A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (13 page)

Patrick moved in with a kick to the back of his calf that dropped him to one knee.

I threw a hard right cross downward into his face, which seemed to have little effect.

Patrick moved in to take him to the ground with an arm bar, but the big man muscled his way out of the hold and thrust himself up and back.

The move startled Patrick and caught him off guard. He reached around the man’s neck and locked his forearm into a solid choke, but the two of them had built so much momentum that they were going to hit the railing.

I was afraid they were so tall that they’d topple over it, so I rushed forward to try to stop them.

I never had the chance.

The railing gave way as if it had been made of balsa wood, and then they were gone.

12

Z
IPLOC BAG
,
QUART-SIZED
,
CONTAINING
:
COMB
,
NAIL CLIPPERS
, A
DVIL
(
FOUR INDIVIDUAL-DOSE PACKETS
).

When I got to the edge of the landing and looked down, I was surprised to see Patrick alone on the ground. He saw me above him and yelled “That way!” He gestured toward the back of the building, and I turned just quickly enough to see a dark shape turn the corner and move out of view.

Patrick looked up at me and said, “I’m okay! Go!”

I took off as fast as I could to the front of the building. As I reached the top of the stairs, I saw the black shirt run out the front gate. Taking the steps three at a time, I gave chase. He turned the corner at the end of the block, and by the time I got there, he was gone. I ran in the direction he had gone and stood in the middle of the intersection looking down each street for a flash of movement or a shape, but there was nothing to see except oncoming traffic. On the sidewalk, two teenagers put their heads down and pretended I wasn’t there.

Gasping for breath, I called in a 911-officer-needs-assistance and turned around to run back to Patrick.

To my surprise, he was standing up. Wincing, but up on both feet.

“Help’s on the way,” I said. “How bad is it?”

“Ankle’s messed up, but I can stand on it. Shoulder hurts worse.”

I had watched him go over and knew he’d gotten lucky when his hand found the railing and caught it with a grip strong enough to slow his fall and to peel the big man off of him. Before the railing gave way completely, it had provided enough support for him to flip himself completely over and drop to the ground feetfirst.

“That fucker, though, the only thing that broke his fall was the wall. Just grunted and got up and ran.”

We heard the approaching sirens, so we headed to the front of the building with our hands up and our badges held high.

Patrick’s left arm was bent at the elbow, though, and his fingertips barely reached above his shoulder. It hurt too much to go any higher.

I said, “On a scale of one to ten, with ten—” I stopped midsentence when the headlights of a Riverside Police cruiser lit us up.

Two uniforms popped out and pointed their guns at us over the opened car doors. “Stop!” the driver yelled.

We did. They saw our badges.

“I’m Danny Beckett. I made the 911 call. This is my partner, Patrick Glenn.”

They relaxed, but not completely. The cop on the passenger’s side holstered his pistol and came toward us. “Can I see your IDs?”

We held them out for him to take a look at. More units were pulling up outside. An ambulance rounded the corner.

I told the responding officer that a suspect was fleeing on foot in the area, and he called it in. By the time the paramedics were examining Patrick, a helicopter was circling the neighborhood and making pass after pass with its spotlight.

“We need to check out the apartment,” I said. “The man we came to see could be bleeding on the floor inside.”

“The sergeant’s on his way. We’ll let him decide how to handle it.”

I didn’t agree, but we were out of our jurisdiction and had no authority. “What’s your name?”

“Rosales.”

“I’m Beckett.” I held out my hand and he shook it.

Patrick was sitting in the back of the ambulance. “They don’t think anything’s broken, but my shoulder’s dislocated and my ankle’s starting to swell up. I’m trying to talk them out of taking me to the ER.”

“You should go,” I said. “Don’t take any chances.”

“What’s going on upstairs?”

I told him.

“Well, I’ll go to the hospital, but not until we see what’s inside.”

The next five minutes felt like fifty. When the sergeant arrived, he got the rundown from the first responders, went upstairs to talk to the two uniforms watching the door, and then called someone on his cell phone before he decided to check in with Patrick and me.

He was short and wiry, and his hair and mustache were so dark and monochromatic that they must have been dyed. The brass nametag on his chest read
F. Berry
.

“You’re Long Beach?” he said to us.

“Yes, sir, sergeant,” I said. “We are Long Beach.”

“That’s quite a drive just to take a shit in someone else’s yard.”

“That wasn’t our intention. We just wanted to ask a guy some questions.”

“Sure, if you say so.” He eyeballed us so hard that Patrick and I deliberately avoided making eye contact with each other. If we had, one or both of us would have laughed in his face. Berry was the kind of cop you can find in significant quantities in any large police department. They get used to people doing what they say because they somehow managed to pass a test that put some stripes on their sleeve, and they confuse the deference that comes to them by way of their rank with some kind of genuine respect or earned authority, and most often they remain completely oblivious to the mockery and derision that always surround them, lurking just out of earshot.

