Hollywood Hills (45 page)

Six-X-Forty-six, the only midwatch unit that was too far away to be racing toward the pursuit, was driven by Della Ravelle, who said to her rookie partner, "Damn, Britney, we had to get that cal
l w
ay up in thirty-one's district. Those lazy bastards're probably screwing off as usual. I wanted you to get in on your first pursuit. And this sounds like a good one. Damn."

"My luck," Britney Small said with a little sigh of resignation.

Jonas Claymore decided that getting anywhere close to his apartment in Thai Town was hopeless. He looked in his rearview mirror and saw at least three cars with red-and-blue lights flashing. There were too many headlights and too many cops and too much traffic. He couldn't go fast enough to shake them. The yelping siren made it hard to think.

Then he thought of where there wouldn't be so much traffic at this time of evening. An area where he could abandon the van and escape into the brush and hide in the darkness where cops couldn't find him. And lately it was an area that he had come to know. He made a hard, sliding, screeching turn northbound on Gramercy Place and then turned westbound on Franklin Avenue. He was heading for the Hollywood Hills.

Della Ravelle said, "Hey, they're coming our way. Maybe we're not completely out of it after all."

"They'll probably double back and head east again," Britney Small said glumly. "With my luck."

The lead chase car, containing the surfer cops, careened up over the sidewalk on the north side of Franklin Avenue to avoid a bicyclist with no lights who'd darted across the wide street at midblock. When the black-and-white came crashing back down onto the street, the Crown Vic was lurching and nosediving. The tires screamed when Flotsam jumped on the brakes, but then he jammed down on the gas pedal again, and silhouettes rocketed past on both sides and horns blared.

Jetsam groaned and said, "Our shop's shaking like a shuttle entering orbit. I think I just got me another muscle spasm."

"Sorry, dude!" Flotsam said, cranking the wheel hard to the right when the car fishtailed again.

"I'm gonna try to parallel them on Yucca," Hollywood Nate said to Snuffy Salcedo, who once again cinched up his seat belt and replied, "Is this any way to treat an old man with a new nose?"

Georgie Adams was doing his best to stay close to 6-X-32 by riding in their siren draft, but he drifted back a few car lengths when they hit heavy traffic at Cahuenga and even worse traffic at Highland.

Jonas Claymore was beyond reckless now and he simply blew across Highland Avenue heading west with complete disregard for the red light and the traffic moving north and south. He caused three fender benders before he miraculously crossed the busy thoroughfare and kept going west. That slowed Flotsam and Jetsam, who had to weave around the traffic collisions, siren still blaring, and it allowed Georgie Adams and Viv Daley time to catch up.

By then, Lieutenant O'Reilly and Sergeant Murillo were monitoring the chase in the office. The lieutenant was almost apoplectic because of the dangers posed to motorists by this wild pursuit.

"Get on tac! Get on tac!" he yelled to Sergeant Murillo. "There're too many units involved. Tell them to drop off!"

But of course in a pursuit like this, with adrenaline erupting and endorphins exploding, the risen Christ couldn't have made them drop off, and Sergeant Murillo knew it. Still, he issued the order on the tactical frequency, knowing that none of his coppers would listen to a drop-off order at this moment. And they didn't.

When Jonas Claymore made the northbound turn onto Outpost Drive, he felt like cheering. This seemed familiar. This seemed possible. This was the area he'd been casing with that bitch that deserted him. This was Bling Ring country. This was the Hollywood Hills!

Della Ravelle and Britney Small were still driving east on Woodrow Wilson Drive approaching Mulholland Drive when they heard Jetsam yelling into the open mike that the pursuit had turned north on Outpost.

"No shit!" Della Ravelle said, making a hard right turn onto Mulholland.

The Wickland Gallery van careened north on Outpost Drive with three midwatch units behind it. And when 6-X-46 heard Jetsam yelling into the mike that the van was now turning west on Mulholland, Della Ravelle said to her young partner, "They're coming right at us! Unlock the shotgun!"

