"On the other side of this senseless tragedy is Lieutenant Alexa Scully," the anchor said. "Privileged, beautiful, and the youngest bureau commander in LAPD history. She was only a thirty-five-year-old lieutenant when promoted to acting head of the Detective Bureau by the LAPD's then incoming Chief of Police Tony Filosiani. Lieutenant Scully's career was highlighted by postings in Internal Affairs, followed by a transfer to L. A.'s hottest division, the old South Central Bureau, where she also saw action on the same mean streets where David Slade once flirted with crime as a child. What angry forces led these two officers to that place where one now lies dead and the other dying? For more on this, CNN Special Correspondent Ann Richardson Brown has a story of passion and civil unrest."
An African-American correspondent took over. She was standing outside the gates of the police academy at Elysian Park.
"Against a backdrop of racial strife in L. A., it appears that much more was going on between these two police officers than just a command relationship."
Still shots of Alexa and Slade at the Academy appeared on screen, followed by candid photos of a police graduation party, where Alexa and Slade, both in their early twenties, were pictured together.
I couldn't take any more. I could see they were leading up to a relationship gone bad story followed by a murder-suicide.
The trauma unit was beginning to fill with the first-round losers in Friday Night's Gunshot Lottery. As the first victim was rushed in on a gurney, I got up and went to the elevator.
A few minutes later I had found my way to the coronary care unit on the ninth floor. I asked a nurse what room Chief Filosiani was in. She gave me the number but told me I shouldn't stay long, adding that he'd just been cleared for visitors that afternoon and was still very weak. When I found his room and looked in on him, he was sleeping, so I turned to leave.
"What took you so long?" His voice sounded like sandpaper from two days with tubes down his throat. He was pale and tired.
"How're you feeling?" I said, turning back.
"Like I got a pasta machine grinding in my chest." He beckoned me into the room. "Siddown."
I walked in and sat beside his bed. "Alexa's been shot. . . . She's ..."
Tony held up his hand and stopped me. "I'm getting hourly reports."
"They won't tell me much," I said bitterly.
"She's stable but not yet responding. They put her in an induced coma with barbiturates. Pheno-something or other. Some guy from UCLA is making arrangements to Medivac her out of here and over there."
All stuff I already knew, but I was glad he'd been checking on her.
"You stay pretty close to things for a guy just out of a quadruple bypass."
"She's one of mine," he said softly. "She's getting a raw deal." His face was now shiny with sweat. He needed a shave.
"David Slade was dirt, and they're acting like he was some reclaimed ghetto hero," I said. "He pulled guns on civilians over bad lane changes."
"Yeah, I read his PSB file," he said. "But the mayor doesn't want us to hit this guy. Slade's already dead. Kicking dirt on him will only make it worse."
"But it's okay to kick dirt on Alexa?"
"It's all gonna come out eventually. It'll get straightened out. This is too big to push down."
"And what am I supposed to do, Tony? You're over here. Mike Ramsey won't deal with it. The press is dying to hang this all on Alexa. She's in a coma and can't defend herself. How do I stop this?"
"She's your wife, son. Go find the piece that's missing."
"Lou Maluga is involved," I said. "I think he may have even pulled the trigger because Slade was having an affair with his wife, Stacy. But I've been so busy with Alexa, I haven't been able to do much to prove it yet."
He reached out and took my hand, "I want you to remember two things." He paused and looked right at me. "There are times when you must risk everything to achieve your goal. And life's defining moments are usually played under the shadow of doubt."
Chapter 24.
IT WAS AFTER eleven p. M. and the trauma ward was still filling up.
The sobbing mothers of gang-bangers held the hands of slack-faced relatives as their half-dead teenage sons were wheeled past.
My head was throbbing. I left my mobile number with the trauma nurses telling them I was going to sleep on a sofa in the hall.
The rest of the night was fitful. Nobody called me, but I kept dreaming that my cell phone was ringing. In the dream someone was trying to give me critical information about Alexa's condition over a bad line. I strained to hear a transmission that was always garbled and unclear.
