1
• • •
“Tell me about the thumb. I know what you told me on the phone, but tell me everything now.”
Starkey inhaled half an inch of cigarette, then flicked ash on the floor, not bothering with the ashtray. She did that every time she was annoyed with being here, which was always.
“Please use the ashtray, Carol.”
“I missed.”
“You didn’t miss.”
Detective-2 Carol Starkey took another deep pull on the cigarette, then crushed it out. When she first started seeing this therapist, Dana Williams wouldn’t let her smoke during session. That was three years and four therapists ago. In the time Starkey was working her way through the second and third therapists, Dana had gone back to the smokes herself, and now didn’t mind. Sometimes they both smoked and the goddamned room clouded up like the Imperial Valley capped by an inversion layer.
Starkey shrugged.
“No, I guess I didn’t miss. I’m just pissed off, is all. It’s been three years, and here I am back where I started.”
“With me.”
“Yeah. Like in three years I shouldn’t be over this shit.”
“So tell me what happened, Carol. Tell me about the little girl’s thumb.”
Starkey fired up another cigarette, then settled back to recall the little girl’s thumb. Starkey was down to three packs a day. The progress should have made her feel better, but didn’t.
“It was Fourth of July. This idiot down in Venice decides to make his own fireworks and give them away to the neighbors. A little girl ends up losing the thumb and index finger on her right hand, so we get the call from the emergency room.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“Me and my partner that day, Beth Marzik.”
“Another woman?”
“Yeah. There’s two of us in CCS.”
“Okay.”
“By the time we get down there, the family’s gone home, so we go to the house. The father’s crying, saying how they found the finger, but not the thumb, and then he shows us these homemade firecrackers that are so damned big she’s lucky she didn’t lose the hand.”
“He made them?”
“No, a guy in the neighborhood made them, but the father won’t tell us. He says the man didn’t mean any harm. I say, your daughter has been maimed, sir, other children are at risk, sir, but the guy won’t cop. I ask the mother, but the guy says something in Spanish, and now she won’t talk, either.”
“Why won’t they tell you?”
“People are assholes.”
The world according to Carol Starkey, Detective-2 with LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Section. Dana made a note of that in a leather-bound notebook, an act which Starkey never liked. The notes gave physical substance to her words, leaving Starkey feeling vulnerable because she thought of the notes as evidence.
Starkey had more of the cigarette, then shrugged and went on with it.
“These bombs are six inches long, right? We call’m Mexican Dynamite. So many of these things are going off, it sounds like the academy pistol range, so Marzik and I start a door-to-door. But the neighbors are just like the father—no one’s telling us anything, and I’m getting madder and madder. Marzik and I are walking back to the car when I look down and there’s the thumb. I just looked down and there it was, this beautiful little thumb, so I scooped it up and brought it back to the family.”
“On the phone, you told me you tried to make the father eat it.”
“I grabbed his collar and pushed it into his mouth. I did that.”
Dana shifted in her chair, Starkey reading from her body language that she was uncomfortable with the image. Starkey couldn’t blame her.
“It’s easy to understand why the family filed a complaint.”
Starkey finished the cigarette and crushed it out.
“The family didn’t complain.”
“Then why—?”
“Marzik. I guess I scared Marzik. She had a talk with my lieutenant, and Kelso threatened to send me to the bank for an evaluation.”
LAPD maintained its Behavorial Sciences Unit in the Far East Bank building on Broadway, in Chinatown. Most officers lived in abject fear of being ordered to the bank, correctly believing that it called into question their stability, and ended any hope of career advancement. They had an expression for it: “Overdrawn on the career account.”
“If I go to the bank, they’ll never let me back on the bomb squad.”
“And you keep asking to go back?”
“It’s all I’ve wanted since I got out of the hospital.”
Irritated now, Starkey stood and lit another cigarette. Dana studied her, which Starkey also didn’t like. It made her feel watched, as if Dana was waiting for her to do or say something more that she could write down. It was a valid interview technique which Starkey used herself. If you said nothing, people felt compelled to fill the silence.
“The job is all I have left, damnit.”
Starkey regretted the defensive edge in her voice and felt even more embarrassed when Dana again scribbled a note.
“So you told Lieutenant Kelso that you would seek help on your own?”
“Jesus, no. I kissed his ass to get out of it. I know I have a problem, Dana, but I’ll get help in a way that doesn’t fuck my career.”
“Because of the thumb?”
Starkey stared at Dana Williams with the same flat eyes she would use on Internal Affairs.
“Because I’m falling apart.”
Dana sighed, and a warmth came to her eyes that infuriated Starkey because she resented having to reveal herself in ways that made her feel vulnerable and weak. Carol Starkey did not do “weak” well, and never had.
“Carol, if you came back because you want me to fix you as if you were broken, I can’t do that. Therapy isn’t the same as setting a bone. It takes time.”
“It’s been three years. I should be over this by now.”
“There’s no ‘should’ here, Carol. Consider what happened to you. Consider what you survived.”
“I’ve had enough with considering it. I’ve considered it for three fucking years.”
A sharp pain began behind her eyes. Just from considering it.
“Why do you think you keep changing therapists, Carol?”
Starkey shook her head, then lied.
“I don’t know.”
“Are you still drinking?”
“I haven’t had a drink in over a year.”
“How’s your sleep?”
“A couple hours, then I’m wide awake.”
“Is it the dream?”
Carol felt herself go cold.
“No.”
“Anxiety attacks?”
