Forty Thieves (11 page)

The sergeant surveyed the driveway and gestured at the brass. “I see you returned fire. Is there any chance you hit one of them?”

“I doubt it,” Sid said. “They would fire and then move in the dark. We were always firing at the place where they’d been. And they kept us pinned down pretty well. I think they were using compact semiauto rifles—Uzis, Tec-9s, or something like that.”

The sergeant spoke into his radio. “We’re looking for a minimum of two shooters. Possibly on foot. Any pedestrian you meet could be one of them, so proceed with caution.”

A cop hurried up to the sergeant, and handed him a brass casing.

The sergeant looked at the end of it, and spoke into the radio. “We’ve got lots of brass from the shooters at the scene, 9mm. Could be a compact tactical weapon, like an Uzi or Tec-9.” He didn’t need to say the rest, because the other police officers knew the implications—that the weapon might be hidden under a coat, or that the suspects might be at a distance aiming at them right now.

The sergeant’s radio squawked a rapid series of short messages, units in the search conveying their locations and directions. After a few seconds there were some overriding instructions from an unseen supervisor to redirect a couple of units. The sergeant turned to the Abels. “Is there a chance they got into your house?”

“It’s possible,” Sid said. “We didn’t see them leave. We reopened the front gate so they might leave if we returned fire, but they didn’t go that way.”

“All right,” said the sergeant. “Can you lend me the keys?”

“They’re on the keychain in the car ignition.”

“Sit tight.” He took the keys from the car, assembled six men, and sent them to take positions around the house. An assault group of another six appeared, three of them carrying shotguns.

In a moment they were in the front door, and as they cleared each room they turned the lights on and moved to the next. The sergeant kept silent as the team reported their progress.

Five minutes later the team declared all the rooms cleared, and began to leave the house. The sergeant said to the Abels, “They didn’t get into your house.”

“Cops!” said Sid.

“What do you mean?” the sergeant said.

“The only people we’ve seen are cops. That’s how the shooters got off the property,” he said. “They must have been dressed as cops.”

“Sid’s right,” said Ronnie. “They knew that if they fired rifles in the middle of a residential neighborhood, police would be arriving in serious numbers in a few minutes. After a couple more, there would be officers going in every direction. All they had to do was wait until then and walk out after them.”

The sergeant said into his radio, “The shooters may have left the yard dressed as police officers. Look at faces. Look at badges and equipment. Ask yourself all the questions when you approach another team. I repeat. The suspects might be wearing police uniforms.”

Three miles away, Ed and Nicole Hoyt sat in the alley behind a row of closed restaurants and stores on Nordham Street in Northridge. Nicole pulled a gray sweatshirt down over her black, short-sleeved police uniform shirt and handed Ed his plaid flannel shirt. He pulled it over his head, and then buttoned the top two buttons. Nicole adjusted the radio scanner beside her to 506.975. It clicked and then a male voice said, “One zebra twenty-six. We went on a burglary at the Springfield Cleaners yesterday morning. They thought a few uniforms might have been part of the missing property.”

“Copy,” said another voice. “Any security video?”

“Negative,” the cop said. “The detectives were planning to check the cameras on other businesses that might have picked something up.”

“We know they won’t find any pictures of us,” Nicole said. “It was as dark as the inside of your pocket that night, and we had ski masks on.”

Ed started the engine and the car crawled down the alley toward the next street. “Even if they don’t catch us, tonight was crap.”

“I know,” said Nicole. “I still don’t know why they’re alive. I’ll bet we put sixty rounds each into that car.”

“We broke a lot of glass, but the shots didn’t go through the doors.”

“Why not?”

“I’m guessing Abel put steel plates in the door panels. That’s when they should have died—right away, when they were still strapped in their seats and ducking their heads.”

“But are you sure there were steel plates?”

“Pretty sure. They should have tried to run. Instead they stayed behind the car, because they knew the doors were armored. We should have learned more about them, and we’d have known they’d pull something like that.”

She knew better than to press him about what they should do to kill these people now. When he was in a bad mood, Ed Hoyt had a tendency to go nonverbal.

