Ty held up the piece of paper with Emily and Charlie’s photographs. The two boys, both around fourteen years old and still hanging on a corner, although midnight had long passed, looked at them.
“You recognize them?” Ty asked.
The taller of the two boys shrugged. “You crazy?”
“Yeah, I am. That’s why I’m going ask you again.”
The kids shared a nervous laugh. “You sure you’re not Five-O?” By their logic, the old black man out there after dark asking questions would be a police officer.
“I already told you I’m not,” said Ty.
“You’re a private cop?”
“Something like that.”
“What about you?” the taller one asked Galante, who was leaning against the car, arms folded.
“I was a cop.”
“We don’t like cops around here,” said the smaller boy. For a kid who barely cleared five feet he delivered the line with a surprising amount of menace.
“Just as well I don’t care what you like or don’t like, then,” said Galante.
It wasn’t language he would use around kids normally, but these streets were a little different. As Ty kept at it, Galante’s eyes swept the block.
It was busy, even at three in the morning. This was a neighborhood that, like many in East Los Angeles, operated on a different timescale. There would have been no point stopping people here in the morning to ask them questions. Anyone out before nine would be on the way to work, and people who worked in these neighborhoods kept their heads down and their mouths closed.
It was only in the afternoon that streets like this sprang to life. Poor, gang-infested neighborhoods operated on an entirely different time zone. East LA time. PST plus five.
A car drove past Galante and Ty, its occupant’s eyes heavy with menace. Someone shouted at them in Spanish. Whatever they’d said, it wasn’t complimentary.
That had been the car’s third pass. They were pushing their luck staying so long. Next time there might be a shotgun poking through the rear window.
“Ty, let’s wrap it up,” said Galante.
“Yeah, we already told you, we ain’t seen any of these bitches,” said the taller kid.
Ty’s hand shot straight out and grabbed the kid by the throat. He lifted him clean off the ground.
Galante watched. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t intervene. He knew precisely what Ty was doing, and why.
“You want to try that again, son?”
The kid did his best to shake his head. The smaller kid stared with something approaching awe. Ty put his friend down and let go of his throat. The kid reached up and rubbed at his neck.
“You’re crazy. You can’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Lift me up like Darth Vader and shit. I’m gunna make a complaint.”
“Who to? I already told you I’m not a cop.”
“I’ll think of someone,” said the kid.
Ty dug out some cards. He handed one to each kid. “Here. When you make your complaint to the Department of No One Gives a Damn, make sure and give them one of these. I hate it when someone can’t spell my name correctly.”
Ty walked across to the car. “I’ll drive.”
Galante tossed him his keys. They got in. A couple of younger kids joined the other two on the sidewalk.
As Ty got behind the wheel, he caught the taller kid, the one he’d lifted off his feet, telling his friends, “Another second and I would have messed him up.”
Ty smiled to himself. It was the kind of thing he would have said at that age.
“Guess we know who’s going to be playing bad cop,” said Galante.
Ty shrugged, spinning the wheel and hitting the gas. “What do you think happens to that kid if he starts talking back to his mom?”
“A lot worse than that,” conceded Galante.
“Precisely.”
The car that had been circling the block appeared behind them, moving up fast on their rear bumper. Ty watched it in the rearview mirror.
“You strapped?” asked Ty.
Galante patted the bulge under his untucked shirt. “Damn straight.”
Ty settled himself back in the driver’s seat. “Glad one of us is.”
“Oh, yeah ‒ I heard about your run-in with the Long Beach PD.”
“Not my first and probably not my last.”
“Have to say it was a pretty good exit.”
During the siege at the emergency room in Long Beach, Ty had figured that his best chance of not being shot as he surrendered was to walk out front in his birthday suit. “Didn’t think you’d approve.”
“Oh, I’d have probably shot you. Just on a point of principle for locking a fellow officer in the trunk of his own car.”
“I had to get in there, and he was in my way. I did ask politely. It’s not like I went straight to putting him in the trunk.”
