But as Gonzo rolled past the house—as she cast one last and final flick of her eyes before pressing on the accelerator—a glimmer of flame caught her attention. Or was it just a reflection? Or even a trick of the optic nerve? Gonzo cranked the wheel, made a three-point-turn, and guided the cab into a dark, curbside spot on the opposite side of the street and one address to the west. She killed the lights, rolled down her window, and stared into windows so black and opaque that they looked as dead as a doll’s eyes. Then she saw it again. A small, yellow flame, tracking deep inside the glass. And quite possibly, the outline of a man.
What is that? A candle?
Gonzo was already out of the car. She turned smoothly in place, sweeping the landscape with her eyes in an attempt to sight down strangers, potential witnesses, or dog-walking bystanders. Thankfully, the rain appeared to have shuttered every living being in the neighborhood but her. The sporadically spaced streetlamps were glowing, as well as windows dotting other homes. This meant that, despite the storm, electricity was obviously intact and being fed to the neighborhood by healthy power lines.
Then why the hell had Gonzo seen a flame inside Stew Raymo’s house?
Troubled but yet undeterred, Gonzo checked the safety on her pistol, tucked the muzzle into her jeans between the small of her back and her wide leather belt, covered the weapon under her letterman jacket, and crossed the street as if she were going to ring the bell of Stew’s neighbor to the left. Once she had crossed the sidewalk, she made three great strides across the lawn and did a one-armed vault over the fence to Stew’s driveway, ever careful to keep the pickup between herself and the house. There, Gonzo paused to recheck her surroundings and the street. She listened for sounds such as windows opening or the muffled strain of raised voices. Any sign that she, the stranger amongst them, had been identified as a prowler.
Breathe, bitch, breathe. And don’t forget your fucking speech.
With that thought, Gonzo muttered her opening lines to herself.
“Stew Raymo? Remember me?”
She tucked her nearly six-foot frame against a five-foot Cyclone gate faced with a privacy screen. In the dark, she couldn’t see the grease spot. Nightly oil drippings from Stew’s truck had left a puddle that, when mixed with the rainwater, left parts of the pavement slick. So as Gonzo, half-crouched, touched her Vibram boot sole to the unseen spot, she slid, spun, tried like hell to maintain her balance, then fell backward and absently thumped hard against the stucco siding of the house.
Mother-fuck!
Gonzo clenched both fists and gave a disgusted yet inaudible shout-down at herself. She knew what sounded like a gentle bump outside had to come across as an audible whump to anybody inside the house.
Above and to her left, Gonzo made out a small, garden window attached to what she expected was the kitchen. And despite the dark, she thought she detected movement somewhere within the three-way reflection. Gonzo pressed her ear to the wall. Were those footsteps she heard? Or her heart pounding? No! Footsteps followed by a clatter of something spilling to the floor. She unholstered her pistol, pressed herself flat against the wall and made a coin flip of a choice. Back door or front door?
Or just retreat to the damn cab!
Gonzo imagined Travis. She saw her son in tears, ignored by the frustrated school mom in charge of his care, bawling for his mother. Gonzo gave herself permission to cut and run. She should return to face Stew another day. Then again, she was an experienced cop with a gun in hand. Her better instincts calculated that she still had a partial element of surprise.
And your speech, Gonzo. Don’t forget your fuckin’ speech!
She chose the back door. She hunched her shoulders and pushed at the gate that opened easily, but squeaked loudly. So with both hands gripping the 9mm, she ran hell-bent along the length of the house.
But who saw whom first?
A broad, darkened figure turned the corner. It was at close range. Barely ten feet separated her from him. Gonzo could have raised her weapon and emptied her clip. Instead, she used her momentum, lowered her left shoulder, and drove hard with her legs.
Contact!
Gonzo felt the pop of her shoulder separating—the A.C. ligament twisting over the top of her collarbone. What would usually be a searing, knife-like pain was masked by a chemical spell of human adrenalin. As the pair spun to a patch of wet earth, Gonzo kept moving. She swung backward with a bone-crushing elbow, then rolled atop him, knee spearing his chest and her pistol tattooing his bloody cheek with the shape of a muzzle.
