“Didn’t they film The Silence of the Lambs here?” I asked as we pulled into the driveway. “Or Terminator Two? No, wait. It was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“I’d advise you at this point in to keep a lid on it, Bennett, or they might not let you back out when we’re done,” my trusty partner said.
After calling ahead, we badged our way through the gate and met California Highway Patrol Sergeant Joe Rodbourne in the front vestibule of the new administration building. The burly, bald sergeant got right to it. He slipped on a pair of granny reading glasses as he freed his notepad from the bulging breast pocket of his khaki uniform shirt.
“OK, here’s what we got. At four twenty-five or there-abouts this afternoon, a BMW tried to make an illegal U-turn at a highway patrol turnaround on the Seven Ten near the Santa Ana Freeway in East LA. As the car made the turn, a southbound Peterbilt hauling a trailer ran right over the top of the Beemer, killing the female passenger instantly. Witnesses say the truck and the tanker rode the median for a quarter mile, throwing sparks, but luckily came back down without going over and killing God knows how many other people driving home from work in the middle of rush hour.”
Rodbourne licked a callused thumb and turned the page.
“The driver of the BMW, named Scricca, Mathew J., was miraculously unscathed. He’s a deep-sea fishing-boat captain down at Marina del Rey. He gets around some, apparently, by his priors. His last one was attempted assault with a deadly weapon outside a Sunset Boulevard strip club on New Year’s Eve last.”
“Scricca is on something, they said?” I said.
The weather-beaten cop studied me over his bifocals.
“The attendant at the ER swore it’s GHB. You know, that nifty new date-rape drug all the lovely young club-goers are experimenting with these days? Makes sense. Scricca reportedly had some, eh, visual disturbances at the scene. Kept going on about flowers. ‘Keep the flowers off me. Get the flowers out of my stomach.’ Interesting stuff like that. That’s why they sent him here.
“We called you guys in when he came down, a little over an hour ago. Make that came down a lot, after he was informed of the fatality he was responsible for. He immediately asked to deal. He said he had something big. Something about Manuel Perrine.”
Parker and I looked at the veteran cop, then each other. We could practically read each other’s minds. Boats. Smuggling. Perrine. So far, so interesting.
“Take us to him, if you would, Sergeant,” Parker said with a smile.
CHAPTER 47
Sergeant Rodbourne found an orderly, and we went in through the administration building and then out through a covered passageway to an older, one-story brick dorm.
We were buzzed through a gate and went down a long, worn, once-white corridor. The hospital’s emergency lockup was lined with the kind of heavy doors usually seen on walk-in freezers. The blast doors had peekaboo windows in them, with thick crisscrosses of chicken wire beneath the smudged, shatterproof glass.
“Are you still dreaming of the lambs, Clarice?” I whispered to Parker, who immediately elbowed me in the solar plexus.
As we stopped at a door near the end of the hallway, I looked through the screened window to see Scricca, shirtless and on his back, handcuffed to a hospital bed.
I was surprised to see that he was good-looking. He was deeply tanned, with long, shiny black hair and pale-gray-green eyes, and was muscular in a wiry, rock-climber kind of way.
Even the creeps have to keep up appearances out here in the land of make-believe, I thought.
I saw ubiquitous tattoos, inked only on his torso in a vestlike pattern. It looked like he was wearing a paisley blackjack-dealer vest of snakes and soaring eagles and eight balls and evil clowns.
“Style. I like that in a man,” Parker mumbled as the orderly cracked the clasps on the door.
What Sergeant Rodbourne said was true, I thought, quickly scanning Scricca’s face as we went into the room. Though his eyes were bloodshot, he didn’t look deranged. If anything, his tired, forlorn expression was quite sober, that of a man who had just awakened to find himself as far up shit’s creek as one could go, and without a paddle in sight.
