by Thomas Perry
He said, “You got in a good shot tonight—wham, and he comes to a full stop.”
She shrugged. “I just hope the customer isn’t unhappy about it.”
“We kind of can’t miss. If they’d caught up, we’d have had to kill them. This way, nobody knows anything.”
“I was thinking that maybe we should have taken them out,” she said.
“We may regret not going ahead sometime down the line. But for the moment, I don’t want to do things the customer hasn’t asked for. It doesn’t make them think you’re being intelligent and strategic. They just think you’re crazy and dangerous, and that can turn into a big problem.”
“I guess you’re right,” she said.
“Even if we’re wrong, then making things right might earn us some more money.”
He finished the cleaning and they were deep asleep in twenty minutes. They were still asleep when the job phone rang. Nicole jumped out of bed and snatched the phone up before the second ring. When she touched the screen the time appeared—7:00 a.m. The job phone was a cell phone that was assigned to this client only, so she had no question in her mind who was going to be on the other end. “Hello,” she said.
“Good morning.” The voice was his, all right. “I’m calling early because I know you’ll want time to plan your day. Can you meet me at nine?”
“Where?”
“The same place.”
“All right. We’ll see you at nine.” She pressed the button to end the call, and then switched off the power. She didn’t want to wonder whether the call hadn’t disconnected and the client was still picking up her next conversation.
Beside her Ed rolled onto his back, his forearm covering his eyes. “Did I hear you say nine? Nine a.m.?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s two whole hours. He wants to meet in the same place.”
Ed slowly sat up, swung his legs off the bed, and sat there staring at his feet. “Does he know we were up nearly all night?”
“I won’t tell him what we were doing if you don’t.”
Ed said, “Seriously.”
She headed for the door. “I’ll start the coffee. Don’t go back to sleep.”
An hour and a half later they were dressed and ready to leave. Ed was wearing a pair of jeans and a Hawaiian shirt that hung down to cover the gun he was carrying. Nicole tried on a couple of outfits, and in the end decided to wear her new light blue shorts, flip-flops, a tank top with her oversize Ray-Ban sunglasses, and to carry her compact .380 Beretta Pico in a small shoulder bag. It was important to look the right way for the place where they were going. While Ed was waiting for her she stood between the two mirrors and approved the way her body looked in the shorts and the tank top. Once in a while it didn’t hurt to have Ed see another man’s eyes linger on her for a little too long.
On the way out, Ed set the alarm system. They had signs in the yard and decals on the windows that gave the name of a fictitious security company, but the alarm was real. It sent a silent phone signal to their cell phones to let them know a breach had occurred. What would happen after that was up to them.
They got into what Nicole called the invisible car, a Toyota Camry with windows tinted as dark as they could be without having the police pull the car over. It was impossible for an observer to see the Hoyts inside unless he was a few feet in front of the grille. The car was a dark gray that was close to the dusty asphalt color of a California highway. The car had a V-6 3.5 liter engine instead of the standard 4-cylinder model, so it was nearly as fast as Ed’s black pickup.
Ed drove to the parking lot at the end of the long entry road at South Weddington Park near Universal Studios. The park was a big L-shaped stretch of grass in a flat valley below the parking lot for the subway station on Lankershim Boulevard. Around the largest section of grass was an oval track ringed by tall old trees, and beyond the parking lot was a fenced baseball field. Ed pulled into a space between a tall SUV that made their car hard to see, and a couple of small Japanese cars that made it hard to remember.
Ed and Nicole sat for a moment looking ahead at the baseball field. It was a Wednesday, so the field would be empty for at least six hours, until the Little Leaguers would arrive for evening practice. Vincent Boylan had chosen the park as a meeting place, and the Hoyts had agreed because it had the right combination of open space and steady traffic that included pedestrians. Sometimes cab and limo drivers parked in this lot in the shade while they waited for their next pickups. The entry road would be lined with food trucks catering to the studio workers in a couple of hours, but for the moment, there were only a few people walking dogs or jogging.
“There he is,” said Ed. “That’s him in the bleachers. Third base side.”
“I see him. Let’s go.”
They got out of their car and walked around behind the backstop to the bleachers on the other side. Boylan was sitting on a bench about halfway up the bleachers, so his body wasn’t high enough to present a silhouette. Behind him was a stretch of grass and then the twelve-foot brick sound wall that separated the park from the Ventura Freeway. The wall was screened by a long line of trees so it didn’t look like what it was. Boylan wore a hooded sweatshirt, jeans, and a baseball cap, so he didn’t look like what he was either. He was gazing out over the infield as though he were watching remembered players running the bases and fielding balls. Ed and Nicole climbed up and sat on either side of him.
He turned to Nicole. “Is there room in that little purse for this?” He produced a thick envelope from the marsupial pocket in his sweatshirt.
“I’ll make room.” The envelope disappeared into her bag. “Do we need to count it?”
“No. It’s fifty thousand.”
Ed said, “What’s it for?”
