“It seems so,” Joe replied, sitting up, his hand still holding his neck. Carlos moved his hand and found a neat wound, oozing blood. He put his handkerchief there. “Hold this in place, and keep pressure on it.” He got out his cell phone.
“Don’t call nine-one-one,” Joe said. “I don’t want an ambulance and all that. Just drive me to the nearest emergency room.”
“You’re sure?”
“It was a .22. I’m sure I’m not mortally wounded.”
“Okay.” Carlos got him outside, then closed the door and locked it with his key, then he kicked it open. “Let’s go,” he said.
Carlos helped Joe to the car, left the trailer park, and drove back toward Sunset.
“UCLA,” Joe said. “There’s a hospital there.”
“Right.” They were at the ER entrance in minutes. “Don’t you move, Joe, I’m going to get some help.” He went inside and stepped up to the desk.
“Fill out this form,” the woman behind it said.
“I’m a police officer,” he said, showing his badge. “I’ve got a cop outside in the car with a gunshot wound.”
She picked up a phone and pressed a button. “Code one at the ER entrance,” she said, then hung up. An orderly came through the swinging doors. “Where is he?”
“Just outside, in the car,” Carlos said.
Joe walked in, holding the handkerchief to his neck. “Where do you want me?” he asked.
? ? ?
THEY MADE CARLOS wait outside the treatment room for nearly half an hour before an impossibly young girl in scrubs came out. “Detective Rivera?”
“That’s me.”
“I’m Dr. Reiner.” She held up a plastic zipper bag containing what appeared to be a .22 caliber short slug. “I thought you might want this for a souvenir.”
Carlos put it in his pocket. “Where’s my partner?”
“Right here,” Joe said, walking through the door with a bandage on his neck.
“He didn’t need to go to surgery. The bullet was just under his skin. Good thing it wasn’t a .38 or a 9mm. He’s got a couple of stitches, and he’s had an injection of an antibiotic and a prescription for a pain pill. Take him home and force him to rest.” She walked away.
“So?” Joe said. “Let’s get out of here.” Back in the car he said, “It was a .22 with a silencer. Let’s get it to ballistics.”
“That’s what our two predecessors were shot with. Check on the silencer. I heard the second shot.” He made a U-turn and headed for LAPD headquarters.
An hour later they stood in a lab and looked at a large computer screen that had photos of two bullets. “The top one came out of your partner,” the technician said. “The bottom one came out of Reeves.”
“Send your report to the captain,” Carlos said, then turned to Joe. “Do you want me to take you home and put you to bed?”
“I’ll outlast you,” Joe said.
“Let’s go back to that trailer. I want to see it without the reception committee.”
“Smart move, kicking it open. I doubt if you could explain where the key came from.”
Back in the car, Carlos said, “You’re a tough old bird.”
“High school football,” Joe replied.
“What are you talking about?”
“I had a coach who was a nut on every team member being fit. He particularly worried about spinal injuries, so we had to do this exercise every day where you lay on your back and dug in your heels, arching your back until all that was touching the ground was your heels and the top of your head. Then he yelled at you to keep pushing, until your neck bent back and your nose touched the ground.”
“That’s impossible,” Carlos said.
“It was on the first day, and the second, but on the third day I made my nose touch the ground. We did that every day for the rest of the season, and we all developed necks like bulls. That’s why my shirt size is eighteen and a half inches today. I have to order my shirts off the Internet. I thought all that muscle might come in handy in a car wreck or something, but I never thought it would stop a bullet.”
? ? ?
THEY ARRIVED BACK at the trailer, and this time Carlos went in first, his weapon drawn. He cleared the place. “Neat as a pin,” he said.
Joe sat down on the sofa. “You check the desk. I’m gonna rest, like the kid doctor said.”
Carlos began rifling the drawers and held up a checkbook. He leafed through the index. “Balance of a hundred and thirteen grand,” he said.
“Somebody’s been paying him big for something,” Joe replied. “What’s his name?”
“Dimitri Kasov.”
“The Russian?”
“One and the same.”
“Anything else in there?”
“A printout of an investment account,” Carlos said, holding up the document. “He’s got nearly a million dollars in stocks.”
“I would have thought a hit man would deal in cash and bank it offshore,” Joe said, “not leave a paper trail a mile wide.”
“Maybe he banked offshore, too,” Carlos replied. “Maybe this is just the cherry on the sundae, what the IRS sees.”
Joe got up from the sofa, walked to the desk, and picked up a framed photo of a woman and two young boys, maybe six and seven. “There’s our shooter,” he said, pointing to the younger boy. “The older one looks like the Dimitri I saw on the autopsy table.”
Carlos looked at the younger boy. “So what’s your name, kid?”
Joe pulled the back off the picture frame, took out the photograph, and turned it over. “Stamped Miller Studios,” he read. “Then in ink, ‘Olga Kasov, Dimitri and Sergei.’”
“You ever heard of a Sergei Kasov?”
“Nah,” Joe said, “but I never heard of a Dimitri Kasov until recently.”
“We should go see the captain,” Carlos said.
51
CARLOS AND JOE sat in Captain Regan’s office; Lieutenant Grover, who commanded the LAPD Homicide squad, sat in, too.
“You got the ballistics report?” Carlos asked.
“I did. Now we need to put a name to the bullet.”
“I think we’ve got that,” Carlos said, handing him the photograph from Kasov’s trailer. “Look at the back.”
The captain did, then showed it to Grover.
“The guy in the trailer has to be the younger one, Sergei,” Carlos said.
“He’s our cop killer,” Grover said.
“Pull out all the stops on this Sergei,” Regan said. “Do we have a motive for the cop shootings?”
“We’ve got the connection,” Carlos said. “Dimitri and Sergei are brothers. As for the motive . . .”
“It’s bizarre that this Sergei would shoot the cops who were investigating his brother’s death.”
“It certainly is,” Carlos agreed. “Maybe he wants to find the killer himself, before the cops can.”
“That’s thin,” Grover said, “but I think it works.”
“Do we have a sheet on Sergei?” the captain asked.
“No, sir,” Carlos replied. “We tried the FBI database, too. There’s nothing on him. Never served in the military, either.”
“He’s gotta live somewhere,” the captain said. “Check the utility databases—everybody has an electric bill.”
“Already done, sir. You want an opinion, I think the guy lives in motels and rooming houses and pays cash. He doesn’t have any credit cards, either, unless they’re in another name. He doesn’t own a car registered in the United States. There’s no record of a cell phone, either, but he’d need one to do business. How else could his customers get in touch?”
“Good point. How did Dimitri’s customers contact him?”
“He had the usual paper trail of a solid citizen—property, utilities, bank account, investment account. He had half a dozen cars registered in his name. He wouldn’t be hard to find for anybody who had his name.”
“There’s another possibility on Sergei,” Joe Rossi said. “He could have been living and working in another country—Russia, the Ukraine, Eastern Europe.”
“Then check with Interpol,” the captain said. “Check with immigration, too, see if he entered the country recently.” He handed back the photograph. “See if the FBI can use their software to age the kid. Maybe we’ll get something we can circulate.”
“We’re on it, sir,” Carlos replied. The meeting broke up, and he and Joe went to work.
? ? ?