Strip (2 page)

He was sitting in the crane operator’s seat, watching the lights of a fire truck weaving up Beverly Boulevard, when he saw two big SUVs arrive at the gate of his construction site. They were both Hummers, both black. From above they looked like two small, shiny black boxes, all squared corners. He couldn’t see the passengers because the windows were tinted, but they couldn’t be anyone he wanted to meet. The Hummers were stopped at the curb right outside the gate. They had an intention, and he sensed it had to do with his construction site. While the crane was a wonderful hiding place, it was not a good place to be cornered. He stood, opened the door, and stepped onto the platform.

Carver began the long climb down. The tall mast of the crane was divided into a series of gratelike floors connected by ladders. Each ladder led to a platform below, and then another ladder to the platform below that. Up above two hundred feet the world was dimly lit. There were few bright lights higher than the streetlamps, and even those were aimed downward at the ground. Until he reached that level, Carver would be difficult to see. He descended ten, twenty, thirty, forty feet, still hidden by darkness. He prepared himself for the run into the shadows. He lowered his right foot to the bottom step on the sixth platform and looked down at the two black Hummers, trying to see who got out of them.

The doors didn’t open. The first Hummer swung wide into the left lane, and then hooked right so it was going head-on when it rammed the gate on its right side, where the chain and padlock held it. Even from up in the air, Carver could see the chain snap and fly wide as the gate swung open.

The second Hummer followed the first through the open gateway and onto the construction site. The vehicle stopped and two big men got out and pushed the gate shut again. One of them tipped a hundred-gallon drum onto its rim and rolled it against the gate to keep it shut while the two Hummers turned around to face the street.

Carver was shocked. He had been trying to descend and slip off into the darkness, but there were already two of Kapak’s men with their shoes on the ground inside the gate. In a moment there were five. Carver had underestimated these people. They shouldn’t even know which side of town he was on tonight, but here they were.

The five men began to fan out across the lot, keeping forty or fifty feet of open space between them. They advanced in a line, scanning for him and keeping straight so nobody got more than a step ahead into the line of fire. Their pace made it look to Carver as though they might arrive at the base of the tower crane just about when he did.

Carver stopped and lay on the platform to peer down through the steel grating. He could see the men as they approached, stepping into the overlapping pools of light near the main steel structure and the tool sheds and the high stacks of wood and steel. He recognized the same five men he had seen at Farmers’ Market: the Gaffney brothers, easy to spot because of their red hair and paper-white skin; Voinovich the Russian, because he was taller than the others; and Corona and Guzman, because they had brown skin and shiny shaved heads and necks that were tattooed with filigree script.

Carver was glad he hadn’t descended any farther. He saw the Gaffney brothers reach the base of the crane, where the huge steel structure was bolted to its concrete slab. Carver waited until he could see they had stopped and were walking away. Then he moved to the ladder to climb back toward the cab. His foot slipped off the first rung and made a clang on the iron grate floor that resonated in the quiet night air.

A shot whistled through the floor grating he was standing on, and then three more shots. Carver held himself flat against the nearest strut. There were more shots—two, then four in a rapid volley. Some bullets hammered solid pieces of steel in the frame of the crane, and others pinged as they grazed the steel grating and whistled off into the dark sky.

Carver climbed steadily, and the next few shots were less accurate, but they came from four or five directions. All the men seemed to be shooting at him now. He climbed faster so there wouldn’t be time for a well-aimed shot. Carter kept looking upward to verify that the triangular pattern of struts going by were really registering movement, and at last he reached the top and scuttled into the crane’s cab.

He sat in the operator’s seat for a few seconds, simply holding himself still and feeling grateful for the steel seat beneath the leather padding, waiting for more gunshots. When he didn’t hear any, he looked out the window of the cab to see where the men were. They were still down on the site, but they had stopped to confer. It occurred to him that the reason none of them was shooting might be that they hadn’t seen him get into the cab. They must believe he’d been hit and was lying on one of the lower platforms dead or dying.