Starkey was wondering how to answer when the pager clipped to her waist vibrated. She recognized the number as Kelso’s cell phone, followed by 911, the code the detectives in the Criminal Conspiracy Section used when they wanted an immediate response.
“Shit, Dana. I’ve gotta get this.”
“Would you like me to leave?”
“No. No, I’ll just step out.”
Starkey took her purse out into the waiting room where a middle-aged woman seated on the couch briefly met her eyes, then averted her face.
“Sorry.”
The woman nodded without looking.
Starkey dug through her purse for her cell phone, then punched the speed dial to return Kelso’s page. She could tell he was in his car when he answered.
“It’s me, Lieutenant. What’s up?”
“Where are you?”
Starkey stared at the woman.
“I was looking for shoes.”
“I didn’t ask what you were doing, Starkey. I asked where you were.”
She felt the flush of anger when he said it, and shame that she even gave a damn what he thought.
“The west side.”
“All right. The bomb squad had a call-out, and, um, I’m on my way there now. Carol, we lost Charlie Riggio. He was killed at the scene.”
Starkey’s fingers went cold. Her scalp tingled. It was called “going core.” The body’s way of protecting itself by drawing the blood inward to minimize bleeding. A response left over from our animal pasts when the threat would involve talons and fangs and something that wanted to rip you apart. In Starkey’s world, the threat often still did.
“Starkey?”
She turned away and lowered her voice so that the woman couldn’t hear.
“Sorry, Lieutenant. Was it a bomb? Was it a device that went off?”
“I don’t know the details yet, but, yes, there was an explosion.”
Sweat leaked from her skin, and her stomach clenched. Uncontrolled explosions were rare. A bomb squad officer dying on the job was even more rare. The last time it had happened was three years ago.
“Anyway, I’m on my way there now. Ah, Starkey, I could put someone else on this, if you’d rather I did that.”
“I’m up in the rotation, Lieutenant. It’s my case.”
“All right. I wanted to offer.”
He gave her the location, then broke the connection. The woman on the couch was watching her as if she could read Starkey’s pain. Starkey saw herself in the waiting room mirror, abruptly white beneath her tan. She felt herself breathing. Shallow, fast breaths.
Starkey put her phone away, then went back to tell Dana that she would have to end their session early.
“We’ve got a call-out, so I have to go. Ah, listen, I don’t want you to turn in any of this to the insurance, okay? I’ll pay out of my own pocket, like before.”
“No one can get access to your insurance records, Carol. Not without your permission. You truly don’t need to spend the money.”
“I’d rather pay.”
As Starkey wrote the check, Dana said, “You didn’t finish the story. Did you catch the man who made the firecrackers?”
“The little girl’s mother took us to a garage two blocks away where we found him with eight hundred pounds of smokeless gunpowder. Eight hundred pounds, and the whole place is reeking of gasoline because you know what this guy does for a living? He’s a gardener. If that place had gone up, it would’ve taken out the whole goddamned block.”
“My Lord.”
Starkey handed over the check, then said her good-byes and started for the door. She stopped with her hand on the knob because she remembered something that she had intended to ask Dana.
“There’s something about that guy I’ve been wondering about. Maybe you can shed some light.”
“In what way?”
“This guy we arrested, he tells us he’s been building fireworks his whole life. You know how we know it’s true? He’s only got three fingers on his left hand, and two on his right. He’s blown them off one by one.”
Dana paled.
“I’ve arrested a dozen guys like that. We call them chronics. Why do they do that, Dana? What do you say about people like that who keep going back to the bombs?”
Now Dana took out a cigarette of her own and struck it. She blew out a fog of smoke and stared at Starkey before answering.
“I think they want to destroy themselves.”
Starkey nodded.
“I’ll call you to reschedule, Dana. Thanks.”
Starkey went out to her car, keeping her head down as she passed the woman in the waiting room. She slid behind the wheel, but didn’t start the engine. Instead, she opened her briefcase and took out a slim silver flask of gin. She took a long drink, then opened the door and threw up in the parking lot.
When she finished heaving, she put away the gin and ate a Tagamet.
Then, doing her best to get a grip on herself, Carol Starkey drove across town to a place exactly like the one where she had died.
Helicopters marked ground zero the way vultures circle roadkill, orbiting over the crime scene in layers like a cake. Starkey saw them just as the traffic locked down, half a mile from the incident site. She used her bubble flasher to edge into an Aamco station, left her car, and walked the remaining eight blocks.
A dozen radio units were on the scene, along with two Bomb Squad Suburbans and a growing army of media people. Kelso was standing near the forward Suburban with the Bomb Squad commander, Dick Leyton, and three of the day-shift bomb techs. Kelso was a short man with a droopy mustache, in a black-checked sport coat. Kelso noticed Starkey, and waved to catch her eye, but Starkey pretended she didn’t see him.
Riggio’s body lay in a heap in the parking lot, midway between the forward Suburban and the building. A coroner investigator was leaning against his van, watching an LAPD criminalist named John Chen work the body. Starkey didn’t know the CI because she had never before worked a case where someone had died, but she knew Chen.
Starkey badged her way past the uniforms at the mouth of the parking lot. One of the uniforms, a younger guy she didn’t know, said, “Man, that dude got the shit blown out of himself. I wouldn’t go over there, I was you.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“Not if I had a choice.”
Smoking at a crime scene was against LAPD policy, but Starkey fired up before crossing the parking lot to confront Charlie Riggio’s body. Starkey had known him from her days on the squad, so she expected this to be hard. It was.
