hair-trigger demurely cocked.
Yippie could dimly feel his own heartbeat; and then, faintly, the renewed whispers of his assailants.
Dogs barked. He heard a distant siren, the droning of helicopters.
He tried to move his fingers. They felt heavy and wet and hot. Just below them, he felt Esmeralda tingling, her body cool, waiting.
Lights went on up Orchid Street-on Sagebrush Road and Terra Vista, the next streets over. Neighbors came out onto their porches.
Still lurking at Yippie’s window, the killer could feel his own hot sweat, each drop a burning heartbeat. As for his heart, he felt it drumming in his chest, confident and strong.
He chuckled and stood up. He was dressed, as were his fleeing cohorts, in a ninja outfit.
“Butterbrains,” he muttered, watching them struggle over the back fence.
He could hear neighbors, slightly louder now, calling out in alarm.
The killer lifted the sawed-off shotgun through the jagged gaps in the wood and glass.
Three more blasts followed for good luck.
A curtain of fire lit the room.
Rooster-tails of splatter dripped down the walls.
Esmeralda slid from Yippie’s big fingers and clattered onto the floor.
The good cop was dead.
A dozen neighbors were milling around the front gate gossiping anxiously when Cravitz drove up twenty minutes later.
He fumbled with the keys, unlocked the gate, and hurried inside.
Unholstering his Beretta, Cravitz moved through the shadowy rooms and hallways. Then he went into Yippie’s bedroom. Ignoring the bed, Cravitz looked around at the shattered window, the floor covered with splinters and glass, the streams of blood and flesh drying on the walls. He walked to the window and peered into the yard. He could make out a few footprints in the dust.
Cravitz gathered himself and turned to face the bed where his old friend lay.
He walked over and stared down at the body.
His hard gray eyes began to work, running along Yippie’s corpse.
He lightly touched his old friend’s forehead.
The lacerations and abrasions from the wounds formed linear patterns. The skull was shattered. His buddy must have been rising up when the killer struck. Cravitz got down on the floor and retrieved some black threads he noticed among the splinters.
He wrapped the threads in a handkerchief and left the lion’s share for the cops. On the edge of the shattered window sill, Cravitz noticed a bullet hole.
Cravitz turned sharply and stared at the bloody nightstand. The briefcase with the dope was gone too. There was a pool of blood gathering just below Yippie’s outstretched hand.
“Esmeralda fell there,” Cravitz said out loud. As he looked closer, he realized the killer had stepped in the splatter. “I know who did this.”
Thirty minutes later L.A.P.D. Homicide detective Manuel Maximillian “Manny” Vargas and his partner Will Dockery arrived. Cravitz, who’d met the detectives through Yippie, walked them through the murder scene.
As Cravitz turned to leave, Vargas said, “You have anything to do with this, Cravitz?”
“I’m a suspect, Vargas? I called you, remember?”
“Just humor me-you do this?”
“Naw, but there are fibers on the window from someone who did. Enough for Dockery here to make himself a skirt.”
“This Yippie’s place?” Vargas asked.
“My brother’s,” Cravitz said simply. “Yip was thinking about buying it. Cash let him try it out for the month-”
“Bullshit,” Dockery said.
“Stay where we can find you, Quick,” Vargas said.
“Yeah,” Cravitz replied.
Cravitz blazed past the afternoon traffic like a bolt of light. Cash was standing at his safe, smoking a long Cuban stogie, when Cravitz barged in. The safe was open. A 9mm pistol lay on the conference table.
“Where’s the smack?”
“Robbed,” Cravitz said.
“You messin’ with my money, lil’ brother. I could kill you, if you wasn’t kin. Might kill you anyway,” Cash said quietly, expelling a jet of smoke. His hard brown eyes turned black.
“You kill Yippie?” Cravitz said.
“What th’ fuck?”
“He’s murdered. You do it?”
“Why pick me, boy. I’m straight as a stick.”
“Bennita,” Cravitz said. “She put you up to this?”
Cash extracted a fresh cigar from his humidor, clipped it, and handed it to his brother. Cravitz hesitated, then took the smoke and bent over the table as his big brother lit it.
“Her brats wrecked the damn room. They was mad when they heard you took the yella dope,” Cash said. “Hi-C an’ nem had to bust ’em up a bit. You think Bennita and them punks whacked Yippie?”
“One of the killers stepped in the blood. That print is from the new Lebron James sneaker. Monster P had on a pair this morning when Yip and me had to spank them. Whoever did this got Esmeralda and the dope too.”
Cash buzzed in Hi-C and picked up his pistol. “Let’s go find these mutts,” he said to Cravitz.
Cash banged on Bennita and Bingbong’s fifth-floor suite with the barrel of his 9mm Glock. Then he used the pass key to go inside.
Brain splatter covered the walls of the suite. Bingbong Jackson lay dead in a pool of blood. A hole resembling a teardrop perforated his brow.
“Esmeralda,” Cash said.
“Bennita Bangs,” Cravitz said.
Cash got on the horn to his lowlife friends. He’d pay $5,000 to the snitch who led him to the killers.
Cravitz cellphoned Vargas. “I suggest your boys shoot to kill.”
Vargas said, “If you kill anyone we’ll arrest you, Cravitz-like any other thug. We’re bringing ’em in alive.”
“Umhum,” Cravitz said, and hung up.
He called his office manager, Betty Penny.
Within an hour, the Central Detection operatives had leaped into the hunt.
They hit the liquor stores and barbershops, the newsstands and pool halls-spreading the word that Yippie Calzone, the storied L.A. champion of the streets, had been ruthlessly cut down, by outsiders, busters
One of mothers of the boys that Yippie Calzone had killed went on TV and said it was God’s will, and that the pig should burn in hell. The other mother said that no one, not even a bad cop, should be murdered in his sleep.
Folks recalled good things Yippie Calzone had done.
He had mentored kids in South L.A.-black, brown, yellow, white. He was a good man.
The dashing new mayor, Arturo Quijada “Miracle” Mendez, a man for whom Yippie Calzone had been a boyhood hero, gave a public address.
“These are dangerous days,” the visibly shaken mayor told the people. “We ask for calm.”
Willie Song, one of the top gun dealers in L.A., called Cash to confirm he’d sold not one, but four shotguns to
