15th Affair (18 page)

My car filled with light.

I peered over the steering wheel for a split second and saw that the shooter in front of me, taking up his lane and half of mine, had opened his car door and was using it as a shield. His head was haloed in the streetlights behind him, and I could see him very well as he rested his gun on his door frame and took aim.

I stayed bent over the wheel, pedal to the floor. There were a loud crunch and a scream as I hit the shooter’s door with him wedged behind it.

I kept going, flying toward Harrison with driving rain coming through my empty windows. Bullets pinged into my car’s chassis and took out my rear window. One after the other, my rear tires blew out. The gas tank would be next.

My car shimmied and hydroplaned as I came to the end of Harriet, and when I took a hard, jackknifing left turn onto Harrison, I nearly lost control.

Horns blared from all sides and panicky drivers jumped lanes to get out of my way. I couldn’t see much through the rain in my eyes, but the Hall of Justice loomed on my left. I sped to Eighth, taking turns onto one-way streets until I cruised to a creaking stop, halting my battered ride beside two cruisers that were parallel-parked in front of the Hall.

A couple of uniformed cops were standing on the side-walk staring out at the mess I’d made of Bryant Street traffic.

I yelled out to them, “I need some help here.”

My badge was hanging from a ball chain around my neck. I held it up to the window frame.

The cops came over and took a look at me. One said, “Mother of God.” And the other leaned in and asked, “How bad are you hurt?”

My face prickled like I’d been stung by a hundred bees, and I could feel blood trickling down my collar. I was soaked and freezing, but I hadn’t been shot.

“I’m OK,” I said. “There’s been a shooting around the corner on Harriet, couple blocks down. There are multiple heavily armed suspects still on the scene. Call all cars and be very careful. And get an ambulance. Someone got hurt.”

I PHONED CONKLIN
from the street, and what I said scared him enough that he and Brady met me before I could reach the front steps of the Hall.

Conklin said, “I’ll take you to the hospital.”

“Thanks, but no way. I wasn’t hit.”

He insisted and I shut him down.

“I’m cold and wet and, yeah, shaken up, but not
shot.
”

We repaired to Brady’s office forthwith. I gave him my gun and he got on the phone and ordered the armorer to get me a new one. Then he called Jacobi.

Conklin found a blanket in the break room and draped it around my shoulders and was pulling splinters of glass out of my cheeks and hair when Claire knocked on the glass. Who called her? Brady?

Claire took one long look and said, “My God, Lindsay. I just heard. Come with me.”

“What for?” I said. “I’m
fine.
”

“Come with me, sweetie. Come on.”

I grumbled but followed my doctor friend to the ladies’ room, where she said, “You only get out of going to the hospital if I say so.”

I submitted. I took off my clothes.

Claire gave me a full 360-degree inspection, saying “Oh, my God,” at the sight of my bruises. She turned me gently around, lifted my arms, and ran her fingers over my scalp.

Finally, she said, “If you feel good enough to go home, you get a pass.”

“I should be dead,” I said, my chattering teeth biting my words into syllables. “Those shits knew my movements. They waited for me and were determined to kill me. Why? And now I killed one of
them
.”

“Come home with me tonight,” Claire said.

“I can’t. I’ll be OK, Claire. Brady will keep eyes on me, put cars in front of my place. I’ll be fine.”

Brady was still on the phone when I returned to his office. I sat with Conklin, and as Brady talked to whomever, I sifted through the events of the last half hour. The best outcome would be if the man I crushed behind his car door was alive so that I could get him to talk. God knew, I wanted answers.

Brady took another call. He listened, said, “Thanks,” then hung up.

He said, “The guy you hit with your car, Boxer—”

“Yes?”

“He walked away. Or his friends scraped him up and threw him into the trunk. There was no corpse on Harriet.”

I had a moment of relief, and then the next thought rolled over me like a tidal wave.

We had no suspects or witnesses, no IDs, no plate numbers. The men who’d attacked me could be heading for LA or Mexico or points east, or hell, they could be idling their engines on Bryant, waiting to take another crack at me.