Riggio’s helmet and chest protector had been stripped off by the paramedics who had worked to revive him. Shrapnel had cut through the suit, leaving bloody puckers across his chest and stomach that looked blue in the bright afternoon sun. A single hole had been punched in his face, just beneath the left eye. Starkey glanced over at the helmet and saw that the Lexan faceplate was shattered. They said that the Lexan could stop a bullet from a deer rifle. Then she looked back at his body and saw that his hands were missing.
Starkey ate a Tagamet, then turned away so that she wouldn’t have to see the body.
“Hey, John. What do we have here?”
“Hey, Starkey. You got the lead on this one?”
“Yeah. Kelso said that Buck Daggett was out, but I don’t see him.”
“They sent him to the hospital. He’s okay, but he’s pretty shook. Leyton wanted him checked.”
“Okay. So what did he say? You got anything I can use?”
Chen glanced back at the body, then pointed out the Dumpster.
“The device was over by that Dumpster. Buck says Riggio was over it with the Real Time when it went off.”
Starkey followed his nod to a large piece of the Real Time portable X-ray that had been blown out into the street. She considered the Dumpster again, and guessed that the Real Time had been kicked more than forty yards. Riggio himself lay almost thirty yards from the Dumpster.
“Did Daggett or the medics pull him over here?”
Anytime there was an explosion, bomb techs were trained to expect a secondary device. She figured that Daggett would have pulled Riggio away from the Dumpster for that reason.
“You’d have to ask Daggett. I think this is where he fell.”
“Jesus. We gotta be, what, thirty yards from the detonation point?”
“Buck said it was a helluva blast.”
She guesstimated the distance again, then toed the body armor to examine the blast pattern. The suit looked as if twenty shotguns had been fired into it point-blank. She’d seen similar suit damage when “dirty” bombs had gone off with a lot of fire and shrapnel, but this bomb had pushed the shrap through twelve layers of armor and had thrown a man thirty yards. The energy released must have been enormous.
Chen took a plastic bag from his evidence kit, pulling the plastic tight to show her a piece of blackened metal about the size of a postage stamp.
“This is kind of interesting, too. It’s a piece of the pipe frag I found stuck in his suit.”
Starkey looked close. A squiggly line had been etched into the metal.
“What is that, an S?”
Chen shrugged.
“Or some kind of symbol. Remember that bomb they found in San Diego last year, the one with dicks drawn all over it?”
Starkey ignored him. Chen liked to talk. If he got going about a bomb with dicks on it, she would never get her work done.
“John, do me a favor and swab some of the samples tonight, okay?”
Chen went sulky.
“It’s going to be really late when I finish here, Carol. I’ve got to work the Dumpster, and then there’s going to be whatever you guys find in the sweep. It’s going to take me two or three hours just to log everything.”
They would search for pieces of the device everywhere within a hundred-yard radius, combing nearby rooftops, the faces of the apartment buildings and houses across the street, cars, the Dumpster, and the wall behind the Dumpster. They would search for anything and everything that might help them reconstruct the bomb or give them a clue to its origins.
“Don’t whine, John. It’s not cool.”
“I’m just saying.”
“How long does it take to cook through the gas chrom?”
The sulk became sullen and put upon.
“Six hours.”
Residue from the explosive would be present on any fragments of the bomb they found, as well as in the blast crater and on Riggio’s suit. Chen would identify the substance by cooking it through a gas chromatograph, a process which took six hours. Starkey knew how long it would take when she asked, but asked anyway to make Chen feel guilty about it taking so long.
“Couldn’t you swab a couple of samples first, just to start a chrom, then log everything after? An explosive with this kind of energy potential could really narrow down the field of guys I’m looking at, John. You could give me a head start here.”
Chen hated to do anything that wasn’t methodical and by the book, but he couldn’t deny her point. He checked his watch, counting out the time.
“Let me see what time we finish here, okay? I’ll try, but I can’t guarantee anything.”
“I gave up on guarantees a long time ago.”
Buck Daggett’s Suburban sat forty-eight paces from Riggio’s body. Starkey counted as she walked.
Kelso and Leyton saw her coming and moved away from the others to meet her. Kelso’s face was grim; Leyton’s tense and professional. Leyton had been off shift when he’d gotten the call and had rushed over in jeans and a polo shirt.
Leyton smiled softly when their eyes met, and Starkey thought there was a sad quality to it. Leyton, the twelve-year commander of the Bomb Squad, had selected Carol Starkey for the squad, just as he’d selected Charlie Riggio and every other tech below the rank of sergeant-supervisor. He had sent her to the FBI’s Bomb School in Alabama and had been her boss for three years. When she had been in the hospital, he had come every day after his shift to visit her, fifty-four consecutive days, and when she had fought to stay on the job, he had lobbied on her behalf. There wasn’t anyone on the job she respected as much, or cared for as much.
Starkey said, “Dick, I want to walk the scene as soon as possible. Could we use as many of your people as you can get out?”
“Everyone not on duty is coming out. You’ve got us all.”
She turned to Kelso.
“Lieutenant, I’d like to talk to these Rampart guys to see if we can’t conscript some of their uniforms to help.”
Kelso was frowning at her.
“I’ve already arranged it with their supervisor. You shouldn’t be smoking here, Starkey.”
“Sorry. I’d better go talk to him, then, and get things organized.”
She made no move to put out her cigarette, and Kelso ignored the obvious rebellion.
