From the moment that first high-velocity round tore though the black-and-white, the trainee’s mind was unconsciously recording at a thousand memory frames per second. The projectile striking Atom Blum sounded like a sharply pitched belly slap. Next came Lucky’s return of fire. With each trigger pull, his pistol recoiled and ejected a .45 caliber empty, the brass tumbling counter-clockwise in uniformed arcs. The dusty mix of spent powder and windshield safety glass filled the air like a million tiny suspended crystals.
Then there were the whizzing bullets. The hot, spiraling missiles, twisting against the air and striking what felt like everything but her. She remembered being pushed downward with such force her shoulder nearly snapped The Box from its bolted mount. The barrel of the shotgun slung over her head had been shoved into one of the holes in the windshield. Though she didn’t remember Lucky’s precise instructions, she retained slo-mo snippets of her jacking shells in and out of the shotgun, one handed, as if stroking off some giant phallus. Was it after-memory? Or in the actual moment had she somehow sexualized her assistive actions? Any and all undertones of the moment had ended abruptly when the scorching brass head of an expelled shotgun shell struck her cheek and burned her back into real time.
In those real time seconds of recall, Shia felt the car’s engine reverse directions and the G-forces from the acceleration. A hard left turn had pulled her back into an upright pose. That’s when Lucky had leaned into her, extended his right hand and unleashed the entire clip from his ankle .45 through her window frame. The gunshots had snapped at the air in perfect time.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
When Lucky touched her had he felt her body quiver? The fear in her loins? The damned knowing that her life was going to finish? Right there in a sheriff’s black-and-white. Not even twenty-five. A full life yet to live, bleeding out in the parking lot of some Godforsaken federal housing project in Godforsaken Compton.
Then, it was as if she were back underwater, plummeting into that blowout on Poinsettia when at last her toes touched bottom. With nowhere deeper to sink and death a practical certainty, a switch in her had been flipped. She was still alive. And while alive she was going to fight.
I’m not dead yet!
And I’m not someone to be protected! she screamed at herself. I’m a Goddamned Los Angeles County deputy sheriff! In a purely instinctive millisecond when Shia recognized Lucky had emptied the magazine of his back-up pistol, she forced herself upright, trained her 9mm out the window and filled her gun sight with the first armed Crip her eyes could capture. Her target appeared less than twenty yards away, sliding out from behind the hood of a gold-flecked Lexus. The gangbanger was nearly as blue-black as she, but basketball tall with an ultra-thin waist underscored by his white skintight wife-beater.
For Shia, the moment was in such crystalline optics she could not only read the ribbed knit of the Crip’s shirt, but could picture three of her bullets striking at center mass and turning the fabric a soiled crimson. Though the assailant was firing wildly in her direction, her picture was so acute she felt she could read the serial numbers on his stainless steel .40 cal pistol. One of his bullets flew close to home, spinning an inch by her right ear before it struck and rattled the safety screen.
Shia clocked the Crip as dead before his body thumped the parking lot. Her first kill. In her mind, a notch was made into an imaginary mantle. All in real time. As she sought a second target, her sight picture turned suddenly to shrubs and taupe stucco a split second before she felt the impact.
Lucky wanted out. Out of the situation. Out of the New Wilmington Gardens. And in that bloodletting moment, out of Compton forever.
Had he been alone in the gunfight, he might have laid off the accelerator, stood his ground, and seen how many bad guys he could drop before a head shot cut his motors for good. Instead, he was encumbered with responsibilities in the form of his trainee and the numb-nuts Hollywood ride-along in the backseat. The movie director had already screamed out that he was hit. Which meant that Lucky was duty-bound to rescue his charge from the immediate peril rather than stay and fight.
His initial intent, once he’d gunned the black-and-white into forward gear, was for his rear tires to catch the asphalt and propel them away from the hail of scorching lead. But it hadn’t rained in months and the pavement had a baked-on veneer of oil. Momentum shifted and sent the radio unit fishtailing across the drive and into the sod. That’s when Lucky readjusted his aim, doing what he could to direct the vehicle to collide passenger-side first into the small outdoor deck of a corner apartment in Building 3. There was the crunch of colliding sheet metal, glass, and plaster. Like gas filling a vacuum, the inside of the black-and-white was so instantly choked with stucco dust Lucky had to hack out his orders between coughs.
