give you a call.” Lt. Armando Cubio ran CTB.

  “Make it happen, guys,” I warned. “ ’Cause there’s big trouble hiding behind Door Number Two.”

  “Man, I think I just shit my drawers,” Perry drawled.

  23

  “Are you with the family?” the county psychiatric evaluator asked, looking down at a clipboard with all of Zack’s pertinent information. We were standing in the lobby just outside the secure psychiatric wing of the Queen of Angels Hospital. The doctor was tall and bald, peering at me through rose-colored lenses, which seemed to me like a bad visual metaphor in the sensitive field of mental health. His name tag identified him as Leonard M. Pepper, M.D., but he was pure vanilla.

  “I’m Don Farrell. Zack’s brother,” I lied.

  He found Zack’s brother’s name on the clipboard. “Okay.” He had that kind of spacey, nonconfrontational manner usually found in westside head shops.

  “I’m just wondering how he’s doing.”

  “How he’s doing is a subjective measure of what he’s willing to accept minus what he’s willing to admit to.”

  Oh, brother.

  “Is he suicidal, for instance?”

  “I’m not sure. He’s very depressed.”

  I tried the direct approach. “Is it possible for me to see him?”

  After a long moment, he nodded and punched a code into the electric door we were standing next to. Once it kicked open he motioned for me to follow him down a narrow corridor that had rooms every thirty feet or so on both sides. The doors were solid metal. Each had an eight-by-ten, green-tinted, wire-and-glass window. As we walked, he droned on.

  “Has your brother ever undergone psychiatric analysis before?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “He said he went through it once in the army.”

  I didn’t know Zack was ever in the army. He’d never mentioned it. I wondered why. But of course I couldn’t say any of that. I was supposed to be his brother. “He never mentioned undergoing analysis in the service,” I dodged.

  Dr. Pepper turned to face me, taking a gold pen out of his pocket. “Was he truant a lot when he was in lower school?”

  “Once or twice, maybe.”

  I was flying blind here. I didn’t want to contribute to an incorrect diagnosis, but a brother couldn’t be completely ignorant, either. I decided to just vague this guy out.

  “Was he often engaged in fights as a child?”

  “No more than anyone.”

  “What kind of answer is that?” The doctor peered over his rose lenses at me.

  “It’s my answer, Doctor.” Now he was pissing me off.

  “He indicated he had problems with bed-wetting into middle school,” Pepper said. “Do you recall when it stopped happening?”

  “What is this?”

  “Just answer me.”

  “I don’t remember…I don’t think so…I don’t know. I had my own problems. I wasn’t paying attention.” The asshole actually noted that down. “Why don’t you just tell me what the hell you’re getting at?” I demanded.

  He clicked his pen closed. “This is still very preliminary. He’s only been here six or seven hours, but your brother exhibits signs of cognitive disassociative disorder, along with what might be described as massive clinical depression. The depression is so strong I’m wondering if it might be a calendar reaction stemming from some event in his childhood. Often our subconscious stores dates and revisits them annually through bouts of depression, even though the event itself may be blocked in our memory. Do you remember something severe in his youth that might have caused that?”

  “No,” I said. “All I know is, right now he’s under a lot of stress with his upcoming divorce. He’s having money problems. He’s also afraid he’s losing his relationship with his sons.”

  “If my diagnosis is right, I would doubt any of that is responsible for the depression. Cognitive disassociates don’t treasure emotional relationships. It’s what that behavior is all about. But it’s hard to tell, because right now, he’s just trying to bullshit his way out of here.”

  “But you’re not going to let go of him, are you?” I said, getting this guy’s drift. He was bored with the endless drug overdoses and soccer moms who felt trapped by the monotony of carpools and Saturday sex. He wanted to hang some high-drama diagnosis on Zack, add some excitement to the revolving door litany of petty complaints he was forced to deal with daily.

  “Your brother also may be a narcissistic personality,” he added, really piling it on. “It’s characterized by a predominate focus on self and a lack of remorse or empathy. This is only a preliminary diagnosis, and mind you, I could be wrong, but I want to keep him here for a while to sort it out.”

  He turned and led me further down the hall, stopping in front of a locked door. “Tell your brother he needs to cooperate with me if he wants to go home.”

  Then he took out a keycard and zapped the door open, letting me pass inside alone. I heard the door close and lock behind me.

  Zack was slumped in a white plastic chair next to the window. The cell-like room was a concrete box painted dull white. In a salute to insanity, the bed and dresser were both bolted to the floor. Zack turned his swollen face to look at me. Without saying anything, he returned his gaze to the window and the distant traffic on the 101 freeway half a mile down the gentle slope from the hospital.

  I motioned to the room. “This seems pleasant and clean,” sounding like a friendly realtor instead of the traitorous bastard who put him here.