“Before you do, you’ll be working with Marzik and Santos on this.”
Starkey felt another Tagamet craving.
“Does it have to be Marzik?”
“Yes, Starkey, it has to be Marzik. They’re inbound now. And something else. Lieutenant Leyton says we might have a break here before we get started: 911 got a call on this.”
She glanced at Leyton.
“Do we have a wit?”
“An Adam car took the call, but Buck told me they were responding to Emergency Services. If that’s the case, then we should have a tape and an address.”
“Okay. I’ll get on it. Thanks.”
Kelso glanced toward the press again, frowning when he saw an LAPD media officer approaching them.
“I think we’d better go make a statement, Dick.”
“Be right there.”
Kelso scurried over to intercept the media officer while Leyton stayed with Starkey. They waited until the other man was gone, then Leyton considered her.
“How you doing, Carol?”
“I’m fine, Lieutenant. Kicking ass and taking names, like always. I’d still like to come back to the squad.”
Leyton found it within himself to nod. They had weathered that pounding three years ago, and both of them knew that the LAPD Personnel Unit would never allow it.
“You were always a tough girl. But you were lucky, too.”
“Sure. I shit luck in the morning.”
“You shouldn’t curse like that, Carol. It’s not attractive.”
“You’re right, Boss. I’ll straighten out as soon as I kick the smokes.”
She smiled at him, and Leyton smiled back, because they both knew that she would do neither.
Starkey watched him walk away to join the press conference, then noticed Marzik and Santos talking to a uniformed sergeant amid a group of people outside one of the apartment buildings across the street. Marzik was looking over at her, but Starkey walked around to the front of the Suburban and examined it. The Suburban had faced the blast at about sixty-five yards away. The telex cables and security line that Riggio had pulled out with him still trailed from the rear of the Suburban to Riggio’s armored suit, tangled now from the explosion.
The Suburban appeared undamaged, but on closer inspection she saw that the front right headlight was cracked. She squatted to look more closely. A piece of black metal shaped like the letter E was wedged in the glass. Starkey did not touch it. She stared until she recognized that it was part of a metal buckle from the straps that had held Riggio’s armor suit. She sighed deep and long, then stood and looked back at his body.
The coroner’s people were placing him into a body bag. John Chen had outlined the body’s location on the tarmac with white chalk and now stood back, watching with an expression of profound disinterest.
Starkey wiped her palms on her hips and forced herself to take deep breaths, stretching her ribs and her lungs. Doing this hurt because of the scars. Marzik, still across the street, was waving. Santos looked over, maybe wondering why Starkey was just standing there.
Starkey waved back, the wave saying that she would join them in a moment.
The mall was a small strip of discount clothing shops, a used-book store, a dentist who advertised “family prices” in Spanish, and a Cuban restaurant, all of which had been evacuated before Riggio approached the bomb.
Starkey forced herself toward the restaurant, moving on legs that were suddenly weak, as if she’d found herself on a tightrope and the only way off was that singular door. Marzik was forgotten. Charlie Riggio was forgotten. Starkey felt nothing but her own hammering heart; and knew that if she lost control of it now, and of herself, she would certainly fall to her death.
When Starkey stepped into the restaurant, she began to shake with a rage beyond all hope of control. She had to grip the counter to keep her feet. If Leyton or Kelso walked in now, her career would be finished. Kelso would order her in to the bank for sure, she would be forced to retire with the medical, and all that would be left of Carol Starkey’s life would be fear, and emptiness.
Starkey clawed open her purse for the silver flask, feeling the gin cut into her throat in the same moment she cursed her own weakness, and felt ashamed. She breathed deep, refusing to sit because she knew she would not be able to rise. She took a second long pull on the flask, and slowly the shaking subsided.
Starkey fought down the memories and the fear, telling herself she was only doing what she needed to do and that everything would be all right. She was too tough for it. She would beat it. She would win.
After a while, she had herself together.
Starkey put away the flask, sprayed her mouth with Binaca, then went back out to the crime scene.
She was always a tough girl.
Starkey found the two Adam car officers, who gave her the log time of their original dispatch call. She used her cell phone to call the day manager at Emergency Services, identified herself, provided an approximate time, and requested a tape of the call as well as an address of origin. What most people didn’t know was that all calls to 911 were automatically taped and recorded with the originating phone number and that phone number’s address. It had to be this way because people in an emergency situation, especially when threatened or dying, couldn’t be expected to provide their location. So the system took that into account and provided the address for them.
Starkey left her office number, and asked the manager to provide the information as quickly as she had it.
When Starkey was finished with Emergency Services, she walked across to the apartment buildings where Marzik and Santos were questioning the few residents who had been let back into the area. They saw her coming, and walked out to meet her by the street.
Jorge Santos was a short man with a quizzical expression who always looked as if he was trying to remember something that he’d forgotten. His name was pronounced “whore-hey,” which had earned him the dubious nickname of Hooker. Beth Marzik was divorced, with two kids who stayed with her mother when she was on the job. She sold Amway products for the extra money, but she pushed it so hard that half the detectives at Spring Street would duck when they saw her approaching.
Starkey said, “Good news. Leyton says the call-out was responding to a 911.”
Marzik smirked.
“This good citizen happen to leave a name?”
“I already put in a call to Emergency Services. They’ll run the tapes and have something for us as soon as they can.”
Marzik nudged Santos.
“Bet you a dollar to a blow job there’s no name.”