“WINDOWS…OUT…NOW…OUT!!!
Despite the dizzying after-effects of the crash, Shia twisted herself and crawled out the window. Lucky impatiently assisted by grabbing a handful of her butt cheek and giving it a forceful shove. He followed, dropping out of the car and onto a half-collapsed kettle grill that appeared never to have been cleaned of charcoal and ash. Overhead, bullets struck the apartment’s slider door, shattering the glass and extorting muffled screams from inside.
“ATOM!” Lucky shouted, just before reaching into the backseat, arms outstretched with hands grasping for the movie director only to come up empty. But for the violent microbes still floating in the air, the black-and-white’s cabin was vacant.
What the hell?
A hundred feet beyond the wrecked radio unit, two shadows approached the left rear window. In near unison they lifted their pistols and emptied what ammo remained in their double-stacked magazines. On hearing the firecracker-like pops, Lucky lifted himself over the buckled half-wall separating the porch from the landscaping and slid back to the deck while the bullets pocked both the car and the porch. Each slug striking the building sounded like a yardstick slapped against a desktop.
And then it was quiet.
Lucky expected the gunfight was pretty much exhausted. Most lasted only seconds before the bad boys would call out for a scatter. All those splashy ghetto rides began roaring out of the compound in hopes of beating the evil eye-in-the-sky—aka the LASD air support helicopter—with all its night-vision, infrared, and vehicle-tag-reading tech. It was the Fourth of July though. Lucky, who currently shared his life with an LAPD pilot, knew response time on the holiday would be dodgy and slower than normal. Low-flying choppers and ground-to-sky fireworks mortars had the potential for tragedy. The air support team was surely cruising at a higher and less accessible altitude.
As for his wounded shoulder, it stung at the point of penetration, the pain radiating fully into his thorax and down to the fingertips of his left hand. He was concerned about Shia, not to mention where in God’s world had that idiot movie director vanished? When and how Atom had exited the black-and-white, Lucky could only guess as sometime between the first shot and the collision into the building. How long a window could that have been? Five seconds? Fifteen? Thirty?
Lucky kept low and swung into the dark apartment. He was reaching for his tac light when Shia’s beam kicked on and swept the unfurnished living room. Cowering crackheads were tucked into the dirty corners. Lucky estimated around a dozen who were either stoned, in the process of smoking rock or meth when the conflagration began, or flat out too scared to move. The floor was a pit of used newspapers, empty dime bags, and refuse from every conceivable fast food franchise.
The radios on their belts squawked.
“Units responding,” announced Shia, a mix of both shell shock and unspent adrenalin. She’d survived, she knew it, and was experiencing a strange, almost chemical elation. “Where’s what-his-face?”
“Abandoned ship—somewhere between out there and here,” said Lucky. “You hit?”
“No,” assessed Shia. “At least I don’t think so.” So far she was unaware of her T.O.’s injury, keeping her tactical beam on the
scrubby addicts in the crack den. “We need to find our ride-along.”
“Thirty seconds,” ordered Lucky, listening for the last hot-rod to wheel past and the engine thunder to abate. “If dumb-fuck couldn’t stay in the car, he can wait for the last gangster to clear out before we make our search.”
Thirty seconds. Jesus.
Lucky couldn’t list all the bad he could imagine that might take place in a simple half-minute. Worlds could change between count one and halfway to sixty. Yet he still needed that one, infinitesimal stretch of time to pass before he’d allow his trainee to face more danger. Twice in three nights, she’d nearly been killed. His charge. On his watch. Surely he’d be grilled on the issue soon enough. Was he taking that extra beat to protect his uninjured deputy because she was a trainee? Or because she was a woman? Or because he’d been shot himself and needed a breather?
None of the above, assholes.
Between the crack den and his future inquisition, Lucky would need to come up with a lie. A believable one. Thus adding to his ever-growing list of procedural indiscretions. All in the course of performing his primal duty—to actually serve and protect.