“Hi, Mr. Scricca. I’m Agent Parker,” Emily said with the slow, deliberate speech one would use with a toddler or a stoned-out junkie. “I work for the FBI.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry that girl is dead,” Scricca said, nervously chewing on the thumbnail of his free hand. “I got two girls of my own. One of them near her age, but, like I told them, she was the one with that mind-bending shit. She told me it was coke. It was bath salts or something, right? To tell you the truth, she was the one who suggested I make the U-turn. She dared me, in fact. Said I didn’t have the balls.”
“You’re a piece of work, Scricca,” Sergeant Rodbourne said, stepping toward him. “First you throw your date under a truck, now you throw her under the bus.”
Sensing trouble, I took a quick step sideways, into the brawny and angry cop’s path.
“Thanks, Sarge,” I said, steering him toward the rubber-room door. “We’ll take it from here.”
“We’re not here about the accident,” Parker said after I pulled the door shut. “You made a claim that you saw the wanted cartel leader Manuel Perrine here in LA. Where did you see him?”
“It’s not a claim,” Scricca said, folding his arms as he slowly looked back and forth at us. “I saw him this morning, before all this happened. He was with someone I know.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said, peering at him. “This morning, Manuel Perrine, the world’s most wanted and most ruthless killer, just strolled past you with a buddy of yours? That’s what you’re trying to tell us? Because when I meet people who have crossed Perrine’s path, it’s usually in a funeral home, not a loony bin.”
“He didn’t see me. I was a couple hundred yards away,” Scricca said, knocking hard on the bed railing with a knuckle. “I saw him with binoculars. I even looked at my cell phone at the FBI website to double-check the face. I’m not shitting you. It was him. Mr. Public Enemy Number One himself.”
“This was on the water?” Parker tried. “You saw Perrine when you were out on your boat?”
Scricca took a deep breath, his handcuff scraping on the bed rail as he squirmed back against the wall.
“I can’t tell you that until I get a deal. I’ll tell you everything I know when you write up some immunity and my lawyer OKs it. Being a rat makes me sick, but I can’t go back inside. My old lady tried to kill herself last time. I can’t do her like that. Not again.”
“OK, Mr. Scricca. I see. We’ll be back,” Parker said, ushering me out.
“What a noble guy, to consider his wife like that, don’t you think?” I said as we hit the hallway. “After he kills the girlfriend he’s been out drugging with and gets busted, his old lady is the very first person he thinks about.”
“The question is, what do you think of his story, Mike?” Parker said. “You think this waste of life might actually know something?”
“Yes,” I said, after a few seconds of looking back in at him. “Other than his taste in three-piece-suit body art and his obvious self-destructive tendencies, oddly enough, he actually seems like a pretty sharp cookie.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” she said. “Screw it. Let’s bite. Offer him a deal based on Perrine’s arrest and capture. If it doesn’t pan out, then what do we have to lose? It’s not like we have any other promising leads.”
“I’m down,” I said. “As long as there’s no cow milking involved, I’m pretty much down for anything.”
Parker took out her phone. She smiled mischievously as she waited for the line to get picked up.
“What’s so funny, Agent P.?” I asked.
“This goose chase that jackass Bassman sent us on,” she said. “How hilarious would it be if we just found the one that lays the golden egg?”
CHAPTER 48
As it turned out, we did strike gold out h
ere in California.
After Emily called back to the task force with our hunch, Bill Kaukonen, the LA County assistant district attorney on call, came to the hospital, and a deal was quickly struck.
Captain Scricca made out like a pirate. He would get a suspended sentence and a six-month stint in rehab for his role in the vehicular homicide if his information led to the capture of Perrine.
It was a sickening arrangement, I thought as I watched Kaukonen leave. The young woman who had been killed was only twenty-eight. But with Perrine out there trying to turn Southern California into the Vietnam War Part Two, it was easy to see that these were desperate times that called for some pretty desperate measures.
