Last Shot (2006) (6 page)

"And see if you can rustle up any information on who LaRue used to run with." Tim tapped Bear on the shoulder. "Let's get Guerrera on that, too. He's probably boring a hole in the phone with the patented Little Havana stare."

Newlin dialed and said as it was ringing, "Oh, and they sent over an update of the crime-scene log." He handed a printout to Tim.

Tim perused the already familiar names. COs and sanitation workers.

His pulse quickened as he sensed--finally--some of the data pulling together. A pattern shifting shape, still eluding him.

Newlin finished his call, and he and Bear reviewed the chow-hall tape yet again. LaRue's bend at the waist. Cupped hand rising to Walker's ear. Fist tightening around fork.

"What the hell could he have told him?" Newlin's curiosity had lapsed into frustration. "Some pickup waiting out in the harbor? A green light for Boss's killing?" He snickered at himself. "His Manchurian Candidate activation code word?"

Tim sank into a chair, glancing at the J-Unit monitor. The wreckage had been largely disposed of, the trash orderlies brought in to mop up the remaining sludge. Walker seized his opportunity in the mayhem?

Tim closed his eyes, considering the cell. Two severed Coke bottles. Piss and mouthwash. Walker's padding himself with shirt over shirt. One mattress untouched, one missing. Two windowpanes punched through. Nothing beyond the bars but razor wire, palm trees, and Dumpsters. The trash can--Kleenex and bottle caps. But what hadn't the trash can contained?

Tim flipped to the log's next page. More COs. The frontloader operator. John Sasso. The same maintenance man from before. McGraw again. Sanitation worker.

Tim stood up abruptly. The chair tilted over with his momentum, clattering on the cheap laminate flooring. He met Bear's and Newlin's startled gazes.

"I know how he did it."

Chapter
7

The crow lurched from one foot to the other on its spongy nighttime perch, its black marble eye shifting in its socket in sudden, awakened alarm. The ground beneath it swelled, and the crow screeched, spooking the roost, which took flight in a grand exodus of flaps and squawks. The dark upsurge lifted out of the San Pedro Municipal Landfill and wheeled south, undulating in the night murk, a few beaks still sounding their agitation.

The charred mattress bulged again, and then an arm slid from the incision, scattering tufts of ash-streaked batting. A plastic cone protruded from the striped ticking like a snorkel, the Coke label rubbed off from friction. The blackened hand groped the uneven terrain, gauging it eyelessly, grotesquely. A head fought its way out next, red-raw cheeks showing in patches through the soot.

Walker pulled himself free and collapsed backward, taking in deep breaths between spasms of coughing. He used the still-moist inside of his shirt collar to clean the grime from his swollen lids and opened his eyes. The moonless sky above seemed impossibly vast.

Aside from a heat-induced ruddiness and a few healthy scrapes along his arms, he was in surprisingly good shape. The mattress stuffing, repositioned to conceal his form and soaked with water from the cell sink, had staved off the fire. He'd dropped the mattress over the railing, then run down to slither through the slit as the ignited trash began raining down. Once inside, he'd had to turn his head to breathe, his lips sealed over the mouth of the upward-facing Coke bottle--his channel to oxygen. When the smoke had been most stifling, in the moments before he'd felt the rescuing scoop of the frontloader, he'd plugged the makeshift snorkel with a finger and sucked what little air he could through a wet rag. The five shirts had insulated his torso from the heat. Though most of the fires, he knew from the last riot, were small and isolated and quickly burned themselves out, he'd had a scare at one point when the heat had pulsed relentlessly through the soaked padding, making him writhe before it backed off.

He sat up and surveyed his surroundings. Lucky as hell--he'd gotten dumped near the top of a heap within the dug-down pit, though he was still a good ten feet below ground level. He laid the blackened remains of a table on end and used them to gain traction against the dirt wall, the crumbling border giving way as he clawed, then squirmed his way over the brink.

A dense film of seagull shit coated the ground. Above the smell of rotted fish and soot, a distant whiff of ocean.