The next morning at seven a. M. after checking on Alexa and getting the usual guarded description of her condition, I treated myself to a sponge bath in the hospital men's room. While I was in the middle of this, my cell phone actually did ring. Luther Lexington was on the line.
"We're moving her at ten a. M. I'm going to use a helicopter because it will cut the transport time and limit her exposure to only fifteen minutes or so. I'll ride over with her in the chopper. I want you at UCLA Neurosurgery on the fourth floor when we arrive around ten-thirty."
"How is she? They still aren't telling me much, Lex."
"There's really nothing to tell. That's the way these things often go, Shane. She's stable and in an induced coma. Until we try and wake her up, we won't know much. I've been studying her brain CTs. There's quite a bit of foreign matter still in there. Some of the bullet fragments look like they might be restricting blood flow to her temporal and occipital lobes. If those areas don't get sufficient blood supply, then brain cells will die. We may need to consider another surgery soon. I'll make that evaluation along with my vascular guy later today. But you need to know, I wouldn't move her if I didn't think I could pull it off."
Next, I called Chooch and gave him the news. After I finished, he said, "I'm coming over there now."
"I'm gonna need you over at UCLA to stay with her, so go there. I've got to get working on who really killed Slade. I need to disprove all this nonsense they're spreading about her on TV."
The problem was, I was unsure of exactly how to do that. The Academy photos proved Alexa and Slade had certainly been friends. But that didn't mean their relationship was more complicated. I believed in Alexa. She had saved me more than once. Now it was my turn to save her.
The Medivac flight went off as scheduled. I caught a glimpse of Alexa as her stretcher was wheeled into the elevator for the quick trip up to the helipad. She was covered with green hospital sheets, her head wrapped in gauze. A drip trolley rode a bed rail above her, feeding fluids. She looked vulnerable and small. Moments later, I heard the blades of the chopper rev up, whining loudly on the roof above. I watched through the window as it headed west, flying low across the skyline carrying Alexa's unconscious body away from me.
I made it to UCLA in less than forty minutes. I parked in a red zone, leaving my handcuffs on the dash, and ran inside, taking the elevator up to neurosurgery.
Luther met me thirty minutes later and reported that Alexa was stable. Everything had gone as he had hoped. He asked me to be back here at seven that evening to meet the team of doctors he'd picked to be on her surgical and treatment teams.
It was a long morning until Chooch arrived. I told him he would need to stay all day, and about the meeting at seven. Then I gave him a hug.
"Dad, I don't know what to tell some of these guys at practice. With everything on TV, they're starting to look at me funny."
"Tell them Alexa's your mom and that you love and believe in her."
As I said this, my mind flipped back to the plastic container buried in my barbeque, with Alexa's taped confession inside. I didn't know why I was so sure it was false. I just was. I left Chooch and headed back to the main entrance.
As I was coming out of the hospital, I ran into a cluster of news camera crews and field correspondents who had been alerted that Alexa had been moved to UCLA.
"Detective Scully, CNN. Can we have a word with you?
" one of them shouted.
"No."
"Detective Scully? Channel Four. Would you talk to us, please?"
"No."
I pushed past them as they turned on their cameras and chased after me. I knew I looked like one of those creeps they ambush on 60 Minutes. I ran past the cameras to my car, trailing a flurry of No Comments. Husband of Lieutenant Scully flees reporters' questions.
My next stop was the Glass House. I needed to pick up Stacy Maluga's pager, which I hoped was back from ESD and on Sally Quinn's new desk. As I drove into the underground garage I noticed at least ten news vans parked out in front of the police administration building. I took the elevator to five.
I was hoping to just pick up the pager and get out. But coming off the elevator, I ran straight into Captain Calloway.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, startled to see me.
Cal was about five feet four with a shaved, black, bullet head, and Mighty Mouse muscles. He was not a guy anybody took lightly.
When I didn't answer, he said, "Hey, Shane, I want you out of here, now. Did you see that circus out front? You need to be invisible."
"Lemme pick up my briefcase and I'll get lost."
