The Samaritan (3 page)

A .45-caliber slug carved itself into the wall behind where my head had been a moment before. As I hit the ground, I swept the heel of my shoe hard into the back of Zoran’s knee as I simultaneously picked up the gun I’d dropped. His knee buckled, and he fell as my fingers closed around the weapon. He fumbled his grip a little, recovered quickly, and started to bring his gun back toward my face. I smashed his wrist with my left fist as the gun discharged, the loud bang echoing and reverberating from the walls of the alley. Before he could take another shot, I had the muzzle of the H&K pressed into his forehead, equidistant between his eyes. His eyes brightened for a moment in surprise and then narrowed.

“Don’t be an idiot,” I said.

Mere seconds had elapsed since the sound of the gunshot, but I was keenly conscious of two sounds that marked the passage of time: Caroline Church’s footsteps fading into the night and the sound of voices from the opposite direction. Now I was the one with the dilemma. Only that wasn’t quite true. Zoran was the one who was going to dictate what happened: whether he lived or died.

His grip relaxed and the gun dropped from his right hand, smacking on the pitted concrete. A rational man. I gave him an apologetic shrug and slammed the butt of the pistol into his right temple. Nonfatal, but enough to give me time to make a graceful exit. He’d thank me in the morning, once the concussion wore off.

I picked up Zoran’s gun as he dropped to the sidewalk; then I glanced out at the street. Caroline had vanished. If she was smart, she’d forget about the car and the fifteen grand and vanish into the night. But then, her actions so far hadn’t exactly been characterized by an overabundance of good sense.

The shouts from the street were getting closer, and I remembered the third guy, less than a block away, who would certainly have heard the gunshots. And he’d be the only person within earshot who wasn’t using his cell phone to call the cops at that moment.

I pocketed the two H&Ks and moved quickly to the nearest Dumpster, pushing it all the way back to brace it against the stucco wall. Then I pulled myself up on top of it, caught my balance, and jumped vertically. I caught the edge of the roof with both hands and pulled myself up and over the parapet, rolling to my feet. From below, I heard a scream and loud voices. I crouched down and risked a glance over the edge to the alley below. Three people at the mouth of the alley, and one of them was Zoran’s guy—the third man I’d seen outside the bar earlier. The other two were a middle-aged couple, tourists from the look of their clothes. The woman was doing the screaming.

“Oh my God, is he dead?”

The husband was crouched beside Zoran, checking for a pulse. The third guy was looking up and down the street frantically, his right hand jammed deep in the pocket of his coat. I ducked down and crawled back before he looked in the right place. I rose to my feet when I’d gotten far enough from the edge and started running back toward the line of units that housed the bar. The soles of my shoes were virtually soundless on the soft asphalt roofing, weathered by ten thousand sunny days. The roof was a long, flat rectangle, patched haphazardly and spotted with air-conditioning vents. It extended for a couple of hundred yards to the point where it intersected the line of units along the main road, of which the bar was one. Beyond the edge of that block, I could see the upper thirds of the palm trees that lined the road.

I picked up speed as I headed for the end of the roof, calling up a mental picture of the street outside the bar as I ran. I estimated that Caroline’s coupe was parked at around the position of the tallest palm tree in my line of sight. She had a good head start, but I was taking the most direct route.

I covered the distance in seconds, grateful for the explosion of energy after the days spent on planes and in cars and sitting down in bars. I heard the peal of a police siren from somewhere behind me as I reached the edge of the roof and peered over the edge. My estimate had been dead-on. The red car was parked directly below me, and Caroline Church hadn’t reached it yet.

She was approaching fast, though. Running barefoot and carrying her boots in her left hand as she dug the keys out of her bag. I turned and looked the opposite way down the street, expecting the third man to appear at the corner at any moment. Small knots of people were beginning to wander up the side street, drawn to the commotion a little farther up like iron filings to a magnet. No sign of the third guy, though. Not yet.

