Pro Bono

Chapter 18

18

A t six o’clock Vesper said, “Let me take you out to dinner to celebrate your victory over Great Oceana this afternoon.” Charlie said, “I’m afraid this isn’t the time to be out in a public place. That guy today didn’t threaten to shoot me. He shot me. If he had aimed anywhere but center mass, I could be dead right now. I’ve been thinking it might be time to hide you someplace where those people won’t find you.”

“They know where I live,” she said. “I don’t have a relative in this part of the country anymore who could put me up, and I wouldn’t ask a friend to take that kind of risk. A hotel is a very public place full of strangers. I’d rather be here for another day. The parking lot has iron bars, the windows are too high to climb in, and I won’t be alone.”

“I’ll call in a dinner order.”

The food was delivered from Bernardine, and came in two large bags. He set the table with a set of plates that was formal and ornate, and heavy silverware. She looked at it and said, “What young, unmarried man has a set of dishes like this?”

“The answer is probably zero,” he said. “They’re the ones my mother and father got when they were married about forty years ago. Now she’s living in a small rented place in Hawaii, so she made me store them. I’ve never used more than about a quarter of the set.”

When he took the plastic containers of food from the bags, Vesper said, “This is shocking. I’m sure you don’t eat this way, and I certainly don’t.”

“It’s a special occasion. I read somewhere that you should stop to celebrate good things that happen. I forget why, since having good things happen ought to be enough. Anyway, this is the best we can do without taking risks. I also haven’t done any grocery shopping since before you came to my office that day. If you need a third reason, I’ll dream one up.”

“Okay,” she said. “I don’t need to be coaxed any more than that, and just being near this food has made me really hungry.”

He came around the table and pulled out her chair for her, and then sat down across from her. They ate some of the food and drank some wine and talked. The talk continued as they put away the rest and loaded the dishwasher, then drifted into the living room with their glasses and the rest of the bottle.

She told him about growing up with her mother, who based her system of values on being what she called “useful.” “It always seemed to me to be a modernization of some leftover ancient worldview, but I never identified it exactly. A mother’s ideas always seem to be the norm to children until they’re proven either false or too constraining. My father was older. He was a doctor who worked at the UCLA hospital for nearly fifty years.”

She said, “They were a good match, and good people. They raised me and my sister as though that was all they had to do, and nothing else mattered. It’s kind of extra sad, because neither of us ever had kids, so we didn’t get to pass any of that on.”

“Is your sister older or younger?”

“She died of cancer a few years ago. She was older, but now I’ve passed her, so she’s younger too, in a way. You’re an only child, right?”

“Yes.”

“You know how I could tell?”

“No.”

“You can be funny, even say goofy things when you want to, but your first language is grown-up. That’s what you’re most comfortable speaking. Slang terms and bad grammar don’t seem to occur to you except as afterthoughts. It’s because in your earliest years there weren’t other kids in the house, so most of the speakers you heard were adults.”

“It’s a good theory,” he said. “I’ll have to try it out on a few other subjects. But lawyers spend all day talking like people centuries older than their parents.”

“I want to thank you for it,” she said. “You’ve been wonderful.”

“I’m pretty sure you did, right after I told you Great Oceana had agreed with us. You’re welcome. But we still have to deal with Founding Fathers Vested. I haven’t heard from them yet.”

They said “good night” at eleven and were both asleep by eleven thirty.

The sounds were very faint and weren’t continuous, so when Warren opened his eyes, it took a moment before he realized he had been hearing them for a while. They sounded familiar but out of place, like an electric toothbrush running, then stopping for a time, then starting again. His first thought was that maybe that was what it was. He reached to the side table and picked up his phone so the screen would glow.

He stood, found his pants and his shoes in the dim light of the phone screen, put them on, and went to the closet. He saw his golf bag, pulled out the nine iron because of the weight and pitch of its head, and stepped down the hall to listen. He followed the noise, kind of a buzz from a small, probably battery-operated, electric motor. There was a subtler background sound, like “err-err, err-err,” as though something was moving back and forth. He moved toward the sound.

Warren stepped slowly around the living room in the direction of the door, trying to verify that was where the sound was coming from. He leaned close to the door and put his ear to the surface. The sound came again, and with his ear against the wood it sounded louder and higher pitched, like a dentist’s drill. He put his hand on the doorknob. This time when the sound came, he could feel the vibration on the knob.

He needed to wake Vesper up, but how close were these people to having drilled the lock? He didn’t want to leave the door if they were about to open it and charge inside. He used his phone to text her number the message GET UP. DANGER. BE SILENT . From his post at the front door, her phone’s text sound in her bedroom was inaudible, but he hoped it would wake her. He pocketed his phone.

