Last Breath

3

Life was funny. She could go for weeks, months, believing she had put her past to rest and finally moved on. And then it would all come back in a hot rush, and she would be ten years old again, huddled in the crawl space with a kitchen knife in her hands.

C.J. pushed the memories away. She wasn’t a little girl anymore; she was a woman of twenty-six, doing her job, and at the moment there was a crazy man with a gun to worry about.

The pathway at the rear of the house was narrow and bright under the midday sun. To her left was a chicken-wire fence protecting a vacant lot. To her right, the home’s stucco wall and the large, overflowing Dumpster that abutted it. Above the Dumpster was a casement window, an inch ajar to let in any breeze that stirred on a January afternoon in LA.

No movement in the window. It seemed likely that the back room of the house was unoccupied.

C.J. muted the radio clipped to her Sam Browne utility belt, then lifted herself onto the lid of the trash bin and peered through the window. She saw a cot piled with disarranged sheets, a pair of threadbare oval throw rugs on a concrete floor, a crib, bare walls. and a doorway that glowed with the flickering light of a TV set in the front room.

That was where he was. In the front of the house. If it could be called a house when it was only a wood-frame garage partitioned into a bedroom, living room, lavatory, and kitchenette. The bedroom had a view of a trash bin, and the living room, windowless, had no view at all.

Crouching on the Dumpster by the window, C.J. listened. There was no sound from the television; the volume must have been turned down. Now and then rose the squall of a baby.

She wondered if she could open the window fully without making a noise that would alert Ramon Sanchez, the crazy man with the gun in the other room.

Never know unless you try, she thought gamely, and she gave the casement window a cautious pull, bracing herself for a squeal of hinges.

The window opened silently.

She knew she was limber enough to wriggle through, even when encumbered by her vest and her belt.

Question was, did she want to do this?

Ramon was out of his mind-his wife, Maria, had been very clear on that point, expressing herself vigorously in both English and Spanish. He was drunk and angry and out of work, and when he got that way, no one could reason with him. She’d called 911 from a neighbor’s home, and the RTO had put it out over the air ten minutes ago.

“Any Newton Area unit, possible four-fifteen in progress at Fifty-fifth and Sloan.”

C.J., riding shotgun in an A-car, had listened to the crackle of static over the cheap speaker. She and her partner Walt Brasco had been on duty since 6:15 A.M., chasing the radio for most of that time. Now it was one o’clock, and they’d been thinking about taking a Code 7 for lunch.

But Fifty-fifth and Sloan wasn’t far from where they were cruising. C.J. looked at Brasco, who nodded and said, “Take it.”

“Thirteen-A-forty-three,” C.J. reported into the handheld microphone hooked to the dashboard. “We’ll take the four-fifteen.”

“Roger, forty-three. Monitor your screen, incident three-seven-one-four. Code Two High.”

Brasco flipped the toggle that activated the car’s light bar and accelerated through a yellow traffic signal. Storefronts flashed past, bearing signs in Vietnamese and Korean and Spanish. A blind beggar held up a cardboard sign at a street corner, in front of a brick wall spray-painted with gang placas.

Welcome to Newton Area division. Shootin’ Newton, as it was known among Officer Caitlin Jean Osborn’s colleagues in the LAPD. A few square miles of multiethnic slums bordered by five other high-crime divisions, a semicircle of blasted hopes: Hollenbeck, Central, Southwest, Seventy-seventh Street, and Southeast. The infamous Rampart Division, now synonymous with police corruption, was wedged between Central and Southwest, not quite touching Newton but close enough, perhaps, to spread its infection here. Crime rates might have dropped in both the city and county of LA, but no one could prove it in Newton.

C.J. kept her eye on the squad car’s computer until it displayed the address of the crime scene. She read it to Brasco, He turned left at the next intersection and pulled to a stop alongside a curb littered with fragments of beer bottles.

A crowd of two dozen was waiting in front of a converted garage that served as somebody’s home. Half the spectators were children with nowhere else to be on a school day.

