The Mammoth Book of Hard Bastards (Mammoth Books) (17 page)

Will made it across the side road that opened on to the 101. The people in the cars that whooshed past in the darkness at 65 or 70 mph had no idea that just outside their rolled up windows a man was running for his life. The footing underneath Coss changed from black asphalt to grey concrete sidewalk and then to the crunchy loose rock of the landscaping as he made his way around the far side of the “L”.

Behind the Pearle Vision Center, Will finally felt it was dark enough and sheltered enough to risk the phone call. He pushed the buttons. The cell phone connected to a 911 dispatcher at 11.40 p.m.

“Yeah, there’s just a shooting over here, Raintree and Pima at the Paradise Bakery,” Will says calmly, “The dude’s still walking around in the parking lot with a gun.”

The dispatcher looks at her screen and determines the exact address. While she does so, Will is describing the man with the gun – he’s “short”, wearing a black shirt, maybe around 185 pounds and is possibly Hispanic. He’s also told her about the vehicle where the shot had taken place – a silver Honda.

“Okay, is it right in front of Paradise Bakery?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says, “right next to my Eco truck.”

“Okay, now I’ve got …” she begins to say.

But she is cut off by the sound of a loud boom.

“Uh, there’s another shot right there … two shots,” Will breaks in. “Get somebody here quick, please.”

Will is on the move. He is slipping in the shadows between
buildings
. He has watched the second shot. The unknown man has calmly returned to the car and pointed inside. Will has watched him do it. Will has seen the flash in the darkness.

“Okay, they’re coming to you. Talking to me is not slowing my officers down,” the dispatcher says. She wants to ask more questions and Will keeps feeding her information but no one is arriving yet. He is staying to the shadows, shielding the light of the phone and trying to keep an eye on his unpredictable enemy. Will has more than enough time to describe the silver car and the clothing worn and the size and complexion of the man shooting. But the dispatcher wants more description of the man. “You said he was short?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Will responds but quickly moves on to the most
compelling
item to describe: “He has a revolver with a nine-inch barrel. It sounds like it’s probably a .380 or a little bigger.”

Now she wants a description of Will’s own vehicle. His tension at last surfaces as he struggles for the make and model of the truck he drives every day “It’s a white silver … uh, uh, what do you call it? Shit, ‘Colorado’ and it says ‘Eco’ on the side. It has that, uh, cover on the back …”

She starts to cut him off. She has bad news, “The officers …”

“It’s backed up to the Paradise Bakery,” Will finishes.

“… are saying,” she delivers the stroke of disaster, “they don’t see a vehicle. Are we sure this is the correct address?”

The fact is officers are now at a Paradise Bakery. They’ve got no silver Honda, no man with a gun, no bleeding victim.

The success of Paradise Bakery, building ten new stores in the area in the last six months, is on the verge of costing the young single father his life.

Officers are at the Paradise Bakery on Doubletree not Raintree. The Doubletree store is on Scottsdale Road, not the freeway. The two locations are six congested, urban miles apart.

“I don’t know if you heard that or not,” Will says, as he hears the devastating news.

“I heard it,” says the operator.

A third shot.

“And the pop sounded like it was right there. It’s pretty close,” he tells her.

Will has kept on the move, ducking into dumpster shelters and behind walls to keep the lit phone from giving away his position as much as possible, but also trying to keep the man in view, “If not, then there’s somebody else in this parking lot. But I saw that dude with the freaking silver revolver.”

The third shot occurs at four minutes and four seconds into Will’s 911 call. He has stood face to face with a murderer. He has seen a man be killed. He is in a cat-and-mouse game for his life. He has watched two more shots be discharged.

And now officers have gone to the wrong address.

Without panicking, he switches from street names, which have failed him, and gives her detailed directions to “turn first right”, “after heading west” and so forth. Will looks around the
far-reaching
shopping centre and begins to name off any building other than Paradise Bakery. There’s New York Pizza Department, he tells her, there’s a Teri’s Consignment Furnishings … “I’m trying to see what else is in the parking lot … Sport Chalet …”

“Okay, yeah I know where you’re at now. That, that address I read to you, that was the wrong one so …”

“I’m sorry,” Will apologizes.