She turned on her red-and-blues and her high beams to get the Mulholland traffic out of the way of the pursuit that was coming right at them. Jonas Claymore saw those lights in the distance just after he passed the big house where he'd first stolen this van. He was hyperventilating and had trouble filling his lungs, and now with cops behind him and cops ahead of him he considered bailing out, but then thought, No, not here. He was going to bail by the big house where it had all started. Where he had first set eyes on this vehicle that was taking him to his destiny.

He made a sliding, squealing U-ee and was heading back down only a hundred yards away from the cars coming up. And then he lost it. He veered too far right and hit a large steel mailbox in front of a view home and the van went skidding left on a collision course with the first chase car.

Flotsam yelled, "Hang on, partner!" And tried to crank it left to swing around the fishtailing van coming right at them, but their Crown Vic was T-boned and got spun into a 360, crashing into a eucalyptus tree before coming to a steaming stop.

The van had almost rolled, but another eucalyptus saved it from turning over, and Jonas felt the hardest jolt he'd ever felt in his life when the driver's side of the van slammed into that tree, the hubcaps cartwheeling across the asphalt. And then he had to get out. He had only seconds. He crawled across the passenger seat. He could look out and hear yelling. He could see cops running with flashlights. His left hand was on the floor and it found the pistol. He wasn't going down easy, not for murder.

He took the pistol with him and bailed out the door and limped toward the brush, where he thought he'd be safe. Where they'
d n
ever find him. Where he'd have time to wait them out and then go home. He had money. If he could just get away from this place. If he could get to a taxi, he could still make it!

But Jonas didn't make it to the thick brush on the hillside. He almost limped right into a small figure with a flashlight. He heard a woman's voice behind the beam of light yelling, "Drop it! Drop it!"

He didn't drop it. He raised the pistol toward the flashlight, toward the voice, and Britney Small fired her Glock from ten feet away.

Jonas Claymore saw the first fireball and that was all. Two of the .40 caliber rounds missed him completely but three slammed into his bony chest and sunken belly. He went down on his back, eyes open, and they never closed again.

There was pandemonium then, with Della Ravelle running to Britney, her shotgun pointed at the supine body of Jonas Claymore. And Viv Daley came running with her shotgun, and Georgie Adams pointed his pistol at the unmoving body.

Hollywood Nate and Snuffy Salcedo helped pry open Flotsam's door. He had blood on his face and on one hand, but he wouldn't get out of the car. He was yelling at them, "Get an RA! Now, goddamnit!" Then he turned to Jetsam, who was moaning in agony, his right foot trapped by mangled metal, and Flotsam said, "Easy, bro! Easy, partner! We'll get you outta here!"

It took both Hollywood Nate and Snuffy to pull and pry at the passenger door of 6-X-32's Crown Vic before they got it open, and when Nate shined his light onto Jetsam's right foot, he yelled to Viv Daley, "Get me a tourniquet or a belt or anything!"

By the time the rescue ambulance arrived, Jetsam was lying on the roadside and was going gray. Kneeling beside him, Flotsam waved away Della, who'd torn open a first-aid kit and wanted to tend to the bleeding contusion at Flotsam's hairline.

He kept saying to his partner, "Easy, bro. Stay with me. Don'
t g
o nowhere, bro. Stay here with me. I ain't gonna leave you, so don't you leave me!"

The tall surfer cop insisted on riding in the back of the ambulance when they loaded Jetsam aboard, and he talked to him all the way to Cedars-Sinai, even when the paramedic said that the officer was showing signs of shock and wouldn't understand him. Flotsam remained outside the ER until Hollywood Nate and Snuffy Salcedo came to get him and transport him to Hollywood Station.

Before they were separated and before Force Investigation Division arrived at the station, Della Ravelle took her rookie partner to the women's locker room and said to the shaken young woman, "You have nothing to fear from FID or anybody else, Britney. It was an in-policy shooting, a good shooting."