“Right there, motherfucker,” hissed Gonzo, “or so help me I’ll punch smoke holes in your face!”
“It’s me,” wheezed the man, working to push air over his tongue. “It’s me, Ben.”
If there had been the opportunity for someone—anyone—to ask Ben if there was a flaw in his plan, he would have replied with the question:
“Isn’t there always a flaw?”
But the plan had been formed so damn fast and with so little regard for anything but his own prismatic sense of justice, there was no time for his usual applied logic or assessment of risk. In the past seventy-two hours, his nerves had received such a beating, merely breathing had felt like a risk. And if he could get over that hurdle, how big of a leap was it for him to figure he could get away with executing Stew Raymo?
Somewhere between leaving Pam in a lusty lurch outside the Radisson and retrieving his car from the City Walk valet Ben had even found a moment to laugh at himself, reminded of what he used to tell his clients about the importance of planning before executing any safety plan. Avoiding costly injuries was five percent planning, ninety-five percent sweating out the plan. Such was the way Ben had spent the last ten years of his life with, in his former interpretation, much success.
No longer.
At least, he thought, not until Stew Raymo was vanquished from the planet. Maybe afterward, if Ben wasn’t dead or rotting away in incarceration, he would revisit all his misconceived concepts. Until then, he needed to execute his scheme.
After paying the valet for his car, Ben had made a quick visit to Target where he had picked up a set of black sweats and a matching rain jacket and knit cap, plus a box of disposable rubber gloves. He donned the new duds in the restroom, returned to his car, and drove unnoticed directly to North Hollywood. It wasn’t until he had parked around the corner and walked onto Morrison Street that he had realized he had forgotten to purchase a flashlight. Of course, he could have easily returned to his car and driven to any convenience store and the problem would have been solved.
But would his nerve have remained intact?
Without an answer, Ben had forged ahead armed with a handful of dangerous knowledge only criminals and paranoids like himself would possess:
The police, after removing Stew from the premises, would most likely not have reset the alarm. And in the unlikelihood that Stew had returned to set the alarm, Ben knew that the LAPD no longer responded to home alarm calls. More pathetic than that was the over-thirty-minute average response to home alarm calls by security companies offering patrol services.
Ben also knew the top ten most likely places people hide house keys, and if no key was found, the easiest and most silent means to enter a suburban house.
The location of Pam’s hidden gun.
The only real dangers, Ben figured, were the possible actions of dogs, pedestrians, and neighbors. The odds, though, were also with Ben. Neighborhood watch programs in L.A. were poorly attended with little or no follow-up by visiting officers or even those who hosted the gathering. That was why Ben lived in Simi Valley with nearly every other LAPD cop. In that way, North Hollywood seemed more like an entirely different country than a different area code.
So it followed that, but for the flashlight, Ben’s execution of the first part of his plan had been nearly flawless. He had trespassed onto Stew’s property without notice. He had found a back door key hidden above the nearby window trim. The alarm had not been set, so no aler
t was triggered and phoned to the security company. Ben had quickly found matches and a candle in a kitchen utility drawer. And lastly, under the sink in the master bath, Ben had found a half-filled box of Tampax, at the bottom of which was a small, nickel-plated revolver with a mother-of-pearl grip.
Ben had found an odd surprise upon the realization that he had never held a gun before. And as much as he knew about guns, their history, the crunchable numbers concerning gun violence, or more accurately, the violence and harm that, statistically, people with guns could and would continue to perpetrate—only the most base of human thoughts entered his head once the gun was firmly gripped in hand. The first revelation had been how heavy such a small weapon was to heft. The second had been how stirred and potent he felt just holding the gun. As Ben pointed the revolver into the scant streetlight filtering into the house, the second and final act of his plan had played out in full, living color.
Then came a sound that startled Ben. A sort of whump had rippled through the house. Ben stood frozen for a moment, one half of him wanting to analyze the sound while the other half yelled pure and simply...
