riverbed.
Black metal drain caps, thirty feet in diameter, each with two triangular cutouts on the top, faintly resembled the heads of huge black cats. Glendale taggers had completed the impression by spray-painting the metal with white noses, eyes, and whiskers.
They moved in single file, in broad daylight, under the leaden stares of the painted drain covers. Shane led the way along the wash, under several bridges, until they got to a huge metal drainage pipe, tunneling deep into the side of the hill. As they entered the mouth of the seven-foot-high sewer, they could hear things slithering and rustling in the inky darkness ahead of them. When they had gone far enough so that there was only a dim residue of sunlight from the tunnel's mouth behind them, Shane stopped.
'This is good enough,' he said, and spun Mayweather around.
The deputy chief started to gurgle and wheeze around his sock gag, but Shane paid no attention. He knew there was a ladder about where they were standing that led to the surface a few hundred feet above.
Shane had been in this sewer drain two years before on a tip that it contained the body of a dead rape victim, a ten-year-old child. He'd found the girl's mutilated corpse in the tunnel, her blond hair and tiny body caked with mud and covered with feasting rats. He had had nightmares about it for a month afterward. He never caught her killer.
Shane found the ladder, more or less by feel. He uncuffed May-weather's right wrist, dragged the disoriented deputy chief over, and hooked him to the ladder with both hands behind his back through the metal rail.
'Gimme the nine,' he said to Alexa. She handed it to him, and he stuffed it into his belt. Then they set up the video camera. It was a Sony compact with a sun gun on the front. The telescoped tripod was fitted neatly into the bottom of the video carrying case. Mayweather, blindfolded and terrified, harrumphed and squirmed at the ladder. Shane secured the camera on the tripod, then turned on the sun gun. The single beam of harsh light hit the deputy chief in the chest. Shane adjusted it until it was right in Mayweather's face, then stepped forward and yanked the blindfold off the startled deputy chief.
'Welcome,' Shane said softly, making his voice loony but also cold and hard as a steel blade.
'Scully?' Mayweather said, blinking his eyes frantically. Shane knew his prisoner couldn't see much, forced to look directly into the bright light.
'Mr. Scully! Let's have some respect for your host.'
'You're gonna go away forever,' Mayweather said angrily. 'This is the most outrageous thing I've ever heard of. You're history. You'll both rot in jail for this. Sergeant Hamilton, you're smart, there's still a chance for you. Just turn me loose, I'll do what I can '
'Shut up and listen!' Shane said. 'If I don't get exactly what I want, this is where you check out, Tom.'
'You can't possibly be serious.'
'Hey, asshole, think about it!' Shane screamed, performing now, trying to sound demented and out of control. 'You think I'd pull this if I weren't desperate? You've got a fucking life-ending problem here!'
Mayweather's eyes darted around right and left, then back to center. All he could see was the blinding light of the sun gun and occasionally Shane's silhouette as he paced. Bathed by the intense glare, his pupils had closed up like a Main Street junkie's.
'You screw up down here, Tommy, and you're on the lobby wall.' A place just inside the huge double doors at Parker Center where they put pictures of all the dead policemen, under a huge gold emblem of the department and the letters EOW end of watch.
'Now, here's how it goes. You tell me everything. I already know a lot, so if you even leave out one little shred, I'm gonna… I'm gonna park a nine between your eyes.' Adding a little insanity into his routine, some Mel Gibson Lethal Weapon madness.
Street cops had to learn to play different roles to get confessions. 'Loose-cannon homicidal maniac' was a favorite. Trouble was, once you'd seen the show, it rarely worked twice. Shane didn't think Chief Mayweather, with his shelfful of basketball trophies and high-profile sports background, had ever spent much time on the street. He probably went right from the Academy to Press Relations or the Chief Administrative Staff. Hopefully, he would be disoriented and frightened enough to buy the act.
