The Face[脸]
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HAZARD IN THE HALLWAY, HAZARD ON THE stairs, acutely aware of what an easy target a big man made in a narrow space, threw himself nonetheless into the hot pursuit. When you took the job, you knew it wasn’t part of the deal that you could pick and choose the places where you would put your life on the line.
Besides, like most cops, he operated on the superstitious conviction that the greatest risk came with hesitation, came in the moment when nerve was briefly lost. Survival depended on boldness seasoned with just enough fear to discourage outright recklessness.
Or so it was easy to believe until a bit of boldness got you killed.
In the movies, cops were always yelling “Halt! Police!” when they knew that the dirtbags running away from them weren’t going to obey, but also when a shout would reveal their presence before absolutely necessary and even before every bad guy on the game board realized that badges were in play.
Hazard Yancy, who had recently escaped being shot at while in an armchair, didn’t bellow either a command or a threat at the gunman who had killed Rolf Reynerd. He just plunged down the stairs after the guy.
By the time Hazard reached the midfloor landing, the shooter had [152] thundered to the bottom of the lower flight, losing his balance as he flew off the last step into the public foyer. He slipped on the Mexican-tile floor, windmilled his arms, but avoided a fall.
Running, the perp never looked back, suggesting that he was oblivious of being pursued.
As he gave chase, Hazard was in the guy’s head. Expecting Reynerd to be Home alone, the rent-a-killer gink comes in to do a quick pop, he drops the sucker with a heart-buster, manages to avoid getting lit up in the process, breaks hard for the street, and now he’s already thinking about smoking some good bo with some long-legged fresh who’s waiting for him in his crib.
The shooter hit the front door, and at the same moment, Hazard landed in the foyer, but the shooter was making too much noise to hear doom closing from behind, and Hazard didn’t slip as his quarry had done, so he was gaining.
When Hazard reached the door, the shooter was already out in the night, down the exterior steps, maybe thinking about spending some of his hit money on fancy chrome laces for the wheels on his bucket, some on 24-carat flash to drape his lady.
Not much wind, cold rain, Hazard on the steps, shooter on the walk: The gap between them closed as inevitably as that between a speeding truck and a brick wall.
Then the car horn blared. One long bleat, two short.
A signal. Prearranged.
In the street, not at the curb, stood a dark Mercedes-Benz, headlights on, engine running, exhaust pluming from the tailpipe. The front passenger door stood open to welcome the shooter. This was a getaway bucket with style, maybe a G-ride, a gangster ride, stolen out of a driveway in Beverly Hills, and behind the wheel sat the shooter’s ace kool, his backup Homey, ready to shave the tires bald in a pedal-jammed escape.
The one long bleat followed by two short must have signaled the rabbit that he had a wolf on his ass, because he made a sudden break [153] to the left, off the sidewalk. He torqued himself around so hard that he should have stumbled, should have fallen, but didn’t, and instead brought up the piece with which he’d popped Reynerd.
Having lost the advantage of surprise, Hazard finally shouted “Police! Drop it!” just like in the movies, but of course the shooter had already earned life without possibility of parole, maybe even the death penalty, by chilling Reynerd, and he had nothing to lose. He would be no more likely to drop his weapon than he would be likely to drop his pants and bend over.
The piece looked big, not a trey-eight or a .357, but a four-five. Loaded with wicked ammo, a four-five would reliably bust bone and tenderize meat for the undertaker, but it required stability and calculation to compensate for the kick.
In a bad stance, from panic rather than poise, the perp squeezed off a shot. His pull was actually more jerk than squeeze, and the round went so wild that Hazard stood at less risk of being drilled by this bullet than of being pulverized by an asteroid.
The instant he saw the muzzle spit fire into the rain and heard the slug shatter a window in the apartment house behind him, however, Hazard was only partly driven by training, partly by duty, and mostly by blood. The shooter wouldn’t be sloppy twice. All the sensitivity instruction, all the earnest lectures in social policy and political consequences, all the police-commission directives to meet violence with patience, understanding, and measured response were impediments to survival when, in the quick, you had to kill or be killed.
The sound of bullet-battered glass was still ringing through the rain when Hazard got a two-hand grip on his gun, assumed the stance, and answered fire with fire. He placed two rounds with little concern for the stern judgment of the Los Angeles Times in matters of police deportment, but with every concern for the safety of Mother Yancy’s favorite baby boy.
The first shot took the killer down, and the second rapped him hammer-hard even as his knees were still buckling.
[154] Reflexively, the perp fired the .45 not at Hazard, but into the grass in front of his own feet. The recoil broke his weakened grip, and the gun flew from his hand.
He met the ground with one knee, in the briefest genuflection, then with two knees, then with his face.
Hazard kicked the dropped .45 away from the killer, into shrubs and shadows, and he ran toward the street, toward the Mercedes.