“All the officers are on the way so just stay safe and just stay on the line with me.

Will wants to stay safe, too, but it’s getting more difficult.

“Now the dude’s running.”

“Okay, uh, do you see the officer?”

Will sees no officers. “Um, no, which way did he come in?”

“What direction?”

But he sees the man with the gun.

“He’s running. He ran towards my truck, he’s gone behind Paradise Bakery or he’s in my truck. I don’t know. He ran towards the freeway like right between Paradise Bakery and the Pearle Vision between the freeway.”

Will is describing the small side street of the broken “L”, the same space he himself had to cross. The Pearle Vision Center is in the lateral strip mall, across from where Paradise Bakery caps the north/south strip mall.

“Okay.”

“He’s on foot and I’ll tell you if I see him running to the left. I still don’t see an officer – no, he’s walking back to the car.”

Will keeps scanning in the darkness, balancing his position between monitoring his pursuer, keeping hidden and scanning for the arrival of any help at all.

At last, “Okay, the officer is … here.”

Scottsdale PD Patrolman Alex Dyer has arrived in a patrol car from the north. He’s been told shots are fired. He sees the Eco Pest Control truck. But with the confusion from the other bakery location, Dyer is not sure what he’ll find here and at first does not see any men on foot, not one with a cell phone and not one with a gun.

From the shadows, Will begins to issue play by play directions:

“I’m standing right here on the left. Tell him to go straight … go straight, keep driving, keep driving, keep driving … Now tell him to take a left. Tell him to take his left and the dude’s right there.”

“So he’s back at the vehicle?”

“Yeah, oh, he’s walking towards us right now.”

“The, uh, suspect?”

“Yes, that’s right. He’s walking in front of a moving van.”

The goods-moving van, parked for the night, is in front of the Pearle Vision Center. Will is hiding in dumpsters behind Pearle.

Officer Dyer has entered the giant shopping centre from the north. His plan was to take a defensive position and then wait for back up. But Dyer now sees a man matching the suspect’s
description
emerge from a dumpster enclosure near Pearle. The suspect is heading north. The officer doesn’t know it, but at this location so far from the Honda the suspect can be doing only one thing: looking for Will.

“I immediately drew my weapon and began issuing commands,” Dyer wrote in his report.

Will sees the man’s hands go up. The dispatcher wants to know if he sees the officers with him. Will corrects her … he only sees one officer. He himself is still in hiding.

“He told him to get on the ground, he’s laying down,” Will narrates for her, “Well, he’s half up, half down.”

The dispatcher begins to ask Will his name and phone number, she thinks he is safe now. But Will knows better. He has kept to the shadows even though a police cruiser is on the scene. He has seen his pursuer put his hands up in the air. He has seen the officer order him to the ground. But knowing what was waiting in the silver Honda at the kerb, Will knows what this assassin is capable of. He thinks neither he nor the officer on the scene are safe.

Will is right.

“He’s running now. The guy just ran.”

Astonished, the dispatcher again enlists Will’s secret direction: “Okay, what direction is he going?”

He tells her he’s running east, he’s running towards the freeway.

Officer Dyer records that he fell in hot pursuit: “I chased him on foot for approximately fifty to seventy-five feet while keeping him at gunpoint.” Officer Dyer can’t talk to dispatch. He’s all alone on scene.

Except for his secret ally, still in the shadows.

Because Will is giving real-time information on the suspect’s actions, dispatch is able to relay the information to other squad cars. One comes screeching in from the south and pulls into the west end of the side street between Pearl and Paradise. Another comes screeching in from the 101 frontage road on the east. The squad car from the 101 had been monitoring the radio dispatches for the last seven minutes but had not deployed because it was too far from the Doubletree bakery. It had been on routine patrol near the Raintree location the whole time. The other squad car has already been to the first bakery, in vain. But they are here now, lights flashing, wheels squealing. Both patrolmen jump from their cars with weapons drawn.

Now the suspect is trapped.

