Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [19]
“Easy! Easy!” he cried. “Don’t shoot! Jesus Christ!”
“Put the weapon down on the ground. Now.”
He put it on the ground. It was not a gun. Worse. A cell phone.
Six.
An emergency briefing was called for 5 p.m.
The Santa Monica Police Department was housed in back of City Hall, in a white Moderne building with blue trim that suggested sand and sea. The police department was in the lee of the building, away from sand and sea, looking at an overpass. If you narrowed your vision to exclude the high-rise hotels, condominiums and gangland ghettos, you might get an idea of what they saw when they built this public works project in the thirties: a sleepy little beach town sparkling with optimism in which all that would be required of the local police would be the management of drunks and theft of the occasional Packard.
They built it small and it stayed small—quaint, by today’s antiseptic standards. The vintage sixties station in Long Beach, where my grandfather, Poppy, served, looks hip by comparison, and the Bureau downright millennial, I thought, quickening my pace across the Civic Center plaza. It was four-thirty and already several Bu-cars were lined up in the lot.
The entryway held a couple of metal chairs and drawings on the wall by schoolchildren. Turn right and a brown arrow led to the holding cells. The hallway to the left was short and dully lit, lined with cases of patches and awards. Over a doorway swung the kind of lacquered wooden sign they used to have in Western movies over the saloon, only this one read Licenses. I hoped they never remodeled the place. I hoped they turned it into a museum.
As I hurried up the staircase leading to Investigations, a woman clattered right into my arms.
“Ana! All the computers went down!”
Margaret Forrester, the police liaison working with the Bureau on the kidnap, had a flair for the dramatic, but as she gripped my elbows, eyes wide, it was clear she was not kidding.
“I am in such trouble!” she stuttered. “Where is your guy?”
She was a beautiful woman, about thirty years old, with layers of glossy brown hair and a face too decorative, too perfectly formed, with its strong dark eyebrows, squarish cheekbones and egg-white skin, to belong in a police station. You had to wonder at the natural selection that produced such a striking girl from a pair of alcoholic dirt-poor Oklahoma drifters, who, according to her, literally lived in the dirt, picking apricots and peaches in the San Joaquin Valley. Nobody at the station looked like Margaret, nobody dressed like Margaret, in a well-cut camel sheath with a shawl collar, low-slung belt and suede boots. Her usual accessories were an ID tag and a water bottle. There was a tinkle about her I would later identify as seashells. She had a business on the side: fashioning natural objects into “body adornments” that she sold to stores. She often wore her own creations. That day it might have been a concoction of abalones, or Native American bracelet charms with feathers.
“Which guy are you talking about?”
“The tech. There he is—Ramon!” she called up the stairs. “Come down here, sweetheart, I’ll show you where the circuit breaker is!”
Ramon’s work boots thundered out of the dimness and he appeared, holding a flashlight.
“I think it might be under there.” Margaret indicated an unlikely hatch beneath the staircase. “But your computers are what’s causing the problem.”
“It ain’t our computers, Chiquita,” Ramon said disdainfully. “It’s your freaking wiring,” grimacing as he pried at the warped door.
“Hope you like spiders,” I called humorously.
Ramon answered with a Spanish phrase he knew I would not understand. Margaret’s hands were still somehow all over me as we chugged upstairs. But then she was all over everyone, shouting, “Congratulations! I heard Brian made the soccer team!” to a busy secretary, or giving the thumbs-up to a baffled cadet behind the desk. The waiting area was basically a wooden pew underneath a pot of fake begonias furry with mold, the yellowing walls