Run!
Ben pocketed the gun, felt his way out of the bathroom into the master bedroom, fumbled horribly with the locks on the French door, and hurried down the rear steps into the backyard. Walk fast, he had told himself. Chest out, shoulders wide, with your head titled down, as if you were Stew. In the dim light, no self-respecting witness would have been able to testify if the dark figure walking alongside the house was or was not Stew Raymo, let alone somebody as unknown and vanilla as Ben Keller.
He had not seen her coming.
Right at him, shoulder down, and rushing like a linebacker. It wasn’t until Ben was flat on his back with her knee in his chest that he heard her voice, and against the clouded haze from a million city lights, had placed that patently curly hair. He knew it was Gonzo.
“It’s me... It’s me, Ben!”
“What the crap?”
Gonzo bared her teeth and shoved Ben’s head back into the sod.
“Can’t breathe!” coughed Ben.
Gonzo climbed off, breathing as if she had just finished a ten-mile foot race. Ben gagged for air.
“Why the hell...” Gonzo didn’t finish her question. That’s because she knew why Ben was at Stew’s.
“Fuck it! Roll over! On your stomach!”
“What’d you say?”
Gonzo didn’t ask a second time. She kicked Ben in the gut, forcing him to contract into a fetal ball. With that, she spiked her other knee into his shoulder blades, thus turning him to a surrendering, prone position.
“Lyd—”
“Shut up! Hands behind your neck. Interlace your fingers.”
“You’re arresting me?”
“For your own goddamn good,” hissed Gonzo. “Put you in jail for as long as it takes to keep your dumb ass alive.”
It was when Gonzo reached back to withdraw a pair of handcuffs from her back pocket that the tender tendon in her shoulder did a reverse loop, jolting her with a deep, searing pain.
“Mother fucker!” howled Gonzo.
“You don’t wanna do this—”
“I said shut up!”
Gonzo cradled her left arm, then with her right hand, stuck her pistol back into her waistband and went about working the handcuffs. Once the restraints were snapped into place around Ben’s wrists, she stood, fought back tears of pain, then yanked Ben upright and kicked his feet to shoulder width. She instinctively frisked him as if he were a common perp.
“You’re screwing with a really good plan,” urged Ben.
“Guess that means the day’s not a total loss.”
“Would you listen to me—”
“What the hell...”
This is when Gonzo discovered the revolver in Ben’s pocket. She pulled it clear and gave it a once-over in the slim light.
“Where’d you get this? This yours?”
“No.”
“Whose, then?”
“Pam Raymo’s,” said Ben with a defeated sigh. “The gun belongs to Stew Raymo’s wife.”
All the while, Stew watched.
From a spot equidistant between the granite countertop and the stainless steel refrigerator, Stew stood like a rampart, screwed into his own kitchen floor as the chemicals in his brain collided with the receptors in his eyes. At first it was the odor of spent sulfur and candle wax that had given him pause. After, it was muted voices that drifted in from the backyard. He tracked the voices with his ears as they moved up the driveway, then his eyes caught two shapes passing by the kitchen windows, left to right, one person trailing close to the other. As the figures moved onto the street, their outlines became more defined, their wet hair glistening under the streetlamps.
A man and a woman.
The woman was tall and walked with the glide of authority. The man appeared slightly slumped and suffering from the familiar gate of an arrestee with hands bound behind his back by a pair handcuffs. A prowler? Caught by a woman cop dressed in tight jeans and a letterman’s jacket and walking him to a checkered taxicab?
The methamphetamines in Stew’s bloodstream had more lasting power than the ethanol. Stew’s warm, boozy buzz was fading while the meth argued that it would feel good to grind his molars down to each respective nerve. Yet, there was the benefit of a heightened sense of time and place and Stew was convinced, a greater visual acuity.
Or maybe it was just that the woman cop was checking her prisoner into a goddamned, yellow-checkered cab. She opened the rear door of the taxi, triggering the dome light, and gestured for her prisoner to get inside. Stew witnessed a brief struggle, followed by an argument that ended with the prisoner relenting and slipping butt first into the backseat.
