I opened my eyes to red lights flashing against a shiny white wall. I saw medical supplies and heard the distant chatter of half a dozen police radios. Then a blurry-looking young man in an EMT uniform leaned over and peered into my eyes.
'Welcome back,' he said. But he kept splitting into two people, then slowly merging back into one. It was beginning to make me nauseous.
'Can you remember your name and why you're here?' he said. 'Don't ask any police questions until his division commander arrives,' a gruff voice said. I strained to look in the direction of the second man. It was then I realized I was on a metal gurney in the back of a rescue ambulance. Next to the open back door of the R. A. sat a big, blurry, blue blob. His uniform and fuzzy chevrons identified him as an LAPD sergeant. He was also splitting and merging. I was close to vomiting on myself, so I started breathing deeply in an attempt to avoid that humiliation.
'Can you remember where you are?' the EMT asked.
'Ambulance?' I said. But beyond that, I was lost. My recent past was a snowstorm that made no sense. Except for an overriding sense of panic, which I couldn't account for, my memory was a mess.
'You're at the El Rey Theatre on Wilshire,' the sergeant prompted. 'That help any?'
I nodded. It seemed vaguely familiar. I thought maybe I'd once gone to a music awards show there, but that was all I could dredge up.
'What's your name?' the EMT asked.
'I'm… I'm Scully. I'm Shane Scully,' I said, pretty sure I got it right.
Then he held up some fingers on his right hand and asked, 'How many do you see?'
'Too many,' I groaned.
The EMT turned to the sergeant. 'He's got a fairly severe concussion and memory loss, which in most cases is temporary and intermittent. It should start coming back. When we get him to MCJ make sure the infirmary there keeps a close eye on him. His left pupil is dilated. I don't like the look of it. I'll flag everything on my field treatment report.'
'MCJ?' I said. 'I don't wanta go there.' That was the Men's Central Jail on the ground floor of Parker Center. Why were they taking me to jail?
'We're not taking him there,' the sergeant said to the paramedic. 'The acting chief wants him to get his MT on the thirteenth floor. He wants to keep him away from the media. According to my watch commander, it's a nightmare at Parker Center.'
I lay there trying to get my head to clear. I couldn't quite remember what the thirteenth floor was, but felt pretty sure it was not a good place for me to go. Then my thoughts started to stabilize and I suddenly knew the thirteenth floor was the jail ward at County-USC hospital.
'Whoa, whoa,' I said. 'I don't want to go there, either!'
'Ain't your call, sport,' the uniformed sergeant said. My vision was beginning to come into sharper focus now and I saw that he had a big Irish face and the red bloated, potato nose of a heavy drinker. His nametag read: E. Riley.
Then my heart froze, as a big ugly piece of memory came crashing back, burying me under an avalanche of pain and sadness. Alexa was near death in a coma. She'd been shot in the head and was being operated on at ten a. M. tomorrow at UCLA. The memory, when it hit me, was so devastating it was like coming to grips with it for the first time. I took several minutes to get my heart and emotions recentered. I tried to sit up on the stretcher but was unable to because my left wrist was handcuffed to the metal rail of the gurney. My ribs on that side were sore.
'What the hell is this?' I said hotly, looking dumbfounded at my handcuffed wrist. Once I was vertical, my head started to throb and a horrible pain suddenly seared behind my eyes. 'Am I under arrest? What's the charge?'
'Don't know yet. That's gonna be up to the homicide dicks at RHD.'
'RHD? I didn't kill anybody.' But to be perfectly honest, I couldn't remember whether I did or didn't. I yanked my left hand violently against the restraint.
The sergeant leaned toward me. 'Calm yourself down, bud. You're in custody. My partner and I are gonna be with you till your division commander or the acting chief decides what they want to do. Now lie back down.' The EMT helped me back down on the metal gurney.
Slowly, a few vague thoughts started to wander around in my head, looking for their correct place in time. I waited until they fell into some kind of recognizable order. David Slade had been found dead in Alexa's car. Alexa had been found shot in the head in a house in Compton. The e-mails I'd found that broke my heart. I remembered I had some kind of a new theory, which might exonerate her, but I couldn't remember what it was. All of this came drifting slowly back to me. Little bits and pieces of confusion. When assembled in the correct order, they formed an ugly mosaic. But everything that had happened inside the El Rey Theatre was still a deep, black hole.
Then I remembered the mini tape recorder with the Malugas' recorded conversation threatening the lives of Curtis Clark and Lionel Wright. I didn't want to explain to detectives how I got that without a warrant, so I snuck my left hand under me and felt for the unit, which was still in my back pocket. By moving to my left I could just get my handcuffed wrist to the strap hanging off the tape recorder. I had to find a way to get rid of it before I was admitted and searched at the thirteenth floor. I worked the recorder slowly out of my pocket by pulling the strap, then pushed it between the pad of the gurney and the wall of the truck. I lay listening to the cacophony of police radios outside and tried to tighten and refine the chronology of the last two days. Little by little details sharpened. But my memory only extended to the moment where I followed the five g-sters in the black Impala SS into the alley behind the theater. After that, nothing.
Then Sally Quinn appeared at the back of the ambulance and showed the sergeant her badge.
'I'm his partner,' she said, looking past him at me.
'You can't talk to the suspect,' Riley said. 'Step back. The sixth floor is all over this, so we're gonna do it exactly right.'
At that moment, his shoulder radio squawked his name and he pushed the transmit button and said, 'Whatta you got, Kyle?'
'Deputy Chief Ramsey is sending two fifth-floor guys over to County-USC to interview Scully. Ramsey wants him transported pronto,' Kyle's voice buzzed through the speaker. Then he added, 'Deputy Chief says don't let anybody near him. Strict isolation.'
'Shane, I'm coming with you,' Sally said, moving forward.
'The hell you are. Step away, Detective,' Sgt. Riley barked, blocking her with a beefy arm. He already knew he'd caught a potential career-ending red ball and that any slight deviation from orders would get him body- slammed with a reprimand and, depending on sixth-floor politics, even a possible mandatory retirement.
Sally stepped back as the sergeant triggered his mike. 'Get your ass back here, Kyle. We both gotta ride with this guy during transport.'
What the hell had happened inside that theater? I wondered. The whole thing was white noise in my head. I couldn't even come up with a half-assed story to save myself.
In less than a minute, the second cop, Kyle, pushed past Sally Quinn, climbed into the ambulance, and pulled the door shut, taking my worried partner from view. He was tall and slight of build with a narrow chin. The two chevrons on the sleeve of Kyle's uniform identified him as a Police Officer Two.
'Let's roll,' Riley said.
The EMT knocked on the panel between the truck and the cab and in a second we were in motion, heading toward the county jail with my future in serious doubt.
Chapter 46
The thirteenth floor jail ward at USC Medical is a county facility policed entirely by the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department. My experience over the years has been that the deputies there seemed to delight in making their brother LAPD officers wait with their prisoners for as long as humanly possible before checking them in and providing treatment. I figured I was in for a long, frustrating night.
Attempting a clandestine arrival, my police guards instructed the ambulance driver to swing around to the