Caroline Church reached the car and fumbled with the key fob, finally finding the right button that made the lights flash and the locks disengage with a
clunk
. I took two steps back to give myself room and then launched myself off the roof, coming down on the car’s roof and then sliding off to the sidewalk, between Caroline and the car.

“I’ll drive.”

She caught her breath, looked back up the street the way she’d come, and back to me. She looked irritated. “Who in the hell are you, mister? And how do you—”

“Hey!”

The yell from the other direction snapped my head around. Coming toward us at a run, right hand buried deep inside the jacket pocket, the third man. Obviously, he’d seen what had happened to his boss and had made sure to remove himself from the immediate vicinity before the police showed up.

I swung the door open and plucked the keys from Caroline’s hand as I got inside. I put the keys in the ignition as Caroline got in the passenger seat and slammed the door. The engine purred to life as our pursuer reached us, getting close enough to slap the dented roof before I peeled away from the curb.

I reached across and pushed Caroline’s shoulders down, hunching down myself and snatching glances in the rearview as I accelerated away. The guy was still on the sidewalk where we’d left him. He had not taken the gun out of his jacket. As we hung a left on the first corner, I guessed he didn’t want to push his luck on what had already been a pretty bad night for his team.

I resisted the impulse to floor the gas pedal, even though the streets were quiet. It would take guy number three a couple of minutes to reach his car, if he even had one. By taking a few random turns, I could make sure the trail was nice and frosty by then. The last thing I wanted to do was draw attention to a car leaving the scene of a shooting. I navigated down a series of side roads before finding the South Federal Highway. When we’d put a mile or so between ourselves and the bar, I slowed down and started paying attention to the signs.

“Okay, who the hell are you? Really?”

“I told you.”

“Bullshit. You’re no consultant. And why have you been following me? Are you some kind of stalker? Is this how you get a thrill?”

I saw a sign for the A1A. Fort Lauderdale was brand-new territory for me, but I remembered from the day before that that route would take me where I wanted to go.

“You’re welcome,” I said. “You have a high opinion of yourself, don’t you, Caroline?”

“You know my name? Of course you know my name.” She frowned. “My dad sent you, right? What did he do? Pay you to kidnap me?”

I turned west onto the A1A and kept my eyes on the exit signs. Palm trees lined the route on both sides. Though I couldn’t see it, I knew the Atlantic was dead ahead, beneath a dirty orange night sky.

“I don’t kidnap people. Your father hired me to find you and to give him my assurance that you’re safe. I’m not sure I can fulfill the second part. How about you?”

She said nothing, bit her lip petulantly.

“I’m betting that right now, going back to Boston and your generous allowance seems a little more attractive than it did. Seriously, you ripped off a Florida gangster for fifteen grand?”

“My dad stopped my allowance. A girl’s gotta eat.”

I saw the exit I wanted and came off the highway onto Sebastian Street.

“You gave a fake name in the hotel last night. The guy who sold you the car didn’t ask to see any ID. That’s good. Did you tell anybody down here your real name?”

She said nothing for a moment, then grudgingly shook her head.

“That’s good,” I said. “If you’re going to lie, be consistent. Okay, I’ll get rid of the car and the guns. Like I said, I can’t tell you what to do, but if you have more than two brain cells to rub together, you’ll be on the first plane back to Boston with your father.”

“My father’s
here
?” She sounded horrified.

I saw the building I wanted and pulled the car to a stop at the curb, twenty feet from the front door of the Sunnyside Beach Resort. I took my cell phone from my pocket and dialed a number from recent calls. It was answered on the first ring.

“Blake—any news?”

“Mr. Church, I’m outside your hotel with your daughter.” I glanced at her as I said this, half expecting her to make another break for it. Running was what she seemed to do best. But she didn’t make a move, just rolled her eyes as she resigned herself to the lesser of two irritants.

“Thank God. Is she all right?”

“She’s in one piece.”

“Thank God. Thank
you
, Blake. You’re worth the fee. You say you’re downstairs right now?”

“That’s right. If you want to come down, I’m sure the two of you can work something out.”

