Cold Hit (25 page)

"Isn't that Eddie Ringerman?" I asked.

"Small fucking world," Emdee said as he pulled me along.

"Why don't you spit it out? What's going on?"

He hesitated, then said, "We got direct orders from the chief not to confide in the competition, but he didn't say we couldn't follow 'em. Ringerman's a rabid Lakers fan, but if our boy gets up to leave with the game in doubt, something's goin' down. So we follow Ringerman, see if we can catch him in politicus flagrante. Then we'll jerk a knot in his tail and make the boy give up something."

Ringerman headed out the main entrance onto the street, then crossed with the light to the east parking lot and got into a gray Lincoln.

Perry still had my arm, pulling me along. "Hustle up," he said. "Game's on."

Chapter
37

Broadway drove the Navigator out of Staples VIP parking and onto the city streets. I couldn't se
e t
he gray Lincoln Town Car that Ringerman was driving. We'd only been following it for three minutes and already we'd lost sight of him.

"I like a nice, loose tail," I said, "but isn't it usually a good idea to keep the target in sight?"

Broadway opened the glove compartment revealing an LD screen. He turned it on and a city map came up displaying a two-mile moving grid. I could see a re
d l
ight flashing down Fourth Street towards the freeway.

"Satellite tracking," Broadway explained. "The feds aren't the only ones with goodies. While you and Perry were watching the game, I hung a pill on Eddie's ride. We're following him from outer space."

We followed the embassy car from a mile back as it turned off the Hollywood Freeway at Highland, then shot across Fountain and down the hill on Fairfax. We turned on Melrose and were right back where Yuri's market had once stood. The center of Russian Town.

This three-block area was the L
. A
. version of New York's Brighton Beach. Russian liquor stores featuring signs advertising expensive brands of Yuri Dolgoruki and Charodei vodka. Restaurants with names like Sergi's and Shura's dotted the landscape. Posters were plastered everywhere advertising an upcoming Svetlana Vetrova concert.

Roger finally pulled up across the street from a restaurant called the Russian Roulette. It was on Melrose at the west end of Russian Town, nestled close to the boundary of Beverly Hills. The building was stucco, but had a slanted roof with fancy trim. I spotted Ringerman's gray Lincoln in a jammed-to-overflowing parking lot.

"Unfortunately, as it turns out, this ain't the best place for me and Afro-Boy t'attempt a covert surveillance," Emdee said once we were parked.

"Shane, you're gonna have to go in there and check it out for us," Broadway added.

"Me?"

"We're unwelcome personages in there," Broadway said. "A month ago, donkey brain over there, attempted to end the criminal career of one Boris Zikofsky, a known L
. A
. hitter and Odessa shit ball."

"The man deserved the bust," Emdee protested.

"Instead of following this hat basher into the parking lot and cuffing him out there like he's supposed to, the Hillbilly Prince badges the motherfucker right in the restaurant without backup, and starts World War Three. My man ended up by dancing Boris through a pricey pastry cart from fifteen hundred Czarist Russia. Cost the department seven grand. The Loot shit a blintz."

"Not my best polka," Emdee admitted.

"So if we go in there, we're gonna get made, turned around, and run right back out, then reported to the lieutenant." Broadway handed me an old, taped together digital camera. "Take lots of pictures."

"I don't even know who the players are. Who do I take pictures of?"

"Everybody." Broadway reached into the glove box and retrieved a big, clunky tape recorder with a directional mike that was about the size of a Kleenex box.

"What happened to all our miniaturized, state-of-the-art goodies?" I said.

Broadway handed the recorder to me and said, "If you can find the complaint box up on five, slip it in as the saying goes."

Then he pointed at the camera. "No flash. It's digital, but just barely," he smiled. "Directional mike on thi
s t
ape recorder has a short, so watch the transmission light to make sure it's recording."

"What are you two gonna be doing?"

Emdee switched on the radio. The Lakers game was in the third quarter. He gave me a lazy smile.

"Right," I said, and headed across the street.

I decided not to go in through the front. I didn't want to be seen, so I went to the rear of the restaurant.

The back of the Russian Roulette was littered with empty produce boxes and used-up liquor bottles. I looked in the trash and found some soft lettuce heads that didn't look too bad. I put my clunky camera and recorder in one of the boxes, then arranged five heads of wilted lettuce on top. I took off my jacket, tied it around my waist, and rolled up my shirt sleeves.

With this brilliant on-the-fly disguise in place, I carried the rotting produce right back into the restaurant.

The kitchen was noisy and full of cooks turning out that vinegary smelling food that Balkan people seem to love. Without warning, a burly guy in a white tunic who looked like a cross between Boris Spassky and Wolfgang Puck, grabbed me and started rattling away in some language with way too many consonants.

"Sorry, pal, I'm just the relief driver," I said into his guttural windstorm. "No speaky da Rooskie," trying to do it like some zooted out delivery guy from Saugus.

He ranted some more Russian at me then grabbed a head of rotting lettuce out of the box and shook it under my nose.

"No can this . . . this . . ." He was sputtering. "Thin
g n
o to eat!" Then in frustration he turned to find somebody who could speak my language.

As soon as he was gone, I set the box down, retrieved my camera and tape and went lickity-splitting down the hall connecting the kitchen and restaurant.

I moved into the back of the dining room. The place was packed and noisy. The predominant language sounded Eastern European--Armenian or Russian. I scanned the room looking for Ringerman.

Halfway down, seated in a wall booth, there he was. Next to him sat Bimini Wright, the Ice Goddess with the silver Jag from the funeral.