The drilling sound stopped. He put his back to the wall on the lock side of the door. If these were going to be the sort of experienced people he expected, they would look for trouble to come from the hinge side. He waited and listened for voices, or at least movements, but now he heard nothing. The window made the room slightly lighter than the bedroom had been with its blackout curtains, but he knew from experience that was still very dark for a person coming in from the lighted hallway. That might give him a few seconds of advantage.

He made final decisions. He was not going to let them get far enough into the condo to reach Vesper, and he would not stop fighting while he was alive.

He raised the golf club above his head and waited. He knew they must be listening too on the other side of the door, no more than a couple feet from him. He kept his breathing slow and deep, his eyes focused on the doorknob.

The doorknob turned, the door swung inward, and his arms were in motion, bringing the golf club straight down as soon as the space appeared. In the light from the hallway, he saw the head of the club land squarely on a man’s forearm. The man let out a sound that conveyed shock and pain and dropped to his knees, trying to grip his injured arm. Warren was already raising the club for another swing, but when it was halfway up, he saw a second man step up behind the first. He recognized him as the one who had fired a shot through his backpack yesterday, and also recognized the movement he’d made to pull the gun out of his jacket.

Realizing that he didn’t have the second he needed, Warren stopped raising his golf club, pushed off with his feet, and jabbed the club straight into the man’s mustache, so it hit the lower part of his nose and his upper teeth at once. The man staggered backward, both hands coming up to clutch his face. Warren saw blood flowing between his fingers. Warren brought the club upward again and swung it down on the first man’s back. The man let out a howl and began to crawl out of the doorway, but he was slow because his right arm was bent and held up to his chest.

Warren knew he couldn’t afford to ignore the man he knew had a gun, so he charged out over the crawling man’s back to reach the one he’d poked in the face. He swung hard at him in a diagonal, chopping arc, but the man saw it coming and dodged to the side, so the club’s head came down in a glancing blow on the man’s shoulder. Warren could tell it hurt, but it didn’t seem to disable the man, because his right hand slid toward the inside of his coat again. The man was ignoring the damage he had sustained and moving faster now, and Warren saw the arm moving to withdraw the gun from the coat.

Warren took a two-handed swing that met the man’s elbow as the gun hand emerged. In the instant when the impact pounded the man’s arm back into his coat, the gun went off. The bullet didn’t seem to hit anyone, and the gun slid down past the waist of his coat to the floor.

“Police! Nobody move!” The voice was loud and authoritative, but the man on the floor reached for the pistol on the carpet with his one uninjured arm. The same voice continued, “Go for it. Say hi to Jesus for me.”

The assailant seemed to realize he had no chance, and he slumped down onto his belly with his arms out from his sides.

Another voice said, “I guess Jesus will have to wait.”

The two men dressed in plainclothes stepped in, took the pistol, and put the second man belly-down on the floor. As they dragged the two intruders’ wrists behind them for the handcuffs, both let out groans of pain. “I think it’s broken,” the one with no mustache said.

“Shut up,” the other officer said. The two men on the floor didn’t seem to notice that he and his partner were a bit older than the usual responders to emergency calls. Their rough, authoritative manner carried the kind of confidence that came with rank.

The Black officer tugged the arm of the man with a mustache. “Get up. You’re under arrest.”

“Call for an ambulance. This guy assaulted us.”

The white officer said, “If you come easy, we’ll get you fixed up. If not, you’ll have to talk to the officers who come next.”

The man with a mustache struggled to get up, so the two police officers tugged him up. His friend saw that, and tried to get up, so they pulled him to his feet too. The Black officer said to Warren, “Sir, you’ll be contacted within a few minutes by officers who will take your statement. Please wait for them inside, and don’t clean up anything out here.”

“All right,” Warren said. He watched Copes and Minkeagan pull the two injured men down the stairs to the small lobby, out the front door to the street. Warren stepped inside and nearly bumped into Vesper, who was wearing the football shirt and pajama pants and gripping the biggest butcher knife from the block.

She said, “Are you all right?”

“Yes, so far,” he said. “How about you?”

“Nothing happened to me. I heard my kidnappers’ voices. Did they turn on you?”

“No, the opposite. I think Copes and Minkeagan must have been keeping an eye on me so I wouldn’t cut them out of the money I promised, and when they saw those guys had broken in, they followed them and pretended to be cops. They’re protecting their money, not us. And they have guns again.”