After the ADA left, we went back into Scricca’s cell and got his statement. The gist of it was that a little after noon, he had spotted Perrine in Marina del Rey, on a deep-sea fishing boat called Aces and Eights owned by a man named Thomas Scanlon. Scanlon was a sketchy character, he said, and it was an almost open joke among the fishermen down at the marina that he was involved with drug running.
Scricca’s story seemed to pan out further when we went back up to our HQ at Olympic Station and Emily put Scanlon into some of the Big Brother federal databases she was privy to.
Scanlon was, in fact, a sketchy character. In 1995, he had gotten booted from the Navy SEALs for a hot drug test. Soon after, Mr. Scanlon’s passport started appearing in some pretty strange places: South America, the Netherlands, Central Africa, the Middle East. It was a lot of world travel for a man who didn’t seem to have any visible means of support.
“This guy was in Qatar for a year and a half,” Parker said over the diner takeout piled on our desks. “When was the last time you went to Qatar, Bennett?”
“Went to Qatar?” I said, cracking the lid of my coffee. “I can’t even play one.”
“Then Scanlon just disappears off the grid for five years, and pow! Out of the blue suddenly pops up in SoCal as a deep-sea fisherman?” Parker said. “How’s that work?”
“You’re right. Overall, this guy seems pretty fishy,” I said.
Agent Parker tossed a sweet potato fry at me, which I deftly caught without spilling my joe. I took a bite and then, remembering it was a vegetable, promptly chucked it into the wastepaper basket.
“So what now?” I said.
“Now we call the bosses in to see how quickly they can spin our gold into straw,” Emily said.
“Ouch,” I said with a smile as Emily started texting people. “That sounds like something a burnt-out, jaded NYPD detective would say after a bottle of twelve-year-old Irish wine.”
“You’re a bad influence on people, Bennett,” Emily said, smiling broadly without looking up. “You should seriously think about talking to somebody about it.”
All the bells and whistles started going off after Emily and I sent the info up both the civilian and military chains of command. Wiretap subpoenas for all Scanlon’s phones were immediately put into motion, as well as round-the-clock surveillance for Scanlon’s boat and his house in Brentwood. The head FBI honcho working with the CIA and military folks up at the air base seemed especially excited, as the Tijuana tip they’d been following had dug a hole as dry as the Mexican desert.
A massive task force meeting was called for eight the next morning. It would be teleconferenced with the military folks at the air base. In the meantime, Emily’s immediate boss, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s LA office, Evaline Echevarria, ordered us to Scanlon’s house for the first shift of surveillance.
Though we’d been running pretty hard since the a.m., we both leaped at the assignment. I know I was pretty jazzed. After being out of commission, out in the sticks, I had a deep store of untapped adrenaline to run on.
As we drove over to the FBI HQ to get a better surveillance vehicle, it was my turn to start laughing.
“That’s a real personal gigglefest you’re having over there, Mike,” Emily said. “You losing it on me already? If you want, I could swing you back to Metro State Hospital for an eval. I noticed the rubber room next to Scricca was free.”
“Not yet,” I said, finally getting myself under control. “It’s just that I pictured Bassman’s face when he heard the news about our little gold strike. That obnoxious bozo is going to be so freaking pissed.”
CHAPTER 49
Scanlon’s house was in Brentwood, on Chaparal Street, a quiet, high-hedged lane behind an all-girls private school. It was an old, tasteful brick Tudor house hidden behind a lot of shrubbery, with a wrought iron gate across its driveway.
There weren’t too many parked cars on the secluded street, and, even with the silver Mercedes crossover we were using for an unmarked, it definitely wasn’t the best setup for surveillance.
“Nice crib for a chum chopper,” I said from where we parked, a couple of houses down.
Parker nodded. “That house easily goes for a million, maybe a million and a half.”
There was a security light on above the garage when we got there. We scanned the windows with binoculars, but there was nothing. No movement anywhere, even after another half an hour. There was no way to tell if Scanlon was home.
