“This is fucked up,” Compton said.
But as they approached the southbound freeway ramp, Ballard saw a glimpse of yellow two blocks ahead. A yellow car had turned into a lot and disappeared.
“Wait, did you see that?” she said. “It was yellow.”
“I didn’t see shit,” Compton said. “Where?”
Ballard drove past the freeway ramp and kept east on Sunset. When she got to the turn-in the yellow car had taken, she saw it was to a Home Depot with a massive parking lot. The entrance was clear and she remembered how it always used to be lined with men looking for day work. That had changed when Immigration and Customs Enforcement started routine immigration roundups.
Ballard pulled in and started cruising the lot. They came upon the yellow Camaro in a spot in the far corner. There were plenty of spaces closer to the entrance to Home Depot, so it appeared abandoned there. Ballard checked the plate. It was the car they were looking for.
“Shit,” she said.
“He’s gone,” Compton said. “Fuck, another guy who watched Heat too many times.”
“What?”
“The movie Heat. From the nineties? Inspired the North Hollywood bank shoot-out?”
“I was on a surfboard in Hawaii most of the nineties.”
“This guy played by De Niro was a robber. He had one rule: first sign of heat, you have to be able to leave everything behind. Just like that.”
Ballard kept cruising, looking at the faces of men on foot in the parking lot, hoping to see the man from the driveway.
She had no luck. Finally, she turned the car into the corner of the lot and came to a stop. Through the windshield they could see the Camaro fifty yards away.
“This is so fucked,” Compton said. “We should’ve just called Welborne. Instead, I listened to you about doing it ourselves.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Ballard said. “You’re blaming me? You wanted this just as much as I did.”
“You’re the one who always has to win. To show the guys up.”
“Holy shit, I can’t believe you. If you’re so worried about the feds, why don’t you just Uber your ass out of here. I’ll call Welborne and give him what we’ve got and put it all on me. I mean, why not, right? Everybody else wants to blame me for everything. Just get the fuck out of the car.”
Compton looked at her.
“You’re serious?” he asked.
“Deadly,” Ballard said. “Get the fuck out.”
With his eyes still on her, Compton opened his door like he was threatening to leave if she didn’t stop him.
She didn’t.
Compton got out and looked back in at her. She said nothing and kept her gaze on the Camaro. He slammed the door. She refused to turn to watch him walk away.
“And another one bites the dust,” she said to herself.
36
Ballard didn’t get to Hollywood Division until almost five o’clock. She had spent most of the afternoon dealing with ATFE and FBI agents, explaining her moves that morning after the interview with Nettles. She left Compton out of it, telling the agents she had acted on her own after leaving Men’s Central. The upset of the feds was mollified to a small degree when she looked at a set of photos they had and identified the man she had seen in the driveway. They said Eugenio Santana Perez was an alias but refused to tell her what his real name was. It was clearly a we’ll-take-it-from-here situation with a heavy tone of you-fucked-this-up-and-now-we-have-to-unfuck-it to top it off.
The feds impounded the Camaro and were waiting on a warrant to enter the house on Serrano Place when Ballard was dismissed with a sarcastic thank-you from Agent Welborne. Back at the station, she pulled a gray interoffice envelope out of her mailbox and went to the lieutenant’s office to get her new desk assignment. McAdams was standing at his desk, taking his gun out of the drawer and clipping it to his belt, a sign that he was heading home. Things were winding down across the entire bureau.
“Ballard, you decided to show up,” he said.
“Sorry, I got tied up downtown, and while I was there, I went to check on my victim from the Trent case,” she said. “Is there a specific desk you want me to take?”
McAdams pointed out the window of his office to the desk on the other side of the glass. It was the worst desk in the house because it was right outside his office and the computer was positioned so that the lieutenant could see its screen at any time. It was known in the squad as the sitting-duck desk.
“I was going to put you there, but now it looks like I don’t even have to find somebody for the late show,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Ballard asked.
“Well, you must’ve talked a good game of it down there today, because, the L.A. Times be damned, I just got the word that FID is calling the Trent killing within policy. And not only that, you got your RTD too. Congratulations.”
Ballard felt a great weight lift off her shoulders.
“I hadn’t heard,” she said. “That seems quick.”
“Whoever your defense rep was, he’s going to be in high demand, I’ll tell you that,” McAdams said. “The picture the Times drew up this morning wasn’t pretty.”
“I didn’t use one.”
“Then that makes this one even more worth celebrating. But if there’s a K party, I don’t want to know about it.”
McAdams seemed to be giving a tacit nod of approval to a kill party. It had once been a secret tradition for officers to gather and drink after one of them had killed someone. It was a way of releasing the tension of a life-and-death encounter. Once the department formed the FID to seriously investigate all officer-involved killings, the parties were pushed back until after an FID recommendation was released. Either way, the K party was anachronistic, and if they occurred at all now, it was only under deep secrecy. The last thing Ballard was interested in doing was celebrating her killing of Thomas Trent.
“Don’t worry, no K party,” she said.
“Good,” McAdams said. “Anyway, I’m outta here. Since you’ve been at it all day, I’ll leave Jenkins solo tonight, and you go back on shift starting tomorrow. All good?”
“Yeah, all good. Thanks, L-T.”
Ballard looked around and saw an empty desk with a reasonably new computer monitor on it. It was far away from the lieutenant’s office and the sitting-duck desk. But when she got there, she noticed a mug of coffee and paperwork spread across the work space. She then did a pivot and spotted another desk nearby in the burglary row that looked empty and unused and had a decent monitor.
She sat down and the first thing she did was go online to see if the Times had anything on the FID investigation that corrected the morning’s story. There wasn’t anything yet. She pulled out one of the business cards she had gotten from Towson and started writing him an e-mail, detailing what she had heard from her lieutenant and reporting that there was no action on it so far from the Times. Her cell phone buzzed just as she hit the send button. It was Rogers Carr of Major Crimes.
“Hey, did you get my message?”
“I got it, thanks.”