8

The police questioned the Abels separately. Because they had both done this kind of interview themselves, they were not surprised that the process lasted most of the day. Detectives took turns talking to them in shifts while other cops analyzed the scene, canvassed the neighborhood, and studied surveillance footage. There were long delays while officers verified the Abels’ histories, checked with the divisions that were investigating the Ballantine murder and the shooting incident in the North Valley, and talked with the people at Intercelleron.

Other officers checked on the Alex Rinosa case, but ruled him out as a suspect. He had been denied bail as a flight risk, and so far he’d spoken only with his attorney, a former federal judge who had no prior connection with Rinosa and would never have agreed to serve as a go-between.

It was evening again when the officers drove the Abels back to their house, where the doors were locked but every light was still burning. Their ruined car was still there, waiting to be towed to a police lot to be reexamined by technicians, who would certainly find nothing that wasn’t immediately
visible. The police lot was only a stop on the way to the wrecking yard.

Sid closed the front gate and they walked up the driveway and in the front door. They relocked the door and then went from room to room to be sure nobody had entered since the police had searched. When they had cleared the house, Ronnie stopped.

“I know this sounds stupid, but would you mind sleeping downstairs in the basement tonight?”

“Is it something I said?”

“No, silly. Both of us. We can drag a mattress down there. Then we can lock the steel doors.”

“The cops said they were going to keep an eye on our house for the next few days.”

“You know what that means,” she said. “They don’t have enough officers on duty to do more than drive by a couple of times tonight, and come quickly if there’s a call with our address in it.”

“You know, we’re probably safe upstairs, with the doors locked and the alarm turned on.”

“‘Probably,’“ she said. “That says it all.”

“I don’t mind being down there for a night, if it’ll make you feel better.”

“Thanks, Sid.”

“Let’s get the place set up,” Sid said. “We’ve been up all night and day, and pretty soon I’m not going to want to drag mattresses around.”

“Okay.” She took his arm and they went to the guest room that had been Janice’s bedroom when she was a child. Ronnie got pillows and blankets and carried some into the kitchen near the doorway to the basement stairs. Then they both
dragged the mattress from Janice’s bed through the doorway and down the steps.

Within a few minutes they had set up their bed for the night. Ronnie stared down at it for a couple of seconds, and then looked around the basement. Across the basement there was a concrete stairway that led up to a sloped set of doors at ground level. The owner before them had installed a steel door at the bottom of the steps to make the basement burglar proof, so all she saw was that. The rest of the basement was dimly lighted concrete walls interrupted by a hot-water heater, a few pipes, a sump pump, a workbench.

“Pretty dismal, isn’t it?” she asked. “Like a dungeon.”

“Old-world charm. As long as we sleep with our eyes closed it will look fine.”

“Let’s go change into something comfortable. And let’s not forget guns and ammo.”

“Do I need to be armed when I’m asleep?”

“Of course you do. A team of killers narrowly failed to get us last night. Even if you’re too thick-skinned to die you should want your wife to feel safe. Humor me.”

He sighed. “All right.”

They went upstairs, changed into jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers, and brought their pistols, holsters, and reloaded spare magazines. They walked the house one more time to be sure nothing had been left unlocked, and then went back to the basement.

Ronnie set their two pistols on the floor at the head of their improvised bed and lay down beside her husband.

“This is actually pretty comfy,” she said.

He didn’t reply. They had been busy all day with their investigation, then lived through an ambush and firefight,
and finally spent the rest of the night and part of the day at the police station. Now they were home, underground, behind a steel door designed to protect commercial buildings. The night was silent.

Ronnie moved closer on the mattress and held her body against Sid’s. “Thanks for putting up with this,” she said. “It just makes me feel good to be barricaded down here where nobody can get at us for one night.”

“Yep,” Sid said. “Tomorrow we’ll talk about remodeling the basement. If we’re going to sleep here more than once we might want to decorate. Or at least dust.”

They were silent for a few seconds, and then she said, “Sid?”

