Playing the Game (6 page)

            As far as the LA Times was concerned, he was tracking down a lead for his next story and not checking on the progress of his first really high profile blackmail attempt.

            He wondered for a minute whether he should break the story about the Senator’s extra-curricular activities instead of blackmailing him. He wouldn’t get fifty grand out of it but he was sure he would be pretty well compensated for it as it would be a major story for the gossip loving citizens of Los Angeles to get their teeth into. The city often times thrived on scandal.  But on reflection he really did need that money. Sporting a wicked grin, he contemplated breaking the story after he had received his fifty grand anyway. That would top it up to nearer seventy, and would definitely be enough to get him out of the shit. Yes, he might just do that.

            He planned to have the Senator drop off the money on Pier D at Long Beach, just under the Gerald Desmond Bridge then have one of his contacts collect the money on his behalf for a small surcharge. He had made many contacts over the years who would come to him with little bits of information, knowing he often paid a good price. These were usually unsavoury characters; often drink dependant, often drug dependant and often surviving by lurching from one minor criminal activity to the next. Although he looked upon many of these individuals with contempt, recently it had been striking him just how similar he was becoming to them.

            He would change that though, as soon as he had paid off Bobby Hambel with the fifty grand he owed him, he’d be in the clear. He thought after that, maybe checking in with the AA would be an idea, and he was pretty sure that weaning himself of the Prozac would be easy enough. He had dabbled sporadically with class A varieties, a little heroin here and there, a little cocaine on occasion, but that was strictly recreational, and he certainly didn’t feel the urge to dabble every day, like he currently did with the Prozac. Nevertheless, over the last couple of years, he’d spent an extraordinary amount on fast living and it had begun to take its toll.

He’d had a wake up call a couple of months ago when he came to in his rented Porsche 911 having wrapped it around a lamppost at three a.m. one morning, hooker passed out in the passenger seat, and six grams of crack cocaine sprinkled on the dashboard. Catching a lucky break in that there seemed to be no-one around, and extremely keen to avoid the minimum five year sentence he’d receive should he have be arrested, he’d paid the hooker off with what little cash he’d had on him and managed to stagger home, grab a shower and three hours sleep. Reporting the car as stolen at nine a.m. that morning, despite not having an alibi, there was nothing to tie him to the scene of the totalled Porsche. Although he’d presumably crashed his car, he’d sustained no visible injuries, although his ribs hurt like hell, and the hooker was hardly likely to be a forthcoming witness, for obvious reasons. He thought the police had their suspicions but it was a case of what they could prove, not what they thought they knew. Of course his fingerprints, DNA and everything else had been all over the car, it was his car so they were bound to be. He was just fortunate that a couple of days ago, when meeting a couple of his petty criminal contacts down on San Pedro Bay, one of them, Carlos Trujillo had begged to sit in the drivers seat to see what it was like, much to Britland-Jones’ amusement. Seeing no harm in it, and because Trujillo had come up with the required goods that evening, he’d agreed, making sure he took the keys out of the ignition, just in case. It was as close as that poor bastard was ever going to get to a Porsche, he knew that much. And thank the Lord he’d agreed; as a result of that, there was DNA the police could not match on the driver’s seat and steering wheel, and that was enough to exonerate him from any wrong-doing in the eyes of the law. Somehow, throughout his years of criminality, Trujillo had evaded the LAPD and their penitentiary system, hence the unidentified DNA.

Once that had been put to bed, he remembered staring into a mirror after getting out of the shower; wiping the steamed up mirror down with a towel, and thinking that he looked a lot older than his thirty-eight years. He looked nearer forty-five, maybe forty-six. That, combined with his distinctly too-close-for-comfort brush with the law convinced him that a change was in order. There was just a matter of paying off Bobby Hambel first, to ensure he kept his kneecaps attached to his legs.

Watching as Conway pulled out of his driveway, down the road and out of sight, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a second envelope, one that contained the instructions for the money drop in three days time.

Less than a minute later he was heading back to his office at the LA Times. He supposed he better at least
try
and get a little work done today.