Santos darkened. He was a religious man, married with four children, and hated it when she talked like that.
Starkey interrupted her.
“I’ve gotta get the uniforms set up for the sweep. Dick says the Rampart detectives offered to help with the door-to-door.”
Marzik frowned as if she didn’t like that idea.
“Well, we’re not going to get to most of these people tonight. What I’m hearing is that a lot of the people who were evacuated went to relatives or friends after the damned thing blew.”
“You’re getting a list of residents from the managers, right?”
“Yeah. So?”
Marzik looked suspicious. Her attitude made Starkey tired.
“Get the managers to pull the rental apps, too. They should be on file. Most of the rental applications I used to fill out wanted the name of a relative or somebody to vouch for you. That’s probably where those people went.”
“Shit, that’ll take forever. I used to have a date tonight.”
Santos’s face grew longer than ever.
“I’ll do it, Carol.”
Starkey glanced toward the Dumpster, where Chen was now picking at something on the ground. She gestured back toward the apartment buildings behind them.
“Look, Beth, I’m not saying do everybody on the goddamned block. Just ask if they saw something. Ask if they’re the one who called 911. If they say they didn’t see anything, tell’m to think about it and we’ll get back to them in the next few days.”
Marzik still wasn’t happy, but Starkey didn’t give a damn.
She went back across the street to the Dumpster, leaving Marzik and Santos with the apartments. Chen was examining the wall behind the Dumpster for bomb fragments. Out in the parking lot, two of the Bomb Squad technicians were adjusting radial metal detectors that they would use when they walked the lawns out front of the surrounding apartment buildings. Two more off-duty bomb techs had arrived, and pretty soon everyone would be standing around with their thumbs up their asses, waiting for her to tell them what to do.
Starkey ignored all of them and went to the crater. It was about three feet across and one foot deep, the black tarmac scorched white by the heat. Starkey wanted to place her hand on the surface, but didn’t because the explosive residue might be toxic.
She considered the chalk outline where Riggio’s body had fallen, then paced it off. Almost forty paces. The energy to kick him this far must have been incredible.
Starkey impulsively stepped into Riggio’s outline, standing exactly where his body had fallen, and gazed back at the crater.
She imagined a slow-motion flash that stretched through three years. She saw her own death as if it had been filmed and later shown to her on instant replay. Her shrink, Dana, had called these “manufactured memories.” She had taken the facts as they had later been presented to her, imagined the rest, then saw the events as if she remembered them. Dana believed that this was her mind’s way of trying to deal with what had happened, her mind’s way of removing her from the actual event by letting her step outside the moment, her mind’s way of giving the evil a face so that it could be dealt with.
Starkey sucked deep on the cigarette, then blew smoke angrily at the ground. If this was her mind’s way of making peace with what happened, it was doing a damned shitty job.
She went back across the street to find Marzik.
“Beth? I got another idea. Try to locate the people who own all these shops and see if anyone was threatened, or owed money, or whatever.”
Marzik nodded, still squinting at her.
“Carol, what is that?”
“What is what?”
Marzik stepped closer and sniffed.
“Is that Binaca?”
Starkey glared at Marzik, then went back across the street and spent the rest of the evening helping the search team look for pieces of the bomb.
In the dream, she dies.
She opens her eyes on the hard-packed trailer-park earth as the paramedics work over her, their latex hands red with blood. The hum in her ears makes her think of a Mixmaster set to a slow speed. Above her, the thin branches of winter gum trees overlap in a delicate lace still swaying from the pressure wave. A paramedic pushes on her chest, trying to restart her heart. Another inserts a long needle. Cold silver paddles press to her flesh.
A thousand miles beyond the hum, a voice yells, “Clear!” Her body lurches from the jolt of current.
Starkey finds the strength to say his name.
“Sugar?”
She is never certain if she says his name or only thinks that she says it.
Her head lolls, and she sees him. David “Sugar” Boudreaux, a Cajun long out of Louisiana but still with the soft French accent that she finds so sexy. Her sergeant-supervisor. Her secret lover. The man to whom she’s given her heart.
“Sugar?”
The faraway voices shout. “No pulse!” “Clear!” The horrible electric spasm.
She reaches toward Sugar, but he is too far away. It is not fair that he is so far. Two hearts that beat as one should not be so far apart. The distance saddens her.
“Shug?”
Two hearts that no longer beat.
The paramedics working on Sugar step away. He is gone.
Her body jolts again, but it does no good, and she is at peace with it.
She closes her eyes, and feels herself rise through the branches into the sky, and all she knows is relief.
Starkey woke from the dream just after three that morning, knowing that sleep was beyond her. She lit a cigarette, then lay in the dark, smoking. She had finished at the crime scene just before midnight, but didn’t get home until almost one. There, she showered, ate scrambled eggs, then drank a tumbler of Bombay Sapphire gin to knock herself out. Yet here she was, wide awake two hours later.
After another twenty minutes of blowing smoke at the ceiling, she got out of bed, then went through the house, turning on every light.
The bomb that took Starkey had been a package bomb delivered by a meth dealer to murder the family of an informant. It had been placed behind heavy bushes on the side of the informant’s double-wide, which meant Sugar and Starkey couldn’t use the robot to wheel in the X-ray or the de-armer. It was a dirty bomb, made of a paint can packed with smokeless powder and roofing tacks. Whoever had made the bomb was a mean sonofabitch who wanted to make sure he got the informant’s three children.
