The Scapegoat, page 16
Just the same, he wanted to get there as soon as possible before the woman had second thoughts and disappeared. She was a vital witness and there was no telling what she might have seen. He blipped the remote and the Dodge’s rear lights flashed.
“You’re not getting in, Grace.”
He opened his door, she opened hers.
Coombes glared at her over the roof.
“Grace, what the hell?”
“You’re going to have to drive over my body to leave here without me.”
He sighed. “Fine, but duck down when I say so.”
She pouted, then got in.
Traffic was light and the drive took about five minutes. As he crossed over 4th Street, Sato pushed herself down in the seat, below the level of the dashboard.
He saw the tents the witness had mentioned.
His eyes swept along the sidewalk, looking for a young woman that looked like she might be a bartender at a night club. He imagined someone like Cora Roche, wearing a lot of tight black clothing. All he saw were people lying broken on the concrete.
The homeless, the addicts, the forgotten.
He knew many were veterans, sent to the same war he’d fought in Afghanistan. It could’ve been him lying there instead of them, all it took was an injury and the opioid addiction that often followed.
Coombes pulled over to the curb and killed the engine. Eyes turned toward them. Only a cop would park a car this new so near an encampment.
He drew his weapon, chambered a round, then returned it to his holster. Coombes wasn’t a hundred percent, but it looked like the bartender had taken off.
He spoke to Sato without looking at her, just in case he was being watched.
“She’s not here. I’m going to walk around, let her see me. Stay in the car.”
“Johnny.”
“I’ll leave the keys in the ignition in case you need to move.”
Coombes stepped out and shut the door.
It was windy on the street and he squinted his eyes to keep the dust out. If she was on foot, the bartender couldn’t have gone far, a couple of blocks max. He stared north toward Little Tokyo, then south toward the Fashion District.
No one was walking on the sidewalk, though plenty seemed to be slowly dying on it. He started off toward 6th Street. Maybe she’d given up waiting and started to walk back downtown.
If she melted away, finding her again might not be easy. She claimed to have been evicted, so any address the club had for her would be useless. If she thought she was in danger, there was a chance she’d disappear until she thought it was safe to resurface.
Coombes reached the intersection with 6th Street.
The sidewalk was clear all the way to Los Angeles Street, where city life seemed to normalize. He turned and began to walk back to his car. Sato was sitting in the driver’s seat watching. Not even pretending to hide. Maybe bringing Sato spooked the witness. He sighed. The whole thing was a wild goose chase, the woman was wasting his time.
He caught a flash of movement to his right.
A young white woman with blonde hair stood in the doorway. Her skin was pure white with no trace of a tan. Like someone that worked nights and slept all day, he thought. When she saw him, she stepped back inside, into the darkness.
Not an invitation, she was trying to conceal herself.
It was a wide industrial unit, an abandoned toy factory. The front door had been forced, but not recently. He followed her into the building. It was dark inside, lit only by shafts of light from rusted-through bolt holes in the iron roof. He lost sight of her as his eyes adjusted from the blinding sunlight on the street.
Coombes drew his weapon and a flashlight and moved forward.
The light from the flashlight was dim, the batteries needed to be replaced. There were people nearby, shapes in the darkness. Squatters. Maybe she had changed her mind about telling him what she’d seen, but he couldn’t leave her in here, it wasn’t safe.
He heard a glass bottle fall over way at the back, then a man’s voice thick with drink or drugs, calling out something angry. Coombes moved the beam of his flashlight toward it and there was a flurry of movement. He saw the bartender running through the darkness and he ran after her.
People were lying on the floor asleep or dead, he had to keep flipping the flashlight down to avoid standing on them or tripping over them.
The woman crashed up a set of metal steps, going up into an office above the main floor. He lost sight of her again as she entered the office. He took the steps three at a time, closing the distance with the blonde.
Coombes was pissed off. Much more of this, and he’d leave her to her fate with the derelicts.
The office door was closed. He tried the handle and found it locked. A frosted glass panel was in the middle of the door with the word MANAGER written on it. Hiding behind a wood and glass door.
It was stupid, the way a child might hide.
He kicked the door hard, his shoe landing right next to the handle. The latch tore through the wooden frame and the door slammed open, causing the glass panel to break and fell on the floor. In front of him, the woman was pressed against the far wall.
“I changed my mind! I don’t want to get involved.”
He holstered his weapon and walked into the room.
“Did you hear what I said?! I saw nothing. Those people are crazy.”
Despite the low light from his flashlight, he could see her clearly.
She was not familiar to him.
He frowned. If she’d been at the nightclub when he visited, she’d stayed back out of sight. On the mezzanine level above maybe. But if that was so, she could never have seen his eyes.
His vision went black for a second, except for a bright purple and white crease that ripped through his vision like lightning.
Coombes dropped to his knees.
Pain soared from the back of his head, unrelenting and without end. He slumped forward and put his hand down on the floor in front of him to steady himself.
The woman seemed to change and become ugly. Her face became a snarl and she was looking over his head.