I pushed past him and got to my cubicle. There was a message slip in Cal's scrawled handwriting in the center of my desk saying that Dr. Lexington had called yesterday, along with the yellow sheets on Stacy and Lou Maluga that I'd requested. There was also a sealed envelope from ESD waiting in Sally's In-basket. My desk was a clutter. She hadn't used hers yet, so it was without a scrap of personal paraphernalia. I snatched up the ESD package without opening it and turned to leave. As I did, my cell phone rang and with it, my heart froze. Something new on Alexa?
But it wasn't the hospital. It was Rosey.
"Hey, Shane, I think we may have a line on this Bodine character."
"Where are you?"
"Meet us at Pepi's Mexican Diner on the corner of Lucas Avenue and Emerald Street in Echo Park?"
"Now?"
"This place is a grease pit. You wait too long, we'll all be in the can, fighting for toilets."
I ran to my car and sped out of the underground garage. All the way there I wondered what they'd found in Echo Park. Suddenly it hit me. If you were so down and out that you had no options left, if you were willing to sleep in a cave with rats the size of house cats, if you could endure the damp reek of the ungodly, then you would go to the old Belmont Tunnel near the corner of Lucas Avenue and Emerald Street.
That abandoned subway tunnel was the lowest rung on the human ladder. The last stop for lost souls in L. A.
Chapter 25.
THEY WERE SITTING out front of a small taco stand under a Cinzano umbrella which was liberally dappled with pigeon droppings. Four tough-looking black guys in Polo shirts, wind-breakers, and jeans. I spotted Dario and Rosey. The other two, I didn't know. I pulled up to the curb and got out. They were all eating tacos and drinking Cokes out of paper cups.
"Shane, this is Lawrence Fischer from West Bureau Vice," Rosey said as I approached and all four stood. I shook hands with Fischer, a skinny undercover cop who was obviously working street strays and dope mokes because he wore long, braided hair, beads, and had arm tats. "And this monster with bolts through his neck is Adrian Young. Known in South Central as Young Frankenstein."
Adrian Young shook my hand, popping two knuckles in the process. He was tall and square, and looked hard as a hickory.
"These guys are also in Oscar Joel Bryant," Rosey said.
"Thanks for helping," I replied. "You think Bodine's in the Belmont Tunnel?"
"Yeah, maybe," Dario said. "Some of his housing associates finally copped to assaulting him. They caught him stealing a bicycle and dusted him up. That was yesterday. Afterwards, they think he might a crawled in there."
I sighed. "If we're going into that sink hole, we're gonna need flashlights."
"And oxygen tanks," Adrian Young said. "It stinks in there."
"It ain't gonna get any sweeter smellin' while we're standin' around talking about it," Rosey said.
Everyone got a black Mag light out of their car and joined me in front of the taco stand. Then we walked five abreast down Lucas Avenue toward the decommissioned tunnel.
The old, boarded-up Pacific Electric Station sat in front of the concrete-faced tunnel entrance. The abandoned terminal was a big, two-story, concrete box with plywood-covered windows and a cathedral-sized, metal door. Over the decades, the building had become a living canvas. There was almost no tagging on the big facade. Most of the decoration had been done by aerosol artists. Dragons adorned the walls in bright colors. Some guy with a lot of leftover turquoise paint had rollered the top third of the building all the way across creating a cornice effect, giving the structure a strange art nuevo look. A few hundred yards beyond this colorful concrete box loomed the tunnel entrance itself: a large gaping arch cut into the Echo Park hillside.
The electric Red Car had been an early attempt at rapid transit in Los Angeles that had lasted from the mid-twenties to the mid-fifties. The Pacific Electric subway tunnel had originally been dug as a shortcut for trolleys going from downtown L. A. to Hollywood or the San Fernando Valley. It had become a victim of the gradual dismantling of the 1,100-mile rail system as freeways took over. Eventually, the electric Red Cars went the way of the snap-brim fedora. The tunnel was used temporarily for city storage, until 1967 when the section between Figueroa and Flower Streets was filled in to pour the massive foundation for the Bonaventure Hotel. The existing tunnel and tracks now went into the hills only for about a mile before they abruptly ended at a concrete wall. Over the years I'd fished several dead bodies out of that miserable hole in the hill. It was the most dismal place I'd ever been. Once a year the County would come out and plow the reeking gunk and human refuse out of the cave and repair the broken-down chain-link fence that attempted to block the entrance. Twenty minutes after they were gone somebody would cut it open again and the cycle would begin anew.