Because of the bushes, Starkey and Sugar both had to work the bomb, Starkey holding aside the brush so that Sugar could get close with the Real Time. When two uniformed patrol officers had called in the suspicious package, they had reported that the package was ticking. It was such a cliché that Starkey and Sugar had burst out laughing, though they weren’t laughing now because the package had stopped ticking. The Real Time showed them that the timer had malfunctioned; the builder had used a hand-wound alarm clock as his timing device, but for some inexplicable reason, the minute hand had frozen at one minute before reaching the lead that would detonate the bomb. It had just stopped.
Sugar made a joke of it.
“Guess he forgot to wind the damned thing.”
She was grinning at his joke when the earthquake struck. An event every bomb tech working in Southern California feared. It would later be reported as 3.2 on the Richter scale, hardly noticeable to the average Angeleno, but the minute hand released, contact was made, and the bomb went off.
The old techs had always told Starkey that the suit would not save her from the frag, and they were right. Sugar saved her. He leaned in front of her just as the bomb went off, so his body caught most of the tacks. But the Real Time was blown out of his hands, and that’s what got her. Two heavy, jagged pieces sliced through the suit, ripped along her right side, and dug a gaping furrow through her right breast. Sugar was knocked back into her, microseconds behind the Real Time. The force of him impacting into her felt as if she had been kicked by God. The shock was so enormous that her heart stopped.
For two minutes and forty seconds, Carol Starkey was dead.
Two teams of emergency medical personnel rushed forward even as pieces of the trailer and torn azalea bushes fell around them. The team that reached Starkey found her without a pulse, peeled away her suit, and injected epinephrine directly into her heart as they administered CPR. They worked for almost three minutes around the blood and gore that had been her chest, and finally—heroically—restarted her heart.
Her heart had started again; Dave “Sugar” Boudreaux’s had not.
Starkey sat at her dinette table, thinking about the dream, and Sugar, and smoking more cigarettes. Only three years, and the memories of Sugar were fading. It was harder to see his face, and harder still to hear his soft Cajun accent. More often than not, now, she returned to their pictures to refresh her memories, and hated herself for having to do that. As if she was betraying him by forgetting. As if the permanence she had once felt about their passion and love had all been a lie told by someone else to a woman who no longer lived.
Everything had changed.
Starkey had started drinking almost as soon as she got out of the hospital. One of her shrinks—she thought it was number two—had said that her issue was survivor’s guilt. Guilt that her heart had started, and Sugar’s had not; guilt that she had lived, and he had not; guilt that, down deep, down in the center of herself where our secret creatures live, she was thankful that she had lived, even at the price of Sugar’s life. Starkey had walked out of the therapist’s office that day and never went back. She had gone to a cop bar called the Shortstop, and drank until two Wilshire Division robbery detectives carried her out of the place.
Everything had changed.
Starkey pulled away from people. She grew cold. She protected herself with sarcasm and distance and the single-minded pursuit of her job until the job was all that she had. Another shrink—she thought it was number three—suggested that she had traded one armored suit for another, then asked if she thought she would ever be able to take it off.
Starkey did not return to answer.
Tired of thinking, Starkey finished her cigarette, then returned to her bedroom to shower. She pulled off her T-shirt and looked at herself with an absence of feeling.
The right half of her abdomen from her breast to her hip was rilled and cratered from the sixteen bits of metal that had punched into her. Two long furrows roped along her side following her lower ribs. Once tanned a walnut brown, her skin was now as white as a table plate because Starkey hadn’t worn a bathing suit since it happened.
The worst of it was her breast. A two-inch piece of the Real Time had impacted on the front of her right breast just beneath the nipple, gouging out a furrow of tissue as it followed the line of her ribs before exiting her back. It had laid her open as if a river valley had been carved in her chest, and that is the way it healed. Her doctors had discussed removing the breast, but decided to save it. They had, but even after the reconstruction, it looked like a misshapen avocado. Her doctors had told her that further cosmetic surgeries could, in time, improve her appearance, but after four operations, Starkey had decided that enough was enough.
She had not been with another man since Sugar had left her bed that morning.
Starkey showered, dressed for the day, then called her office and found two messages.
“It’s me, Starkey, John Chen. I got a pretty good swab from the blast crater. I’ll set it up in the cooker, but that means I won’t be out of here until after three. We should have the chrom around nine. Gimme a call. You owe me.”
The Emergency Services manager had left the second message, saying that she’d duped the tape of the 911 call reporting the suspicious device.
“I left the tape at the security desk, so you can pick it up anytime you want. The call was placed from a pay phone on Sunset Boulevard at one-fourteen, that would be yesterday afternoon. I’ve got a street address here.”
Starkey copied the information into a spiral casebook, then made a cup of instant coffee. She swallowed two Tagamet, then lit a cigarette before letting herself out into the sultry night air.
It was not quite five, and the world was quiet. A kid in a beat-up red hatchback was delivering the L.A. Times, weaving from side to side in the street as he tossed out the papers. An Alta-Dena dairy truck rumbled past.
Starkey decided to drive back to Silver Lake and walk the blast site again. It was better than listening to the silence in her still-beating heart.
Starkey parked in front of the Cuban restaurant next to a Rampart radio car watching over the scene. The mall’s parking lot was otherwise deserted, except for three civilian vehicles that she remembered from the night before.
Starkey held up her badge before she got out.
“Hey, guys, everything okay?”
They were a male/female team, the male officer a skinny guy behind the wheel, the female short and chunky with mannish blonde hair. They were sipping minimart coffee that probably hadn’t been hot for hours.