Then Stew saw Ben.
The moment Ben’s face became illuminated it was, for Stew, as if a snapshot had been taken and etched with laser precision into each cornea.
The bastard!
The man Stew had last seen in a tearful embrace with his precious Pam, had somehow returned into his orbit without so much as an invitation. Captured and arrested? And for what? A flash of memory pushed through the synthetic static between Stew’s ears—and with it came a prickly heat to the skin on his face. It was the picture of a woman detective who had visited him during his hours of post-operative recovery. She had pressed Stew about a set of twelve-year-old murders in Culver City.
That’s her, Stewy. The cunt that started this shit!
Ground zero, reasoned the rationally-inhibited killer. The downward spiral Stew was on hadn’t begun with Ben. It had begun with... Her!
The short respite from the storm was closing in a cascade of heavy rain that lowered like a curtain at the end of a final act. As the rain pounded hard against the house, growing louder by the microsecond, Stew’s picture of Ben and Gonzo in the checkered cab, framed by the generous kitchen window, quickly dissolved into a watery blur of amorphous and benign contours.
Stew’s right hand gripped a two-gallon gas can. In his left hand he clutched rags to use as a wick for the firebomb he planned to set in the bedroom. He dropped the contents of both fists in a synchronized clatter, then swept his arm across the kitchen counter until he heard the familiar jangle of his truck keys landing on the floor.
“I’m going to uncuff you for a second,” said Gonzo. “Turn ’em this way so I can see ’em.”
Ben rolled his eyes, then twisted in the seat to show Gonzo his hands. Gonzo keyed the lock, releasing one of Ben’s wrists.
“Okay. Buckle up,” said Gonzo.
“You’re making a mistake,” pressed Ben.
“You already said that,” Gonzo shot back. “How’s this? If my big mistake is stopping your even bigger mistake? I can learn to live with that.”
Ben wanted to resist. With his own hands free and Gonzo’s left shoulder clearly compromised, how hard would it be to grab a handful of Gonzo’s hair and slam her head into the Plexiglas safety screen, retrieve Pam’s revolve
r, and run? Would Gonzo dare shoot him? Would it be a kind relief to have bullets sting him from behind and cut the motors to his brain? Ben would never know, wisely deciding to comply with her command. He reached across and snapped himself in with the three-point harness.
“Run the open cuff underneath the lap belt,” ordered Gonzo. “Then snap the cuff back on.”
“I’m not gonna run.”
“Just do it for me, will ya?” said Gonzo.
Gonzo tested Ben’s handiwork with a tug, making sure he was secure. Satisfied, she slammed the door shut and climbed in behind the wheel with an audible groan. Her left shoulder felt like someone had dropped a sledgehammer onto it. She tossed both her 9mm and Pam’s revolver onto the passenger seat and started the engine. She shook her hair so violently, it left a symmetrical pattern of watery droplets across the safety screen.
“I know you think you’re helping,” said Ben. “But all you’re doing is prolonging the inevitable.”
“Half my job is prolonging shit. The other half is hoping that by prolonging shit, people’s better angels prevail and they forget what got ’em pissed off in the first place.”
“Right. Like I could ever forget.”
“Shut up. Most of what you’re hot about right now is Alex kicking you out. You just don’t know it yet.”
Ben shook his head in disagreement. “Guess word travels fast in Simi,” he said.
Gonzo flicked a guilty look into the rearview mirror before making a hard right, surging south onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard and through a changing stoplight, then swinging into northbound traffic on the Hollywood Freeway with the accelerator pressed to the floorboard. After all, Gonzo still needed to get back home to rescue her boy from that impatient mom.
It was 9:32 P.M.
“Take a picture,” said Gonzo, trying to lighten the moment. “If a year ago, somebody told me that I’d be driving a cab with Ben-the-Safety-Expert handcuffed in the back, I woulda told them to get their head checked.”
The Safety Expert Page 33