“Here’s your new gun,” Brady said, handing over a Glock identical to my old one. “The chief ’s on the way down.”

Damn it. Now I was going to have to tell this story to Jacobi.

CHIEF OF POLICE
Warren Jacobi is big and gray-haired and he walks with a limp because of two bullets he took to the hip on a bad night in the Tenderloin. I was also shot that night, but unlike Jacobi, I remained conscious and called for help. That night Jacobi and I bonded for life.

Over the last dozen years, Jacobi has been my partner, my subordinate, and now my boss. I stood up when he entered Brady’s small office. He reached out and folded me into a gentle hug.

My eyes welled up and I dried them on his jacket.

“I’m OK. I’m really OK.”

He released me and shook his head.

“Boxer, I want you to listen to me. You’re a target. I don’t know why, and from what I hear, you don’t know, either. And I know you weren’t careless or stupid. Regardless, you’ve been beat up and chased and shot at, and next time these guys get you in their sights—I don’t need to spell it out, do I? So don’t fight me. Don’t make me pull rank. Just do what I say. Take some time off. Leave town until we nail these guys.”

As I listened to Jacobi’s litany, something inside me heated up and boiled the hell over. I went off. I just blew.

“With all due respect, Jacobi, that’s a load of bull. It was bad, but I handled it. That’s what the job is. I hardly have a scratch on me. So stop treating me like a victim. I’m fully functional and absolutely sane. This is my case and I’m on it. OK? OK?”

I went to my desk and typed up a report. I handed it to Brady, then went down to the street and emptied my glove box and got my bag out of the front footwell before my fatally crippled Explorer was loaded onto a flatbed truck and taken out to the forensics lab.

Conklin drove me home. I didn’t talk during the ride, but I grabbed his hand and squeezed it before I got out of his car. And then he came around and opened the passenger door. I gave him a look that should have stopped him.

“Shut up,” he said. “I’m going in with you.”

Once inside my apartment, I greeted our nanny and said good night and good-bye to my partner. I showered, then ate something with tomato sauce, I don’t remember what.

I played blocks with my daughter and put her to bed. After that, I rechecked the locks and the security system and looked out at the patrol cars parked down on the street. I put my gun on the night table, and then I got into bed with Martha and fell asleep. I didn’t think and I didn’t dream.

When I woke up in the morning I was madder than I’d ever been before in my life. I understood now that I was being treated like an orphaned kitten not just because I had been repeatedly attacked and almost killed. It was also because Joe had left me without a word.

The men who’d tried to kill me would answer for what they’d done if it was the last thing I did in my life.

And that went for my husband, too.

OFFICER EVELYN FINLEY
drove me slowly and carefully to the Hall that morning, as if she were transporting vintage glass Christmas ornaments. She also walked me through the lobby and waited with me until the elevator came.

“Following orders,” she said.

Damn it.

“Thanks, Finley,” I said. “I can take it from here.”

I rounded Brenda’s desk at the entrance to the bullpen and saw that Conklin, Chi, McNeil, and Brady were in some kind of huddle near Chi’s desk. Apparently, a meeting was in progress. Maybe I hadn’t been purposefully excluded. Maybe it just felt that way.

Conklin waved me over and both he and Brady scrambled to get me a chair. I almost laughed. Instead, I muttered, “Thanks. I’ve got it. I’ve
got
it.”

Cappy McNeil is almost fifty, carrying too much weight around his middle, but he’s a steady old hand and a very good cop.

His partner, Sergeant Paul Chi, is ten years younger and one of the sharpest cops in the city. The two of them were getting their first look at my face of a million cuts, but they’d already heard about the turkey shoot last night.

Cappy said, “Ahh, sheet, Boxer. This is just wrong.”

He patted my arm and passed me one of his two untouched donuts.

Once I was settled in, Chi resumed his briefing.

“Lindsay, to bring you up to speed, I have a CI who lives over a grocery store on the corner of Jackson and Stockton. He called me last night to say he’s seen about four Asian businessmen, well dressed, driving deluxe vehicles, coming and going at odd hours. They’re apparently based in a crappy apartment building right here.”