The female officer nodded.
“Yeah. We’re good, Detective. You need something?”
“I’ve got the case. I’m gonna be walking around.”
The female officer raised her eyebrows.
“We heard a bomb guy got creamed. That so?”
“Yeah.”
The male officer leaned past his partner.
“If you’re gonna be here a few, you mind if we Code Seven? There’s an In-’n-Out Burger a couple blocks over. We could bring you something.”
His partner winked at Starkey.
“Weak bladder.”
Starkey shrugged, secretly pleased to be rid of them.
“Take twenty, but you don’t have to bring me anything. I won’t be out of here before then.”
As the radio car pulled away, Starkey clipped her pistol to her right hip, then crossed Sunset to look for the address that the Emergency Services manager had provided. She brought her Maglite, but didn’t turn it on. The area was bright from surrounding security lights.
A pay phone was hanging on the side of a Guatemalan market directly across from the mall, but when Starkey compared it to the address, they didn’t match. From the Guatemalan market, she could look back across Sunset at the Dumpster. She figured out which way the numbers ran and followed them to find the pay phone. It was housed in one of the old glass booths that Pac Bell was discontinuing, one block east on the side of a laundry, across the street from a flower shop.
Starkey copied the name of the laundry and flower shop into her notebook, then walked back to the first phone and checked to see if it worked. It did. She wondered why the person who called 911 hadn’t done so from here. The Dumpster was in clear view, but wasn’t from the other phone. Starkey thought that the caller might’ve been worried that whoever set the bomb could see them, but she decided not to worry about it until she heard the tape.
Starkey was walking back across Sunset when she saw a piece of bent metal in the street. It was about an inch long and twisted like a piece of bow tie pasta, one side rimed with gray residue. She had picked up nine similar pieces of metal the night before.
She brought it to her car, bagged it in one of the spare evidence bags she kept in the trunk, then walked around the side of the building to the Dumpster. Starkey guessed that the bomb hadn’t been placed to damage the building, but wondered why it had been set beside the Dumpster. She knew that satisfying reasons for questions like this often couldn’t be found. Twice during her time with the Bomb Squad, she had rolled out on devices left on the side of the freeway, far away from overpasses or exits or anything else they might harm. It was as if the assholes who built these things didn’t know what else to do with them, so they just dropped them off on the side of the road.
Starkey walked the scene for another ten minutes and found one more small bit of metal. She was bagging it when the radio car returned to the lot, and the female officer got out with two cups.
“I know you said you didn’t want anything, but we brought a coffee in case you changed your mind.”
“That was nice. Thanks.”
The female officer wanted to chat, but Starkey closed the trunk and told her she needed to get into the office. When the officer went back to her unit, Starkey walked around the far side of her own car and poured out the coffee. She was heading back to the driver’s side when she decided to look over the civilian cars again.
Two of the cars had been pinged by bomb frag, the nearest of which had lost its rear window and suffered substantial damage. Parked closest to the blast, it belonged to the man who owned the bookshop. When the police let him back into the area, he had stared at his car, then kicked it and walked away without another word.
The third car, the one farthest away, was a ’68 Impala with bad paint and peeling vinyl top. The side windows were down and the rear window had been replaced by cloudy plastic that was brittle with sun damage. She looked beneath it first, found nothing, and was walking around the front of the car when she saw a starburst crack on the windshield. She flashed the Maglite inside and saw a round piece of metal on the dash. It looked like a disk with a single fine wire protruding. Starkey glanced toward the Dumpster and saw it was possible that a piece of frag had come through the open windows to crack the windshield. She fished it out, examined it more closely with no idea what it might be, then dropped it into her pocket.
Starkey climbed back into her car without looking at the uniformed officers, then headed downtown to pick up the audiotape before reporting to her office. The sun was rising in the east, filling the sky with a great red fireball.
Mr. Red
John Michael Fowles leaned back on the bench across from the school, enjoying the sun and wondering if he had made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. Not an easy thing to do when they didn’t know who you were, but he’d been leaving clues. He thought he might stop in a Kinko’s later, or maybe the library, and use one of their computers to check the FBI’s web page for the standings.
The sun made him smile. He raised his face to it, letting the warmth soak into him, letting its radiation brown his skin, marveling at the enormity of its exploding gases. That’s the way he liked to think of it: one great monstrous explosion so large and bright that it could be seen from ninety-three million miles away, fueled so infinitely that it would take billions of years to consume itself, so fucking cool that the very fact of it spawned life here on this planet and would eventually consume that life when it gave a last flickering gasp and blew itself out billions of years from now.
John thought it would be seriously cool to build a bomb that big and set the sucker off. How cool it would be to see those first few nanoseconds of its birth. Way cool.
Thinking about it, John felt a hardening in his groin of a kind that had never been inspired by any living thing.
The voice said, “Are you Mr. Red?”
John opened his eyes. Even with his sunglasses, he had to shield his eyes. John flashed the big white teeth.
“I be him. Are you Mr. Karpov?”
Making like a Florida cracker talking street, even though John was neither from Florida, nor a cracker, nor the street. He enjoyed the misdirection.
“Yes.”
Karpov was an overweight man in his fifties, with a heavily lined face and graying widow’s peak. A Russian emigrant of dubious legality with several businesses in the area. He was clearly nervous, which John expected and enjoyed. Victor Karpov was a criminal.
John scooted to the side and patted the bench.