Officers Osborn and Brasco got out, surveying the neighborhood. It was like so many in Newton, a barrio of one-story buildings that might have been nice once. Cars sat on blocks and faded in the sun. Graffiti webbed the walls and fences and even the tree trunks; there were gang names sprayed on and X’d out with what the gangbangers called “dis marks”; the number 187-the section of the California Penal Code that covered homicide-appeared prominently, a bright promise of death. Rap music blared from an open window down the street, and somewhere a dog wailed in counterpoint to the throbbing beat.

C.J. approached the crowd. The kids wore pants several sizes too big in the approved gangsta style, their sleeves rolled up to show off crude, malevolent tattoos. The adults glanced at her suspiciously and looked away.

“Who telephoned the police?” she asked in Spanish. Brasco was letting her handle it. He knew she was better at dealing with people.

A thin, frightened woman elbowed her way forward from the rear of the crowd, answering in uncertain English. “Me, it was me.”

“Okay, senora. What’s your name?”

“Maria Sanchez. It is my husband in there. My Ramon.”

“You had a fight?” The dispatcher had called it a 415-domestic disturbance.

“No, no fight.” Tears welled in the woman’s large brown eyes. “He lose his job. He get drunk, try to shoot me. He has a gun, he is crazy!”

Drunk and crazy with a gun, C.J. thought. Terrific. “What kind of gun?”

“It is, how you say, six-shooter.”

“A handgun? Like this?” C.J. tapped the Beretta 9mm bolstered to her right hip.

Maria Sanchez nodded. “Like that, but old, an old gun he got from no-good friend.”

“And he tried to shoot you with it?”

Frantic nodding. “Point it at me, and I run out the door. But he still in there. He got Emilio. I no have time to grab him.”

“Emilio?” C.J. asked, hoping it was a dog.

“ Mi nino!”

My boy. This was getting better and better.

“How old is Emilio?” C.J. asked.

“ Seis -six months.”

“We’re gonna need backup,” Brasco said abruptly. Tension had pulled his broad, pockmarked face into a stiff mask. “This isn’t no goddamn four-fifteen. It’s an ADW that’s turned into a hostage-barricade.”

“Let’s see if we can talk to him first.” C.J. didn’t wait for Brasco’s reply. She asked Mrs. Sanchez if her husband spoke English, and when the answer was yes, she rapped on the front door, raising her voice. “Mr. Sanchez, this is the police. Open up, please. We need to talk to you.”

Silence from inside.

“Mr. Sanchez, we just want to talk.”

Nothing.

“Open the door, Mr. Sanchez.” She tested the knob and noted that it did not turn. Locked. “This is the police. Open up and let us talk to you, okay?”

Still no response.

“Fuck this,” Brasco said. “I’m calling it in. We need SWAT down here with a CNT.”

C.J. nodded, but she wasn’t happy about it She didn’t want to bring Metro SWAT into this. What had started as a drunken dispute could end up in a bloodbath.

She heard Brasco on the radio while she gathered additional information from Maria Sanchez. Layout of the house, possible exits, time elapsed since she fled the residence. Brasco came back and reported, “ETA ten minutes for another squad, thirty or more for SWAT and a negotiator.”

C.J. pointed toward the back of the house. “There’s a rear window. I’d better cover it. You watch the front door.”

“Okay. Hey, C.J., you’re just gonna watch the window, right?”

“Right,” she said, though she wasn’t at all certain what she would do.

And now it was decision time.

She could wait by the window until another A-car arrived, then wait much longer for the SWAT boys to get here with the negotiator. When Ramon Sanchez learned he was surrounded, he might surrender-or put the gun to Emilio’s head and pull the trigger.

And if SWAT went in…

Five men with machine guns bursting into this tiny house, screaming orders, ready to fire at any shadow…

The baby shrieked louder.

C.J. made up her mind. She tried to ignore the trickle of sweat down her back as she drew her Beretta and climbed through the window.