“It’s a down payment on a new part of the job. I want you to be sure when we leave here that you’ll always get your pay.”
“I already was sure,” said Ed. “A person would have to be brain-dead not to pay us.”
“Don’t be rude, Ed,” said Nicole. “Just say thanks.”
“Thanks,” Ed said.
Ed Hoyt’s expression gave Boylan a chill. It was the eyes, he decided. They were wide open, unblinking, watchful, but they didn’t change the way human eyes did. They revealed nothing. “It’s okay. Ed’s right to be puzzled. I don’t usually give you a pile of cash we haven’t talked about. But I wanted to ask you to do something right away, and I didn’t want you to think I was trying to put it on a tab.”
“What do you want done?” asked Nicole.
“The man and woman you were following last night. The Abels. They need to be taken out.”
“It would have been easy to do then. Now, it’s not so easy,” said Ed.
“We just got the go-ahead a couple of hours ago,” Boylan said. “I called you as soon as I knew.”
“Do you know anything about them that we can use?” asked Nicole.
“Pretty much what you already know. They’re both former LA cops, working as a two-person detective agency. They’re very well known. As soon as the client found out who they were, the Abels got added to their list.”
“The price of being very well known,” Ed said.
“This needs to be quick before they find out anything.”
“What’s there to find out?”
“If I knew that, there would probably be somebody else here hiring you to kill me,” Boylan said. “I’ve got to assume it’s this thing the Abels offered the reward on. This guy that got killed a year ago.”
“It’s all right,” said Ed. “We’ll manage.” He stood up and began to make his way down the bleachers.
Nicole got up too. “We’ll let you know when it’s done.”
When they got home, Ed said, “I don’t think their post office box is going to be a good enough address after last night.” He went into the den to call his contact at the boiler room sales service. The operation consisted of a big room over a furniture store with long tables where men and women sat and c
old-called people, then read scripts trying to persuade them to buy things. Their biggest customer was a contractor who got people to sign contracts for kitchen remodeling, took a deposit, and never came back. The contractor’s business name changed about once a month, but he paid the phone sales service without fail.
The phone sales service worked with a computer program that they would set for an area code and a three-digit prefix indicating a smaller area, and it dialed the last four numbers in sequence, one after another. When the computer dialed the number and the call connected, its screen would display the name and address, so the script reader could ask to speak with that person.
Ed turned on his phone browser and looked up the numbers the Abels supplied for their reward then dialed the number of the sales service manager. “Hi, Ron,” he said. “This is Ed Hoyt. I’ve got a phone number for you.” He read it from the Abels’ ad.
After a moment, the manager said, “That’s a cell phone.”
“Can you get me the billing address?”
“Sure. Give me ten minutes, and I’ll call you back.”
“Good enough.” He hung up. Ed was tempted to use the landline to call a contact he had at the DPW while he was waiting. He had another one at the gas company. If he had taken the license number of the Abels’ car last night he could have cooked up some nonsense about a hit-and-run accident to put on the DMV form to get the address of the car’s owner. He had lots of ways to get an address, and some that he hadn’t even used yet.
6
The Abels went out to their garage, where one space was empty, a reminder that the BMW was in the dealer’s shop having its windshield replaced. They got into the black Volvo that was left and drove out of the gate at the end of their driveway. They had bought this house in Van Nuys while they were still police officers.
Ronnie had noticed the house while she was patrolling the old, quiet neighborhood. She had driven past it many times, until one night shift she saw a newly posted sign that the house was for sale. She had always been curious about the house because it had a bit more than a triple lot. There was nothing else special about the house or the neighborhood. The house itself was a white ranch-style bungalow that sprawled on its plot without apparent planning because rooms seemed to have been added whenever the place grew too small for its occupants. The trees on the block were old, but they were mostly the low, bumpy magnolias that infested this part of the Valley. They provided little shade and dropped their thick, leathery half-brown leaves twelve months a year and their oversized white flowers for one week, leaving cone-like seed carriers the size and shape of grenades. Ronnie had simply been ready for her own house, and she liked this one.
On the first break of her shift she had called Sid, who was working homicide from the Metro Division at the time, and told him there was a house he had to see. They had not been able to meet at the address until after 8:00 a.m., when they were both off the clock.
They had walked the perimeter, gone off to breakfast together, then called the realtor and returned with him to look at the inside. Sid had been largely silent, because he knew by then that Ronnie was already determined, and the walk-through was a formality, a concession to his need to persuade himself that he wasn’t participating in a purely emotional decision. Ronnie did not believe that emotion was a bad basis for a decision about where and how a person lived—certainly better than numbers—but she let him look and pretended to listen when he spoke.
Over the years, the house had changed little. It still looked like thousands of other houses in the center of the San Fernando Valley—a small and undistinguished old house that had a two-story addition in the back. The house had a bit more land around it than some. Most of the first ones on their street had been orange groves or apricot orchards two generations ago. This had been out in the country then.
