by Jack Quaid
‘After you decided to enter the premises, tell me what happened.’ Internal Affairs was Lopez’s first assignment out of uniform. She was trying too hard. ‘What happened next, Detective?’
Sullivan sighed, looked to Jones.
He knew Sullivan’s story wasn’t going to change, no matter how many times he told it. ‘Lopez, do you mind giving us a minute?’
Her chair scraped the concrete as she pushed back. A moment later the door closed behind her and the room fell quiet. Jones stood and stretched out his busted leg. The pain eased, but only a little. He was two years older than Sullivan but joined the LAPD the year after him. He graduated top of the class and did the customary six months in uniform before shifting to undercover, where he exposed a drug smuggling ring out of LAX. The bust netted seventy million in heroin, and it made him a real-life genuine star. The bosses were grooming him to be the next power player, possibly even chief, so a young Jones found himself being transferred to a different department every twelve months to learn policing from all angles. It was during his brief stint in Homicide that Sullivan met him. They were partnered up together and got thrown a Jane Doe that nobody expected to solve. They traced that girl to a guy, and traced that guy to another guy, and the whole thing led to bringing down a people-smuggling operation out of KL. Jones took most of the glory. Sullivan didn’t care. He just moved on to the next case. Jones’s promising future all went to shit when his leg was blown apart by a religious zealot with a shotgun preaching peace, love, and child sex slaves. The leg never recovered, and Jones was taken off the street and put in Internal Affairs.
Jones turned the tape recorder off, drew in a long deep breath, and sat on the edge of the table. ‘Sometimes I worry about you.’
‘It’s nice to know you care.’ Sullivan shrugged. ‘My report’s clean.’
‘Doesn’t mean it’s faithful.’
‘Look,’ Sullivan said, ‘I made a call. The girls are safe, and only the bad guys got hurt.’
‘That’s a common theme in your reports.’
‘Making arrests.’
‘Suspects getting hurt.’
‘Am I under investigation, Lieutenant?’
‘We’re just two cops having a chat.’
Sullivan didn’t buy it. ‘Bullshit. What am I doing here?’
Jones leaned back in his chair. Picked up Sullivan’s personnel file. It was three inches thick. ‘I read this, and I see two things. I see a career detective who’s brought down some heavy hitters. Benny Eastwell, Rob Black—Jesus, you hunted Terry Vass halfway across the country and copped two bullets in the back for your trouble—and you still brought him in. I look at this and see a hero cop with more commendations than twenty cops put together. Then I read between the lines, and do you know what else I see?’
Sullivan shook his head.
‘I see bruised suspects, and others in body bags. I see corners cut and laws bent—’
‘I never broke the law.’
‘You’ve skimmed the edges of it. The question I ask myself is, who is the real Angus Sullivan? The hero cop on these pages or the violent man hidden between the lines?’ He put the lid on his pen and the pen in his pocket.
‘Well, there is one thing I’ve been wanting to get off my chest,’ Sullivan said.
Jones smiled. ‘Good.’
‘It’s a little embarrassing.’
‘Go on.’
Sullivan filled his lungs and slowly let the air escape. ‘Yesterday, I parked in a handicapped zone.’
‘Come on. I’m being serious.’
‘I feel really guilty about it.’
Jones stretched his leg. ‘Get out of here.’
Sullivan stepped into the hall. Uniforms passed him in one direction as they came on shift, while others hurried in the other with booze and women on their minds. A door down the hall opened and closed, and Captain Patrick Wilson stepped out. Sullivan knew the room he was just in. One table, one chair, and a television to monitor the interview rooms like the one Sullivan was just in.
‘Did you hear everything that just happened in there?’ Sullivan asked.
‘I heard,’ Wilson grumbled. ‘You went in without a warrant.’
‘I had probable cause.’
Wilson smirked to himself. ‘So you say.’
‘Everything worked out,’ Sullivan said. ‘How we got there shouldn’t matter.’
Wilson shrugged. ‘There’s something you should hear.’ He stepped off and Sullivan followed. He was a big man with the body of a boxer who, after his career, had let loose and eaten everything in sight to make up for the years of discipline, but he was still light on his feet and could still throw a punch.