“I’ll be down right away.”

I looked back at Caroline Church. I’d known her for all of twenty-five minutes, but already she’d cost me a year’s worth of hassle.

“Make it quick.”

SUNDAY

4

LOS ANGELES

The man in the baseball cap drove on through the night.

The rain had abated an hour before, leaving streets that shone with surface water. The man drove with caution, but not overcaution, aware that he didn’t need to run red lights or exceed the speed limit in order to draw attention to a vehicle like this. All being well, there would be no trouble, though, because fortune favors the prepared mind. The spare had replaced the shredded rear tire, and he’d taken the time to confirm that there was no visible damage to the bodywork and that all of the exterior lights were operational.

There was still a quarter of a tank left, which was more than enough to get him where he wanted to go, with enough left over for the car’s onward trip.

The clock on the dash read a few minutes to five, which meant he still had almost an hour until daybreak. As he neared his destination, he was careful not to let up his guard, keeping a watchful eye on the occasional cars that appeared ahead of him and in the rearview mirror.

People who do not live in Los Angeles like to complain that it all looks identical: an endless sprawl of street after street after street, all looking much the same. Not true. Just tonight, he’d driven past gated communities and through peaceful suburban picket-fence neighborhoods. He’d encountered architectural marvels and the gray utilitarian concrete of 1960s apartment buildings. And now the geography changed once more. Overgrown yards, broken fences, gang graffiti. Apartment blocks enclosed by steel fences—gated communities of a different kind. Ageing duplexes with the street numbers spray-painted on the front. Here and there, the man saw properties that were better maintained, that had neat lawns and freshly painted doors. He knew most people would wonder why they bothered, but he understood. The simple pleasure of taking pride in yourself and your work while everything else went to hell.

The specific character of the neighborhood was a momentary distraction, and his eyes remained firmly on the road. If he was to be stopped by a traffic cop anywhere on the journey, it would most likely be here. The silver Porsche stuck out like a Michelangelo sculpture in a landfill. But that was exactly why he’d brought it here. It was how he’d be able to make the car disappear for a while.

He saw a short line of retail units—a couple of easy credit places, a vacant unit, and a liquor store. Two Hispanic men in their twenties were facing each other on the sidewalk. They looked drunk and were engaged in what was either a spirited debate or the beginnings of a fistfight. The bigger one wore a sleeveless shirt and his arms were coated with tattoos.

The man in the baseball cap pulled the Porsche over and put the brake on. He took a last look around the interior. The leather seats were spotless, nothing in the footwells, nothing in the glove compartment.

Leaving the keys in the ignition and the engine still running, he opened the door and got out. The two men had noticed him now, the incongruity of the Porsche and its driver distracting them from their disagreement.

“Hey, man,” the one with the tattoos said. “Nice car.” He said it as though he was weighing up whether or not he wanted the statement to be a threat.

The man in the baseball cap made no acknowledgment, other than to tug the brim a little further down over his face. As he walked past the two men, the tattooed one moved to intercept, grabbing his arm.

“I’m talking to you, man.”

The man in the baseball cap stopped, looked down at the fingers curled around his forearm, and then raised his head again so that his eyes met those of the tattooed man. The guy blinked and his fingers snapped open as though spring-loaded.

He kept staring at him, unblinking.

The tattooed guy looked at the Porsche, with its engine running, and then his eyes moved all around, as if to say,
Look at this place
. “You’re just going to leave that? Here? Are you nuts?”

“Luis, what the fuck, man?” the older one said, keeping his distance from the pair.

The man turned away from the two drunks and started to walk again, his strides carrying him along at a steady four miles an hour. He had taken less than two dozen paces before he heard the door of the Porsche slam shut and the idling engine roar to life again. He kept walking as he heard the tires peel away on the damp surface, turning and heading in the opposite direction. He kept walking as the sound of the powerful flat-6 engine built and then faded and then vanished into thin air.