The driver gunned the engine an instant before he let up on the brakes. Shrieking tires spun off clouds of vaporized rain, and smoke that stank of burnt rubber.
Maybe Hazard was at risk of being shot by the driver, who could get a line on him through the open front passenger’s door, but that was a risk worth taking. An ace-kool wheelman specialized in flight, not fight, and although the guy would be packing heat for use in a cornered-rat situation, he wouldn’t likely draw down on anyone when he had an open street, gas in the tank, and ignition.
Splashing along the puddled pavement, Hazard reached his sedan. Before he could get around that parked vehicle, into the street, the spinning tires of the getaway car bit blacktop and bolted forward with a bark. Momentum slammed shut the passenger’s door.
He hadn’t gotten a look at the driver.
The figure behind the wheel had been little more than a shadow. Hunched, distorted, somehow ... wrong.
To Hazard’s surprise, the ragged fingernails of superstition scratched at the inner hollows of his bones, where usually it lay buried, quiet, forgotten. But he didn’t know what had stirred his fear or why a sense of the uncanny suddenly possessed him.
As the Mercedes roared away, Hazard didn’t squeeze off a few shots at it, as a movie cop would have done. This was a peaceful residential neighborhood in which people watching reruns of Seinfeld and other people cleaning vegetables for dinner had every right not to expect to be shot dead over their TV remotes and their cutting boards by the stray rounds of a reckless detective.
[155] He ran after the car, however, because he couldn’t get a clear take on the license number. Exhaust vapors, street spray, falling rain, and the gloom of day’s end conspired to shroud the rear plate.
He persisted, anyway, glad that he regularly used a treadmill. Although the Mercedes soon pulled away from him, a couple street-lamps and a clearing crosswind revealed the plate number in pieces.
Most likely the car had been stolen. The driver would dump it. Nevertheless, having the number was better than not having it.
Giving up the chase, Hazard headed back to the front lawn at the apartment house. He hoped that he’d shot the shooter dead instead of merely wounding him.
Minutes from now, an Officer Involved Shooting team would be on the scene. Depending on the personal philosophies of team members, they would either vigorously build a defense of Hazard’s actions and strive to exonerate him without any genuine search for the truth, which was fine by him, or they would seek the tiniest of meaningless inconsistencies and screw him to a cross of bogus evidence, haul him into the court of public opinion, and encourage the media to build a fire at his feet and give him the Saint Joan treatment.
The third possibility was that the OIS team might arrive without preconceptions, might examine the facts analytically, and might come to a dispassionate conclusion based on logic and reason, which would be jake with Hazard because he’d done nothing wrong.
Of course, he’d never heard of such a thing actually occurring, and he considered it far less likely than being eyewitness to eight flying reindeer and an elf-piloted sleigh three nights hence.
If the shooter was alive, he might assert that Hazard had killed Reynerd and then tried to frame him for it. Or that he’d been in the neighborhood, collecting donations to Toys for Tots, when he’d been caught in a cross fire, giving the real shooter a chance to escape.
Whatever he claimed, cop haters and aggressively brainless citizens would believe him.
More important, the shooter would find an attorney to file suit [156] against the city, eager to feed at the public trough. A settlement would be reached, regardless of the merits of the case, and Hazard would probably be sacrificed as part of the package. Politicians were no more protective of good law-enforcement officers than they were of the young interns whom they regularly abused and sometimes killed.
The shooter posed far less of a problem dead than alive.
Hazard could have moseyed back to the scene, giving the perp a chance to bleed out another critical pint, but he ran.
The killer lay where he’d fallen, face planted in the wet grass. A snail had ascended the back of his neck.
People were at windows, looking down, expressions blank, like dead sentinels at the gates of Hell. Hazard expected to see Reynerd at one of the panes, black-and-white, too glamorous for his time.
He turned the shooter faceup. Somebody’s son, somebody’s Homey, in his early twenties, with a shaved head, wearing a tiny coke spoon for an earring.
Hazard was glad to see the mouth stretched in a death rictus and the eyes full of eternity, but at the same time he was sickened by the sense of relief that flooded through him.
Standing in the storm, swallowing a hard-to-repress sludge of half-digested mamoul that burned in his throat, he used his Cell Phone to call the division and report the situation.
After making the call, he could have gone inside to watch from the foyer, but he waited in the downpour.
City lights reflected in every storm-glazed surface, yet when night swallowed twilight, darkness swelled in threatening coils, like a well-fed snake.
The rat-feet tap of palm-pelting rain suggested that legions of tree rodents scurried through the masses of arching fronds overhead.
Hazard saw two snails on the dead man’s face. He wanted to flick them off, but he hesitated to do so.
[157] Some onlookers at the windows would suspect him of tampering with evidence. Their sinister assumptions might charm the OIS team.
That scratching in his bones again. That sense of wrongness.
One dead upstairs, one dead here, sirens in the distance.
What the hell is going on? What the hell?
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