They moved through the internal maze of paint-chipped corridors and came to an unmarked door. Wilson used a key, unlocked it, and they both stepped through. Sullivan’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. He saw through the two-way mirror and into the interrogation room. The animal Winter had tussled with earlier sat cuffed at the table. He had a hard face and an even harder looking bald head covered with dents from previous bad decisions. Track marks led up his neck along a collapsed vein and faded around the same place the scabs on his face began.
‘Haven’t been able to shut him up,’ Wilson said. ‘Nothing but yak, yak, fucking yak.’ He picked up the telephone and told whoever answered that they were ready.
A moment later Winter entered the interrogation room. At twenty-five she was young to be a detective. She came from a family of cops. Her granddaddy was a cop, her daddy was a cop, and she was the youngest of six children. All boys, all cops. Chasing bad guys was the family business. She was smart, Sullivan thought. Overzealous but smart; the heavy makeup and clothes led most people to believe otherwise.
She chugged a can of Mountain Dew and stared the junkie down.
His eyes had trouble focusing. ‘If I rat, this going to shave any jail?’
‘If it pans out, I’ll put in a word,’ Winter said.
The junkie sized up his options and realized he didn’t have any.
‘What do they call you?’
‘Roach.’ Winter uncuffed him. ‘You got a smoke?’
She tossed him a pack. His cracked lips hooked onto one and pulled it from the deck. ‘Whatcha wanna know?’ he said as he lit up.
‘Tell me about this Hailstrum.’
Roach slumped in his chair. ‘Why do you want to know about him?’ he said quietly. ‘I know other things. Lots of other things. I can tell you about those things instead.’
Winter took a seat. ‘I don’t want to know about those things. I want to know about Hailstrum.’
Roach, scared, chewed a dirty nail. ‘He leads a network of dirty cops. Word is he runs girls, drugs, the occasional robbery.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Nobody knows. All you hear is whispers and shit talk. Somebody, somewhere disappears. Somebody gets knocked. Nobody ever says nothing. Everybody is too scared.’
‘How did this dirty cop get to you?’
Roach dragged on a cigarette. ‘Last week, I’m out and about with my boy Beanzie drinking, cruising for snatch. Good times, y’know? Then he gets a call…’
‘Beanzie?’
‘Yeah,’ Roach said. ‘He’s all fidgety, like he’s got to score up, but he don’t, cos he’s already high as all fuck. Says he’s gots to go do this thing. Wants me to go for moral support or backup or some fuckin’ shit.’
‘What’s Beanzie do?’
‘Big dicks, little dicks, clean dicks, put-a-hole-in-the-world dicks. You want a gun that’ll do any of the above, Beanzie’s your man.’
Winter waved her hand for Roach to move on.
‘We headed out of the city.’
‘Where to?’
‘Out of the city, I dunno. Lyon maybe. We roll up on this joint and Beanzie’s getting all nervous and shit like a little bitch, so I tell him to man the fuck up.’
‘Did he?’
‘After I slapped him, he did. We knocks on this door and
this cop—’
‘How’d you know he was a cop?’
‘You all have a look.’
‘What kind of look?’
‘I don’t know, a cop look. Now, I was only there for a few minutes, but I could see that these guys were definitely the don’t-fuck-around types. They didn’t say much, but they didn’t need to. It was the look in their eyes. That look did all the talking.’
‘How many?’
‘Three or four.’
‘Was it three or was it four?’
‘Do I look like a mathematician?’
‘No,’ Winter said. ‘Not really.’
Roach flicked his cigarette to the other side of the room and let the smoke escape his nostrils. ‘One of them went to Beanzie’s car and got the guns.’
‘What kind of guns?’
‘I didn’t look.’
‘If you had to guess?’
‘M16s.’
‘That’s a hell of a specific guess.’
Roach looked around. Paranoid. ‘That’s not all. They had maps. On the walls in the place, they had maps, blueprints, timetables and shit. Now I’ve seen some shit in my time and I’d have to say that these guys look like a bunch of guys who were planning some shit. My guess, a robbery.’ Roach leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. ‘Six a.m. tomorrow morning is when it’s going down, and it’s all ran by this cat, Hailstrum.’ He was pretty pleased with himself. ‘So what about my jail?’
