Dawn Patrol (31 page)

“Hey, Tammy,” Johnny says, “you
saw
her get killed, didn’t you? You were there. You got away. You could give us the guy who did it.”

She finds an interesting stain on the table, wets her finger, and rubs it out.

“That’s the good-parts version,” Johnny says. “You want to hear the bad version?”

She goes back to the shrug.

“The bad version,” Johnny says, “is that you set her up. You both saw Danny set the fire, but you made a deal and she wouldn’t, so you got her in that room to be killed. Try to follow along here, Tammy, because I’m presenting you with a very important choice. It’s a one-time offer. It goes off the table in five seconds, but right now you get to choose which you want to be—witness or suspect. We’re talking first-degree homicide, premeditated, and I’ll bet I can get ‘special circumstances’ tossed in. So you’d be looking at … I don’t know. Let me get my calculator.”

“I want a lawyer,” Tammy says.

Which is some sort of progress, Johnny thinks. At least we’ve gone verbal now. The problem is, she’s verbalized the magic words that will stop the interview.

“Are you sure about that?” Johnny says, playing the standard card because he’s not holding any better ones. “Because once you ask for a lawyer, you choose suspect.”

“Twice,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“This is twice I’m asking for a lawyer,” she says.

Johnny pushes his luck. “Who was the kid, Tammy?”

“What kid? I want a lawyer.”

“The kid in the room with Angela, a little girl, pink toothbrush?”

“I don’t know. I want a lawyer.”

But she knows. Johnny sees it in her eyes. Dead as stone until he mentioned the kid, and then there was something in there.

Fear.

You’re a cop for more than a few weeks, you know fear when you see it. He leans over the table and says real quietly, “For the kid’s sake, Tammy, tell me the truth. I can help. Let me help you. Let me help
her
.”

She’s at the tipping point.

Again, he knows it when he sees it. She could go either way. She’s going toward Johnny’s when—

There’s a commotion in the hall.

“I’m her attorney! I demand access!”

“Get out of here,” Harrington says.

“Has she asked for a lawyer? She has, hasn’t she?”

Tammy sets her jaw and looks at the ceiling. Johnny gets up, opens the door, and sees Todd the Rod standing in the hallway. The lawyer looks over his shoulder at Tammy.

“It’s okay now,” he says. “I’m here. Not … one … more … word.”

He has her out of there in thirty minutes.

Boone’s in a lot longer.

After all, he hit a cop.

A detective, no less.

In a courthouse hallway.

And Boone didn’t just punch Harrington once. He went off on him—big heavy hands and muscles hard from years of surfing slamming punch after punch into Harrington’s face, ribs, and stomach until Johnny Banzai managed to get some kind of judo hold on him and choke him out.

Now Boone lies on a metal bench in the cell and nobody fucks with him. He shares the cell with mostly blacks, Mexicans, and some white-trash drunks, bikers, and tweekers and nobody fucks with him.

He hit a cop.

A detective, no less.

In a courthouse hallway.

Boone could run for president of the cell and win by acclamation. They love him in there. Guys are offering him their bologna sandwiches.

He’s not hungry.

Too fucking miserable to eat.

It’s over, he thinks. I took Harrington’s bait like the chump fish I am, and now I’m looking at a felonious assault rap on a law enforcement officer. That means certain jail time, and my PI card is gonzo.

Half The Dawn Patrol’s pissed at me and the other half must think I’m a total barney, and they’re totally correct in that. I let this Roddick babe
play me like a fish, make me chase her like she didn’t want to be caught, and then, bang, she turns around and rams a hole in the boat.

And we’re all going down with it.

Roddick set us up. She was never going to testify against Danny. She sold the insurance company a story so it would deny Silver’s claim. Then he could sue for the big bucks when she changed her story. The whole chase thing was to make us want her more. And it worked.

Judge Hammond will deny Alan’s motion for a mistrial and grant Todd’s motion for a directed verdict. When court reconvenes in the morning, he’ll instruct the jury that the insurance company has already been found guilty and that all they need to decide is how much to award in punitive damages.

Which will be in the millions.

And Alan will be referred to the State Bar Association for ethics charges, not to mention the district attorney’s office for suborning perjury. So will Pete.