Chi pulled up a map on his computer, street view. He stabbed a location on Stockton, middle of the block, east side.

“This is it,” said Chi. “Ten Thirty-Five Stockton. Low-rent joint with a dry cleaner downstairs. Now, the tenant of the presumed crappy apartment is Henry Yee. Two small-time drug busts. He works in the noodle shop over here. Corner of Jackson. He’s subletting his place to these guys, sleeps at the restaurant.

“Now, rumor has it that these men are here on some kind of government business. They’re not into drugs or—”

I stopped him. “Wait. What government?”

“Chinese, I’m guessing, but no one knows,” Chi said. “My CI called last night because last week, he sees these men unloading long, heavy boxes from a black or blue SUV. He didn’t think much of it until last night.

“According to my snitch, around eight p.m. last night, one of those slick Chinese guys parks his SUV on Stockton near the corner of Jackson. The car’s got two busted headlights. And now my snitch is thinking back on those heavy loads that were taken out of the SUV last week and wonders if that stuff wasn’t artillery. My guy’s a junkie, but he’s not stupid. I tend to believe him.”

I said, “Some kind of dark vehicle smashed my front end last night. And then I backed hard into the vehicle behind me. This SUV you’re telling us about had to be one of those cars.”

Brady called Jacobi, who came downstairs and joined us. An hour later, we had a plan.

BY FOUR-THIRTY
that afternoon, three teams from Homicide and our SWAT unit were deployed discreetly around Stockton and Jackson, a neighborhood known for its traditional Chinese shops and also for its drug, gambling, and gang activity.

I took it all in from where Conklin and I waited in our parked car on Stockton.

Our focus was on a three-story beige stucco apartment building across the street from us in the middle of the block. Next to the dry cleaner Chi had referred to was a gray-painted door that led to the apartments upstairs.

SWAT SUVs bracketed the apartment building and covered the open stores, their bins of merchandise spilling out to the sidewalks teeming with shoppers and passersby. Traffic stopped and started at the intersections, delivery trucks double-parked, a school bus dropped off children, and laughing tourists came out of a restaurant.

I kept scanning the street.

I could see Lemke and Samuels of our squad, parked at the corner of Washington. Michaels and Wang, also in Homicide, were in their car at the Jackson end of Stockton, watching the noodle shop where the waiter worked.

Brady was across the street from us, leaning against the wall of a ginseng company, reading a paper.

Chi and McNeil were in plain clothes, examining the produce in the corner market across from us, when a blue BMW SUV with a long gash on one side double-parked fifty yards up the block from the apartment house with the gray-painted door.

Brady flicked his eyes toward us.

Conklin and I got out of our car and crossed the street through traffic as Chi and McNeil walked up behind the two Asian men who were heading toward the apartment building.

I was too far from Chi to hear his voice, but I knew he was introducing himself, saying he had a few questions and he’d like to see identification.

The taller of the two men smoothly pulled a gun from his waistband and got off three shots while the other man opened the door to the building. Chi grabbed at his neck and went down.

McNeil dropped behind two cars at the curb and fired on both men, who disappeared through the doorway. SWAT swarmed out of their vehicles in full tactical gear— helmets, shields, armor, and M-16s. That was when automatic gunfire sprayed down on the street from the apartments above.

In the space of a few seconds, an everyday street market scene had turned upside down into panic and utter chaos. Pedestrians shrieked and ran for cover as Brady and McNeil dragged Chi out of harm’s way.

Conklin and I kept moving, throwing open the gray door, running toward the stairs. A trail of blood drops spattered the treads leading up.

I called Wang and told him to pick up Henry Yee, the waiter who lived in the top-floor apartment. Seconds later, SWAT entered the building. The ten of us thundered up the stairs.

CONKLIN AND I
were wearing Kevlar under our jackets and had our Glocks in hand. This wasn’t much protection, but I was so pumped on adrenaline, I didn’t care.