16

To say that things were not going according to plan would be the understatement of the year, and James Tetley was beginning to worry.

It had started off well enough, but around the one minute mark it became clear that Jimmy was here for more money than they had agreed in the car. They had burst through the doors of the Pacific with Jimmy firing off a round into the ceiling to show they meant business.

‘Nobody fucking move’, he commanded, ‘We will kill you all if we have to’. Tetley knew this was an empty threat of course. Over the many jobs they had pulled together over the years they had beaten people, sure, sometimes maybe even a little excessively at times when they felt a point had to be made, or when you got some prick with ideas above his station looking like he might turn into John Rambo at any moment unless he was taken out swiftly, but they had always stopped short of actually shooting anybody. And Tetley didn’t particularly want to start today.

Taking his position by the door, as he always did, he let Jimmy control the cash collection. Looking at his watch, they were twenty seconds in.

For Jeannie Sharples, a slightly overweight clerk in her late forties, whose ambition was never going to stretch beyond her current position and who had been complaining as recently as yesterday afternoon to her fellow window clerks that she was tired of the doing the same thing day in, day out, her reaction of using her right foot to trigger the silent alarm as she raised her hands on the command of this tall thug with a nasty looking gun to hand, was automatic. She hadn’t even realised she had done it, until she was drawing her foot away from the trigger. Eventually realising what she had done, she felt a hot flush come over her face, and she just hoped the masked gunman put this down to the shock of the hold-up rather than any incriminating action on her part.

‘Start bagging it up, bitch’, Jimmy really sounded the part. ‘And fucking hurry up about it too. All of it, come on!’

As the seconds ticked away, it soon dawned on Tetley that Jimmy was not sticking to the terms agreed a couple of minutes before, in the car.

‘Hey man, forty thousand tops, that’s all we need’, Tetley hoped he sounded calmer than he actually felt. Burke half turned towards him, still watching Jeannie and two other clerks fumbling behind the glass counter, bagging up what they could, although they were shaking so much it was a wonder they could bag up anything at all.

‘That’s not gonna do it man’, Burke shouted, ‘I need at least eighty. We don’t get eighty I’m a dead man’. Tetley didn’t have time here and now to get into they ‘whys’ of Jimmy’s situation, all he could do was mouth ‘Fuck’ under his breath and continue to man the doors. For a split second, he wondered if he should bail, but the thought of Graziadai and Seinfeld not receiving their money kept him rooted to the spot.

None of the six or seven customers in the bank were going to give them any trouble and the one security guard in the place had voluntarily surrendered his piece the moment they had stormed in. Tetley didn’t blame him for that, they guy must have been in his late fifty’s and was never going to be any sort of match for himself and Jimmy. Hardly worth risking losing your pension over, never mind your life.

Three and a half minutes and counting. Tetley was beginning to get nervous. ‘Hey come on, we’ve got enough, we gotta get out of here’, he was almost pleading. He was sure he’d just heard a siren. Burke, however, remained steadfast. ‘One more minute, man, just one more minute’.

Shaking his head, Tetley glanced outside just in time to see two police cars screech round the corner. The sight of their getaway car hastily speeding off rendered him momentarily speechless. He watched helplessly as one of the cars sped past the bank after Moseley. Well that was something at least, if they were going down for this then he hoped they would at least also catch that sinking-ship deserting motherfucker.

Before he could get his words out to warn Jimmy, the cops were seemingly out of the second car and swarming towards him at the door. Tetley raised his Mossberg to his shoulder to take aim, but it was too late. The earth-shattering sound of splintering glass was followed by a sharp, piercing pain, as a bullet from one of the ascending officers lodged itself in Tetley’s upper thigh. The force of the bullet cascaded him backwards a good four or five feet, and dropping his shotgun, Tetley crumpled in a heap grimacing in agony.

If the sound of the sirens hadn’t alerted Jimmy Burke to their impending problem, the sound of bullets, shattered glass and his friend’s agonising cries certainly did. Spinning round, eyes raging, staring in disbelief as three armed officers filed in, shouting various instructions at him, he did the only thing that made any sense to him at the time. He opened fire.