35
The movie viewed through Atom Blum’s box office lens had been unspooling since he had first laid eyes on the New Wilmington Gardens. The projects had appeared like a modern, Gothic painting. Completely plain and architecturally benign, yet fenced like a mental asylum. The few tall palms swaying against the reflecting night sky only made the picture that much more surreal. Fantastic. A neo-modern, horror dreamscape.
That was all before the reinforced guard gate clattered shut behind the Sheriff’s black-and-white. The unmistakable connection Atom heard was akin to a prison cell door slamming closed for good. As his pair of front-seat hosts eased the radio unit forward, ever deeper into the complex, reality had infected his moment of cinematic reverie. A cold had swept over him—a chill he tried to jettison as a complication from both fatigue and his prescription pain meds.
So obsessed was Atom with cinema he’d often dream he was in a movie. Sometimes one of his own making. And sometimes there would come a moment when the dream became a nightmare—when Atom realized that he was no longer part of something make-believe and instead in real danger. On nearly every occasion, that’s when Atom would wake and be grateful to discover himself in his Malibu bedroom and no longer requiring rescue.
Neither Lucky nor Shia had acknowledged Atom’s wailing hysterics. Atom had feared his eardrums would rupture when Lucky aimed his big pistol at the windshield and begun blasting holes in the direction of the shooters. Then the car was lurching backwards. More than hearing the incoming gunfire, Atom could feel the black-and-white’s skin getting punctured by bullets from what had to be every conceivable direction.
This is when Atom’s amygdala grabbed control from his frontal lobe. The picture in his mind turned into a wide-screen, panoramic view from the radio unit’s backseat. In the front seats was a pair of sheriff’s deputies. Police officers. Cops engaged in a surprise and overwhelming battle with society’s underclass. After all, hadn’t it been plastered all over the nightly news? The Man was under fire. Authority deserved a righteous comeuppance at the hands of the abused.
In that microsecond of panic, Atom convinced himself that he wasn’t a target. He was only a tourist there to observe and learn, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just because it was Lucky and Shia’s turn to die didn’t mean his destiny was to become a collateral casualty in a civil war between the oppressed and their uniformed oppressors.
The left rear passenger door popped open in practical silence, smothered by the discordance splitting the air. Despite feeling wounded from the rifle round that struck his body armor, Atom was reasonably quick to his feet and bolted in a direction his gut instinct informed was the shortest distance from peril. To his immediate left was a building corner around which he might conceal himself. Then dead ahead, was something altogether more inviting: a neon yellow mountain bike that appeared abandoned at the edge of the asphalt drive.
Atom’s plan formed quickly. The neon yellow bike would be his means of escape. Hell, he figured. The way the bike had been left, the front wheel was already pointed in the direction of the front gate. All that was left for him to do was swoop in, right the two-wheeler, and pedal to safety.
Before he had even lifted the bike and climbed on, Atom was so far ahead of himself he was imagining how far west he’d need to travel before he’d be in range of an Uber pick-up.
Then home, a hot shower, four capsules of Tylenol PM washed back by half a bottle of Jack Daniels. Then some dreamless Goddamn sleep.
Tunnel vision had set in for the boy wonder. So much so that he was too impaired to notice the bike’s owner. A skinny black teen nearly a foot shorter than Atom was angling sharply from his right.
“Hey!” shouted the skinny teen.
Atom was so focused on the bicycle his response was delayed. Only after he’d snatched it from the ground and set it on two wheels did he unthinkingly swivel his head in the direction of the voice.
“Fuck the police!” hissed the skinny teen.
Atom’s eyes narrowed across the bridge of his bandaged nose, instantly freezing on a very obvious gun muzzle. The weapon was in the outstretched hand of the skinny teen, whose face was, if anything, determined.
“Oh fuck,” whispered the boy wonder. And that utterance was his very last.