‘What about it?’ Winter said.
‘This is gold. This shit’s going down.’
‘What shit?’ Winter said. ‘Some fairy tale about a network of bent cops? Some bullshit about a robbery tomorrow morning? You don’t know who they are, what they’re robbing. You don’t know shit.’
‘Beanzie will tell you; go ask him. He hangs out on Mack Avenue.’
‘Is Beanzie his real name?’
‘No.’
‘What is?’
Roach couldn’t remember and slapped the table. ‘Fuck.’
‘Come back to me when you have something that’s actually something.’
Winter left the room.
‘Hey,’ Roach’s cracked voice yelled. ‘Six a.m. It’s meant to happen at six a.m. Fucking six a.m., Six fucking a.m. Tomorrow at six a.m.’ And the more he said it, the more insane he grew at the sound of his own voice.
Wilson flicked the switch and muted the interview room audio.
‘Do you believe him?’ Sullivan asked.
‘The chief believes it, and I believe what she tells me to believe, so we’re looking into it.’ Wilson cocked his head and smiled. ‘What do you say? Do you want in?’
‘Every second crim whips out that story when they’re busted. Hailstrum is nothing but a dead end. A myth. There’s no network of corrupt cops.’
‘It’s not the first time you’ve chased a dead end that led somewhere.’
‘Do you really believe this guy?’ Sullivan dry rubbed his face. He was tired, and Roach had given him a headache. ‘Put Internal Affairs on it. Jim Jones would chew this up.’
‘Jim Jones is only looking to get his head on the TV. He’s still trying to save the career he had before his leg was blown off. The chief wants this taken care of quietly. If it gets out that a group of officers pulled a robbery and we knew about it, it’ll fuck us up for years. There will be budget cuts across the board. Then we’ve got low-paid officers, then we’ve got corrupt officers. We need to find Hailstrum and stop whatever is happening before tomorrow at six a.m. If this thing goes down, a lot of people are going to get hurt.’ Wilson put a fatherly hand on Sullivan’s shoulder. ‘I don’t have anyone else I can trust.’
Sullivan gave a weak nod. ‘Alright, shit. I’ll look into it.’
‘That’s a boy,’ he said, slapping Sullivan’s shoulder. ‘Give me updates. Any lead, no matter how insignificant, you hear me?’
Wilson headed to his office, and Sullivan waited until the locker room was empty before taking a shower.
His thirty-year-old body was an embarrassment, covered with the history of his life in a mess of tattoos, scars, and gunshot wounds. The twelve years on the street running and gunning felt twice as long and his body felt as if it were three times as old. Even after a shower, he could still smell the gunpowder on his hands and hear the ringing in his ears from the mess at the green stucco house.
Then he strapped on his Glock and stepped back out into the concrete jungle.
Chapter Three
Junkie. Rapist. Murderer. Roach was all these things and probably more, but that didn’t make him a liar. Sullivan parked in the police bay and climbed out. 14th Precinct loomed over the street. Anybody pinched is initially kept at the station, but when the detectives are finished listening to their confessions and lies, they’re transported to the watch-house for a short stay, then either released on bail or taken to a long-term holding facility out of the city. Sullivan stepped through the double doors and into the quiet of the lobby. It was nothing special: four dirty walls, a couple of plastic chairs, and a glass window for checking in and out. Sullivan tapped his badge on the glass that somebody had tried scraping their name into.
The cell officer, Bean, waiting out retirement, looked up from his Playboy. ‘Dropping off or picking up?’
Sullivan put his badge away. ‘Neither. I logged an arrest earlier; I need to see him again.’
Bean rose to his feet, stretched out his back. It cracked all the way up to the top. He laid the paperwork on a clipboard and picked up a pen. ‘Name?’
‘Mine or his?’
Not impressed. ‘His.’
‘Leroy ‘Roach’ Blacker.’
‘Christ, what’s wrong with the names they’re given?’ Bean slid the clipboard under the glass. ‘Sign. Badge number and weapon.’