  He wouldn’t look at me.

  “I just talked to your psychiatric evaluator,” I continued. “He says you can work your way out of this, but he wants you to open up to him more.”

  Nothing from Zack.

  “He also said you gotta come to grips with the divorce. Once that happens things are gonna get better, the depression will go away.”

  He hadn’t mentioned any of that, but I was on a roll, here. I waited for Zack to say something like, “Gee, that’s swell, Shane,” or “I don’t blame you for ratting me out and ruining my li
fe.” But he just sat there. Over three hundred pounds of Irish anger stuffed in a too-small hospital gown.

  “It’s hard,” I monologued. “I know how much this is ripping you up…but the thing you gotta know, Zack, is I’m in your corner. A lot of people are.”

  He scooted his plastic chair further away from me, giving me almost his whole back now.

  “Listen, Zack, I know you think I sold you out, but I was only trying to…” His shoulders slumped so I stopped.

  I grabbed a chair and brought it closer. I sat next to him but I couldn’t engage his eyes. I was talking to the side of his head. “Zack…listen to me, Zack. I’m really worried about you. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but this is the best course. You can get help here.”

  He turned his chair even further away.

  “I’ve got a plan, Zack. Will you listen to me?” I was starting to sweat, but I kept going. “This doesn’t have to be as bad as it seems. We’ve got Alexa on our side and I’m about to split Forrest out of the Fingertip case. I think I can fix it so we can work on that murder and get off the task force. I’m pretty sure now that Forrest is a copycat. He was a Mossad agent named Andrazack, in this country illegally. I think he was killed by some foreign agent, not the Fingertip unsub. You’re gonna be getting a clean bill in a few days, but in the meantime, I wanta come by and run some of this stuff by you, get your take on it. That sound like a plan?”

  He just sat there.

  “Zack, don’t give up here, buddy. Zack? Hey, come on man, look at me.”

  Nothing.

  I wondered if I was getting a look at cognitive disassociative disorder.

  24

  When I got home my head ached and my eyes felt grainy. All I wanted was a glass of scotch to wash my treachery away. But getting wasted was my old solution. I’d moved past that now. In a gesture of determined sobriety, I settled for a Coke and a bag of chips and walked out into the backyard where I sat in one of my rusting patio chairs and looked out at the wind-ruffled water on Venice’s narrow canals, thinking you really did need a sense of humor to appreciate its corny charm.

  Every time I have problems I find myself sitting here, drawn to Abbot Kinney’s faded dream, as if some part of my soul will be reborn in the stagnant water of these shallow canals. Sometimes, I feel as if he had designed this strange place with me in mind. I fit right in, a romantic in a fast-food world, lodged hopelessly in a moral cul-de-sac just like the McDonald’s wrappers that collected under the fake Venetian bridges. But there was a sense of past and future here. The throwback architecture, the scaled-down plot plan from the 1400s, all managed to coexist in some kind of insane proximity to the strip malls two blocks away and the Led Zeppelin music that drifted across the narrow canals from my hippie neighbors’ windows. If only I could find such an easy truce with my disparate emotions.

  Half an hour later I heard the back door open, and then Alexa dropped into the chair beside me and heaved a deep sigh. She had a beer in her hand, and I listened while she pulled the tab, the chirp mixing neatly with the sounds of a hundred keening insects.

  She grabbed a handful of chips and said, “I’m fucked with these crime stats. The chief is gonna redeploy at least twenty of my detectives. It’s gonna foul up my whole grid plan.”

  Tony Filosiani was famous for his constant shuffling of manpower after COMSTAT meetings. He had installed a big, electronic map board of the city in the sixth-floor conference room. It was a complex son-of-a-bitch, which almost required a Cal Tech graduate to operate. Different colored lights represented different categories of crime that had occurred in the previous two weeks. One little light for every criminal incident. Murders and Crimes Against People were red; Burglaries—blue; Armed Robberies—green. While carjacking was technically a CAP, it was also such a growing category it had acquired its own color—yellow.

  The division commanders would walk into the darkened COMSTAT meeting and see the board twinkling like a desert sky at midnight. Then Chief Filosiani would flip a switch and white lights would appear all over the map in clusters. The white lights indicated our deployed police presence. In one glance you could see if you had your troops in the right place. If a street gang like the Rolling Sixties went hot and started jacking cars and houses, you could see if there were enough cops at Sixtieth Street and MLK Boulevard to handle it. If there were too many white lights where nothing was happening Tony would move people around. Just like that, cops got transferred to new divisions.

  At the end of this light show, the chief would extinguish all of the cleared cases and embarrass any commander who still had too many colored lights burning in his area.