“What are we going to find inside?” he asked.

“I don’t have any idea.”

“We’re going to wait for SWAT.”

“Don’t. The man who attacked us was an imposter. Roberto Solano could be bleeding out on the floor of his apartment. If you don’t want to take responsibility, I’ll go in right now.”

“Oh,” Berry said, his voice thick with condescension. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said with as much earnestness as I could muster, “I would.”

“I’ll back him up,” Patrick said.

“Great, that’s just great.”

“Please, go in. If there was another suspect inside we’d know by now.”

“Sarge,” Rosales said, “I don’t think we should wait.” He spoke with an edge of experience in his voice that his sergeant would never lay claim to because it was the voice Berry mistakenly believed he already possessed.

Berry looked at the officer, then back at me, and then once more at the officer. Then he spoke as if he had made the decision himself. “Take whoever you need and go check it out.”

Rosales looked at me. “You guys are Homicide?”

I nodded.

“Looking for a missing kid?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on upstairs.” Rosales rounded up two more uniforms and led us up to Solano’s apartment.

“Let us go in,” he said to me. “Soon as we clear it, you can check it out.”

“Thanks,” I said.

It took them all of about ninety seconds, and then they were back out on the landing. I moved toward the door and looked inside.

The man I assumed to be Solano was in the middle of the living room strapped to a dining chair with heavy-duty plastic cable ties and duct tape. He was slumped over, and his face was bruised and swollen and dripping blood onto the worn rust-colored carpet.

I looked at Rosales. There were small dots of blood on the index and middle fingers of his right hand from checking for Solano’s pulse. He wiped them on his pant leg and shook his head.

“Still warm?”

He nodded.

I fought the urge to cross the threshold. But if there’s one thing every homicide cop knows, it’s that you never violate someone else’s scene.

The Riverside detective who caught the case was a long-timer named McDermott. After he apologized for Berry, I gave him a detailed statement about our case and told him I’d copy him on all the reports.

“You have any other leads on Jesús?”

“None yet. I’m hoping he ran. If there’s an upside to this, it’s that if they had anything solid on him, they wouldn’t be torturing his father.”

“That’s true. I’ll let you know if we come up with anything about the Solano boy. Might come across someone who knows something about him.”

A uniform approached us. “Detective McDermott?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“We think we might have the suspect’s car. A witness on the next block saw a man run across the street and get into a Ford Fusion. We got a description and a partial plate. It was reported stolen from Long Beach Airport this morning.”

“Well,” McDermott said, “looks like the ball’s back in your court.”

While I was waiting for Patrick at the ER, I called Ruiz and Jen to update them.

Ruiz had already heard from the Riverside PD brass and was more concerned about Patrick’s condition than anything else. I told him it didn’t look bad and that I’d update him when we were on the way home.

Jen didn’t take the news as well.

“Fuck,” she said when I told her how the incident outside Solano’s apartment had gone down.

“It’s okay,” I said to her.

“No, it’s not. I knew I should have gone with you.”

“Why? So you could have gone over the railing, too?”

The silence that greeted that comment caused me to regret my choice of words.

I said, “I just meant that I don’t like to think about something like that happening to you.”

She was still quiet. I wasn’t sure if I’d insulted her by suggesting that she wouldn’t have handled the altercation any better than we had, or if it was something else.

“I know it probably wouldn’t have,” I said, “but thinking about you getting hurt bothers me.”

“It’s okay, Danny.”

“It is?”

“Yeah. But you know I wouldn’t have gone over that railing, right?”

A nurse wheeled Patrick out into the loading zone outside the ER, his arm in a sling and his ankle wrapped with an elastic bandage. He had a large ice pack slung over his shoulder.

I opened the passenger door and heard Patrick say, “Thanks for everything, Kelly.”

“You’re welcome. Now get in the car,” she said as she squeezed his shoulder and smiled at him. “You’ve got a long drive.”

When he closed the door, I said, “She’s cute.”

“She’s a really good nurse.”

“Call Jen,” I said. “She thinks it’s her fault you went over the railing.”

“How could it be her fault?”

“She said if she had been here, she could have handled him.”

“When the two of us couldn’t?”

The traffic light at the hospital’s exit was red, and it gave us the time to exchange a glance in which we both acknowledged silently that, in all likelihood, she was right.

When I parked the unmarked cruiser in the alley behind my duplex, the clock on the dash read 4:15. It was Saturday, so on the off chance that I was able to sleep, I wouldn’t have to get up early. At that point, though, the likelihood of a restful early morning seemed remote. I was wired from the events of the night before, and my mind was racing with the implications of the murder of Jesús and Pedro’s father and the man who killed him.