She said, “This is all so crazy.” After a moment she said, “You’re covered with sweat.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve been in a fight. I forgot how tired it makes you, like you strained every muscle. And when the adrenaline stops flowing, it leaves you feeling kind of hollow.”

Copes and Minkeagan pushed the two handcuffed men ahead of them to the Ford sedan parked thirty feet past the edge of the condominium building. Copes said, “Listen carefully. I’m going to ask you a few questions now. If you lie to us, I don’t know what my partner will do, but I know you’ll wish you were back up there with that guy and his golf club. First question. Is this your car?”

The man with the mustache nodded and the other said, “Yes.”

Minkeagan patted that one down and took a wallet from his pocket, then did the same to the other one, who also had keys. He unlocked the car, opened the door, and used the dome light to search the wallets. He held up a plastic card. “This one is an ex-cop. It’s an out-of-date ID from Missouri.”

Copes said, “Check the other one.”

After about five seconds Minkeagan held up another card, and said, “Him too.” Almost immediately he added, “This one’s older. He was a cop in Tennessee before that.”

Copes said, “You guys were fired. Did you really think you’d get hired here? You can’t just drive to a station in California and think your record hasn’t chased you here. We probably already have it.”

The one with the mustache said, “We weren’t looking for law enforcement jobs.” He had a hard time getting all of that said, and he’d started to bleed from his mouth again.

“I don’t judge. It makes me feel a little sympathy for you.” He looked at Minkeagan. “Do you think we could consider offering these two a break? A little professional courtesy?”

Minkeagan looked them up and down. “It depends on how bad they want out of this, and whether we can trust them not to be stupid. One chance.”

“Thanks,” Copes said. “What did you want with that guy with the golf club?”

The man with no mustache said, “We’re registered bounty hunters. He’s—”

The mustached man said, “Stop! Shut up!” Then he said, “Some people hired us to kick his ass. The woman’s too.”

“Good save. Your stupid friend almost got me to give up on you. Nothing personal, then?”

“It was a job.”

“I’m sure you know how this works,” Copes said. “What have you got to make us take the risk of letting you start your car and head east? One bid, and make it fast. We can’t keep off the radio for much longer.”

“The inside door panel on the back seat passenger side comes off. There’s a white plastic bag stuck in the empty space.”

“Have you lost your mind?” the man with no mustache said.

“You think they wouldn’t find it when they searched the car at the station?”

Minkeagan opened the backseat door, took out a pocketknife, thumbed the spring assist so the blade flicked out, and pried the panel off. He reached in and pulled out the pharmacy bag that Ollonsun had given the mustached man hours ago. He looked inside, then pulled out his own pistol and held it on the two men and handed the bag to Copes. After a look, Copes closed it and said, “It’s your lucky night.”

Minkeagan straightened the row of ID cards and driver’s licenses on the car seat and took a few pictures with his phone. Then he put his phone away and held his pistol on the two men while Copes took a handcuff key out of his pocket and unlocked the two men’s handcuffs.

Minkeagan said, “I shouldn’t have to say this, but since one of you is as sharp as a potato, I will. We’ll be watching for you. If we see either of you anywhere in the City of Los Angeles again, or your car gets picked up on a license plate reader, you’ll be charged with attempted murder of that guy upstairs. We have pictures of you, your ID, your car, the bullet hole in the wall, the gun that fired it, and your blood all over the carpet. If I were you, I’d be sure to drive at least until daylight before I stopped at an emergency room to get my golf injuries treated.”

They watched and waited while the two men got into the car and the one with the blood-soaked mustache reached across his body with his left hand to start the engine and drove the vehicle down the street. Minkeagan said, “How much do you suppose is in that bag?”

“Too much for beating up a law-abiding couple, I think.”

“Maybe they were supposed to kill them.”

Copes and Minkeagan walked around the block to their car and got inside. Minkeagan bent down and flapped back the upper end of the rubber mat at his feet to retrieve the burner phone Warren had given him. He pressed number three and waited, then hung up. About a minute later his phone rang. He said, “Hi.”

Warren said, “Tell me what you’re doing.”

“I just called to tell you those two are gone.”

“You didn’t—”

“We gave them an opportunity to escape prosecution. They’re on the freeway by now.”

Warren paused. “Thanks for coming by.”

“Don’t mention it.”

The call ended. Warren put the burner phone back on the kitchen counter and plugged it in to charge. He looked at the clock on the screen. It was four sixteen A.M. He went to the door between the kitchen and the dining room and picked up the rubber doorstop that kept it open. He carried it to the entrance door the intruders had drilled open and jammed it under the door to keep it shut. Then he carried the coffee table over and propped it against the doorknob and said, “Let’s try to get some sleep.”