Carver waited. Maybe they’d declare victory and go away. He stayed low but moved his head close to the window and looked down. He could see the five men were moving again. This time they were walking toward the steel frame of the building, preparing to climb the temporary staircase that had been erected along the near side. If they got up to the top floor, they’d be almost beside him and could fire at him through the cab windows.

He was trapped. He had no more than a minute or two to do something to preserve his life. He stared straight ahead, through the windshield of the cab. From where he sat, his eyes were aimed out along the seventy-five-yard horizontal arm of the crane. Along its underside, he could see the trolley on rails that held the cable and the hook, a piece of steel the size of a man.

He glanced out the side window at the five men moving toward the stairway that led up onto the skeletal building, and then he looked straight ahead again at the arm of the crane. Right before him was the control console of the crane, a black, sloping surface full of switches and dials and levers and knobs. His hours reading the manual and comparing the pictures with the controls had made them familiar. His hand reached out for the toggle switch that said “master power,” and he flipped it.

Lights glowed on the console. He tentatively moved the control stick to swing the crane’s long, horizontal arm—called the “jib” in the manual, as though this huge machine were a sailing ship—slowly to the left, then stopped. The cab moved with the arm, so the movement made him dizzy. He reached out for the winch control and lowered the cable with the hook on the end. As he lowered it, he pushed forward on the control to send the trolley out on the horizontal arm.

The hook descended to the heavily trodden lot and landed in a small explosion of dust. He pulled back on the control and raised it a bit, so it dangled from its cable about a foot off the ground. He reached for the lateral control, and the long, horizontal arm of the crane began to move again. He pushed it farther, his cab turning faster with the arm.

The heavy steel hook on the end of the long cable stayed a bit behind the moving arm. When he stopped the dizzying lateral movement, the cable swung toward the men and the heavy hook swept into their midst. The five scattered, and the hook swung past them and clanged against a horizontal steel girder of the building a story above their heads. As the hook swung back, Carver turned the arm back a little to guide the hook into the gang of men a second time. It narrowly missed Voinovich, who flung himself to the side on the dirt and gravel.

Carver felt the vibrations as bullets banged on the bottom of the steel cab. He could see the five men dancing from one side to another, trying to get a better shot at the glass windows.

Carver glanced beyond them at the streets. By now, cops should be surrounding this area. He could see for many blocks, but there was not a single flashing light coming from any direction. Was everybody around here deaf? The past few minutes had sounded like a war. But this was a commercial neighborhood, and everyone nearby had probably gone home hours ago. Whatever Carver was going to do, he would have to do it alone.

He looked below for the men, but they had scattered. His gaze settled on the two Hummers. He moved the trolley that held the hoist farther out on the crane’s arm, almost the full seventy-five yards, and turned the crane at the same time, so the hook on the end of the cable was in motion again. The men below seemed to understand the meaning of his movement immediately. They abandoned their hiding places, desperate to kill him before he could carry out his intention. They fired rapidly, and he could feel the vibration each time a bullet hit the cab’s steel shell. One shot hit a side window, and glass exploded into the cab.

Carver brushed the glass off his lap, and then swung the big hook again. To his disappointment, it missed the back of the closest Hummer entirely. But before he could readjust the angle, the hook swung back, directly into the windshield of the Hummer parked in front of it. He could hear the bang of the impact and the crash of breaking glass as the hook burst through the windshield and buckled the roof. Carver swung the arm back and saw that the hook was caught on the vehicle. His movement dragged the front Hummer into the back Hummer, crumpling its hood and grille. He activated the winch and raised the front Hummer forty feet into the air, and then lowered it as quickly as he could onto the back Hummer. The hook came free, and the front Hummer rolled off onto its side.

