Dangerous Games (31 page)

An LED on the meter panel blinked on. The diode at 135 degrees—southeast.

The signal-strength meter flickered feebly, showing two bars on the twenty-increment graph. There was no audible tone from the speaker. That meant the signal was so far away as to be barely within range.

Still, she had a bead on it.

She’d found Kolb.

31

“I don’t think most cops would feel that way about their work,” Abby said as the car glided along dark streets.

Kolb looked at her, his face unreadable. “You’re awfully protective of the police. You got someone in the family who’s a cop?”

“No.”

“You ever know any cops other than me?”

“Well, no.”

“So you don’t know shit about it, do you?”

“I just think—”

“I know what you think. You think it’s good guys versus bad guys.” He made angry stabbing motions with his forefinger. “There are evil people out there on the street, and the boys in blue have to put them away.”

“Something like that.”

“It’s a load of crap.” Kolb cut south on Western Avenue, driving too fast, the tires squealing as he made the turn. “Let me tell you what really goes down. The typical cop would feel right at home with those neo-Nazi cellmates of mine.”

An interesting criticism, since Kolb was the one with the swastika tattoo. “Why would police officers get along with a bunch of thugs?”

“Because the police officers
are
a bunch of thugs.” Kolb thrust his chin out, a threat display. “You know who becomes a cop? The bully from your local playground. The kid who wasn’t as smart as the other kids, but he could beat the snot out of them. Then that kid is all grown-up, and he can’t go around pounding on people anymore. Until he finds out there’s a job for him. A job where he gets to carry a club and handcuffs and pepper spray and a big honking gun. A job where nobody can question him or even look at him cross-eyed without putting themselves in a world of hurt.”

“You’re saying cops are just dysfunctional kids who never grew up?”

“Dysfunctional—I like that. Yeah, they’re dysfunctional, all right. They want to strut. They admire Mafia guys and high-rolling pimps and crack addicts. They all want to prove they’ve got the swingingest dick on the block.”

“So it’s a macho thing.”

“Not macho. Not in the true sense. A real man doesn’t need to prove himself. He can take any amount of abuse, and it runs off him like water off a duck. He can stand there and take the insults without flinching, no matter what those spic assholes say….” He had detoured into some private memory. She saw him shake himself back into focus. “My former colleagues aren’t strong enough, centered enough, for that kind of discipline. They don’t rise above their environment. They lower themselves to it. You know what the LAPD is? A gang. A street gang.”

“I think that’s a little extreme.”

“What else would you call a bunch of guys who roam bad neighborhoods at night and smack down anybody who pisses them off?”

There was some truth in this, Abby knew, but there were plenty of good cops, too, like Wyatt. Anyway, her personal feelings didn’t matter. She had to keep working on Kolb. “The police aren’t outlaws,” she said. “They
are
the law.”

“That only makes them more dangerous.” At the Santa Monica Freeway he took the on-ramp, racing east in the fast lane. “Except I shouldn’t say
them
. I should say
us
. I was one of them. Every night it was our gang against theirs, our colors against their colors. Their colors were black, brown, and yellow. The blacks, the Hispanics, the Asians.”

“I thought you didn’t care about skin color.”

“I don’t. None of us did. It wasn’t racism. We didn’t hate them. We went up against them,
mano a mano
.”

Abruptly he veered across three lanes and shot down the Vermont Avenue off-ramp. He’d been on the freeway less than a minute.

“What was that about?” she asked.

“Changed my mind,” he said curtly. “Decided to take the surface streets.”

Abby knew his real reason. The maneuver was a standard technique of evasive driving. Anyone on their tail would have been lost during the quick exit.

She saw Kolb glance again at the rearview mirror. He nodded, satisfied.

“But race does matter?” she pressed.

“Only as a signal. It tells you who to look out for. You know about that, I’m sure. Picking up signals. Reading people.”

She phrased her response cautiously. “Why would I know anything about that?”

“You live in this city, don’t you? You couldn’t survive here for a week if you didn’t know how to size up a threat.”

