Three shirt deal

Chapter 50

I regained consciousness.

Rivulets of sweat ran down my back and into my crotch. I was instantly nauseous, on the verge of throwing up. I opened my eyes into blinding light. My shirt was off and silver duct tape pinned my arms and legs securely to the frame of a rolling office chair while my exposed upper body slowly turned bright pink. Where the hell am If I thought.

Then I saw a professional paint sprayer with a long rubber hose attached to a compressor, hanging from a rack. Four, wall-sized aluminum reflectors fitted with large heat-producing lights shined down on me from two walls. That's when I knew. I was inside the paint bay at the Church of Destruction, being cooked alive.

My head throbbed while my stomach continued to churn. Mike Church and a VSL veterano I remembered as Tyler Cisneros were standing on the far side of the room beside a partially open door trying to escape the oppressive heat.

"Turn 'em off," I croaked, unable to stand even another minute of this.

Mike Church spun around. His overlit pitted complexion was slick with sweat. He walked over, leaned in, and studied me like a bug pinned to a board. In his right hand, he was holding an Arwen 37, which I knew from a week of intense riot training at the Academy, was special-issue police department ordnance. The Arwen fires two-inch-long, cylindrical, baton rounds made of hard black rubber. According to the LAPD information office, we use these weapons exclusively to quell "incidents of civil unrest," which is code for riot gun.

Suddenly Church backed away and pointed it at me, saying, "Check it out, homes."

He fired from only fifteen feet away. The two-inch-long, hard rubber cylinder flew out of the tube barrel and hit my shoulder like a Mike Tyson right. I let out an agonized moan. The Arwen is supposed to be a nonlethal alternative weapon, but our Academy instructors had told us if fired at point-blank range to the head, it could be deadly.

"Get ready to have a bad last forty minutes," Church said maliciously.

That's when the lights that were cooking me suddenly went out, taking away the wall of blistering heat and leaving the booth dimly illuminated by two small overhead bulbs.

"Turn those things back on," Church ordered Cisneros, who was standing by the door. "I'm cooking me some roasted pig here."

My stomach suddenly lurched and I projectile-vomited the booze Alexa and I had consumed earlier in premature celebration. Some of it splattered on Mike Church.

"Sorry about that," I muttered weakly.

Church stepped forward and hit me with the butt of the gun, bringing it down sideways across my head. It opened a gash on my cheek and I almost went out, fought for consciousness, managed to hang on.

"We've got to wait for Brian," Cisneros said. "He doesn't want to mess him up too bad."

"Fuck Brian. Turn the lights back on," Church demanded.

"If we take him out to Six Flags, we don't want the cops to find no body that's all charred and shit. That won't look like no accident," a third man argued. My eyes, slow to adjust in the sudden gloom, could barely identify another VSL banger, Jose Diego, on the far side of the room.

"You two are fucking pussies," Church said, but the lights stayed off.

For the next twenty minutes, Church never let go of the Arwen 37 and, just to amuse himself, he would occasionally turn and say "Hey, Scully, here comes the Goodyear blimp." Then he'd fire another rubber baton at me. The round would strike my body, breaking blood vessels under my skin, leaving big, blue-red marks wherever it hit. Each time he fired, I almost lost consciousness.

During this ugly demonstration of riot gun effectiveness, I had one coherent thought. If the Arwen was what had knocked me out when I was jogging on the Venice bike path, then it was also probably the murder weapon Alexa and I had been looking for. I wondered if Church used it at point-blank range to kill his own father in the shower, and later to incapacitate Ron Torgason before drowning him in the swimming pool. The hard rubber batons, if fired to the head at close range, would probably result in the kind of skull trauma we'd seen in both autopsy photos. But even as I had this thought, I knew it came way too late to do me much good.

I don't know how long I was forced to endure this punishment, but sometime later Brian Devine walked into the paint bay wearing jeans and a police windbreaker. He took the riot gun out of Mike's hand and smiled. "You really love this thing, don't ya, Churchy? If you behave, maybe I'll let you keep it."

He checked the clip, looked over at my bruised body, then smiled. "Man, this may be the new American record. How many did you fire at him?"

"Lieutenant, this is coming apart," I croaked. "The department knows about everything. You can't be dumb enough to partner up with these idiots."

" 'Cept I'm not the idiot taped to a chair," he said.

"They got fifteen million. I hope you got a fair cut of that," hoping to produce some trouble. It didn't work.

"Nice try," he said. "But I'm a very happy citizen. Got my boat all stocked and ready to go in Mexico. Right now, we're just in the loose-end business. Pisses me off I didn't close your account years ago. Would've saved me a lot of trouble." Then he turned and fired the Arwen at me from ten feet away. The hard rubber round hit my forehead and I was out. I never even heard the riot gun's retort.