“I’m not entirely lucid right now.”
“I’m very sorry to trouble you at a time like this, but I was hoping you could tell me-”
“You worked with Wally before, didn’t you?”
“Yes. At Pacific. We met once.”
“Could you at least give me the courtesy of telling me what’s going on. Grazzo didn’t tell me a damn thing. Only that Wally was killed in some off-duty incident.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Wegland, but that’s all I know.” I felt sorry for the woman. But not sorry enough to tell her the truth. And knowing that I might only have the opportunity to ask her a quick question or two, I blurted out, “I’m guessing your husband had a home office. Can I quickly check it out?”
She stared at me, eyes glassy, gripping the back of the sofa for balance.
A moment later, her sister charged into the room. “Out!” she shouted at me, jerking her thumb at the door.
Ignoring her, I asked Grace, “This might be important, Mrs. Wegland: Do you know any reason why Wally would have any business in Pomona?”
She continued to gaze at me with a slack-jawed, unfocused expression.
The sister marched to the door and swung it open.
As I drifted toward the door, I asked again, “Anything about Pomona-”
“Now!” the sister shouted.
She slammed the door as soon as I stepped on the porch. A moment later, I heard Grace Wegland utter a muffled sentence. “Storage.” was the only word I could make out.
Sitting in my car, I mulled over what she had said: storage. What did that have to do with Pomona or the key I discovered?
I rolled the window down. The scent of a spring evening in Los Angeles suffused the car with an intoxicating blend of mock orange and freshly cut grass.
“Of course,” I muttered to myself. “Storage.”
The faint writing on the key was pomona rage. But now I realized that the first three letters of the second word had worn off the old brass key.
It should have read POMONA STORAGE.
CHAPTER 30
I pulled off the freeway about thirty miles east of downtown and rolled into the parking lot of Pomona Storage, one of the ubiquitous self-storage warehouses hard by the freeway that dot the Southern California landscape. I parked on the street and walked past the small office-closed for the night-and onto an asphalt lot with a dozen cinderblock warehouses. In the corner of the lot was the warehouse for spaces 1-60, but there was a security box outside the door, and I didn’t have the code.
After lingering by the back fence for fifteen minutes, I was relieved to see a pick-up truck screech to a halt in front of the warehouse. An unshaven man wearing jeans and cowboy boots hopped out, punched a code in the security box, and opened the door.
When I followed him inside, the man shouted, “What the-”
But he stopped in mid-sentence when I pulled my suit coat back, revealing the badge on my belt.
As I walked down the narrow, dim corridor lit by dusty lightbulbs, I recalled when I was a young patrolman and I was dispatched to a self-storage warehouse in Mar Vista to investigate a noxious odor emanating from a unit. My partner and I discovered a bloated, dripping, decaying body in a packing crate. Later, when I had worked the robbery table, I discovered that a few of the burglars I was tracking had stashed their loot in storage units all over town.
Pomona Storage, with its cracked cement floors, ceilings covered with tattered aluminum insulation panels, and stripped-down exterior, had been shoddily built decades ago. The warehouse where Wegland rented space, however, had one concession to modernity: climate control. Cool air blew from the ceiling vents and a digital thermostat on the wall read: 66. I figured the owners installed a heating and air-conditioning unit in one of the dozen warehouses on the property and then charged the customers-who wanted to protect their belongings from mildew-double the rent.
At space 52-a few doors down from the man in the cowboy boots-I pulled out the key, opened the padlock, raised the metal roll-up door, and flipped on the light. Inside was a cubicle the size of a large office, with a cement floor and plasterboard walls lined with metal shelves. Strewn about were dozens of empty cardboard boxes, a few bare picture frames, and mounds of balled up packing paper.
Too late, I thought. I wonder who got here first?
When I heard a loud rattling, I whirled around and saw the metal storage door closing and caught a quick glimpse of the bottom half of a body-just jeans and sneakers-and fingers sliding the door down. Before I could move, glass shattered on the cement floor. The door rattled to the ground. I heard the metallic click of the padlock. The moment I smelled the gasoline, the packing paper ignited, shooting flames above my head, singeing the boxes on the shelves.
I darted to the door and began kicking it, but there was little give. I banged on the plasterboard walls and began shouting for help. Suffocating from the smoke and beating on my flaming pants cuffs, I ran around the room, hammering the walls, desperately searching for a soft spot, an opening.
The boxes on the shelves had ignited and were shooting flames up to the ceiling. I wrapped my suit coat around my right hand and began knocking boxes off the shelves and onto the floor. I climbed the shelves like a ladder, my head grazing the plasterboard ceiling. The smoke was now so thick I couldn’t see the door. I had investigated enough arson-murders to know I had only a minute or two left until the room was sucked of oxygen.
I grabbed my gun and blasted the corner of the ceiling, emptying my magazine, the hefty 230-grain, 45- caliber hollow-points punching a fist-sized hole in the thin plasterboard. I slammed another magazine into the Beretta and, with a few more shots, widened the hole. Gripping the opening with both hands, I realized it was a false top, a shoddily constructed ceiling plopped on top of the framing. Straining, my feet wedged against the wall for leverage, I slid the ceiling over a few feet, and climbed up and onto the metal framing. I scuttled along the framing for about twenty-five yards, struggling in the darkness, coughing through the smoke, frantically searching for a wedge of light. I was trying to gauge which unit the man with the cowboy boots had opened.
Jamming both heels on the edge of one of the false ceilings, I rammed it open slightly and peered inside. I was exultant to discover the lights were on and the metal roll-up door was open; I knew I had hit the right space. When the man in the cowboy boots smelled the smoke, he must have dashed outside without closing the door.
I wriggled through the opening, landed on the cement floor, and sprinted out the door and toward the street. Blinded temporarily by a bright light, I saw the faint silhouette of a man standing beside his car, holding a flashlight above his shoulder. A moment later I saw the muzzle flash and heard the pop. I hit the ground, ripped the Beretta out of my shoulder holster and, as the shooter hopped into his Jeep Cherokee and careened down the street, squeezed the trigger and kept squeezing, the spent casings tinkling on the cement like a wind chime, until I realized my magazine was empty.
I darted out of the parking lot and into the middle of the street. Crouching, I spotted a half dozen shards of splintered glass. One of my shots had clipped a taillight.
CHAPTER 31
I sat on the curb for several minutes, hacking, spitting, and gulping air, my lungs burning, my chest aching. Easing into my car, my knees bruised and sore, my back aching, I drove a few blocks to a mini-mart, passing a convoy of fire trucks, sirens blazing.
When I paid for a bottle of water, the teenage clerk stared at me and said, “Dude, looks like you been
