LA Requiem

'Keep your damned head with that bomb, Riggio. How's your body temp?'

'I'm okay.'

In truth, he was so hot that he felt dizzy, but he wanted to make sure he had good clean shots. He circled the box like a man in a space suit, getting front, side, and off angles, then pointed the Real Time straight down for a top view. That's when he saw a shadow that hadn't been visible in the side views.

'Buck, you see that? I think I see something.'

'What?'

'Here in the overhead view. Take a snap.'

A thin, hairlike shadow emerged from the side of one pipe and extended up through the spool. This wire wasn't attached to the others, which confused Riggio until a sudden, unexpected thought occurred to him: Maybe the spool was there only to hide this other wire.

In that moment, fear crackled through him, and his bowels clenched. He called out to Buck Daggett, but the words did not form.

Riggio thought, 'Oh, God.'

The bomb detonated at a rate of twenty-seven thousand feet per second, twenty-two times faster than a nine millimeter bullet leaves the muzzle of a pistol. Heat flashed outward in

a burst of white light hot enough to melt iron. The air pressure spiked from a normal fifteen pounds per square inch to twenty-two hundred pounds, shattering the iron pipes into jagged shrapnel that punched through the kevlar suit like hyper-fast bullets. The shock wave slammed into his body with a force of over three hundred thousand pounds, crushing his chest, rupturing his lungs, and separating his unprotected hands. Charlie Riggio was lifted fourteen feet into the air and thrown a distance of thirty-eight feet.

Even this close to the point of detonation, Riggio might have survived if this had been, as he first suspected, a garage bomb cooked up by a gangbanger with makeshift materials.

It wasn't.

Bits of tarmac and steel fell around him like bloody rain, long after Charlie Riggio was dead.

'Tell me about the thumb. I know what you told me on the phone, but tell me everything now.'

Starkey inhaled half an inch of cigarette, then flicked ash on the floor, not bothering with the ashtray. She did that every time she was annoyed with being here, which was always.

'Please use the ashtray, Carol.'

'I missed.'

'You didn't miss.'

Detective-2 Carol Starkey took another deep pull on the cigarette and crushed it out. When she first started seeing this therapist, Dana Williams wouldn't let her smoke during session. That was three years and four therapists ago. In the time Starkey was working her way through the second and third

therapists, Dana had gone back to the smokes herself, and now didn't mind. Sometimes they both smoked and the goddamned room clouded up like the Imperial Valley with an inversion layer.

Starkey shrugged.

'No, I guess I didn't miss. I'm just pissed off, is all. It's been three years, and here I am back where I started.'

'With me.'

'Yeah. Like in three years I shouldn't be over this shit.'

'So tell me what happened, Carol. Tell me about the little girl's thumb.'

Starkey fired up another cigarette, then settled back to recall the little girl's thumb. Starkey was down to three packs a day. The progress should have made her feel better, but didn't.

'It was Fourth of July. This idiot down in Venice decides to make his own fireworks and give them away to the neighbors. A little girl ends up losing the thumb and index finger of her right hand, so we get the call from the emergency room.'

'Who is'we'?'

'Me and my partner that day, Beth Marzik.'

'Another woman?'

'Yeah. There's two of us in CCS.'

'Okay.'

'By the time we get down there, the family's gone home, so we go to the house. The father's crying, saying how they found the finger, but not the thumb, and then he shows us these homemade firecrackers that are so damned big she's lucky she didn't lose the hand.'

'He made them?'

'No, a guy in the neighborhood made them. I ask the father where he got the stuff, but he won't tell us. He says the man didn't mean any harm. I say, your daughter has been maimed, sir, other children are at risk, sir, but the guy won't cop. I ask the mother, but the guy says something in Spanish, and now she won't talk either.'

'Why won't they tell you?'

'People are assholes.'

The world according to Carol Starkey, Detective-2 with

LAPD's Criminal Conspiracy Section. Dana made a note of that in a leather-bound notebook, an act which Starkey never liked. The notes gave physical substance to her words, leaving Starkey feeling vulnerable because she thought of the notes as evidence.

Starkey had more of the cigarette, then shrugged and went on with it.

'These bombs are six inches long, right? We call'm Mexican Dynamite. So many of these things are going off, it sounds like the academy pistol range, so Marzik and I start a door-to-door. But the neighbors are just like the father—no one's telling us anything, and I'm getting madder and madder. Marzik and I are walking back to the car when I look down and there's the thumb. I just looked down and there it was, this beautiful little thumb, so I scooped it up and brought it back to the family.'

'On the phone, you told me you tried to make the father eat it.'

'Well, I grabbed his collar and pushed it into his mouth. I did that.'

Dana shifted in her chair, Starkey reading from her body language that she was uncomfortable with the image. Starkey couldn't blame her.

'It's easy to understand why the family filed a complaint.'

Starkey finished the cigarette and crushed it out.

'The family didn't complain.'

'Then why—?'

'Marzik. I guess I scared Marzik. She had a talk with my lieutenant, and Kelso threatened to send me to the bank for an evaluation.'

LAPD maintained its Behavioral Sciences Unit in the Far East Bank building on Broadway, in Chinatown. Most officers lived in abject fear of being ordered to the bank, correctly believing that it called into question their stability, and ended any hope of career advancement. They had an expression for it: Overdrawn on the career account.

'If I go to the bank, they'll never let me back on the bomb squad.'

'And you keep asking to go back?'

'It's all I've wanted since I got out of the hospital.'

Irritated now, Starkey stood and lit another cigarette. Dana studied her, which Starkey also didn't like. It made her feel watched, as if Dana was waiting for her to do or say something more that she could write down. It was a valid interview technique which Starkey often used herself. If you said nothing, people often felt compelled to fill the silence.

'The job is all I have left, damnit.'

Starkey blurted it, regretting the defensive edge in her voice, and felt even more embarrassed when Dana again scribbled a note.

'So you told Lieutenant Kelso that you would seek help on your own?'