"Funny thing," the young cop said. "It doesn't seem right to call killing somebody a good shooting. It doesn't feel good. I don't feel good."

"He's dead and you're alive," Della said. "That's good. Very good."

"He was my age," Britney said.

"And you would never have gotten a day older if you hadn't done what you did," Della said. "Now listen to me. After you get interrogated and after they say you can return to duty, you're gonna be treated different. The male cops, particularly the macho OGs, will pat you on the back and praise you and show you some deference. You won't get treated like a rookie anymore."

"Because I killed somebody?" Britney said.

"Because you've proven yourself to them," Della said. "Just go with it and smile politely and you'll find that your job will go better in this man's world we live in. From now on, you won't be a little female boot they make fun of. They'll respect you and even admire you. Like it or not, girl, you're now an authentic and bona fide gunfighter."

***

By daybreak, both Hollywood Division and Beverly Hills homicide detectives had worked out what had transpired at Wickland Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard. Their reports said that Jonas Claymore, who had recentely been arrested for felony possession of controlled substances, had probably been in a drug-induced state when he'd entered the gallery and caught Nigel Wickland by surprise in a blitz attack, cutting his face with a knife that was found in the wrecked van. There were signs of a life-and-death struggle in which Nigel Wickland apparently managed to get his hands on a Smith & Wesson 9-millimeter pistol registered to him. However, he was overcome in the struggle and was shot dead by the assailant, who then stole the gallery owner's wallet and wristwatch, which were found in Jonas Claymore's pocket after he was shot and killed.

Because an art gallery wasn't the kind of business that would be a normal target for this kind of attack, the detectives made a note that the gallery owner was openly homosexual. They surmised that because Jonas Claymore was a handsome young man, he may have had a past intimate relationship with the victim, a relationship that had soured and turned violent. The fact of the van having been in Jonas Claymore's possession on at least one other occasion when officers of Hollywood Division had questioned him tended to validate the theory of an intimate relationship between victim and assailant.

By the next afternoon, Ruth Langley, the only employee of the Wickland Gallery, told detectives through copious tears that she was led to believe that the young man who had borrowed her employer's van on the prior occasion was his nephew. Nigel Wickland had described him as a kind of black sheep. But the deceased killer's mother, who lived in Encino, denied that they were related to Nigel Wickland. She could offer no explanation for her son's bizarre behavior other than that he had been using drugs heavily and had lately been living with a young woman whose name she did not know. Jonas Claymore's mother suggested that the youn
g w
oman had no doubt enticed her son into the drug use that led to his death.

Ruth Langley of Wickland Gallery could not account for the poster-board photographs of two Impressionist paintings that were found in the wrecked van. She told detectives that they must have been something that Nigel Wickland had picked up from one of the many art dealers he knew, perhaps to frame and hang in his condominium. She told the detectives that the pictures had no value other than as decorative art and that she would like to have them as mementos of her years working at the Wickland Gallery.

Two days after the murder of Nigel Wickland, Hollywood Nate Weiss went to Cedars-Sinai before reporting for duty at Hollywood Station. The floor nurse told him that the patient's mother and two sisters had just been there, and the patient's father had visited separately. She added that the police partner of the patient was in his room now and that the patient should only have visitors for brief periods of time.

She asked Nate if he was aware that the patient's foot could not be saved, and Nate said that everyone at Hollywood Station knew about it. She said that if he wished, he could join the officer and the patient's partner for a little while but added that the patient would soon need to rest.

Hollywood Nate walked down the corridor and was surprised that his palms were moist. He didn't know what he'd say to Jetsam other than something trite: "You're looking great. Are they treating you okay? Everyone sends their best. Is there anything you need? Anything at all?"

Nate stopped at the door to Jetsam's room to try to think of something better to say and he heard the voices from inside. He decided to listen to them for cues on how he should handle this. Flotsam's voice sounded somber even though his words were meant to be uplifting. Jetsam just sounded feeble.