“Here. Sit. We’ll talk.”
Karpov dropped like a stone onto the bench. He clutched a nylon bag with both hands the way an older woman would hold a purse. In front, for protection.
Karpov said, “Thank you for doing this, sir. I have these awful problems that must be dealt with. These terrible enemies.”
John put his hand on the bag, gently trying to pry it away.
“I know all about your problems, Mr. Karpov. We don’t need to say another word about’m.”
“Yes. Yes, well, thank you for agreeing to do this. Thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me, Mr. Karpov, you surely don’t.”
John would have never even spoken to the man, let alone agreed to do what he was about to do and meet Karpov like this, if he had not thoroughly researched Victor Karpov. John’s business was by referral only, and John had spoken with those who had referred him. Those men had in fact asked John’s permission to suggest his name to Karpov, and were in a position to assure Karpov’s character. John was big on character. He was big on secrecy, and covering one’s ass. Which is why these people did not know him by his real name or know anything about him at all except for his trade. Through them, John knew the complete details of Karpov’s problem, what would be required, and had already decided that he would take the job before their first contact.
That was how you stayed on the Most Wanted List, and out of prison.
“Leave go of the bag, Mr. Karpov.”
Karpov let go of the bag as if it were stinging him.
John laughed, taking the bag into his own lap.
“You don’t have to be nervous, Mr. Karpov. You’re among friends here, believe you me. It don’t get no friendlier than what I’m feeling for you right now. You know how friendly it gets?”
Karpov stared at him without comprehension.
“I think we’re such good friends, me and you, that I’m not even gonna look in this bag until later. That’s how such good friends we are. We’re so fuckin’ tight, you and me, that I know there is EXACTLY the right amount of cash in here, and I’m willing to bet your life on it. How’s that for friendly?”
Karpov’s eyes bulged large, and he swallowed.
“It is all there. It is exactly what you said, in fifties and twenties. Please count it now. Please count it so that you are satisfied.”
John shook his head and dropped the sack onto the bench opposite Karpov.
“Nope. We’ll just let this little scenario play out the way it will and hope you didn’t count wrong.”
Karpov reached across him for the sack.
“Please.”
John laughed and pushed Karpov back.
“Don’t you worry about it, Mr. Karpov. I’m just funnin’ with you.”
Funnin’. Like he was an idiot as well as a cracker.
“Here. I want to show you something.”
He took a small tube from his pocket and held it out. It used to be a dime-store flashlight, the kind with a push-button switch in the end opposite the bulb. It wasn’t a flashlight anymore.
“Go ahead and take it. The damned thing won’t bite.”
Karpov took it.
“What is this?”
John tipped his head toward the schoolyard across the street. It was lunchtime. The kids were running around, playing in the few minutes before they would have to troop back into class.
“Lookit those kids over there. I been watchin’m. Pretty little girls and boys. Man, look at how they’re just running around, got all the energy in the world, all that free spirit and potential. You’re that age, I guess everything’s still possible, ain’t it? Lookit that little boy in the blue shirt. Over there to the right, Karpov, Jesus, right there. Good-lookin’ little fella, blond, freckles. Christ, bet the little sonofabitch could grow up fuckin’ all the cheerleaders he wants, then be the goddamned President to boot. Shit like that can’t happen over there where you’re from, can it? But here, man, this is the fuckin’ U.S. of A., and you can do any goddamned thing you want until they start tellin’ you that you can’t.”
Karpov was staring at him, the tube in his hand forgotten.
“Right now, anything in that child’s head is possible, and it’ll stay possible till that fuckin’ cheerleader calls him a pizza-face and her retarded fullback boyfriend beats the shit out of him for talking to his girl. Right now, that boy is happy, Mr. Karpov, just look at how happy, but all that is gonna end just as soon as he realizes all those hopes and dreams he has ain’t never gonna work.”
John slowly let his eyes drift to the tube.
“You could save that poor child all that grief, Mr. Karpov. Somewhere very close to us there is a device. I have built that device, and placed it carefully, and you now control it.”
Karpov looked at the tube. His expression was as milky as if he were holding a rattlesnake.
“If you press that little silver button, maybe you can save that child the pain he’s gonna face. I’m not sayin’ the device is over there in that school, but I’m sayin’ maybe. Maybe that whole fuckin’ playground would erupt in a beautiful red firestorm. Maybe those babies would be hit so hard by the pressure wave that all their shoes would just be left scattered on the ground, and the clothes and skin would scorch right off their bones. I ain’t sayin’ that, but there it is right there in that silver button. You can end that boy’s pain. You have the power. You can turn the world to hell, you want, because you have the power right there in that little silver button. I have created it, and now I’ve given it to you. You. Right there in your hand.”
Karpov stood and thrust the tube at John.
“I want no part of this. Take it. Take it.”
John slowly took the tube. He fingered the silver button.
“When I do what you want me to do, Mr. Karpov, people are gonna die. What’s the fuckin’ difference?”
“The money is all there. Every dollar. All of it.”
Karpov walked away without another word. He crossed the street, walking so fast that his strides became a kind of hop, as if he expected the world around him to turn to flame.
John dropped the tube into the nylon bag with the money.
They never seemed to appreciate the gift he offered.
John settled back again, stretched his arms along the backrest to enjoy the sun and the sounds of the children playing. It was a beautiful day, and would grow even more beautiful when a second sun had risen.
After a while he got up and walked away to check the Most Wanted List. Last week he wasn’t on it.
This week he hoped to be.