The prostitutes ball

Chapter 15

We flagged the outstanding warrants so if the warrant delivery team finally pulled up an existing address on the guy, we would be on their contact list. Then I called in a new firearms check, giving them the correct name and spelling.

When we got back to the office, guess what? No Brooks Dunbar. Stender Sheedy was there with his little jar of Vaseline, trying to get another six hours. I jammed the warrant into his hand.

"That's a copy. If your client even makes an illegal turn, he's gonna end up in jail. You want my opinion, we should let it happen. He's got too many people protecting him. Next time he falls, you oughta let his ass hit the dirt instead of always shoving a feather pillow under him. Maybe some jail time will straighten him out."

"Don't do this," Stender pleaded.

"Already did."

After he left, we were pulled into Jeb s office. We'd been working the whole night and for us, it seemed like forever since we'd gotten the case. Jeb, on the other hand, had gone home to bed, and since Scott Berman's death was blasting out of every radio and TV speaker when he awoke, he was complaining about how quickly the press had gotten it.

We brought him up to date on Karel Sladky, who was a definite person of interest. The fact that we had a name to chase after seemed to please our captain.

"This is good progress," he said. "Good stuff. You've made me happy."

"We live for those moments, Skipper," Hitch said. I couldn't tell if he was kidding or just in the midst of a monumental ass kiss.

"You guys now have a prosecutor assigned to work with you," Jeb continued.

"Already?" Hitch moaned. "Aren't we supposed to arrest somebody before they assign a prosecutor?"

"District Attorney Chase Beal wants to make sure none of the evidence is compromised. He put one of his best gunslingers on this."

"Uh-oh," I said. "Who'd we get?"

"The Black Dahlia."

"Dahlia Wilkes?" we both said, simultaneously groaning.

"She wants to meet with you before the end of the clay to be briefed. In the meantime, she gave instructions that she wants you to personally get back out to Skyline Drive with an evidence collection team and some metal detectors to locate every single slug that was fired from that Bizon.

"So far CSI got no prints off the cartridges they found," Jeb continued, "but they only picked up twenty casings and fourteen slugs. The Bizon's got a sixty-four-shot clip, so there's a lot still out there. It's a big job. Sorry."

"Do you think there'll be time for us to wash and wax Miss Wilkes's car before we go?" I said.

"Look, Shane, you're the one who wanted to work on high-profile hits."

We left the captain's office and sat at Hitch's cubicle because Sally still hadn't cleaned out her desk. I looked up at Hitch's cork divider. He had put up pictures of different clothing ads from GQ and Vanity Fair. The men in the shots had sculpted chins and moussed hair. They stood in poses that could get you killed in a biker bar.

"These are nice." I frowned.

"Hey, Shane, 'til I was assigned to partner up with you I had no fucking cases. I was working on my spring look."

We arranged for an evidence team to meet us at the crime scene. I walked over to my desk, unlocked the bottom drawer, and switched guns. I left the Ultra-Lite. 38 revolver with its ankle holster in favor of a bigger-bore 9 mm automatic. Something told me I might want to pack heavy. Then, because I was still separated from my vehicle, we were back in the Porsche Carrera. Hitch gunned the engine.

"Can we at least put the top up?" I suggested.

"Sure, homes." He hit a button and a mechanical hardtop lifted out of the trunk deck and cantilevered forward, snapping down and locking itself into the brackets.

"Pretty sweet, huh?" he said.

I nodded because it was, and we were out of there.

We parked down the hill from 3151 Skyline Drive and walked up. The vacant lot we'd assigned to the press now looked like the media center in Baghdad's Green Zone. Satellite uplinks, news vans with station call letters on the sides, a craft services section complete with a catering truck advertising five choices of hot meals.

"American journalism at its finger-lickin' best," Hitch said, checking out the food truck. We walked past a phalanx of microphone-wielding reporters gathered by the gate. I knew a few of them. They all knew Hitch.

"Hey, Hitch, over here!" they shouted, gunning off footage.

"Sorry, guys," he said, smiling and waving like a red-carpet celebrity. "I'm working right now."

They shot tape of us, but we made it past without giving an interview, and proceeded on up the driveway.

"This was a good wardrobe choice," Hitch said to nobody in particular. "This rust suit looks hot on camera."

Our evidence team showed up ten minutes later and we went to work with them, hunting with metal detectors for spent cartridge casings and stray bullets.

Doing the math, if the clip contained sixty-four rounds, with nine bullets in our three vies and fourteen more bullets recovered from the crime scene, that meant if he shot 'til slide lock, there were forty-one slugs missing, and forty-four cartridge casings.

After an hour we had found six more Makarov slugs and one more brass cartridge. By early afternoon, it was starting to be longer and longer between shrill electronic beeps. Hitch and I were bushed and took a break, stretching out under an umbrella on the pool chaises.

At around three, we were both dozing when the metal detector lit up something.

"Got a hit," the operator called out.

We both rolled into sitting positions, rubbed our eyes, and ambled over to where he was working.

The way you retrieved this stuff was with little forensic tools. Tiny Barbie-sized spades and brushes. Finally, the technician exposed the find, pulled a bullet out of the ground and dropped it into an evidence bag. But this one was much smaller than the 9 mm Makarovs we'd been digging up.

"What the hell is that?" Hitch asked.

"7.65 mm slug," I replied, peering down at it.

"So our guy used two weapons?" Hitch said.

"Or we've got a second shooter."

Hitch turned to me with a troubled look. "We don't want a second shooter, Shane."

"Whatta you mean we don't want? You got the wrong verb there, partner."

"It's way too late in Act One for a second heavy. Splits the focus."

I glared over at him. It didn't even deserve a response.

"I just don't think we should jump to conclusions," he persisted. "We don't know there was a second shooter. A second shooter? Why? Sladky had a weapon that could put out six hundred rounds a minute and for backup, he brings along some guy with a pathetic little 7.65 automatic?"

"7.65 slugs originally came from Europe. Same with Makarov nines," I said.

"I don't like it, homes. It's not working for me."

By then I'd really had it with this movie bullshit. "How 'bout this?" I snapped. "What if our second shooter is Scott Berman's hot bitch lover from Sarajevo? She could be over here with the Czechoslovakian female fitness team, which maybe Karel Sladky coaches. All of them wearing tiny little string bikinis, glistening with baby oil. Berman discovers that these hard bodies are really trying to blow up LAX with a stolen Russian suitcase nuke but before he can go to the cops, he gets greased, taking our story down a whole new path with a lot of great shit for Act Two. Does that make it work any better?"

"I know you're just playin' with me, but that's not half bad," Hitch replied.