Vigilante

CHAPTER 41

When he first moved to L.A., Shaq O’Neal bought a huge, modern house for his mother on the east end of town, in the hills above La Canada Flintridge. It sat on a point that overlooked the Rose Bowl to the south and the 210 Freeway and Mount Wilson on the north. The front of the triangular house was three stories of rounded green glass that jutted out on a promontory point and looked like the prow of an ocean liner. When Shaq left the Lakers to play for the Miami Heat, his mother soon followed and the house was sold. With the real estate downturn, it was on the market again. When Hitch and I did our background investigation on Nix Nash, we found out that Nash had worked out a short-term lease deal for the property. He had moved into the mansion two months ago for his six-month stay here.

Even during off-hours in L.A. traffic, La Canada was at least a forty-minute drive from the V-TV studios in Century City. At peak rush hour I figured it could take as much as two hours. The estate was located well outside of the glitzy Hollywood limelight Nash seemed to covet. While it was a magnificent property, it seemed like a strange residential choice, and that got me wondering.

At eight thirty the next morning, Hitch and I were standing beside my bugged Acura in the parking lot of La Canada High School. Three hours earlier, ESD had begun to organize electronic surveillance teams and position them in various strategic spots around the L.A. Basin. The teams were now setting up receiving equipment so they could initiate a trap and trace on any cell calls transferred from Nash’s rental house to one of the hundreds of cell towers in the greater metro area.

We needed a warrant to do a regular hard line phone tap and we couldn’t get one, so Alexa and Deputy Chief Hawkins talked the phone company into temporarily shutting off service to Nash’s house, which would force him to use his cell if he wanted to place a call. We would not be listening in on his conversation but merely tracking it, so there were no evidentiary or procedural hurdles requiring a judge’s permission. No one knew where Lee Bob Batiste was hiding. It could be anywhere in the 490 square miles of Los Angeles. We were hoping the trap and trace would narrow our search to a single cell tower.

“You really think we should be way out here on the east end of town?” Hitch asked as he sipped from a cup of Starbucks coffee we’d picked up on the way out here.

“If you had a guy like Lee Bob Batiste under wraps, what would you do with him?” I asked.

“I’d have him chained up in the basement with a pound of raw meat.”

“But if you couldn’t do that, where would you put him?”

“Close enough to know what he’s up to.”

“That’s why I convinced Jeb to give us this sector. There’ve been dozens of fires in the Angeles National Forest and that dust we got off his boot print had traces of fire retardant.”

“So your theory is, Nix Nash leased this house way out here because it was a good out-of-the-way spot up in the hills where he could park Batiste?”

“Yeah.”

Hitch cocked a skeptical eye at me but said nothing.

By nine thirty, I got a text message from Jeb informing me that the ten ESD geeks were set up and ready to go. The operation was code-named Black Swan. I don’t know who picks these corny op names. When I asked, I was told that Nash was a dirtbag celebrity, a black swan. Some genius on the command floor had come up with it.

We had learned that Nix never left for the V-TV studio until after ten in order to miss the rush-hour traffic. At exactly nine thirty, Hitch and I got back into the parked Acura and I called Hitch’s cell from mine. As soon as he answered, I hung up.

“What up, Captain?” Hitch said to nobody, miming the conversation. “You got a latent print from where?” He was playing to the surveillance bug buried in my rearview mirror. “Okay. Gimme it.” He paused, then said, “Thanks,” and disconnected.

“You won’t believe this, Shane.” His voice was full of excitement. Like most cops who had risked their lives undercover, he was a remarkably good actor. “The science division got a palm and three fingers off the wall above the toilet in Lita Mendez’s bathroom. The print hit came back to somebody named Lee Bob Batiste.”

“That’s the serial killer Nix Nash busted in the Everglades back in the nineties,” I said, giving it my best gee-whiz reading. “Why would he be out here in L.A.?”

“Maybe he and Nash are somehow in this together,” Hitch suggested.

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

By now, both of us were staring at the rearview mirror, hoping our little-theater production was being transmitted to Nash. We got out of the car again so we could talk freely.

“I wonder how much time this will take?” Hitch asked as we sat on a metal bench at the edge of the high school parking lot.

“If somebody is monitoring this bug twenty-four-seven, we should get something immediately. If they’re only picking up tapes and checking them later, who knows?”

As it was, it took almost two hours. The sun was high overhead and we were still sitting on the metal bench when Hitch’s cell phone rang. It was Jeb.

“You guys must be clairvoyant. He just made a single call. It was received by a cell pod tower in La Canada off Inverness, up in the foothills near where you are.”

“We’re on it, Skipper,” Hitch said. “Send us some backup from the sheriff’s substation in Flintridge. Tell them it’s a Code Two run and that we need them nearby but to hold back. Once we get a location we’ll radio the sheriff exact directions.”

We got in the Acura and hauled ass from our parking place at the high school with Hitch on the GPS giving me directions on how to get to Inverness Drive. We took Berkshire under the 210 Freeway up into La Canada, climbing into the hills above Nash’s rented mansion. When we got to Inverness we started driving west along the winding street, checking out the forest on the right side of the road.

“Look for an old burn,” I said as we both scanned the hills for either blackened trees or a patch of new growth.

It made sense that an outdoorsman like Lee Bob would be camping out in the wilderness. From what Nash had told me I sure couldn’t see Lee Bob kicking back in a suite at the Four Seasons cooking roast pig in the bathtub.