'You wouldn't dare kill me. You wouldn't dare,' Mayweather said, but he sounded now as if he was trying to convince himself, not Shane.
'You don't think I'll kill ya; watch this, asshole.' He pointed Alexa's Beretta at the wall beside the deputy chief's shaved head. He aimed it wide so that the shot would ricochet off the concrete a few inches from Mayweather, then fly harmlessly up the tunnel, into the dark. But he wanted the bullet to be close enough for Mayweather to feel its draft.
Shane fired the gun. The echo of the 9mm pistol was deafening in the enclosed space. Chief Mayweather actually yelped when the gun fired. The slug hit inches from the side of his head, throwing plaster and dust in all directions, then whined away up the tunnel into the dark. Speckles of blood suddenly appeared on Mayweather's face where some flying concrete chips had hit his left cheek.
'Shit, Alexa, this thing pulls right,' Shane said, keeping it loony and loose.
'Whatta you doing?' she shouted. 'Are you nuts? Stop it! You can't kill him… You can't! I don't wanna go down for murder!' Picking up her cue perfectly, she turned on the camera without having to be told. Shane heard it whir softly behind him, and just like Coy Love, he stayed to the side, out of the frame.
'Okay, okay… I won't. You're right you're right. Jesus, what's wrong with me… It's just… Ahhh, fuck it! This guy is going!' Shane pointed the gun at the chief and pulled the hammer back. The metallic click echoed in the silence.
'Don't, Shane. Please!' she shouted, in standard Actors Studio over-the-top fashion. Mayweather was too panicked to spot their bad performances.
'Please… please stop him. Don't let him shoot me,' the deputy chief begged Alexa. This was a new Tom Mayweather; no longer the officious police commander, this one was shitting his pants, pleading for his life.
'How can I stop, Tommy? You're such a hopeless prick. I can't believe all the worthless shit you've been pulling, starting with screwing me for Ray's death, going all the way up the penal code to double felony kidnapping.'
'What're you talking about?' he said, his lips quivering, blood beginning to run down the side of his face where the cement chips had cut him, staining his collar.
'What I'm saying, Tom, is I want answers. Don't you get it? I'm fucking pissed off! I'm through taking your shit. You don't walk away from a bad FI down here. You get buried in this fucking wash!' Shane was taking time on his performance now, first working on his loony sound, then screaming, making it unstable and completely out of control.
'Look, I don't know what's going on,' Mayweather blurted.
'Come on, you think I'm a fucking moron? You're the deputy chief, asshooolehe said, dragging the word out, leaning on it. 'You're Burl's guy. You think I'm gonna believe that? You took all those files outta Zell's office. Your fuckin' prints are all over the folders.' He was pacing madly back and forth, strobing the floodlight, keeping his head turned from the lens but throwing a moving shadow against Mayweather and the sweating concrete tunnel wall. The effect was eerie.
'I just get money. I don't ask questions. I do what I'm told.' His voice shook badly.
'Is that how you can afford that shiny new sailboat?' Shane asked.
'I… I… Yes.'
'And you know what? You know what? You know what I'm feeling?' He was rolling his words around like marbles in a tin dish. 'I'm thinkin' you and Brewer and Ray and his whole fuckin' den are just scum-sucking pieces of shit! You sold out the fuckin' job for a fuckin' sailboat.'
Mayweather was breathing through his mouth now. His fear was so pronounced, he'd forgotten to swallow; drool started coming out the right side of his mouth, running down his chin. He was close to snapping. Close to the edge of temporary insanity.
'Hey, Shane, calm down, for Chrissake. Whatta you doing?' Alexa said, seeing the dangerous change in Mayweather, not wanting him to snap and start babbling. 'The man wants to talk why don't you let him?'
'Tom, you gonna talk?' Shane said, sounding a little more in control. 'You talk, maybe you could live to go sailing again… Maybe just maybe. But I need answers, man. I can't take no more shit! I can't… I just fucking can't.' A little insane exasperation.
