smoking around slower cars, tailgating, honking his horn, and passing in the service lane. Despite all his frantic driving, every time I looked back, the three federal sedans were still right back there.
'Can't you shake these assholes?' I said. 'They're not in Ferraris, it's a flicking Escort and two Toyotas.'
'Gotta have more than just stock blocks under the hood,' Broadway said.
He put more foot into it, careening between slower vehicles, finally hitting the off ramp at Fifth Street and roaring down the hill toward Parker Center.
'Let's see if these humps want to have it out in the police garage,' he said.
He broke a red light at Sixth, and another at Wilshire, then hung another right and headed straight toward the Glass House. The huge, boxy building loomed in front of us.
'Going under,' Broadway shouted, sounding like a crazed subcommander as he drove into the garage.
He grabbed his badge, and as we roared up to the guard shack, held his tin out to the rookie probationer guarding the parking structure and frantically signaled the young cop to raise the electronic gate arm. The wooden bar went up and we went down.
I turned just in time to see the Escort flying into the garage after us. The driver didn't wait for the closing arm. He broke right through, snapping it off. Splintered wood went flying. The two Toyotas followed.
The startled police rookie pulled his gun and ran down the ramp. A siren went off somewhere.
Roger held the SUV in a hard right, our tires squealing loudly on the concrete as we descended level after level. Emdee pulled his gun out of his shoulder holster and laid it on his lap.
'You aren't really planning on shooting FBI agents are you?' I asked.
'Depends,' Rowdy answered, his mouth set in a hard line.
We finally reached the bottom level, four floors below the street and were flying toward a cement wall.
'Bottom floor,' Broadway announced. 'Perfume and body bags.' The Navigator spun right, and skidded to a stop, inches from the concrete. We bailed out just as the federal sedans squealed to a stop behind us. Doors flew open and six guys with thick necks and hard faces jumped out. Everybody had a badge in one hand and a gun in the other. Then came the shout-off.
'You're under arrest! FBI!'
'Stick it up your ass, Joe Bob!'
'Federal agents! Throw the guns down! Assume the position!'
'Eat me!'
The sound of police sirens now filled the garage, growing louder, echoing in our ears. Seconds later four squad cars, called in by the garage probationer, roared down the ramp and careened to a stop. Eight uniforms from the mid-watch jumped out with guns drawn. I heard more running footsteps pounding on the pavement.
'LAPD! Drop your weapons,' a burly uniformed sergeant from an L-car boomed. It was chaos. Everybody was pointing guns, waving badges and screaming.
Then the elevator on the far side of the garage opened and Tony Filosiani charged out, gun in hand. The garage security alarm sounded in his office and had brought him running.
'What the fuck is this?' the Day-Glo Dago bellowed.
'These men are under arrest for failure to heed a direct order from the head of California Homeland Security,' Agent Zant shouted hotly. 'We're FBI! They're coming with us!'
'No they're not,' Tony said.
'This is a federal issue,' Zant brayed. 'It involves national security.'
'No it ain't,' Tony yelled back. 'It's the LAPD garage, and it involves your fuckin' imminent arrest and custody.'
Zant looked startled.
'You guys may not have noticed, but you're way the fuck outnumbered here,' Tony growled.
The FBI agents slowly turned. By now thirty cops had them surrounded with their guns drawn. Some were in uniforms, some in plainclothes. The feds turned back to Tony.
'And just who the hell are you, fat boy?' Zant asked angrily.
'I'm the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and you six cherries got thirty seconds to get off LAPD property. Failure to comply gets you a bunk downtown.'
'We're federal agents,' the big, pockmarked ASAC said. 'You can't jail us. Are you nuts?'
'You obviously ain't been reading my press releases,' Tony sneered.
After a minute of indecision, Zant knew he was beaten. He motioned to the others and they got into their cars.
What followed was low comedy. Everyone was so jammed in down there that turning their vehicles around was next to impossible. Finally they got it done and a trail of red taillights retreated up the ramp.
Tony's chest was still heaving, out of breath from all the adrenaline. 'This parking lot ain't secure,' he finally said. 'We gotta get a metal arm on that entrance.' Then he turned and pointed at me. 'This was supposed to be a covert op. Where's the fucking marching band?'
'I think this Navigator may still have a few bugs on it,' Broadway said.
'All three of you. My office! Five minutes!' Then Tony turned and strode back to the elevator and left us there.
'We're in deep doo,' Broadway said.
'Yeah, but at least we won't have to listen to Barry Manilow,' I answered.
Chapter 39
You guys were supposed to be running a low-profile no-see-um ground op, but less than ten hours after you leave this office, half a dozen feds chase ya into the police garage.' Tony was a red-faced, five-anda-half-foot blood pressure problem, standing in the center of his office with his feet spread, glaring at Rowdy and Snitch, Cubio and me.
'Don't you get it?' Tony continued. 'If the humps down at Homeland decide to make all of you disappear, I can't do shit. It's worse than just them catching you out there disobeying Virtue's direct orders, they also probably know exactly how you're doing it.'
'How?' I asked. 'All we did was go to a Lakers game and to a Russian restaurant.'
He crossed to his desk, retrieved a small box, and emptied it onto his blotter. Ten or twelve miniaturized bugs, none of them any bigger than the transmitter we pulled off the Fairlane spilled out onto his desktop.
'So far this is what Sam Oxman in Computer Services found in our phones and ceiling fixtures. We also turned up scans on half a dozen computers, including Alexa's and the main databank at CTB. So far, thank God, we haven't found anything in the ME's office.'
'Keep looking,' I said. 'There has to be something down there.'
'We're still on it, but after finding this stuff, I also notified the DA and the Superior Court. If somebody wants info on our activities this bad, it could also extend to other branches of municipal law enforcement, like prosecutors and judges.'
I glanced around the office with concern and Tony waved my look off.
'This room is clean now,' he said. 'We went through it twice. Found four transmitters on this floor alone. Somebody in our own house must be planting these things, 'cause security's too tight for anybody else to get in here and do it. I'm gonna give everybody in ESD a close look and a lie-detector test.' He grabbed up a couple of the bugs from the blotter and held them up. 'Some of this stuff is so new we've never seen anything like it before. We had to use a microwave zap to shut the damn things off. They've got batteries the size of a pinhead, and they're sound activated. They run on such low power that our ESD analyst said they could have up to a twenty-year life.'
'If ya let hornets nest in yer outhouse, it's hard t'get pissed when they buzz down and sting yer ass,' Emdee contributed wisely. Tony groaned at the analogy.
'Do you think these came from Americypher Technologies?' I said, looking at Emdee and Roger. Each picked up a bug and studied it. It was hard to tell because none of them had brand markings. Finally, Broadway shrugged.