Considering he’d had no formal training with weapons, and that the only target practice he’d ever really had was on bottles and the like as a teenager, he did remarkably well. His first shot caught Officer Reed squarely in the chest. Although Reed was wearing the state issued bullet proof vest, the force of the blast was enough to wind him, taking him momentarily out of action. Officer Hart took Burke’s second shot straight through the neck, piercing the trachea and shattering the top of the spinal chord on exit, killing him instantly. As Burke was about to get a third shot off two bullets from Officer Coen hit him in the shoulder and stomach. Coen’s third and fourth were both head shots, and Jimmy Burke was dead before he’d even begun falling to the floor.

James Tetley watched as one of his best friends waged his one-man war against his LAPD counterparts, then passed out from the pain of his leg wound just as what was left of Jimmy Burke’s body crashed to the ground.

17

Even though we were anxious to get in there, Charlie and I duly waited for the back up to arrive, which it did with a commendable amount of silence, as instructed. Unless, as a resident of the Boulevard, you were standing at one of your front windows looking out directly onto the road or happened to be at the front of your house doing one-or two odd jobs like a couple of the residents were, you would never have known about the significantly increased police presence.

Signalling that we would take the front, I silently directed three teams of two officers round the sides and back of the detached number twenty-two. Once at the front door, we gave it about thirty seconds for the rest of the team to get in position. I nodded to Charlie, who took the door off its hinges with one powerful kick.

Seconds later, I heard a crash, which signified that my team was also coming in from the rear. So far, so good. No surprises. Nothing out of the ordinary. A quick sweep of the ground floor rooms uncovered nothing further. It just appeared to be your typical suburban house. The kitchen was clean, but with several dirty plates and bowls piled high in the sink and the leftovers from a meal lay on the breakfast table. The living room looked comfortable and well used; cushions and magazines strewn across the sofa, a dining room that looked more for show than for any practical purpose.
But
we were here for a reason, weren’t we?
Whilst Charlie and I had taken the downstairs, two of the backup team had taken upstairs.

‘Hey Patton’, I heard one of them shout, the sense of urgency in his voice undeniable. ‘Get up here! Master bedroom’

Taking the stairs three at a time, my mind was racing. Was this what we were here for? I’m not quite sure
what
I was expecting but I was surprised, even bewildered at what we found.

Looking very tired and extremely frightened was a woman, sitting up in bed, hugging her knees tight to her chest and pulling the duvet cover right up to her chin. The room was spacious and daylight penetrated the room from a slit in the drawn curtains.

Whilst the rest of the backup re-scouted the house under Charlie’s supervision, it took me around five minutes of questioning to ascertain some basic facts. Once over the initial shock of having four strangers burst into her bedroom, she was extremely forthcoming and a couple of quick checks via the PD confirmed her story.

Her name was Laura Edwards and she worked as a full time nurse at one of LA’s busiest hospitals, The Cedars Inter-Community Hospital in Inglewood. She was on overnighters this week, meaning that she started work at ten at night and worked through to eight in the morning after shift handover at half past seven. Looking around the room, I could see her nurses uniform slung over the back of a chair, and her bloodshot eyes spoke volumes; turned out she had been in bed for just over half an hour before we burst in.

‘Do you have
any
idea why your address would be in a code, given to us?’ I asked. I had been vague with the details, certainly no mention of The Chemist, or the fact that we were chasing a potential serial killer.

‘I don’t, I really don’t’, she seemed genuine to me. ‘I’m sorry I can’t be of more help to you Detective Patton’.

Charlie returned and a quick shake of his head confirmed that there was nothing relevant after a preliminary search. I declined to tell Laura at this stage that several officers would remain here all day anyway, and that she was unlikely to be going back to sleep.

I sighed, looking around the room, more out of exasperation and frustration than anything else. I had no clue how to proceed from here, but there must be a reason we were here, that’s assuming Ferguson was right about the code. What was it we were missing?