But McGrave doesn't walk in.
He drives in.
The Crown Vic blasts through the front door and takes most of the wall with it, plowing over Otto before he can even squeeze the trigger.
McGrave gets out of the car in a rain of dust and debris and squints down at Otto's arm sticking out from underneath the front driver's-side wheel.
There's a colorful tattoo of a woman embracing a bear on the dead man's twitching arm. The twitching makes the tattoo look like a crudely animated cartoon.
McGrave takes out his. 357 and strides casually into the living room.
He couldn't possibly be happier than he is right now.
And the feeling isn't diminished one bit when he sees Richter, his face hidden by the ski mask, standing behind Frank Russell and holding an automatic weapon to the dizzy ex-cop's head.
McGrave raises his gun and aims it at Richter, who stands across the room full of ceramic antiquities. 'LAPD. Game over.'
Richter cocks his head. 'You're really a cop?'
'I am,' McGrave says.
'Where did we go wrong?'
'You made two mistakes. Your first was using a Comcast cable truck in a Time Warner Cable neighborhood.'
'I'll have to remember that next time. What was the second?'
'Picking a hostage who is screwing my wife.'
McGrave fires.
The bullet smashes through the three-thousand-year-old stone toilet, obliterating it, and hits Russell in the upper chest, passing through him into Richter's shoulder.
The German tumbles backwards and fires, spraying the room with bullets.
McGrave dives to the floor as glass and ceramics explode all around him.
Richter scrambles out of the room and down a hallway. McGrave runs up and checks on Russell, who is wide awake and wishes he wasn't. His new suit is soaked with blood. At least his teeth are fine.
'Are you going to live?' McGrave asks.
'Yeah,' Russell says.
'My aim must be off,' McGrave says, then hurries after Richter.
The BMW is running, Serena is at the wheel, and the garage door is open as Richter staggers in, clutching his bleeding shoulder. He gets into the car. She peels out, filling the garage with smoke.
A moment later McGrave rushes in, spots the Mercedes, and grabs the key. He gets in the car and backs out fast, scraping the passenger side of the Mercedes against a pillar and shearing off the mirror.
The chase is on.
Los Angeles is the only big city that's got a small mountain range in the middle of it.
But that's part of the whole status thing. The mountains are a natural dividing line between the haves in Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, and Hancock Park on one side and the have-nots in the tract home and shopping mall wastelands of the San Fernando Valley on the other.
Mulholland Drive is a two-lane, serpentine road that runs along the crest of the mountains and is named after the guy who built a two-hundred-mile aqueduct to drain water from the Northern California delta down to Los Angeles just so developers could get rich building homes in a place that otherwise is inhospitable to human life.
The whole city is a carefully constructed lie built on greed.
So now you know why they make so many movies, television shows, and fighter jets here.
And why Los Angeles has more plastic surgeons per capita than anywhere else on earth.
Serena is not only beautiful, but she can drive.
She heads up the hill to Mulholland, then weaves through the traffic at an insane speed, deftly avoiding cars going in both directions without hitting the hillside on her left or going off the cliff on her right.
She makes it look easy.
McGrave is coming up fast behind them, weaving wildly around cars, going in and out of oncoming traffic, scraping the hillside and the guardrail.
He makes it look scary.
'Who is that guy?' Serena asks in German.
Richter takes off his mask and looks over his shoulder as McGrave sideswipes the car Serena just avoided in his zeal to catch up to them.
'A dead man,' Richter says.
Serena passes an SUV that's in front of them and, as she does, Richter leans out the window and shoots out the SUV's tires.
The SUV spins out of control, right across McGrave's path.
He swerves into the other lane, clipping the spinning SUV with his front passenger-side bumper.
The impact triggers his air bags.
He keeps on going, pedal to the floor, even though he can't see a thing with the bag in his face.
The car scrapes the guardrail, shooting off sparks, as he heads towards a hairpin turn.
Serena is already in the turn, swerving into the opposite lane to pass a slow car in front of her.
She doesn't see the Hollywood Celebrity Homes Tour bus coming around the bend until it's too late.
Serena jerks the wheel hard to the right to avoid a head-on collision and tries to squeeze between the bus and the guardrail.
And gets rear-ended by the car she just passed.
She loses control, smashes through the guardrail, and goes off the cliff.
The BMW flies into the night sky and then drops into the deep canyon below.
McGrave pushes the air bag out of his way, sees the curve and the bus coming at him, and wrenches the steering wheel hard to the left at the last possible second.
The bus grinds to a stop, brakes squealing like pigs.
McGrave spins and ends across the lanes. The bus hits the passenger side of his car, shattering his windows, buckling his dashboard, and snapping the burled walnut trim. The side air bags all go off.
He scrambles out of the crumpled Mercedes and staggers to the broken guardrail just in time to see the BMW swallowed by the dark depths of the canyon below.
Captain Roy Thackery has been a cop for twenty-five years and has a nice side gig working as a technical consultant on one of those TV series where the cops do autopsies themselves, wear Armani suits, drive vintage muscle cars, live on the beach, and can access the cameras on spy satellites with their cell phones.
He answers incredibly stupid questions from the writers, offers them 'authentic cop talk' that he totally makes up, and shares outrageously embellished anecdotes from the cases he's worked.
The producers think that his input gives their show its 'gritty verisimilitude,' as if having their ex-stripper turned Navy SEAL turned homicide detective character say a few words from an actual cop makes her any more believable than, say, a talking goldfish who solves crimes.
But for his $500 an episode, he's glad to tell them that it does.
What he really wants is to write an episode himself. That's a $30,000 payday, not including residuals, and he figures if his script is any good, it could lead to something more, like maybe a producing gig, maybe a series of his own someday.
