Flat Spin (19 page)

I
returned Lamont Royale’s call the next morning and got his voice mail. If he had any insights as to who killed Echevarria, I told him, I was all ears. My next call was to Detective Czarnek. I asked him to fax me a copy of Echevarria’s autopsy report.

“I can’t do that,” Czarnek said.

“Sure you can. All you do is put some paper in the machine and hit send.”

“I’d have to clear it with my supervisor, and I don’t think he’d go for it.”

“I’m trying to help you, Detective.”

Czarnek exhaled. “I know.”

Kiddiot sat in front of his cat door and looked at it like he’d never seen it before, yowling mournfully to be let out. No use arguing with an animal that dumb. I opened the people door. He sauntered past my feet and into the backyard like he was the one doing me a big favor.

I asked Czarnek if the LAPD had any other suspects in the case. He cleared his throat and lowered his voice.

“You were it,” he said.

I could hear Windhauser’s voice in the background. He was bitching to someone about how much he’d been ripped off for termite repairs on his house.

“How many other homicides you guys working?” I asked Czarnek.

“I don’t even fucking know at this point,” the detective said. “Gangs are keeping us crazy busy right now. Big turf war going on. Pacoima Flats and Paxton Street Locos. Little punks. I’d like to take a bazooka to all of ’em.”

“I know a couple of places where you could pick one up cheap.”

“That story you rattled off at lunch the other day,” Czarnek said, “about you and Echevarria doing the Lord’s work. That true?”

“Well, if it wasn’t, it ought to be.”

There was a pause like he was thinking about it. Then he said, “Gimme your fax number.”

I had no fax number. Mainly because I had no fax machine. Couldn’t afford one. I gave Czarnek the number to Larry’s machine in the hangar instead.

Larry’s fax machine was broken. Something about the feeder mechanism. Every incoming page looked like it had gone through an accordion, then splotched black. Larry said he’d been intending to get the piece of crap fixed but lacked the necessary funds. Now that I’d finally paid him what I owed him in back rent, he could send it out for repair.

“I’ll get to it next week,” he said, bent over his workbench, tinkering with a troublesome magneto.

I called Czarnek back, told him my machine was on the fritz, and gave him the number for my “other fax.” I didn’t tell him I happened to share it with Kinko’s.

T
he seven-page report was waiting for me by the time I drove downtown to the copy shop a half-hour later. Czarnek had also faxed a copy of the LAPD’s preliminary investigation of Echevarria’s homicide, including witness statements.

“Interesting reading,” the clerk said.

“Only if you like blood and gore,” I said.

She was maybe twenty-two, not unattractive in an underfed, nose ring, urban grunge kind of way. “I’m totally into blood and gore,” she said. “Seriously, I would
kill
to work for CSI.” She slid the faxed pages into a flat paper bag. “You know where else I’d like to work? Caltrans. Picking up road kill. Would that be a
great
job or what?”

“‘Enjoys scraping dead animals off the freeway.’ I’ve heard that’s one of eHarmony’s twenty-nine dimensions of compatibility.”

She smiled. “With tax, it comes to nineteen dollars and thirtyone cents.”

I gave her a twenty and she handed me my change, accidentally dropping a quarter on the floor.

“Oops. Sorry about that.” Her Kinko’s polo shirt hiked a few inches above her waistline as she stooped to pick up the coin, exposing what looked like a bowl of fruit inked across the small of her back.

They must’ve passed some new law. Every woman in California under the age of twenty-five is now required to visit her local tattoo parlor so that some sleazoid can etch a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling just north of her butt crack and call it art.

Like a bumper sticker on a Bentley,
I thought, trying not to stare.

She handed me the quarter and my receipt. I said I’d let her know if I heard about any vacancies in the field of dead animal retrieval. She thanked me like she meant it.

A block down the street was a coffee shop. The barista working the counter was all pimples and puka necklace. I ordered a cup of black coffee to go. Not a grande Chai Creme Frappuccino. Not a skinny Caramel Macchiato with soy milk. A cup of coffee. Black. To go. The extraordinarily unusual nature of my order seemed to throw him.

“That’s a first,” he said. “Could I get a name?”

“Lord Emilio Fishbinder, member of Parliament.”

He scrawled something with a Sharpie on a wax paper cup and said, “Next in line.”

I waited. The place featured the usual collection of office workers reluctant to return to their desks, college girls commiserating about their loser boyfriends, and a paunchy Hemingway wannabe pecking away on his laptop, trying hard to appear deep in creative thought.

“Order ready for Lord Emilio.”

I fetched my coffee, sat down at a table outside and read Arlo Echevarria’s autopsy report.

If it’s true what your mother says, that it’s all about what a person is inside, then Arlo Echevarria was a human garbage disposal. Among the approximately 500 milliliters of partially digested contents found in his stomach, the coroner identified tortillas chips, a hot dog, peanuts, barbequed chicken, bamboo shoots, penne pasta with spinach, white rice, and what appeared to be either a Milky Way or Snickers candy bar. His blood-alcohol content registered .07 percent. No narcotics were found in his system. The autopsy also revealed that Echevarria had gone through life with an undescended testicle. Who knew?

The bullet that most likely killed him entered his body slightly above his nipples, fifteen inches below the top of his head and left of his midline. It ripped through the second intercostal space, shredded the lateral edge of his sternum, perforated the arch of his aorta, deflected one and a half inches at the junction of his left subclavian and left common carotid arteries, then punched through the upper lobe of his left lung and fractured the left aspect of his third thoracic vertebra before exiting the middle of his upper back. There was abundant gunpowder stippling around the entry wound, as well as stippling around the other two wounds to Echevarria’s torso. This meant that all three shots had been fired at a distance close enough to singe his skin through his T-shirt. Bullet fragments recovered during the autopsy were consistent with a Smith & Wesson .40-caliber, 165-grain, copper-jacketed round.