Two men ran toward the gate, sprinting as hard as they could while he moved the horizontal arm backward. As he prepared to swing the hook again, they toppled the barrel and rolled it away, shouldered open the gate, and ran outside and across the street to disappear between two buildings. A moment later, the other three made a dash for the wide-open gate. He tried to move the arm to swing the hook toward them, but by the time he got it moving, they were already across the street. He watched them from his height for a few seconds until they disappeared beyond a building.

He knew a couple of them would be lying in wait for him across the street. The others would make their way around the block to surround the construction site. As soon as he came down from his crane, they’d kill him or try to take him alive and make him give up the money he didn’t have. They knew he couldn’t be armed if he was reduced to defending himself by swinging cars at them with a crane.

Carver sat still in his crane, trying to spot the men moving to positions where they could fire through the chain-link fence into the lot. Then his eye caught a new brightness. From this height he recognized the blue and red flashing lights long before he could hear the sirens. There were two, four, six police cars now, coming fast along Beverly Boulevard. He saw two more appear on Bronson, trying to cut off an escape. He looked for the five men again. This time when he spotted them, they were blocks away, running hard.

He opened the cab of the crane to step onto the first ladder. He looked back once, noticed the three nude pictures of Mitch’s wife taped to the inside of the cab, and hesitated. Tomorrow morning there would be people all over this cab—probably cops, supervisors, all kinds of people. He tore the photographs down, bent them into a little tent shape, set them on the floor, lit each of them with his lighter, and let them burn. Mitch would see the ashes and know what had happened to them. Then he hurried down the ladders to reach the ground before the cops arrived.

He ran to the contractor’s trailer at the edge of the lot farthest from the gate. He picked up a plank and propped one end on the roof of the trailer and the other on the top of the chain-link fence, compressing the coiled razor wire. He climbed to the roof of the trailer, walked the length of the plank, and jumped to the sidewalk outside. In a few moments, he had dissolved into the night.

M
ANCO KAPAK AWOKE
to the sound of the master bedroom door swinging inward. He tugged the sleeping mask up onto his forehead with his left hand, reached under his pillow with the right, grasped the .45 pistol, and held it under the covers, squinting against the morning sunlight as he prepared to fire through the blankets. He had been jumpy since the night a month ago when a man in a ski mask had stuck a gun in his face and robbed him.

“It’s me, Mr. Kapak. It’s only me.” The male voice was soft and calm.

It was Spence, Kapak’s driver and bodyguard. Kapak brought the pistol up and put it into the top drawer of the nightstand. “What do you want?”

“It’s the police on the phone. They say they need to talk to you right now.”

“Shit” Kapak sat up and yawned, then rose to his feet. He caught sight of himself in the mirror and once again felt the shock of seeing his naked body. His shoulders and upper arms were still hard and muscled, his forearms and thighs still had sinews like cables under the leathery skin, but over the years his torso had grown thick and soft, the belly rounded now like a pear, and the pectoral muscles loose like little breasts. His skin was gray-white like a dead man’s, except in the places where it was blotched and reddish from sleep.

Spence held the phone out and Kapak took it, then looked over his shoulder at the small shape under the covers on the other side of the bed. He saw long blond hair on the pillow, but her name didn’t come to mind. He stepped into the living room and closed the door to let her sleep.

“This is Mr. Kapak.”

“Good morning, sir. This is Lieutenant Nicholas Slosser, Los Angeles Police Department. We would like you to come in this morning to talk to us”

“Where is ‘in,’ and what do we have to talk about?”

“‘In’ is Parker Center, Room Five Thirty-two. We’re investigating an incident that took place last night on a construction site in Hollywood. Two vehicles registered to the Kapak Corporation were found wrecked there.”

“Wrecked? Are you sure?”

“We’ll talk about it. It’s seven now. Can you be here by nine? Or I can send a unit to pick you up.”

“I can get there myself.”

“See you then.”

Kapak pressed the button to end the call, then punched in the cell phone number of Gerald Ospinsky. After a couple of seconds he said, “Gerald.”

“Yes?”

“It’s me. I just got a call from a Lieutenant Slosser at Parker Center. They want me to go in there at nine.”