Her career is fucked. She’ll be lucky if she keeps her Bar card, never mind make partner. If she does manage to stay in the law biz, she’ll be doing fender benders and slip-and-falls until her hair is gray.

A skinny white tweeker approaches Boone and shoves a couple of pieces of stale bread at him. “You want my sammich?”

“No, thanks.”

The tweeker hesitates, his shrunken meth-reduced mouth trembling with anxiety. “You want a blow job?”

“Get away from me.”

The tweeker sidles off.

But this is what life’s going to be, Boone thinks. Stale “sammiches,” tweekers for friends, and offers of jailhouse love.

He rolls over and faces the wall, his back to the cell.

No one’s going to fuck with him.

Petra sits on a plastic chair bolted to the wall of the receiving station at the downtown jail.

She’s glad to be there, though, glad to be anywhere that isn’t in the proximity of Alan Burke, who’d gone off on her like a pit bull on crank.

“Good job,” he’d said, storming down the street outside the courthouse.

“I didn’t know,” she said, working hard to keep up with him.

He stopped and whirled on her. “It’s your
job
to know! It’s your
job
to get witnesses ready to testify! For
our
side, Petra! Not the
other
side! It’s my fault for not having mentioned that earlier, I guess!”

“You’re right, of course.”

“I’m
right
?” he yelled, holding his arms out like Christ crucified, spinning in a 360 and yelling to everybody on Broadway, “Hey, I’m right! Did you hear that? The associate attorney who’s never tried a case in her fucking life tells me I’m right! Does it get any better? Does life get any happier than this?”

People walked by them, chuckling.

“I’m sorry,” Petra said.

“Sorry’s not good enough.”

“My resignation will be on your desk by the end of the business day,” Petra said.

“No, no, no, no,” Alan said. “Too easy. You’re not walking away from this. No. You’re going to stay for the whole long, miserable march to death, humiliation, and destruction. Right by my side.”

“All right. Certainly. Yes.”

“Are you sleeping with him?” Alan asked.

“With whom?”

“With Todd the Rod!” Alan yelled. “Boone! Who did you think I meant?”

Petra turned beet red and stared at him, mouth agape. Then she said, “I don’t think that’s an appropriate question for an employer to ask an employee.”

“Sue me,” Alan said, and walked away. Then he turned around, came back, and said, “Look, we fell for a trick older than dirt. It’s not your fault, I should have spotted it. They set us up. Burned a cheap building down, produced a phony arson witness, then had her flip on us in court to get a punitive damages award. They win; we lose. It happens. Now go bail Boone out. We don’t shoot our wounded.”

So now Petra sits on the plastic chair waiting for the desk sergeant to process paperwork. He seems to be working at glacial speed.

It’s a
Beauty and the Beast
scene.

Tammy Roddick walking down Broadway in the company of Todd the Rod. Draws smirks from passersby whose sole thought is that the ugly fat man has maxed out an AmEx black card for a matinee at the Westgate Hotel.

They go to the Westgate, all right, but not up to a room.

Todd the Rod walks her into the parking structure, right to a gold Humvee, where Red Eddie sits in the backseat eating a fish taco smothered in salsa. He stops chewing long enough to say, “Get in, pretty lady.”

Tammy balks.

Todd the Rod is already sleazing his way toward the elevator.

“No worries, sistuh,” Eddie says. “No one going to touch a hair on your head. On the life of my child.”

She gets into the backseat with him.

“Where is she?” she asks.

He holds up a white paper bag. “Taco?”

“Where is she?”

“She’s safe.”

“I want to see her,” Tammy says.

“Not yet.”

“Right fucking now.”

“You’re a real
tita
, huh?” Eddie says. “You know
tita
, Hawaiian for ‘tough girl’? I like that. We got some time to kill,
tita
, maybe we can kill it together. Oooh, look at them green cat eyes, getting so angry. Gets me hot,
tita
, gives me wood.”

“I held up my end of the deal,” Tammy says.

“And we’ll hold up ours,” Eddie replies. “Just not yet. You have to develop a little patience,
tita
. It’s a virtue.”

“When?”

“When what?” Eddie asks, taking a huge bite of the taco. The salsa drips from the side of his mouth.