What the autopsy report told me was that whoever killed Echevarria wanted him
seriously
dead. It also confirmed that the killer was no pro. The oversized caliber of the murder weapon was proof alone of that. Professionals typically prefer .22-caliber pistols.A .22 is quieter, smaller, more easily concealed. Granted, a .22 slug is roughly half that of a .40-caliber round and offers considerably less stopping power, but a .22 often causes greater damage than larger bullets, with just enough power to ricochet off bones and through vital tissue, bouncing around inside the body like a pingpong ball. The professional also knows that a .22 bullet is made of soft, unjacketed lead. It deforms easily. That and the fact that it is the most common round made in America makes it virtually impossible to trace. But that wasn’t how I knew definitively that Echevarria’s murder was the work of a non-pro.

It was the location of the wounds themselves.

Firearms rarely kill instantly. Unless it’s a clean head shot, victims often are able to fight on for several seconds before succumbing to shock caused by their catastrophic loss of blood. A dying shooter can squeeze off a lot of rounds in that amount of time. The trick, then, is to place your shots in such a way that your adversary has little chance of returning fire. The technique we used in Alpha, the same technique taught to virtually all trained killers, goes by many titles—the “Mozambique Drill,” the “Rhodesian Drill,” the “Failure Drill,” “Body Armor Defeat,” the “2+1 Drill”—but it’s all essentially the same concept: two quick shots fired at the target’s center mass, or chest, followed by a deliberate third shot to the head.

I learned the method from an alcoholic, chain-smoking former Spetsnaz commando, Laz Kizlyak, who served as Alpha’s senior weapons instructor. Laz had honed his craft kidnapping and executing dissidents in Chechnya and Afghanistan before defecting to the West.

“Trauma of impact and wound channel from two shots to center mass cause reflexive nervous system to collapse ninety-six percent of time,” I remember him saying in his thick accent my first day on the range. “In other four percent, adrenaline or stimulant drugs will override reflex. This, my lovelies, is why you put third bullet in motherfucker’s brain.”

I don’t know where he got his numbers, but the man knew guns like Hef knows the female form. The only time I ever saw Laz’s hand not trembling was when it was holding a loaded weapon. He taught us to double-tap our first two shots, aiming at the target’s center, pausing a millisecond to reassess, then squeezing off the head shot, ideally between the eyes. Any higher, the bullet could deflect off skull bone. Any lower, and it was unlikely to produce the kind of catastrophic damage to the nervous system that Laz liked to call, “The gift that keeps on giving.”

We practiced shooting until the process became reflexive muscle memory. Then we practiced more. I would eventually put Laz’s lessons to good use in the field more times than I care to remember. Two quick shots to the chest, reassess, then one to the head. The industry standard.

I got good at it. Arlo Echevarria got even better.

I sipped some coffee and watched a scruffy panhandler shake down a couple of Japanese tourists too frightened to tell him no. Then I read the LAPD’s report. Every witness said they had heard a single gunshot that night, a pause, then two more shots in quick succession. All three bullets had been delivered to the torso. None to the head. Poor technique. Too much gun.

And then there was Echevarria’s own perplexing lack of defensive countermeasures. The nine-millimeter Beretta that the LAPD found wedged in the small of his back, though fully loaded, was effectively worthless. He would’ve first had to draw and chamber a round before using the weapon against his assailant—a split-second response that in a tactical environment could mean the difference between death and life. A trained hunter-killer doesn’t open his front door with such complacency to a stranger late at night in a shitty neighborhood if they legitimately fear someone is out to harm them. You come to the door with pistol in hand, ready to rock. Either Echevarria felt he had nothing to fear, or he’d simply grown complacent in his retirement. Or maybe the whiskey he’d drunk that night had dulled his instincts. I pondered the irony of it: the master caught flat-footed by some bush leaguer. It happens sometimes, I suppose.

I got up to toss my empty coffee cup when Lamont Royale called. He said he was outside the pro shop of the Las Vegas Country Club and couldn’t talk long; Carlisle was inside, testing out new putters. Their tee time was in five minutes.

“I tried calling you back last night,” Royale said. “I heard explosions, then the line went dead.”

“I was gearing up for the Fourth of July.”

“But it’s November.”

“When you’re a true patriot, it’s never too early to celebrate the birth of our illustrious nation.”

“OK, whatever,” Royale said.

“You said last night you had some information about Echevarria?”

“Actually, it’s more about his first wife.”

Royale told me he’d overheard a heated phone conversation between Savannah and Echevarria less than a week before he died. Savannah was out visiting her father in Las Vegas. According to Royale, Echevarria’s ex-wife, Janice, had discovered a diamond ring missing from a safe deposit box. Echevarria, cheapskate that he was, had given Savannah the ring for their engagement without revealing how he’d acquired it. Janice had demanded the ring back.

“He admitted to Savannah where he got the ring, and that if his ex-wife didn’t get it back, she was going to put a contract out on him—and she had the resources to do it, too,” Royale said. “Savannah was so mad about him giving her some other woman’s ring in the first place, she threw it down the garbage disposal.”

“Did you tell the LAPD this?”

“I didn’t think it was my place, considering I was listening in on a private conversation. I don’t know whether it means anything or not. But I thought I should mention it to somebody. Whatever you do, I’d really appreciate you keeping my name out of it. I don’t want to upset Mr. Carlisle more than he already is.”

“Heaven forbid,” I said.