As we neared the mouth of the tunnel, I began to pick up the sour sweet stench coming from inside. Wounded men and animals crawled in here for refuge and often to die. Homeless people cooked food or drugs over newspaper fires, slept in the tunnel's * dank confines, and defecated in the slight indentations where the red car tracks used to be. Their old cooking fires had blackened the walls while the spirits of the long dead seemed to hover in every crack and crevice.
"Welcome to Paradise," Rosey said, as we switched on Mag lights and began the gruesome trek down the bleak corridor.
Before we were a hundred yards in, a pair of feral eyes reflected in the light of my flashlight beam. Huge rats, known by tunnel dwellers as track rabbits, scurried away from us in the dark. They were ugly rodents that hunted in the dark. Anything they could digest, they tried to eat, even crouching in packs to nibble the fingertips of blitzed-out bums in a drug haze. But in this desperate place the tables could quickly turn. The tormented men and women would sometimes trap the rats and spear their rodent carcasses on sticks so they could be eaten, roasted over smoldering sections of the L. A. Times.
We found our first cardboard condo about four hundred yards in. The resident was a woman with stringy black hair and oozing track marks on both arms. She peered out of her crate like a ghoul in a horror flick.
"You know John Bodine?" I asked.
She had a different kind of deal in mind.
"You got five bucks I'll suck off all a you," she whispered, her voice rasping.
It was hard to understand her because somebody had knocked out most of her teeth.
"We're looking for John Bodine," I repeated.
"You don't want a blow job, then get the fuck away," she said, slinking back into her box.
We shined our lights on down the tunnel and kept moving. The beams only penetrated fifty feet ahead. From beyond the reach of our flashlights, something growled at us. Man or beast, I couldn't tell. We were flushing people and animals up the tunnel ahead of us. They w
ould sometimes hide in the cutbacks and then try to sneak back around. We shined our lights on them as they scurried past. Nobody looked like Long Gone John.
A half a mile in, we encountered a larger cardboard condo complex: six shipping crates huddled together where people lived. Most were currently empty, but two appeared occupied. I went over and shined my light into a box where there was a man lying inside. I reached in to wake him.
"Shit," I said, as my hand touched his cold, stiff body.
"What is it?" Dario asked from behind me.
"This guy's dead."
I could smell his rotting flesh. God only knew how long he'd been there. His next-door neighbor was snoring, so I woke him.
"Whatta you want?" he groaned at me.
"Your buddy here is dead."
"Not my buddy." He sat up. "Fucking guy," the man said, leaning out and looking over at his dead neighbor who was now illuminated in the narrow beam of my Mag light. "Thought he was just sleeping off a powder fix."
"You know John Bodine?" I asked. He looked at me through tangled hair. "They call him Long Gone John," I added.
"I can know lots about him. You got some cash?"
"Describe him. If you get it right, then we'll talk money."
"Fat guy. No teeth."
"Nice try." I turned back to Rosey. "Better radio this DB in."
Lawrence Fischer triggered his walkie-talkie and tried to put out the call, but he only got static. "We're in too deep," he said. "Gotta wait till we're outside."
We moved on. The smell was horrific. The few people we encountered who hadn't slipped past us turned away, trying to hide from our flashlight beams. They looked like grotesque Salvador Dali sketches. The ones we did talk to claimed not to know anything. I pinned each one with my flashlight, asked about Bodine, got nothing and moved on.
"I can't take much more," Adrian Young said. "This stench is gonna make me yak up those tacos."
Half an hour later I was beginning to feel like we were wasting our time. The end of the tunnel was coming up. The opening stopped at a dirty concrete wall, which was the foundation of the Bonaventure. It seemed a striking contrast. On the other side of that wall, just a few floors above, was a luxury hotel with people eating steaks while down here they were lined up waiting to get into hell. The paradoxes in this town can drive you nuts.
White Sister (2006) Page 12