This was innocuous enough, but she still wondered what had made him raise the issue in the first place. “It sounds like everyone who’s poor and nonwhite is a threat.”

“I told you, we didn’t hate them. Tell you the truth, we probably respected them more than most of the law-abiding citizens we met. At least the guys we tangled with had
cojones
.”

“If you didn’t hate them, why tangle with them at all?”

“Because they weren’t us. The battle lines were drawn. We were on one side, and they were on the other.”

“They were civilians, you mean?”

“They were combatants.”

“How about someone like me? Am I a combatant?”

He looked at her, his face lit by the glow of the dashboard. “I don’t know, Abby. Are you?”

She didn’t care for that question or for the intensity with which he asked it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He laughed, evading an answer. “Just trying to give you an education in the real world. Giving you the benefit of my new perspective, now that I’ve broken free from the group-think of my police fraternity.”

“Maybe your new perspective isn’t any more valid than your old one.”

“Oh, no. I’m seeing clearly now. You can’t believe how clearly I see…everything.”

He took Hoover Boulevard north, shooting under the freeway overpass, then hooked up with Washington Boulevard as it headed southeast. The towers of downtown were visible to the north. Ahead there was nothing but increasingly run-down neighborhoods—and the river.

There was a confrontation coming up. Abby could feel it. And it could be dicey.

She had some things going for her. She had the advantage of experience—she’d been in comparable situations many times. She had a gun, and she’d mastered the street-fighting skill of Krav Maga, a no-holds-barred form of combat imported to the U.S. from Israel. Her reflexes were quick, her nerves steady.

But Kolb was no pushover. He was an ex-cop and an ex-con. He’d stayed fit. His arms were huge, his body packed with muscle. He’d been in street fights himself. And there was a good chance he was armed. His gun, if he had one, was concealed under his leather jacket, maybe tucked into the waistband of his jeans. He could get it into his hand as fast as she could find the Smith’s trigger.

So they were evenly matched, more or less. She gave herself a slight edge—but then, she always did.

Never bet against your own team. That was her motto.

Kolb sped along Washington Boulevard. A block north, the freeway ran parallel to the surface street. Through gaps in the buildings Abby could see the rush of traffic on the elevated roadway.

The car hit another pothole, rattling fiercely, and Abby tightened her grip on her handbag. “Nowadays,” she said, “you must identify with the people you used to arrest.”

“I don’t identify with anybody. I’m beyond that.”

“Beyond what?”

“Trying to fit myself in with some group, like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Pledging allegiance to my Aryan brothers came easy to me. I’d already pledged allegiance to my brothers in blue. In both cases, all I had to do was let someone else do my thinking for me.”

“Now, I take it, you’re thinking for yourself.”

“Damn straight. That’s why I’m thinking clearly at last.”

At the next corner Tess headed east, watching the meter panel as the lighted position switched to forty-five degrees.

If she could judge by the signs in Asian characters all around her, she was in Koreatown. Downtown LA lay straight ahead.

Still no tone from the speaker, but there were three bars showing on the graph. The signal was weak, vanishing for as long as a minute before reappearing. The lights of the bearing indicator blinked on and off, sometimes at forty-five degrees, sometimes at ninety. The target’s bearing wasn’t actually shifting that much—she was picking up multipath reflections. As long as she stayed in motion, the false bearings would average out.

At Lafayette Park, Wilshire Boulevard curved southeast, and the signal drifted close to zero degrees. The signal-strength meter showed ten increments on the bar graph. And from the speaker came low but audible beep tones. She was getting closer, but there was still significant interference. She adjusted the variable attenuator to cut down on weaker signals, which were almost certainly reflections.

As she cut through the intersection of Wilshire and Union Avenue, the signal abruptly swung to the northwest side of the dial. Could be an artifact. She ignored it for another couple of blocks, but the signal grew stronger, and she had to follow it. She steered northwest on Lucas Avenue, skirting the downtown area and the flow of traffic on the Harbor Freeway, which hemmed in the city center like a moat.