Parker fixed that, and quick. She made a phone call, and about twenty minutes later, a plain, white panel van pulled onto Chaparal. It passed us without acknowledgment and then slowed to a brief stop in front of Scanlon’s house before pulling away.
Parker’s phone dinged a couple of minutes later.
“It’s clean,” came a voice from the speaker, “but there’s a dog, Parker. A big son of a bitch. Good luck.”
“Gee, thanks,” Parker said, hanging up.
“Infrared?” I said.
“Close,” Parker said. “That was the LA office’s portable X-ray van. We use it at the ports sometimes, and on presidential visits. Two techs in the back of it work equipment that can see right through just about anything.”
“Like a TSA team on wheels? I take it that’s a pretty much all-male detail. Tell me, Parker. Can federal contractors apply for the job, and what’s the waiting list like?”
Parker raised one of her auburn eyebrows.
“You’d be surprised how many female agents are in the unit, Bennett.”
I blinked at her.
“Well, in that case, remind me to head to the supermarket before we go back to the hotel. I need to make a supply of tinfoil boxers for my stay here in LA.”
Though Parker tried to hide it, I noticed she actually laughed a little at that one. My war of attrition was taking its toll. As usual, I was wearing her down with my charm.
“Now, if Scanlon isn’t home trying not to let the bed-bugs bite at this time of night, where do you think he is, Mike?”
“That’s the sixty-four-million-dollar question, isn’t it?” I said. “If I were an international fugitive sneaking into an unfriendly country, I’d probably want to keep everyone who knew about it on a tight leash. At least until I left. If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on it that Scanlon is chilling with the big boss for the duration of his trip.”
“Which means, if we find Scanlon, we find Perrine,” she said.
“We can only hope and pray,” I said.
CHAPTER 50
After it was determined that Scanlon wasn’t home, phase two of the operation was put into play.
Parker got on the horn again, and then, twenty minutes later, a beat-up Dodge Ram pickup with a camper bed pulled up behind us.
“More friends of yours, Parker?” I said. “What does this truck do? Test your cholesterol?”
As she shushed me, I noticed that the two men who got out of it were dressed head to toe in black. I also noticed that the cabin light in the pickup failed to go on when the men opened the doors.
Parker zipped down her window as they approached. One of the agents was stocky and older, with a dark mustache. The other one was blond and looked like he’d just started shaving. I thought they looked like a father-and-son team of American ninjas.
“The one with the gate,” Parker told him. “There’s a dog, apparently.”
“No problem,” said Senior, patting the bag he was holding with an evil grin. “We love puppies.”
Junior kept his eyes on the house as he put a chaw of chewing tobacco between his cheek and gum. There was a light jingle of metal on metal when he tightened the knapsack on his back. He checked his watch.
“We’ll call you in … seven minutes?” he said, cocking his head at his partner.
“Six,” the older partner said with a nod before they walked off.
“The wheels of justice are moving so much faster than I remember. This must be some sort of land-speed record for a search warrant,” I said, watching the FBI agents scale the driveway gate like squirrels.
Parker ignored me. I’d only said it to tease her. This was an illegal, unauthorized black-bag job if there ever was one.
One I thoroughly approved of, actually. Following the letter of the law when Perrine was out there wiping out families and cops would be like obeying the traffic laws while driving a dying relative to the emergency room. In a word, stupid.
We needed information, the faster the better. We needed to be on Scanlon, on his phone, neck deep in his life, before he had the slightest inkling of what was what. My eyes were locked firmly on the prize, namely, a world without Manuel Perrine. I’d cut more corners than a miter saw to take out the son of a bitch who was still out there on the loose, trying to kill my family.
It was actually only five minutes from when the FBI Watergate plumber guys hopped the fence until it slowly started opening. The older agent opened the door formally, like a butler, as we came up the drive.
“Where’s Fido?” Parker asked.
“Out like a light. After we picked the lock and tossed him a treat, he got real sleepy all of a sudden. Funny, huh?”
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