Cold Hit

Chapter 50

That pretty much sucked," Broadway complained. "Maybe if you hadn't taken out your street baton and started raising knots on his head, we would a done a little better," I countered.

"Don't let the fey Brit accent fool you," Roger cautioned. "Bam-Bam killed his share of cowboys. He's deadly as an E-Street gangster. You gotta go at him head-on. Besides, it's almost impossible to role-play spooks with political immunity. He probably wasn't going to give us squat anyway."

Perry nodded, chewing on a toothpick. The three of us were sitting at a concrete picnic table on the long wooden pier that stretched out from the beach into the ocean at Santa Monica. The structure included an amusement park and restaurants, which were almost empty at this hour of the morning. A ten-foot hurricane break from a storm in Mexico was rolling in, pounding the sand, slamming against the concrete pilings. Not that we were overly paranoid, but we chose this location because even with a powerful directional mike, it would be next to impossible for the feds, or anyone else, to record our conversation over the crashing surf.

"I'm open to suggestions," Roger said. He had bought a hotdog from a vendor and was peeling back the paper.

"You know what this feels like?" I said. "Feels like everybody is holding a piece of the same puzzle, but we're all so locked into security concerns, the bunch of us will never put the damn thing together.

"We need to bring these people together. The Russians, Israelis, and the CIA. Get them all talking to each other and to us."

"You ain't gonna get Bam-Bam Stan and Bimini Wright in the same room together 'less you turn off the lights, and give 'em both switchblades," Emdee drawled.

Roger took a big bite of the hotdog and added, "Their rivalry is personal. Goes all the way back to the eighties in Moscow."

"What if we start the bidding by throwing something useful on the table? Give them a couple of good pieces of our Intel."

"You're loadin' the wrong wagon, Joe Bob. We ain't got nothing they want," Perry said.

"We got the ballistics match on the five-forty-five automatic that could end up putting Sammy behind two murders. If Stanislov wants to get rid of the Petrovitches like he said, that gun could do it."

"You nuts? We can't give these people that part of our case." Broadway stopped chewing and his mouth fell open in astonishment.

"Close your fuckin' mouth," Perry said. "Bad enough I gotta look at ya without watchin' that mess a chaw get goobered."

Broadway swallowed and shook his head. "If we give that information to Stanislov, and it turns out he was lying and the Petrovitches really are working for him off the books, then that murder weapon gets dumped in the ocean and we'll never make our case."

"I didn't say it was perfect, but we need to find a way to unstick this."

Broadway threw the half-eaten hotdog in the trash. Apparently, I'd destroyed his appetite.

"They won't come to a meeting, no matter what we give 'em," he finally said.

"We don't know that," I persisted. "Look, we're out of moves, and with Homeland circling us, we gotta set up something fast."

Suddenly, Perry snapped his fingers and we both turned.

"How 'bout we call in your Uncle Remus," he said to Roger.

"We don't have a warrant to plant a bug, and he won't wire one up without court paper. I ain't ready to put my badge in Lucite," Roger said, referring to the department's practice of encasing a cop's badge in a block of plastic as a souvenir to take home after he left the force.

"Not plant a bug, dickhead. I'm thinking Remus should just turn one of his old ones back on."

"Who the hell is Uncle Remus?" I asked.

"Ain't named Remus," Broadway said. "That's just what this gap-toothed cracker calls him. He's talkin' about my Uncle Kenny. He's an electronic plumber for the National Security Agency in L. A. When NSA gets a warrant to plant a bug, Kenny and his technical engineers do the black bag job; go into the location at midnight and plant the pastries. These boys are real craftsmen. Dig up floors and run fiber-optic cable all through the walls. Got electronics so small, the lenses and mikes are no bigger than computer chips. They plaster everything up, paint it over, and leave the space just like before. In less than eight hours, they got the place wired up better'n a Christmas window and you'd never know they were ever there."

"So how does that help us?" I asked.

"After the cases go to court, most of this shit is never pulled out," Broadway explained. "It's usually too dangerous to go back and remove the hardware, so they just turn it off and leave it. Uncle Kenny's got deactivated bugs in buildings all over town. The beauty of Perry's idea is, maybe since the bugs are already in place, we don't need a warrant to turn one back on." He looked at Emdee.

"It's a unique concept, untested by law," Perry answered. "Who knows? I'm saying we don't."

"I still don't get it," I said, wondering how random bugs in buildings around town helped us.

"Since the bugs ain't where the Petrovitches are," Perry said, grinning. "All we gotta do is get the Petrovitches to the bugs."

Then he told us what he had in mind. It was smart but also risky. There was no way our bosses in the department would ever sanction it. That meant we'd have to run a dangerous operation off the books without LAPD backup.

We sat on the pier feeling the warm sun and the thundering surf.

Finally, I stood and said, "Okay, but if we're gonna do this, we need to find somebody to watch our six."

"Except, we can't go to Alexa, Cubio, or Tony," Broadway said. That means we've gotta get these intelligence agencies to help us."

"We can't have dickwads and liars holding our back," Emdee argued.

"We've got no choice," I said. "Sooner or later, we're all gonna be dead anyway."