Walker peeled off his top two shirts and threw them aside. He went with the fourth shirt since the third still bore traces of ash and the bottom one was drenched with sweat. His pants were filthy, but they'd do. They were baggy and low-slung--inmates couldn't be trusted with belts--but prison couture had spread to the outside, so he'd blend right in with the other lowlifes. Retrieving the plastic bag from his waistband, he slid out the last dripping cloth and used it to wipe off his face, his hands, his forearms.

By the time he cracked his back and began to jog toward the stream of headlights far off to the west, he looked by most accounts like an average citizen.

Chapter
8

Bear crouched with his prodigious ass floating above his heels and let his flashlight beam pick over the trash below. At his side Tim watched. It couldn't have been much clearer. The mattress, split like a pita. One Coke-bottle segment pushing clear of the top fabric, the second one smothered in the trash below. Finger furrows up the wall of the pit. And then, a few strides from the lip, a puddle of ruined clothes.

A B-movie monster hatching.

Bear spoke with a sharp, wounded intensity. "So he sawed off a Coke bottle, then peed into it just to draw our attention away from the missing bottle tops?"

Tim said, "That's right."

They'd raced over from the prison. The garbage-truck driver, a rotund bearded man, had forged over hills and around sunken plots to show them where he'd made the dumps. Now, a scant forty minutes later, flash-lights were visible across the landfill, bouncing like fireflies. Dogs stood slack on their leads, and deputies hollered their frustration over the wind. If there was any amalgam better at killing a scent trail than garbage and ash, Tim didn't know what it was. Bleach and civet, maybe.

San Pedro PD units were prowling the surrounding streets, but the landfill was close to a number of thoroughfares and the 110, and they weren't working on a time frame that made Tim optimistic. A tech had identified the blood type as O from a streak on the mattress, giving them a match. She was running a DNA to be sure, but Tim already was.

Bear said wryly, "Got us looking the wrong way."

"That's right."

"A stall."

"Uh-huh."

"Bought himself time."

"That he did."

"The dental floss? The bedsheet?"

"Set design."

"Clever fucker." Bear rose and planted his hands on his hips. "So now he's out. Maybe he moves to Cambria, opens an antiques store."

Tim recalled Walker's face in the dining hall once the shock had faded and he'd stood and made his way to the exit. Steel and focus. Whatever Walker was out for, he had risked being incinerated, compacted, or buried alive to get it done.

"Doubt it," Tim said.

"Me, too." Bear heaved a world-weary sigh. "Bakery, maybe."

Bulldozers peered over the edges of the wide pits. In the distance a queue of landing lights dotted the darkness, a lineup for John Wayne Airport. Rats tugging at the bent pizza box that Tim was standing on retreated a few feet when he shooed them with his boot. He preferred his rodents demure. And his fugitives less inventive.

Every household and business in San Pedro generated trash, and it wound up here. Tim thought about the garbage pipeline stretching back from this foul hub to all those places and then to all the places beyond those. A million spots for a smart fugitive to hole up and plan his next move.

A smart fugitive with extensive combat training.

More than anyone that Tim had squared off against since joining the Service six years ago, Walker Jameson could take him head-on, test his limits. He hoped it wouldn't come to that but already knew better.

As Tim followed Bear back to the truck, glass and eggshells crunching underfoot, the Nextel vibrated at his hip. He flipped it open and pressed it to his ear.

Newlin said, "I got you a phone number."

Chapter
9

Fifth and Wall. The nucleus of a few blocks that stoically held out for squalor, resisting tooth and nail the gentrification of downtown Los Angeles. Two homeless guys were fighting by an overturned shopping cart, bears spinning in rags. They were well padded and badly coordinated, their blows decelerated to a slow-motion tempo by alcohol or exhaustion. They stumbled off as Tim and Bear drew near, their fleeing shadows stretching several stories up. One storefront remained lit, leading Tim to ponder the age-old question: Who buys a mini-motorcycle at eleven-thirty at night?