He goes back down to the asphalt but he’s fighting and
screaming
. One of the officers turns on a tape recorder to capture the ravings: “I fuckin’ merked him, I’m gonna fucking kill all of you, I smoked him, fool, you guys are all gonna die.” It takes four
patrolmen
to control the suspect. Officer Dyer even sustains injuries and the suspect will be charged with assaulting an officer. The officers ask him what “merked” means. The suspect explains it means to shoot people. He continues to thrash and struggle and yell threats. When the paddy wagon comes, the suspect is still so combative, even though he is already handcuffed, he is strapped into a
restraining
seat.

Will later described the situation, “I was off in a corner in the dark watching him, observing him so I could run if I had to run. I knew she sent them to the wrong place when she said ‘they’re on site’ and I said ‘no, they’re not’ cuz I pretty much could see both directions down the parking lot.

“It was a big relief when they came,” Will says with a soft giggle. “Finally there was enough cop cars there I knew they would they get him so I could come out into the open.”

With the suspect finally in custody, the next officers to arrive surrounded the Honda. With weapons drawn, they called upon the man at the wheel to show his hands. He did not respond. They cautiously crept nearer. When they got close enough to see, they dropped their weapons. With one foot drooping out the door, the man’s upper body stretched toward the passenger side, his head facing toward the open door. Behind that passenger door, on the south side of the Honda, was where the suspect had been standing when William heard the first shot. The man at the wheel, lifeless foot dangling out the door, had been shot from behind.

The man’s brains and skull pieces were blasted all over the interior of the cabin.

As officers looked inside, a cell phone began to ring.

Rami Merza had placed a calm and innocent call asking for directions at 11.30 p.m. At 11.40, Will’s phone had connected to 911. The person calling now, as officers gazed upon his spattered remains, had no way of knowing yet that big grinning Rami would never pick up.

Homicide Detective Hugh Lockerby arrived on the scene and took over the case. “William Coss’s cool demeanour played a huge role in this case,” he says. “He stayed on the move in case he needed to escape more, he made his way around buildings, always keeping an eye on the suspect. He must have had an elevated heart rate, a fear for his life, probably scared shitless, any person would be, hearing a gunshot and being that close yet he was still calm enough and cognizant enough to get on the phone, keep himself alive and actually direct officers to the scene and even during that time observed the suspect going back and shooting the victim again. It was huge. It was massive.”

When Ramsen Dadesho was finally taken into custody – nine minutes into Will’s call – the weapon Coss had described was no longer on his person. William continued to help.

“He walked back by the silver car,” he had told the dispatcher during the confusion. “He didn’t get to the car but he walked back toward the parking lot … a little north of that behind the car. But I don’t know if he walked and hid the gun and then came back out or not but that’s about right when all the cruisers showed up.”

At 2 a.m., Detective Richard Best found the weapon. Eighteen inches below the surface of a three-foot-tall purple sage bush, tucked down inside the cylinder shape of the plant, the gun was suspended in the darkness. He reported from the way it was positioned, it had to have been placed deliberately inside the shrub, not thrown. The purple sage bush was far out in the parking lot, just as Will had suggested.

The gun was a Smith and Wesson .44 revolver. It would have sounded like a cannon when fired at such close range, as Will screwed on the bottle cap at his truck six parking spaces north. Three cartridges were spent. Three bullets were still in the chamber.

Lockerby says without Will Coss’s icy calm under fire, they most likely would have ended up with a very difficult, even unsolvable, case. “I mean, how often do you have an actual eyewitness that was completely uninvolved with the murder? If he wouldn’t have done what he did, first of all officers wouldn’t have been able to get there as quickly which would have given the defendant time to get away. The two Modesto men were friends, too, so without the witness, it might have been impossible to figure out the role of the suspect or who the suspect was. Even if we had figured it out, it would have been a lot harder to prove.”

Without Coss’s quick manoeuvring, Scottsdale Police Department may have been presented days later with two separate missing persons reports, with no connection to each other: an Eco Pest Control employee and the unemployed Modesto man with the Mesa address. They may have found two bodies in the parking lot and had to assume some kind of confrontation or relationship between them. Or they may have found one body but not the other. If Coss had not been there at all, Rami’s murder may have been pinned on a mythical third party such as an armed robber who got away. In fact, Ramsen did try to sell a story of a mysterious black Tahoe with tinted windows.