  It was Alexa’s job to move detectives and balance caseloads. The short-term problem for her was handing off old cases to new detectives and all of the confusion this produced.

  “I need to cover some business,” I finally said, setting my Coke on the table next to us. “I’ve got a couple of things to discuss.”

  “Look, baby, I’m sorry about this afternoon and Zack. I understand what you’re feeling, I just don’t agree, that’s all. Can’t we leave it at that?”

  “I went by the hospital to see him after work.”

  “How’d you get in? He’s supposed to be incommunicado.”

  “I told the psychiatrist I was his brother.”

  I waited while she sipped her beer. Finally, she responded. “I keep forgetting how stubborn and resourceful you are.”

  “I don’t usually get slammed and complimented in the same sentence.”

  “You’re also an asshole who’s kinda cute,” she said, doing it again.

  “I give.” I didn’t have to look over to see that she was smiling.

  “Okay,” she said. “Gimme the second chorus.”

  “Zack’s really screwed up. Wouldn’t look at me. Wouldn’t even talk. I was there ten, fifteen minutes, and he didn’t say one word.”

  “Unless he’s gone completely over the falls, he’ll get over it.”

  “I don’t think so. His psychiatric evaluator thinks he has a narcissistic personality with cognitive disassociative disorder, whatever the hell that is. I thought it was BS until I saw him. He’s beaten, and he hates me.”

  “He doesn’t hate you,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, you weren’t there.”

  She thought for a moment before she turned to face me. “A while back, when I was in patrol, I caught a payback hit in Compton. This was two, three years before we met. The mother of one of the dead boys was this big, floppy soul with drooping eyes. I’m trying to take her statement, she’s crying because she lost a son, and I say to her, ‘These kids must really hate one another.’ It was just nervous chatter. But she turns to me and says, ‘Where you been, child? It takes powerful love to do a thing like this.’Then she said, ‘Hate needs love to burn.’”

  Alexa stopped and put her beer down. “At the time, I thought that was nuts, but you know something? Working murders all day long, I’ve come to realize that she was mostly right. Hate is just a few degrees past love on the dial. Hate and love feed on each other.”

  “And all of this tells me what?” I said, frustrated.

  “That Zack loves you. He’s stressed and feels abandoned, so yes, right now there’s some hate, but it’s built on love, Shane. Right now, you both have the volume up too high. Turn it down and see what happens.”

  I sat next to her and tried not to argue. I remembered what Zack said to me in the bar. “Everything I say, people hear too loud.” But I also remembered the psychiatrist’s words: “His personality type doesn’t treasure relationships.” I was too confused to sort it out, so I just said “Okay” and moved on.

  “You said there were a couple of things,” Alexa pressed. “What’s the other?”

  So I told her about Rowdy and Snitch, and the strange guest list at the funeral.

  “Sounds interesting,” she said, softly.

  “Whatta I do?” I asked. “I’ve got Deputy Chief Mike Ramsey on on
e side and Deputy Chief Talmadge Burke on the other. Broadway and Perry are gonna try and get me conferenced in, but they have to clear it with their lieutenant.”

  “And since John Doe Four turned out to be an Israeli spy, the case falls into some kinda no-man’s-land between CTB and the Fingertip task force,” she said. “So what do you want?”

  “I want off the Fingertip case. I want to work this homicide out of CTB with Broadway and Perry. I really can’t stand that task force. I’m not doing any good. The boss doesn’t like me. He’s gonna backwater all my leads anyway.”

  “Shane…I can’t take you off the Fingertip killings and I can’t reassign you to the Andrazack case.”

  “Why not?”

  “Armando Cubio runs a tight operation at CTB. He won’t want you in the mix.”

  “I think you’re wrong. He’ll want to work it, but he’d also just as soon keep Andrazack in the Fingertip case. Strange as it seems, it’s lower profile if it stays there, lost in the mix with four others. I had to tell Underwood what’s going on and he’s agreed not to make Andrazack’s name public. CTB doesn’t want a news story on how some black ops Mossad agent in the U.S. without permission got murdered.”

  Alexa looked beautiful, her black hair picking up fleeting specks of moonlight, her mouth soft and inviting. But she wasn’t about to answer, she was mulling it over.

  “Okay, then here’s another plan,” I said. “How ’bout we skip dinner and get naked. Maybe I can change your mind in the bedroom.”

  “You mean sexually entertain your division commander in an attempt to affect a duty assignment?”

  “Something like that.”

  So we went into our bedroom, took off our clothes, and lay on the bed holding each other. She nuzzled my neck.

  “This is beginning to make my Southwest crime problem seem irrelevant,” she said, reaching for me.

  I was already breathing hard when she stopped suddenly and looked into my eyes.

  “Sometimes we’re going to be on opposite sides of things.”