Shouts from various open windows called for someone to shut up, demands so self-defeatingly persistent that Tim couldn't discern their target. When the yelling quieted, the source confrontation became audible--a stern domestic lecture emanating from a parked Cadillac.

Happily for Tim and Bear, Guerrera had sublimated his pent-up frustration from being deskbound into working the databanks. He'd not only produced an address for them from the phone number LaRue had dialed, but he'd also ferreted out the apartment records. A gas bill had been paid three months ago by a check on First Union Bank, account of Freddy Campbell, the same Freddy Campbell who'd celled with Tommy LaRue in Victorville for a few years before LaRue's transfer to TI. The apartment leaseholder was thrice-divorced Bernadette Monroe, whom Guerrera pegged for Freddy's girlfriend, given that they'd traveled together last March to Rio. Freddy had no driver's license, no registered vehicle, and no major credit cards in his name.

Tim and Bear made their way up sticky stairs to number 214, rang the bell, and stood to the side of the door, hands on their guns.

"Better be your sorry-ass ass," they heard, and then the door pulled open to reveal an imposing woman, bathrobe barely containing a mass of flesh and frilly nightshirt. "The hell are you?"

Bear and Tim peered past her into the one-room apartment.

Bear said, "U.S. Marshals, ma'am. Mind if we come in?"

"Hell, you can drag the National Guard through here, all I care. Maybe they can find the fool calls hisself the man of this crib."

Bear brushed past her, moving to safe the apartment. She exaggerated, stumbling back from the intrusion, her eyes flaring. "Oh, no you didn't just! Oh, no you di'int!"

"I'm terribly sorry," Bear said over a shoulder, "but I did."

He disappeared into the bathroom, and Tim heard him rake back the shower curtain. Tim checked the closet--empty--and peered under the bed. Boxes littered the water-warped floor, cardboard lids torn back to reveal every order of merchandise--pedicure kits, baby lotion, bootleg purses, dolls, bags of balloons with Chinese ideograms, coffee mugs with corporate logos. Cosmetics overflowed a vanity beneath the window. Papers, mail, and half-burned candles covered an embattled wooden table.

Bear emerged, running a forearm across his brow. "We're looking for Freddy Campbell. Do you know if--"

"Don't you be talkin' to me after you shoved me outta the door."

Bear tried to voice an apology but found himself talking to the hand.

"Ma'am," Tim interrupted, "does Freddy Campbell live here?"

Bernadette whirled, suddenly calm and regal, head withdrawn. A delivery worthy of a screen diva: "Not anymore."

"Are you expec--"

"Hayell no. And that fool better not think he can limp his nappy ass home with an empty wallet again. Stankin' of cheap liquor and knockoff perfume. Uh-uh. I said he beh'a not."

Tim held up Walker's booking photo. "Do you know this man? Walker Jameson?"

From her face it was clear she didn't. "He your brother or something?"

Tim shook his head, sliding the photo into his back pocket. "Did Freddy ever mention a guy named Boss Hahn?"

"Quit playin'. Ain't no fool named Boss nowhere 'cept on the TV."

"Do you know where we might find Freddy?"

But already she was hustling them toward the door, literally leaning into Bear with the heels of both hands. "You come all storm-troopin' through here, and me in my drawers."

The phone rang, and she gave up momentarily, holding up one finger while she hunted for the cordless. "I ain't done with y'all."

As Bernadette rooted through the bedding for the source of the trill, Tim surreptitiously flipped over the top pieces of mail on the table, scanning a few bills and junk-mailers.

Bernadette slammed a fist to her cocked hip and shouted into the phone, "Do I sound like I wanna refinance?"

As the phone sailed back toward the bed and Bernadette began a dramatic pivot to face them, Tim tossed the mail to the table and dropped his hands to his sides. The paperwork mound slid over a few inches, revealing a torn paycheck stub bearing the golden arches.

July 27. $375. Freddy Campbell.

Bernadette came at them, leading with a long maroon nail. "Get to steppin'. Or come back with some paper."