“Finish him! Kill the bastard!”
He turned to the space next to the door he’d just walked through.
A figure stood there.
He reached for his Glock but before he could get his hand on it, pain exploded across the top of his forehead. Blackness washed over him, but not for long, soon he was back only to find that he was flat out on the floor and the woman was kicking him repeatedly in the side of his chest.
There was no strength left in him, he doubted he could even stand. His hand fell back and touched against his side, his holster.
The figure walked toward him. It was too dark to see if it was Marks, all he could say for sure was that it was a man and that he was well-built. The man put his feet on either side of Coombes’ knees and looked down at him. He was holding something in his hand.
A baseball bat.
He was going to be beaten to death in this shitty toy factory.
Coombes eased his Glock slowly out of his holster.
He didn’t have the strength to raise it, never mind aim it. He rested the butt of the pistol on the floor and angled it up, toward the ceiling and fired.
His Glock held 17 rounds and he fired all of them about a second and half apart. The room filled with sound of gunfire, the smell of cordite, and the gentle ding of the ejected brass cartridges falling on the floor.
A moment passed and then he heard laughter.
“Hey, cop! You missed. You missed seventeen times!”
“Yeah, but my partner won’t and now she knows where we are.”
The bat hit him again and this time the blackness swallowed him.
25
When Coombes came around, he was in utter darkness. He tried to sit up but it felt like a freight train ran over his head and he let himself lie still. The tips of his fingers felt the same dirty floor he’d been on before. He reached out his right fingers and found his Glock lay where he’d dropped it.
Before he’d been able to see enough to see the figure by the door. He’d seen the woman’s face twist up with hatred. There’d been some light in the room, now it was black. The only thing that made sense was that he’d been unconscious all afternoon and that it was now night.
It had been just after 12:30 when they’d left the PAB. He didn’t know when it got full dark, but it had to be at least 8 p.m.
There was no way he’d lost seven and a half hours. For one thing, he’d be starving and he was, at best, hungry. Going by his stomach-clock, he doubted he’d been out more than a couple of minutes.
His head pounded in time with his heart.
He heard movement next to him, shoes scraping on the floor.
He wasn’t alone.
The woman who’d lured him here had to be one of the kidnappers and that the man and woman she described being with Amy in The Hard Limit, was herself and the man who’d hit him with the bat. Presumably, Marks.
It meant that they were tracking the investigation, and that they didn’t like what they saw, so they decided to take him out.
He wished he knew which part they didn’t like, because it didn’t feel like he was making much progress.
If the person next to him was one of the kidnappers, then it followed that they were leaving him alone because they thought he was dead or unconscious. Changing them of that view would be a bad move.
He heard a sigh. It was a sound he’d heard before.
“Grace.”
“John?” She never called him that, things must be bad. He felt a small hand on the center of his chest, then it held his hand. “You were out a long time, I got scared.”
“I can’t see anything, I’m blind.”
“What about now?”
He saw something, a glow.
“Wait, I see that. What is it?”
“My flashlight, straight into your face. You have blood in your eyes. Don’t worry, help’s on its way.”
“Did you see the two pricks that did this to me?”
“I saw.”
“And?”
“I’m sorry, Johnny. They got away.”
They said nothing for a moment. He felt ridiculous lying on the floor.
“Help me up, will you?”
He rolled onto his side, then part-way onto his front, the knee of his outer leg drawing up to brace himself like a sniper. He pushed down on the floor with his hands, then on his knee. He was half-way. The freight train returned, its steel wheels rolling fast over his head.
He put his arm around Sato’s shoulders and paused for a moment, waiting for the pain to subside. His heart thumped fast in his chest and the room began to spin. He straightened his knees and back and took a couple of unsteady steps.
“Thank you, Grace. I’d kiss you, but I’m probably hideous now.”
“Oh, you have no idea.”
They were laughing as they left the office and came down the metal staircase together. He had his left hand on a rail, his right on her hip. They reached the bottom of the steps and moved across the factory floor. There were no shapes of sleeping squatters in old blankets, they had all cleared out for now.
They got out onto the street.
He’d never been so happy to feel the heat of the sun against his face.
He saw the edges of buildings against the bright blue sky. It was coming back. A siren approached, then a boxy shape pulled alongside and he heard doors slamming and hands were guiding him toward the vehicle where he sat on the back step.
“My name’s Michael, I’m a medic with the Fire Department. What’s your name?”
“John.”
“All right, John. Let’s take a look.” Hands carefully moved his head and parted his hair to inspect impact sites. “You have sustained a blow to the left side of your forehead, the crown, and to the right rear of your head. Do you have any other injuries?”
“I decided that was enough.”
“I’ll bet. Let’s clean up your face. Lean forward.”
He felt a liquid lightly hitting his forehead, then his eyes. It took nearly a minute of rinsing but finally the world came back into focus. A young man was crouched in front of him with latex gloves and a bottle with a spray head. When he finished, he used cotton pads to clean the area then applied sutures to the open cut on his forehead.