The signal was still strong, but she was sure she was on the wrong track. The tones from the speaker were no longer pure. They’d developed the raspy quality caused when multiple reflections hit the antenna almost simultaneously, distorting the audio. She was following a ghost signal. The clutter of downtown and the surrounding freeways had sent her on the trail of a reflection.

She pulled a U-turn and retraced her route, exceeding the speed limit. The ghost signal faded, but she didn’t pick up anything else. She dialed up the receiver’s sensitivity. Still nothing. She passed Wilshire and continued south, hooking onto a series of side streets that led her to the Harbor Freeway. She sped onto the southbound lanes. The freeway raised her up high over the surface streets. Height was what she needed. It was easier to pull in a signal from a high point.

There. No beep tone yet, but one of the diodes on the meter panel was flickering. She’d reacquired the target.

The signal came from the southeast. At the freeway interchange, she connected with I-10, heading in that direction, while the signal strengthened and loud beeps came through the speaker, clear and undistorted. A true signal this time.

The bearing indicator shifted from forty-five degrees to ninety, then to 135. She’d overshot the mark. Kolb was traveling on a surface street, moving slower than the freeway traffic. She took the next exit, at San Pedro Street, and turned west on Washington Boulevard. The transmission was strong now, the signal-strength meter maxing out, the bearing indicator’s LEDs flickering with false readings. She adjusted the attenuator until only one signal remained, centered at zero degrees, dead ahead, and getting stronger. Kolb was on this street and headed right for her.

And he shot past. She caught a glimpse of him behind the wheel of his Olds, Abby in the passenger seat. Tess didn’t think he’d noticed the antenna array on her roof.

Then the car was gone, speeding east, while the signal lessened and the bearing indicator shifted to 180 degrees.

She swung onto a side street, executed a K-turn, and peeled onto Washington, cutting off traffic as she veered into the eastbound lane. Kolb wasn’t far ahead, and as long as she remained locked on the transmitter’s signal, she couldn’t lose him.

If Kolb was the Rain Man, he would be taking Abby to the storm drains. He would have to stop the car at some point, either to take her into the tunnel system on foot or to gain access to a vehicle entry point. When he stopped, Tess would have a chance to take him out.

She ought to call for backup. She was reaching for her cell phone when the signal strength abruptly increased.

He must have stopped already. That was a surprise. She hadn’t expected him to stop on a crowded thoroughfare like Washington Boulevard.

She cut her speed but continued. There was no sign of Kolb’s Oldsmobile, though the speaker was screaming at her, the bar graph showing signal strength at 100 percent, the bearing indicator fixed on zero.

And then the signal was coming from behind her. She’d passed the target without seeing it.

Impossible. It didn’t make any sense. It was as if she’d driven right over his car.

No. Not his car. Only the transmitter.

Tess braked the sedan on the shoulder of the road and got out, leaving the engine running. She ran a few yards back down the road, and yes, there was the transmitter, lying on the pavement, some of the electrical tape still in place. As she watched, vehicles drove over it, and one of them mashed it under its tires.

The mounting hadn’t held. She remembered she hadn’t had time to finish securing it with tape. Kolb had hit a pothole, and the impact had jarred the device loose.

Now she had no signal to follow.

She ran back to the sedan and pulled the antenna array off the roof, dumping it on the roadside. She didn’t want Kolb seeing the antennas if she got close enough to make visual contact.

Then she was behind the wheel, driving fast. Kolb couldn’t have gotten far. As long as he stayed on Washington, she had a good chance of catching up.

“So I guess,” Abby said slowly, “you must regret the time you spent on the police force.”

“Oh, I don’t know. There was a good side to the job. There were the perks.”

“What perks?”

He smiled, a man gathering fond memories. “The best thing was the head rush. Pulling over some jagoff in a BMW who was exceeding the speed limit. Making the guy sweat behind the wheel before you get out of the car and come up to his side door. That guy might pull in more money in a year than you’ll make in your life, he might have a supermodel girlfriend and a condo in Aspen and a free ride on a corporate jet—but at that moment, you’ve got him by the short hairs. You tell him to bend over and kiss his own ass, and he’ll give himself a hernia trying to do it.”