Sullivan filled out the form, unclipped his sidearm, and slid both under the glass. Bean buzzed the door, and Sullivan stepped into the man-made purgatory. It was after dinner but before lights out. The prisoners were relatively content, as content as prisoners were ever going to be, anyway. The halls were calm and quiet.
‘Buddy. Hey, buddy.’ A prisoner leaned through the bars of his cell. His hair was long, grey, and thinning. He whispered, ‘Can you spare a smoke?’
Sullivan pulled out his pack and gave the old-timer a smoke and a light.
‘Thank you, buddy. Thank you.’
Sullivan nodded and moved on. His footsteps echoed on the thick concrete. Somewhere in another part of the facility a radio played. His footsteps and the muffled music were all that could be heard until the peace was broken by a whooping alarm. Red lights flashed all the way down the corridor. Farther up, cops in riot gear rushed out of a door and disappeared around a corner.
Sullivan picked up the pace.
Beating sounds up ahead.
His steps turned into a jog, then into a run.
He took the corner. Stopped.
A frantic mess. Three guards were battling a wall of inmates. On the floor, a prisoner convulsed as blood pumped out and painted the floor a brown shade of red. Two other guards worked to keep him alive, but a couple of seconds later the body stopped moving. Sullivan took a couple of steps forward and got an angle on him… or what was left of him. He was a mess. His face was swollen and blue, and there was an ear-to-ear smile across his throat. Despite all that, it was as clear as day that the hunk of meat on the floor was Leroy ‘Roach’ Blacker.
Sullivan didn’t know if there was a network of corrupt cops or if there was a kingpin going by the name of Hailstrum in the LAPD. What he did know was that there was somebody out there that thought that Roach was telling the truth. Or enough of the truth to put out his lights.
Sullivan turned, headed back the way he came, past the ambos whose only purpose now was to fill out paperwork.
He clocked his watch: 12:07 a.m.
Less than six hours left until the robbery.
Chapter Four
12:57 AM
Roach had sai
d Beanzie hung out on Mack Avenue. It was an area riddled with bootleg bars, tattoo parlors, boarded-up houses, and people who knew how to keep their mouths shut. So to say Beanzie hung out on Mack Avenue was about as useful as saying Beanzie’s favorite color was orange. Sullivan ran the usual checks. The computer came back with 315 Beanzies and none of them with a weapons charge in their file.
He brought the car to a stop across from Monroe Guns n’ Ammo. The four-lane street was busy. Cars shot past, and he had to stop three times before he made it to the other side. There was a firing range at the rear of the shop, and shots could be heard from the street in muffled thumps and cracks.
The bell above the door announced Sullivan’s arrival. The woman behind the counter, who had tattoos for sleeves and an asshole for a face, briefly looked up before refocusing her attention on the weapon she was cleaning.
‘Jackknife around?’
Her eyes avoiding him, she called out, ‘Jack. Some pig out here wants to see you.’
Movement came from the small room behind the counter, and a moment later Jackknife filled the space in the wall where a door would usually go. His gut hung out over his sweatpants, and his T-shirt wasn’t big enough to cover it.
‘New diet?’ Sullivan asked.
‘Fuck off,’ he mumbled. ‘I’ve been trying.’ He thumbed toward the shooting range, and Sullivan followed him through.
The smell of stale gunpowder hung in the air, and the walls looked like they were imported from Baghdad. Somebody farther down popped off a few rounds as Jackknife came to a stop. Four years ago, Sullivan sent him away for receiving stolen ammunition from the DPD’s armory. What he left out was that his fifteen-year-old son Wyatt was in on the act as well. Jackknife took the fall, and his son walked.
‘I’m looking for a runner. Calls himself Beanzie.’
Jackknife’s eyes avoided Sullivan’s. If he’d been connected to a lie detector, he probably wouldn’t be feeling too comfortable. ‘Nah, don’t know him,’ he mumbled.
After twenty years of listening to lies, Sullivan had a pretty keen bullshit detector. ‘Yeah, you do,’ he said.
They locked eyes. Jackknife’s face wasn’t the lying kind, and he knew it. ‘Fuck.’