I crowded behind a flower arrangement and took pictures of everybody in the restaurant. Then some patrons in the booth next to Ringerman's got up to look at the pastry table. Apparently the priceless rolling cart hadn't made it back from antique repair. I slipped down the aisle between tables and slid into the recently vacated spot next to my targets. Then I turned on the tape and laid it under my jacket close to the next table.

They were speaking softly in Russian. It surprised me that Ringerman and Wright, two Americans, would choose to converse in a foreign language. I couldn'
t u
nderstand a word. They acted like people who were plotting something. I taped them for about ten minutes until the people from my borrowed booth headed back, carrying dessert plates. Then I bailed.

Minutes later, I was back in the Navigator, where Broadway and Perry were still listening to the Lakers game.

"You see him?" Broadway asked.

I scrolled through some digital shots of the two of them.

"Bimini Wright?" Broadway said as soon as he saw her picture. "Maybe the Israelis are using Eddie to build a bridge to the CIA." He looked up at Perry. "Something is sure as shit in the wind." Then he turned to me. "What were they talking about in there?"

"Beats the hell outta me." I punched Play on the tape recorder and we listened while their whispered voices, speaking Russian, filled the car.

W
e pulled out of Russian Town while Emdee hunched over the tape recorder in the fron
t s
eat with an open notebook on his lap, translating the conversation. It surprised me that this transplant from South Carolina actually spoke Russian. These two were full of surprises. Listening to my bad recording, I could barely distinguish Eddie Ringerman's whispered baritone or Bimini Wright's elegant soprano. They spok
e s
oftly, their voices all but drowned out by the loud background chatter in the restaurant.

"Since they're both American, why are they talking in Russian?" I asked.

"They're both fluent. Both went to spy school. It's the kinda stuff these spooks live for," Broadway said. "Besides, it puts a crick in our dicks when we try to eavesdrop. Now this ignorant cracker gets to practice his night-school Russian."

I glanced out the rear window of the Navigator at traffic piling up at a stoplight half a block behind us. Suddenly, the headlights on a blue Ford Escort swung wide and the car roared around waiting traffic into the oncoming lane. It ran the light and rushed up the street after us.

"She's bitching about something called the Eighty-five Problem," Emdee was saying, playing a section of the tape over. "It happened when she was stationed in Moscow. She's pissed. Eddie is trying to calm her down."

"Bimini Wright was at the U
. S
. embassy in Moscow for ten years in the mid-eighties and nineties," Broadway said as the tape ran out.

"This all you got?" Emdee complained.

"Yeah. I had to leave the booth I was in."

I was still looking out the rear window. The blue Escort now ducked in behind a Jeep Cherokee, trying t
o h
ide.

"Hey, Roger, make a right."

"I don't want to make a right," Broadway said. "I'
d l
ike to go back to Parker Center."

"How'd you like to go back to the Tishman Building?"

Broadway grabbed the rearview mirror and repositioned it.

"Which one?"

"Behind the Jeep Cherokee. The blue Escort."

"Get serious," he growled. "Nobody runs a tail in an Escort. They got less horsepower than a Japanese leaf blower."

"Turn right and see what happens."

Roger hung a hard right and started down Pico. A few seconds later we saw the Escort make the same right and follow.

"Go right again," I said.

Roger swung onto a residential street. Only this time, after he rounded the corner, he didn't stick around to watch. He just floored it. We flew down the narrow street over speed bumps that launched the Navigator into the air each time we hit. I wasn't buckled in and shot up into the headliner with the first landing, slamming my head into the roof.

"Ooo-ee!" Rowdy shrieked, loving it.

When Roger got to the end of the street he hung a U and headed straight back toward the pursuing Escort. The two guys in the front seat suddenly started rubbernecking houses, pretending to be looking for an address.

"Look at these two dickwads," Broadway said. "Comedy theater."

We passed them and turned back onto Pico the way we came.

"We need to get outta here, Roger. One of those guys was the steroid case who walked us through the Tishman yesterday."

"Danny Zant, the FBI area commander," Roger said, and floored it again, heading for the freeway.

Just as he did, two more unmarked Toyotas skidded onto Pico, leaning sideways, burning rubber from all four tires with the turn. "Two more bogies," I said. "Blue Toyotas."

Roger had his foot all the way to the floor and the engine in the black Navigator was in a full-throated roar. He found an on ramp for the San Pedro Freeway and flew up onto the eight lanes of concrete, heading east. The next few minutes were a white-knuckle experience. We merged with unusually heavy 11 P
. M
. traffic. Roger was smoking around slower cars, tailgating, honking his horn, and passing in the service lane. Despite all his frantic driving, every time I looked back, the three federal sedans were still right back there.

"Can't you shake these assholes?" I said. "They're not in Ferraris, it's a flicking Escort and two Toyotas."

"Gotta have more than just stock blocks under the hood," Broadway said.

He put more foot into it, careening between slower vehicles, finally hitting the off ramp at Fifth Street and roaring down the hill toward Parker Center.

"Let's see if these humps want to have it out in the police garage," he said.

He broke a red light at Sixth, and another at Wilshire, then hung another right and headed straight toward the Glass House. The huge, boxy building loomed in front of us.

"Going under," Broadway shouted, sounding like a crazed subcommander as he drove into the garage.

He grabbed his badge, and as we roared up to the guard shack, held his tin out to the rookie probationer guarding the parking structure and frantically signaled the young cop to raise the electronic gate arm. The wooden bar went up and we went down.

I turned just in time to see the Escort flying into the garage after us. The driver didn't wait for the closing arm. He broke right through, snapping it off. Splintered wood went flying. The two Toyotas followed.