There was a puddle between his feet that was pink with blood.
A second medic applied ice packs to his head and held them lightly in place while the first took a pen light from his pocket. Coombes knew what questions would be coming next.
“Grace, I left my flashlight and sidearm back there, could you get them?”
She was staring at his head with her eyebrows pitched up at an angle and her mouth drawn tight. It looked like she was about to cry.
“Grace! My gun?”
“Sorry.” She left them and went back inside the building.
The medic shone the light into one eye, then the other. Back and forth.
“What day is it today, John?”
“Thursday.”
“What year?”
“2020.”
“Who is currently President?”
“Donald Trump.”
“What’s my name?”
“Michael.”
“All right. Did you lose consciousness at any time?”
“No.”
“No?!” There was disbelief in the man’s voice. “How about a nap? Did you have one of those?”
“No.”
Michael sighed.
“Very well. Using first your left eye, follow my finger.” The medic moved his finger from side to side, then up and down. “And now with the right.”
Coombes did as he was told.
“Your tracking is fine, but your iris response times are sluggish at best and your left pupil is visibly larger than your right. I recommend an MRI.”
“I’m in the middle of a case and a woman’s life is in danger.”
“Isn’t it always? Look, do me a favor. Let your partner drive for the rest of the week, leave your gun in its holster, and avoid any further impacts to your head. If your pupils don’t match tomorrow morning or if you pass out again, go to the nearest ER immediately.”
“Fine. Do you have anything for the pain?”
“We’re the Fire Department, not a pharmacy.”
Lying about blacking out had pissed off the medic. Coombes got down from the rear steps of their vehicle and stood carefully on the sidewalk. The dizziness had passed. Sato returned with his Glock and flashlight.
The medic turned to her.
“Your partner has a hard head, Detective.”
“It’s not hard,” she said. “It’s solid bone.”
Coombes smiled, then thanked the medics for their help and walked back to the Dodge. His left hand held the ice packs in place. They seemed to be holding off the freight train. He got into the passenger side of the car and slid the seat back into place.
He felt stupid for being ambushed. Sato had saved his life, he had no doubts about it. Coombes glanced at her and was surprised to see that she was watching him.
“I don’t think I said before. Thank you.”
“You did say before, but it’s not necessary. We’re partners.”
“Nevertheless, I owe you one. Not to mention another apology for being a dick.”
“I’m not going to sugar-coat it, Johnny. It took a lot of work to break you in and I don’t want to have to start over with someone else. I got a lot invested here.”
“I feel the same way, Grace.”
Sato started the engine and pulled smoothly away. The Charger’s seat held his body perfectly. He was so tired he could barely keep his eyes open. If it wasn’t for the pain in his head, he’d fall asleep.
“I suppose we’re going to pretend that you didn’t pass out back there?”
Coombes said nothing.
26
They stopped for lunch in Little Tokyo at a ramen place on Central Avenue that Sato liked. He figured he might draw a few looks, so they decided to get takeout and eat in the car. While Grace picked up their food, he tilted the seat back to something close to fifty degrees and lay there with the ice pack against the bump on his forehead. He closed his eyes and tried to picture in his mind the woman who’d set him up.
Shoulder-length blonde hair. Five-six to five-eight. Average build. Skin as white as a corpse. She’d been wearing boots, he thought. The chunky kind, with at least an inch heel, something to factor into her height.
He tried to think of anything else, but couldn’t.
The figure with the bat he hadn’t seen clearly at all. A man in his early forties, doubtless Nathan Marks. Luring him there like that, hitting him from behind.
What a chickenshit move. What a coward.
Rage surged around his system unchecked.
He recalled that Marks’ service in the Marines was in protection which had set him up nicely for his future with Tremaine. He had no experience on the battlefield, or of going house to house, clearing villagers from combatants.
All defense, no offense.
Based on this experience, he wondered how things had really gone down at the animal hospital. Logically, more of the same. Using a fire extinguisher instead of a baseball bat, hitting the armed men from behind. The extra heft of the metal cylinder causing near-fatal injuries to the men with shotguns.
Where the comparison fell apart, was that Marks had no forewarning of what he was walking into at the animal hospital and had reacted with whatever was to hand. At the toy factory, he knew exactly what was coming. Coombes figured Marks was armed now, so the decision to use the bat was out of a desire not to kill him, only to set back the investigation.
The driver door opened and Sato got in.
“You better not be dead, Coombes. I just dropped twenty-five bucks on your lunch and it wasn’t even my turn to buy.”
He smiled and tilted his chair back up.
Why did he fight his attraction to her? Why did he seem to be trying to sabotage their relationship?
They ate in silence, the inside of the car filling with the smell of spices and garlic. He was hungry and ate quickly, a slight shake in his right hand fading away as the hot food went down. Ramen steaming in a broth with chunks of pork and handfuls of chilies, gyoza pan-fired dumplings, beansprouts with a lot of garlic, and a side of chili-salted edamame.