The man in the baseball cap walked ten blocks north as the sky began to reveal the first hints of light on the horizon. Another mile or so and he would catch a bus and sit anonymously among the luckless Sunday-morning shift workers. He’d alight a mile or so from the house and make the rest of the trip on foot.

And then? A shower, perhaps something to eat, and then sleep. It would be good to get some rest. It had been another busy night.

5

LOS ANGELES

A Sunday-morning homicide and a hangover: never a good combination, Detective Jessica Allen thought. How did the Johnny Cash song go? Something about there not being a way to hold your head that didn’t hurt.

Going to Denny’s friend’s birthday party had been a bad idea, but drinking as much as she had had been a much worse idea. This wasn’t like her, but she realized it had happened a couple of times recently. It would be easy to blame the job, and she knew plenty who did just that, but she knew that wasn’t it. She was drinking a little more because spending sober time with her boyfriend was beginning to feel like a drag. Probably not a good sign. She resolved to make some changes—easy to do with the headache as an incentive.

God, it was a bad one. Her head was throbbing so painfully that, perversely, catching a body dump out in the Santa Monica Mountains qualified as a break. It meant fresh air and a cool breeze instead of staring at a computer monitor for the next few hours.

Or at least, it would mean that, as soon as they got out of the damn car.

The sun had almost finished burning off the morning mist, and it was already clear and warm. Allen was pretending to look out the window as they drove north through relatively light—for LA—traffic on the 405. What she was actually doing was resting her eyes behind her sunglasses. She started to feel the welcoming pull of sleep and reluctantly fought against it, turning her head to look at her partner in the driver’s seat.

Jonathan Mazzucco was a little older than she was; probably in his early forties, though she’d never gotten around to asking. He looked good, as he always did. Better than the father of a three-month-old had any right to, give or take some dark shadows under his eyes. Never a crease on his suit, never the hint of stubble on his unblemished face. His hair never seemed to get longer or shorter. It just stayed in its no-nonsense crew cut. Allen liked to joke about it; she’d ask him how the commute was from the fifties, but he never seemed to mind, or feel the need to respond in kind.

Mazzucco was smiling behind his own sunglasses. Either in amusement at Allen’s fragile condition, or simply because he was enjoying being allowed to drive without his partner putting up a fight, for once.

“You take some aspirin?” he asked, without looking back at her.

Allen nodded. “Four.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to take four at a time.”

“Trust me, I needed four. How much farther?”

They’d left the freeway and the city proper behind them now and were winding their way north up Mandeville Canyon Road. Mazzucco made a mental calculation. “Ten minutes. Can you hang on?”

“I’m fine.”

“You look fine.”

“Fuck you.”

Mazzucco laughed.

Allen turned back to the window so that he wouldn’t see her smiling too. She liked Mazzucco. He was one of the few she did like after six long months. Six months, and DC to LA was proving to be a more difficult transition than that simple exchange of initials would suggest. It wasn’t that the other guys in Robbery Homicide were unpleasant, exactly. Joe Coleman aside, most of them were fine. But it was almost as though there were some kind of invisible force field that kept her separate from the rest of them.

Or perhaps it was more like a firewall, something that allowed the other detectives to interact with her and work with her but without letting anything extraneous through. At first this hadn’t surprised her—it was the standard team response to a new recruit. It was even more to be expected with cops, who were more suspicious than average by profession. But as the weeks became months, she began to wonder if the frostiness was exacerbated by the fact that she’d arrived in the department with more baggage than most. There were times when she’d wanted to ask Mazzucco about it, about whether or not the other guys actively disliked her. And each time she’d realized how pathetically high school that sounded and dismissed the idea.

The road took an unexpected dip and shunted office politics to the back of Allen’s mind once more. The wave of nausea rose and retreated, leaving an unpleasant thought in her mind like driftwood on a beach.

“This isn’t a decomp, is it?”

“Nope. Day or two at the most, they said. And if it’s one day, we might even have an idea of who it is.”

“Yeah?”

Mazzucco nodded. “Sarah Dutton. Reported missing last night; lives up on Mulholland.”