Lil Rod’s revolver, the very same snub-nosed .38 he’d unleashed on Mush Man, let out a high-pitched pop! To the gangbanger’s ears, the noise blended nicely with the other gunshots. Only while most of the other expended bullets in the gun battle were missing wildly, Lil Rod’s single pull of the trigger hit its upward mark with close-range accuracy. Without even a thought, he’d adjusted his aim at that bright white X of a bandage in the middle of the bike thief’s face and let fly. The tall, suspected cop stood for a surprised half-second before his knees finally gave way. The body buckled to the pavement, pulling the bicycle down with it.
“Tha’s my bike, nigga!” pissed Lil Rod, who retrieved it from the dead man’s grasp, hopped aboard the vinyl seat, and was peddling home just as the last of the gunshots subsided into silence.
36
Downtown Los Angeles. 6:28 A.M.
The Xanax had worn off minutes shy of 5:00 A.M. It had been a banner night of sleep for Cat Rincon, even if she had cheated with a fair dose of prescription meds. She lolled for some time on the feather-top bed, curling herself around the pillows as if they were lovers spooning. For the hour and a half she lay there, only half-hoping for sleep to return, she tried to distract her overwrought brain with pleasant thoughts. She thought of all the liaisons she’d had at the Downtown Crown—aka the Crown International Hotel, the discreet eight-story kissing cousin to the more prestigious Biltmore that stood across the street.
Jeez, Cat. Before last night had you only ever stayed here for sex?
In her hazy state, the string of lovers she’d met at The Crown seemed impossible to calculate. In contrast, she could count on two fingers the number of men and women with whom she had shared her home bed. One she called Mr. Regrettable. The other, a mercy encounter with a mayor’s office missus in a bad marriage and a story too tragic to fathom.
Try as Cat did, her eyes wouldn’t stay shut, peeling themselves open into slits and facing the pair of French doors which led to the balcony. Cat unconsciously recalled a year-old news tale. If the faint memory served, it was about some software success story who had murdered a prostitute then swan-dived off one of the Crown’s balconies.
Is that where I am? In the suicide suite?
The haunted hotel stories about the Downtown Crown poisoned any chance Cat had of carving out an extra hour of bonus slumber. After a minute searching the sheets, she found the TV’s remote near the foot of the bed and flipped on one of the five local morning shows where all the anchors, sports readers, and booty-popping weather girls looked as if they’d been sp
it from the same 3D printer.
She found her tablet, intending to check her calendar to the cheerful morning chatter. Instead, there were texts. Reminders from the night before. Mayor Ramon Avila had arranged for a pair of luxury boxes at the Dodgers game to entertain the usual array of public employee honchos, key brokers from the utility and city service vendors, Democrat Party campaign bundlers, and a few handpicked council members and county supervisors. It was a veritable who’s who of Los Angeles power players—minus, of course, the millionaire and billionaire classes. Mayor Ramon—or just Ram to his friends—was never one to upstage his hosts, the LA Dodgers management group—especially when those luxury boxes came for free.
Cat stared at the swirled patterns on the hand-plastered ceiling, trying to make figures out of them. She couldn’t even recall whom the home team had played against. She’d started drinking blue tequila Dodger-ritas from the moment she’d arrived mid-fourth inning. Meanwhile, she’d convinced a trusted DWP intern to swing by her house, pack a small bag with the clothes she’d listed, and drop it by the stadium. Her excuse was that she was vacating for three days of termite tenting.
Oh, the bed you’ve made, Catty-Cat.
The confident, politically savvy princess of the DWP board was troubled to her ligaments. The terror she’d felt the day before at the arroyo had escalated into a problem demanding a quick solve.
Dipshit twat. This is a problem you can’t fuck your way out of.
The morning news show was mostly noise to her—weather, traffic, celebrity gossip, a thumbnail of last night’s news, along with more suffocating weather and butt-numbing traffic. If Cat hadn’t heard the name Compton uttered, she most likely would’ve continued padding barefoot and naked from the running bathtub to her compact suitcase. She slowed a step, tilted her head toward the television screen and caught some typical local news B-roll. It was edited like every other news crime story with images of swirling lights against a nightscape, police tape, and distant, telephoto shots of bodies lying under tarps.
The Lucky Dey Thriller Series: Books 1-3 (The Lucky Dey Series Boxset) Page 81
