His plan was to wait until Tammy left for her regular morning auditions. As soon as she passed the voyeur, Pullman would jog up to the man, brandish the bat and shout to her to call the police, this man was stalking her.
He’d make the guy lie on his belly until the cops arrived; he and Tammy would have a good ten minutes to talk.
Wiping his sweating hand on his slacks, he got a firmer grip on the taped bat handle.
The opening front door of Tammy’s apartment interrupted the fantasy.
She stepped outside and pulled her expensive shades down over her eyes. Today, her black hair sported a bright-red headband, which matched her finger- and toenail polish. She had her blue purse over her shoulder and was carrying her portfolio. She started down the walk.
The voyeur tensed. The clipping ceased.
Pullman gripped the bat harder yet. He took a deep breath, rehearsed his lines once more.
Ready, set…
But then the voyeur stepped back. He set down the clippers and began fumbling with the front of his overalls.
What—?
Oh, Jesus, he was unzipping himself and reaching inside.
He
“No!” Pullman shouted and ran forward, waving the bat over his head.
“Hey!” The rapist blinked in panic and stumbled back, tripping over a small wicket fence around a mulch bed. He landed hard and cried out in pain, his breath knocked out of his lungs, gasping.
Tammy stopped, turning toward the commotion, frowning.
Pullman yelled to her, “Call the police! This guy’s been watching you. He’s a rapist!” He turned back to the blond man, waving the bat. “Don’t move! I’ll—”
His words were cut off by the stunning explosion of gunshots from directly behind him.
Pullman howled in panic and dropped to his knees as the bullets slammed into the stalker’s head and neck, leaving a bloody mist around him. The man shivered once and slumped to the ground, dead.
“Christ!” Pullman whispered in shock and slowly rose to his feet. He turned toward Tammy and frowned in astonishment to see her holding a large black pistol, which she’d pulled out of her Coach purse. She was crouching and looking around like a soldier in an ambush.
So she didn’t just study karate for self-protection; she had a license to carry a gun too. Well, a lot of women in LA did, he’d heard. On the other hand, Pullman wasn’t sure you could just shoot a man who was lying harmlessly on the ground, when he hadn’t actually attacked you.
“Hey, you,” Tammy called, stepping closer.
Pullman turned. He got a good look at the woman’s beautiful blue eyes and her diamond earrings sparkling in the sun, and he smelled a flowery perfume mixed with the acrid firecracker smell of smoke from the gun.
“Me?” he asked.
“Yeah, here.” She handed the portfolio to him.
“This’s for me?”
But she didn’t answer. She turned away and sprinted into the alley behind the apartment complex, a flash of vivacious color that vanished an instant later.
As Pullman was staring in confusion at the portfolio, he heard a rustle of feet behind him and an instant later was grabbed by a half-dozen massive hands. The next thing he knew he was being slammed face-first into a patch of extremely well-raked lawn.
Tammy Hudson, Rodney Pullman learned from his lawyer, was one of Southern California’s most successful, and most elusive, drug dealers.
It seemed that she’d been responsible for importing thousands of pounds of high-quality cocaine from Mexico over the past year. (Hence, her frequent trips south of the border.) Driving a beat-up old sports car and living in a pathetic place like the Pacific Arms Apartments kept her off the radar screen of DEA and police officials, who found it easier to find and track the high-living kingpins in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs.
Sitting in the LA detention center across from Pullman, the lawyer now delivered the bad news that the D.A. had no intention of dropping any of the charges against him.
“But I didn’t do anything,” Pullman whined.
The lawyer, a tanned forty-year-old with a fringe of curly hair, gave a chuckle, as if he’d heard that line ten thousand times. He continued, explaining that the prosecutor was out for blood. For one thing, a cop had been killed; the blond man, the apparent voyeur, had actually been an undercover LAPD officer pretending to work for the landscape maintenance company. His job was to report whenever Tammy left the apartment. Other officers or DEA agents would then take over surveillance and follow her in unmarked cars or vans. (When Pullman thought that he was reaching into his pants in preparation for a rape, the officer was in fact merely fishing his radio out of an inside pocket to tell the other surveillance team that she was leaving.)
“But—”
“Let me finish.” The lawyer added that the cops were also outraged that, because of Pullman, Tammy had successfully escaped. She’d disappeared completely and the FBI and DEA believed she was probably out of the country by now.
“But they can’t think I was working with her! Is that what they think?”
“In a word, yeah.” He went on to say that Pullman’s explanation for the past several days’ events raised eyebrows. “To put it mildly.” For instance, the police were curious why, if he’d noticed the supposed voyeur the day before, he hadn’t told her then. If his concern, as he claimed, was for an innocent woman’s safety, why didn’t he tell her she was in danger when he’d first found out about it?
His red-faced explanation that he wanted to use the voyeur as an excuse to introduce himself to Tammy was greeted with an expression in the lawyer’s eyes that could be read as either skepticism or embarrassment for a pathetic client. The man recorded this explanation in a few anemic notes.
And why would he lie to his employer about being sick today? To the police, that made sense only if he was serving as Tammy’s lookout. Today’s was to be a big drug transfer and they reasoned that Pullman had stayed home to make sure Tammy got away safely to deliver the goods. Their theory was that he had figured the maintenance worker for law and attacked him to give Tammy the chance to flee.
Physical evidence too: both his fingerprints and hers were on the portfolio, which happened to contain no headshot photos or audition tapes but rather a kilo of very pure cocaine. “She gave it to me,” he’d said weakly. “To create a diversion, I’ll bet. So she could escape.”
The lawyer didn’t even bother to write that one down.
But the most damning of all was the problem with his claim that he didn’t know her. “See,” his lawyer said, “if you really didn’t know her or have any connection with her, we might get a jury to believe everything else you’re claiming.”
“But I
The attorney gave a faint wince. “See, Rodney, there’s a problem with that.”
“I prefer ‘Rod.’ Like I’ve said.”
“A problem.”
“What?” Pullman scratched his head; the cuffs jingled like dull bells.
“They searched your apartment.”
“Oh. They did? They can do that?”
A laugh. “You were arrested on felony murder, assault, aiding and abetting and drug charges. Yes, Rod, they can do that.”
“Oh.”
“And you know what they found?”