“When do you hold up your end of the deal?”

“Some things have to happen first,” Eddie says. “Things go as planned, you
keep
that sexy mouth shut … tomorrow morning.”

“Where?”

Eddie smiles, wipes the salsa from his lips, and sings, “ ‘Let me take you down, cos I’m going to …’ ”

Boone can’t let go of Teddy D-Cup.

Lying there on the metal bench, his mind keeps going back to Teddy in the motel room with the little
mojada
girl. Natch you can’t let go of it, he tells himself. Face it, you have a serious jones going for pedophiles. Don’t let it twist your thinking on this.

Yeah, but it’s not, Boone thinks. There’s something there, something about the Teddy-Tammy connection that doesn’t jive.

Work through it.

Tammy leaves Mick Penner for Teddy. No surprise there—she’s trading up, except most of Teddy’s strippers work him for some cosmetic
work, and Tammy hasn’t had a stitch of plastic surgery. Okay, maybe she just didn’t want any or they haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Mick knows his girl is doing Teddy because he followed them to the cheap motel up near the strawberry fields. Which doesn’t make any sense, because Teddy could do his matinees at any upscale hotel in La Jolla, or even at Shrink’s, and a girl like Tammy would expect—in fact, insist on—a little luxury.

So why does he take her to the cheap joint all the way up in O’side?

Because it’s near the strawberry field where he picks up a little
mojada
girl. But that doesn’t make any sense. You’d think that’s the last place he’d take Tammy; you’d think the good doctor would want to keep that little assignation
way
deep on the down low.

It doesn’t make sense on another level: Pedophiles are pedophiles because they like little girls, not grown women. But Teddy is notorious for banging fully grown strippers and got his nickname for giving them big, fully grown, triple-X adult boobs.

Teddy D-Cup likes women.

Yeah, except, you saw him in the room with the child, so …

A guy’s staring at him from across the cell. Big guy who looks like he hits the weight room pretty regularly.

“What?” Boone asks.

“You remember me?”

The whole cell is quiet, watching this develop, hoping for a little relief from the mind-numbing monotony of jail.

“No,” Boone says. “Should I?”

“You tossed me out of The Sundowner once.”

“Okay.” Like, big freaking deal, Boone thinks. I’ve thrown a lot of idiots out of The Sundowner.

The guy gets up and stands over Boone. “But you ain’t got your big Samoan buddy or that other guy with you now, do you?”

Boone sort of remembers him now. East County guy who got a
turista
drunk and was going to take her somewhere for a gang bang. He makes a point of looking around the cell, then says, “No, I don’t see either of them here. So?”

“So, I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”

“I don’t want any trouble.”

The guy sneers. “I don’t give a fuck what you want.”

A biker sitting against the wall asks Boone, “You want us to take care of this?”

“No, but thanks,” Boone says. He’s had a bad day, a
really
bad day that’s not going to get any better. He hasn’t had any sleep, he’s aching and tired and irritable, and now this pumped-up kook is trying to make his day even worse.

“Get up,” the guy says.

“I don’t want to.”

“Pussy.”

“Okay, I’m a pussy,” Boone says.

“You’re my bitch.”

“If you say so,” Boone says, folding his arms across his chest and closing his eyes. He feels the guy reach out to grab him, flicks his hands out to separate the guy’s arms, then knife-edges both his own hands into the guy’s neck.

The guy is done now; he just doesn’t know it yet. Stunned from the double strike to the carotids, he can’t react quickly enough as Boone slides his hands around the back of his neck, holds his head, and brings his knee up three times into his chin. Boone lets go, pushes, and the guy slides to the floor unconscious, blood trickling from his mouth.

Boone lies back down.

There’s a short pause; then the tweeker who had offered Boone a bologna sandwich and a blow job scoots over to rob the unconscious man. He reaches inside his shirt and yanks out a small chain with a little crucifix on it, holds it up to Boone, and asks, “You want this?”

Because jailhouse law says it belongs to Boone by right of conquest.

Boone shakes his head.

Thinking, You’re an idiot, Daniels.

A total barney.

He gets up from the bench, steps over a few guys to get to the bars, and calls out to the jailer. “Yo, bro! Any word on me getting out of here?”