We continued to look for old fire areas as we passed Corona Drive and headed up to Haverson, where we merged right. There were more small dirt offshoots up here than I expected. Finally, we found a twisting one-lane road that looked promising and which led us farther up into the hills where a new growth of brush marked a recent fire. The growth only looked to be a few months old. About half a mile up the road we spotted an old rusted-out Airstream trailer sitting on a burned-out, junk-strewn clearing. Off to the right was a crude fire pit.

I dialed up the sheriff’s substation and relayed the location; then Hitch and I got out of the Acura.

“You wanna wait for our backup?” Hitch asked.

“Do you?”

“Kinda not our style,” he said. “Besides, he’s only one guy, and if he’s in there, he had to already see us pulling up.”

“Okay then, let’s clear it,” I said.

We both pulled our guns and approached the dwelling slowly, staying away from the front window to defeat a possible line of fire.

Just then a shot rang out from the hillside on our left. Hitch spun around and went down, blood blossoming from his right leg.

“Shit!” he screamed.

I fell on top of him to protect him from additional fire. I couldn’t tell exactly where the shot had come from. I had my gun trained on the hillside but couldn’t see anyone. When I looked back down at Hitch I saw that he was bleeding badly from his thigh.

“Up there,” Hitch grunted, pointing to a scorched stand of trees on the right edge of the old burn.

I could hear someone crashing through the dried foliage up in the tree line. I rolled off Hitch and checked his leg. The shot hadn’t hit an artery, but he was losing a lot of blood from a huge exit wound. I pulled off his belt and fixed a tourniquet around his right thigh, a few inches above the wound.

“Hold this in your teeth and keep it pulled tight,” I said, handing him one end of the belt, which he clamped between his molars, keeping the pressure on by pulling his head back while still aiming his Beretta in the direction the shot had come from.

I ran back to the car and grabbed the dash mike, switched to the county sheriff’s frequency, and made my broadcast. “This is LAPD D-Fifteen. In the hills above Flintridge. We have an active shooter with shots fired and one officer down. I’m at a mountain trailer site in an old burn area half a mile up a dirt road east of Haverson. Cross street Corona. Send backup and EMTs.”

I jumped in the car as that call got retransmitted and rogered. I pulled the Acura up to the spot where Hitch was lying and put the car between him and the hillside to shield him from any additional fire. The shooter might have a scoped rifle and could be dialing up a kill shot.

“Go get me some payback, dawg,” Hitch hissed through teeth still clamped tightly around the belt tourniquet. “I’m good. I’ll cover your run.”

“Paramedics are coming. You sure?”

“Go.”

I left him and started across the open clearing. I made it with no additional shots fired. Clutching my weapon, I clamored up the mountain grade toward the stand of burned trees. It was a charred hillside, the leafless, misshapen, burned-out trees giving the landscape the blackened look of a war zone.

I searched for broken branches, scuffs in the dirt, or anything that looked like a recent track of any kind. I will admit right now that I’m not much of an outdoorsman, but it didn’t take me long to realize the shooter was gone and I was actually sort of lost.

I turned and headed back down, finding my way by stopping occasionally to listen for traffic noise from the 210 Freeway, which I knew was to the north.

After about fifteen minutes I made it down to the clearing where a half a dozen sheriff’s cars and an EMT fire unit were now parked near the Acura.

Hitch was lying in the back of an ambulance with his leg in a compression bandage. The bleeding had stopped, but he had refused to be transported to Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, insisting instead that he remain in charge of our crime scene until I got back. He had also refused to let the uniformed deputies search the trailer without my being there.

“This is a secondary crime scene in a current LAPD homicide investigation,” I explained to the lead sheriff.

Before going inside the trailer I told the ambulance driver to get going. The EMTs rolled out using red lights and siren, taking Hitch to the hospital. Then, with two sheriff’s deputies flanking me, I approached the trailer. There was a Vespa motor scooter chained to the trailer hitch, which I assumed was Lee Bob’s only transportation. That meant he was probably on foot until he could steal something. I kicked open the Airstream’s door and stepped across the threshold.

The trailer reeked inside. The smell was a pungent mixture of chemicals. I was familiar with this odor from taking down meth labs in the past. It’s produced by cooking a mixture of ephedrine, anhydrous ammonia, red phosphorus, paint thinner, Freon, and battery acid. The reek told me that at one time in the not-too-distant past this Airstream had manufactured crystal meth. Biker gangs had these things parked in remote wilderness areas all around L.A. In the middle of the night with the windows closed to keep the telltale odors from escaping, stringy-haired crystal cookers would fire up their stoves and brew bubbling batches of crank. They picked remote spots like these because of the hard-to-disguise stink these chemicals produced when heated. Most meth cookers ended up inhaling copious quantities of their brew, which killed millions of brain cells and turned them into mumbling idiots. Meth labs also tended to explode more frequently than suicide bombers, and from the look of the Airstream that’s exactly what had happened. The original stove had been ripped out, but there were extensive burn marks where it had once stood. A boarded-up window told me that one of these brain-dead assholes had thrown his flaming pot of crystal out the window, where it had promptly ignited the brush and burned down the adjoining hillside. With the trailer ruined, Lee Bob had moved in.

I checked over the rest of the room. A stained sofa was pushed against the wall opposite a new small one-burner butane stove, which looked to me like a recent addition. There was a paint-chipped, cigarette burn-scarred dresser. No mirror, no shower. In the back of the trailer, a toilet sat behind a dirty brown curtain.

I knew I was in the right spot because on the dresser I saw a half-empty box of 129-grain Hydra-Shok Federals.