After many years and raising two children here, they had needed to replace the cracked and uneven asphalt driveway, and so Ronnie had picked out a style made of artificial paving stones, and Sid had decided they may as well add a new gate that didn’t require him to get out of the car to shut it. As they drove out of their driveway in the Volvo, they could hear the automatic gate roll along its track and then give a satisfying clank.
“You know,” said Sid, “I sometimes forget how much I like this car. I get used to driving that BMW, but this thing is like an old friend.”
“It ought to get us up to Osborne Street if you can keep from chasing down any more shooters.”
They were on their way north to the Foothill station to meet with Detective Hebert, the officer in charge of the investigation of the shooting. When they arrived, Hebert came out to the lobby to meet them. “Come on in,” he said. “Let’s go into an interview room so we can talk.”
Sid and Ronnie exchanged a glance so furtive that he didn’t see it. Ronnie said, “All right.”
“Here,” he said, and opened the door of an interrogation room. “You can wait in there while I get us some coffee.”
Sid and Ronnie entered and sat down in the two seats normally reserved for the two officers conducting the interview. The video cameras were aimed downward from above and behind them at the empty chair. They shared an understanding that Detective Hebert had gone to turn on the cameras and microphones to record what they said to each other, so they did not speak.
Hebert returned with a uniformed cop who carried two paper coffee cups. Hebert carried his own and opened the door. “Thanks,” he said, and the cop set down the two cups and went away. “I brought you cream and sugar.” He reached into his coat pocket and then placed some thimble-sized creamers and small envelopes in front of them on the table.
“Thank you,” said Ronnie.
Hebert hesitated for a few seconds, then sat down in the only empty chair and pulled it closer to the table. “Well, let’s talk about this shooting incident last night,” he said. “I’d like to go over some of the impressions I got last night, to be sure we’ve got all the information we need. What were you doing up there on Clovermeadow Lane last night after nightfall?”
Sid said, “The reason we were up there was that we had visited the Department of Public Works office, where we got a list of the construction sites where there might have been an open storm drain on March fifth of last year. That site was number three, the last one of the day.”
“And that was part of the investigation you’re on?”
“Right,” said Ronnie. “The body of a man named James Ballantine was found stuck in a storm sewer under a street in North Hollywood around then. There was no easy way for him to have gotten there, because the drains along the streets are designed not to let anything big, like a body, get into the system. So it had to be an open drain somewhere upstream.”
“And of course, you’re both former LAPD officers.” He paused. “I assume you both left the department without any issues?”
“You didn’t check?” said Sid.
Ronnie said, “No issues. I left after ten years and Sid left after twelve because we wanted to work together on our own.”
“Is that working out pretty well?” asked Hebert. “I think I’ve heard your names a few times.”
“It’s okay,” said Sid.
“Good, good,” said Hebert. “And you just said you were looking into the death of James Ballantine last March.”
“Yes,” said Ronnie. “We did.”
“A homicide. Who hired you to do that?”
“Mr. Ballantine’s employer, Intercelleron Corporation. The contact person is named David Hemphill.”
“Hemphill,” said Hebert, and wrote the name on his note pad. “And what does Mr. Hemphill say his company wants?”
“Two new pairs of eyes looking at the case. He says the directors of the company are concerned because one of their employees was murdered, and they’re willing to pay to keep someone working actively on the case. It seemed to us that reaching the anniversary of the crime was the trigger.”
“I’ve seen that before,” said
Hebert.
“We see it often,” Ronnie said. “The survivors get a lot of information at first, but then the flow slows down and they tell themselves they’ll give the police until some particular time. If the case isn’t solved when that time comes, they’ll hire their own investigators.”
“You ever get any results on that kind of case?”
“Sometimes,” said Sid.
“Really? Ever apprehend any perpetrators and get them convicted in a court?”
“Some,” Sid said.
“How many?” Hebert said. “One?”
“Sid doesn’t like to keep score,” Ronnie said.
Hebert leaned back in his chair and his lips began to curl upward into a smile.
But Ronnie wasn’t finished. “But I do. Since we left the LAPD we’ve had twenty-one homicide convictions, about half of them murder one and the others bargained down to second degree or voluntary manslaughter. There were also four who were guilty but got themselves killed while officers were trying to make the arrests. I think a couple of those were suicide by cop.” She paused. “Of course, we don’t usually take on murder cases. When we do, we usually work for defense attorneys.”
Hebert was silent for several seconds. “Ever think of coming back to work?”
“No,” said Ronnie. “Not once.”
“Why not?”
“We still have a lot of friends on the force, but—”
“I’ll bet you do, with all those convictions.”
Ronnie ignored the interruption. “We like to work together. No department in the country would let us do that.”
“I see,” said Hebert. “But I guess it’s safe to assume we can count on you to cooperate with the official investigation of the shooting.”
“We always do,” Sid said. “At the moment we haven’t got much to share. We’ve just started to look at the Ballantine case.”
“That case belongs to somebody in North Hollywood homicide. I’d be satisfied to get the person who shot out your windshield. That’s my case. What’s your theory?”