“How long was she gone before they reported her?”

“Since last night.”

“So why do we know about it already?” Allen was curious. Contrary to popular belief, there was no official waiting period of twenty-four hours before you could report somebody missing, but that was generally still how it worked in practice.

“I guess Dad made sure it was on the fast track.”

“Ah,” Allen said. “She lives on Mulholland. So who’s the father? Movie producer or something?”

“I don’t think he’s in the business,” Mazzucco said. “Although I heard he lives in Marlon Brando’s old house.”

“That’s novel. I was beginning to think there was nobody in this town who wasn’t either a cop or an out-of-work actor.”

Mazzucco grinned. “And how is the new boyfriend? Dave, is it?”

“Denny.” She sighed. “I’m sure he’s fine.”

“Ohhh-kay.” Mazzucco’s eyebrows rose behind his sunglasses.

“No, really. Denny’s great.”

“But . . .”

“But I think he’d prefer it if I were an out-of-work actor rather than a cop, you know?”

“Allen, there are some days I’d prefer to be an out-of-work actor rather than a cop. A lot of days.”

Allen smiled and tucked a stray lock of blond hair behind her ear. The headache was way too intense to wear it in her usual ponytail. “How’s Julia?” she asked after a minute. She asked only out of politeness, because he’d made the effort to ask about Denny. From the way Mazzucco’s wife had sized her up the one time they’d met, she was pretty sure they weren’t ever going to be getting together on a social basis.

“She’s great,” Mazzucco said quickly, unconsciously mirroring her lukewarm endorsement of Denny. Allen could always tell when Mazzucco and his wife had been fighting the day before. He was always a little quieter, less chatty. She guessed a cop’s marriage was stressful enough—throw a new baby into the mix and it wasn’t surprising things were a little tense. All of a sudden, Allen was grateful that most of her off-duty problems could be solved with aspirin.

Mazzucco slowed and took the turnoff for the fire road. The surface was rough and pitted for the initial stretch. A minute later, they saw a uniformed cop standing in front of the open gate at the point where the road turned into a narrow dirt track. He waved them down. The narrow-eyed stare told Allen that he was reasonably convinced of who they were by the make and model of their car but wasn’t taking any chances. He approached the driver’s window, which was already rolled down, and Mazzucco badged him.

“Detective Mazzucco, Detective Allen, RHD.”

The uniform nodded and told them his name was McComb, out of West LA Division, and waved them through.

Mazzucco slowed to ten miles an hour or so as they passed through the gateway and onto the dirt track.

The scene was another half mile along the fire road. Two more marked cars and a coroner’s van were jammed at the edge of the track in single file. The hill rose up from the road at a shallow gradient, and the focus of activity was about fifty yards up the slope. Mazzucco parked on the dirt shoulder and they got out and started the ascent. The earth was still damp from the rains the previous night as they picked their way up through the rocks and brush.

Allen breathed in and out through her nose, grateful to be out of the car at last. She decided the pulsing headache was at least as much to do with caffeine withdrawal as it was to do with the hangover, and she regretted not having had time to get a strong black coffee before leaving headquarters.

There were four more uniforms up here, arranged around a nude female body. She was about five six, slim, had dark brown hair, and was facedown and smeared from head to toe with dirt. The coroner investigator was on his knees by the body, scraping dirt from the victim’s fingernails into a plastic evidence bag. There was a small tattoo of a butterfly or a fairy or something in black ink at the base of her spine. Allen showed her ID this time and introduced herself and her partner. Then she opened her notebook and started jotting down the specifics of the scene for the report as the older of the four cops gave them the basics.

“Caucasian female, late teens to early twenties. No identification, obviously.”

“What about that?” Mazzucco said, pointing to the ink.

The cop snorted. “Yeah. That’ll narrow it down.”

“Preliminary cause of death?” Allen asked, addressing the coroner investigator this time.

He didn’t look up. “Slit throat, multiple stab wounds, partial strangulation. Some shallow lacerations to the face and upper body, too.”