He sighed. “I’ll go check.” He got up and walked across the basement to the steel door in the concrete wall. He unbolted the door, and then climbed the narrow concrete steps up to ground level. Above him was the sloping wooden door. He unlatched the door, lifted it about six inches, and looked out to scan the moonlit yard for a few seconds, then lowered it again. He bolted it, descended the stairway, closed and bolted the inner door, and walked back to the bed he and Ronnie had made.

Ronnie’s eyes were shut and her chest rose and fell in the deep, slow rhythm of sleep. Sid looked down at her for a few seconds, and then went to the wall switch, switched off the lights to throw them into darkness, and slid onto the bed beside her.

He kept thinking about what had happened last night, going over all of it in his mind. The shooters must have planned many hours earlier to kill them and to escape by impersonating cops. Thinking about the police uniforms stolen from a dry cleaner’s shop disturbed him, but also brought back a memory of the day he had met Ronnie.

They had been married over thirty years now. At first he was not quite able to believe in her affection. He had wondered if she was one of those career-oriented people who went into relationships assuming they would end pretty quickly anyway, so there wasn’t much of an emotional investment. His mother’s sister Amelia had been married about five times and she had never seemed especially elated to begin a relationship or sad to end it. Men were just one of many commodities, and she paused to sample a few of them as she passed by on her way to something else that interested her.

Ronnie had not been that way. They had met on a task force that was assembled to break up a Los Angeles group that was moving prescription drugs they’d obtained in a series of hijackings and burglaries in eastern states. He had been attracted to Sergeant Veronica Hall instantly—the gleaming brown hair, big, intelligent blue eyes, and incredibly smooth skin made it hard to keep his eyes from returning to her whenever she wasn’t looking. He was at the meeting with another detective who was called out unexpectedly and took their car, so Ronnie had offered to drive him back to Metro.

On the way they talked easily and found things to laugh about, and he caught the moment when she was stopped at a light, and in midsentence flicked her eyes downward from his and double-checked his left hand for a ring. His pulse quickened. She must be interested. But maybe she wasn’t, because what she said next was, “Would you mind if I made a very quick stop on the way? I have a couple of uniforms at the tailor’s.”

“At the tailor’s?” he said. “You have uniforms tailor-made? Not that you don’t look great, but are you taking money from the evidence room or something?”

“It’s just alterations,” she said. “They’re a necessary expense. Women’s uniforms have to be taken in at some places and let out at others or they don’t fit right.”

“You mean everybody still does that in this day and age?”

“Only people who aren’t shaped like men. Meaning women. Female officers.”

“But that’s not fair. You should complain.”

She laughed. “Don’t cry for me. The world’s nearly perfect. There’s body armor made to fit women, sort of. If you and I were the same rank I’d have the same title and be getting the same pay as you. And if you were to put your hands on me without my permission, I could get you suspended and probably fired. That’s enough progress for one lifetime.”

“I’ll remember to keep my distance,” he said.

“Very prudent,” she said. She pulled to a stop in front of a small shop. “I’ll be right back.”

He watched her run inside, hand a woman at the counter a credit card, sign a slip, and take a couple of uniforms on hangers, then hurry back. She put the uniforms in the trunk, resumed the driver’s seat, and pulled back out into traffic, heading toward the police headquarters building. “I apologize for that,” she said. “Of course, your wife probably picks up your uniforms from the cleaners on the rare occasions when a detective needs one.” So maybe she was interested, but she wasn’t sure if he was married. Plenty of married cops didn’t wear a ring on duty.

“Interesting thought,” he said. “I’ll add it to my collection of fantasies about my future wife.” He felt a moment of pride for the way he had slipped that into the conversation.

“I hope the rest of them are better than that,” she said.

“They are, but they can’t all be about the same subject or I’ll seem shallow.”

“You’ll have to tell me the others another time,” she said. “Here’s your stop.”

He thanked her, got out, and went into the building. As soon as he was inside where he could watch her pull away, he regretted not asking her to go for coffee sometime, or asking for her phone number, or giving her some absolutely clear signal that he wanted to see her again.