“You mean when you tried to impersonate a police officer?”
“Listen, dude, any man who allows himself to be locked in the trunk of his own car is kind of impersonating a police officer too.”
Galante laughed.
They reached the end of the block. Ty checked the rearview. The same car was still following them. “Knuckleheads,” he said.
“They probably just want to make sure we’re leaving.”
“You think we’re going to find these kids alive?” Ty asked.
“I’d say it’s fifty:fifty. MS-13 aren’t exactly shy about killing people.”
“I sense a ‘but’,” said Ty, flicking his eyes back to the rearview. The car had gone. Behind, the road was empty.
“They’re also a business organization. If they feel like there’s money to be made from keeping someone breathing then that’s what they’ll do. I’ll tell you one thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
Galante eased back in his seat as they drove down a block of abandoned houses, the front yards overgrown with weeds, windows either broken or boarded up.
“If they do get paid a nice ransom, and walk away without being caught, we’re going to see a bunch of this type of shit.”
“I hear that,” said Ty, lurching forward suddenly, his seatbelt snapping tight, preventing his chest slamming into the steering wheel as something hit them, at speed, from behind.
Ty didn’t need to look behind to know what or who it was. Next to him Carl Galante was wiping blood from his nose after he’d bounced face forward into the passenger dash.
“You okay?” asked Ty.
“Assholes,” said Galante, reaching down, his gun clearing leather.
“Hold that thought,” said Ty, burying the gas pedal, the car lurching forward. “You have insurance on this thing, right?”
“We might have to lie about you driving but, yeah, I do.”
“Good,” said Ty, spinning the steering wheel, the car spinning around so that it was facing in the opposite direction.
The driver of the gang car threw it into reverse and backed up at speed. Ty could see four people inside. Two in front, two in back, their faces covered by bandanas the same color as those of the people who had taken Emily and Charlie. Ty doubted it was the same gang members, but they were almost certainly MS-13, or affiliated in some way.
“Why don’t we just get out of here?” said Galante.
The cars were facing each other, separated by half a block of empty street. The driver of the gang car flicked his headlights onto full power as the passenger door popped open and someone got out.
“Nah, the hell with that,” said Ty, as a yellow blaze of muzzle flash lit up next to the gang car.
Ty and Galante dived down. Ty hit the gas pedal again, aiming straight for the gang car. He kept his head down, grasping the bottom of the steering wheel as rounds shattered the windshield.
Keeping his foot to the floor, Ty kamikazed his way down the street, occasionally peeking over the dash and adjusting his steering so that he was aimed directly for the open passenger door the gunman was using for cover.
A fresh three-round burst slammed into the engine block.
“Are you nuts?” screamed Galante, as Ty held onto the wheel for grim death.
A final peek through the shattered windshield revealed the gunman throwing himself towards the sidewalk as Galante’s car clipped the open passenger door.
The grating sound of metal on metal was accompanied by a shower of sparks.
Ty eased up on the gas pedal and hit the brakes. The car slowed. He yanked down on the steering and turned the car around. Now he was looking at the rear of the gang car as the gunman who’d taken refuge on the sidewalk set off running for a nearby alleyway, abandoning the rest of his crew. “Punk-ass bitch,” he muttered, under his breath, at the retreating figure.
He reached over and peeled Galante’s gun from his fingers.
Galante offered token resistance. “What are you doing?”
“Hey,” said Ty. “They started it. You think I’m going to have a bunch of assholes try to kill us and just let it go? Forget that noise.”
Holding Galante’s gun, Ty popped his door open, got out, and squeezed off two shots at the rear of the gang car, shattering the rear windscreen. Inside, the gang members dove for cover in the footwells.
The gang car took off, the hinges of the passenger door giving way, the door dropping onto the street. Ty let off one more round for good measure as the sound of police sirens punched through the quiet.
Galante got out, watching the gang car recede into the distance as Ty stood up and walked to the front of their vehicle to assess the damage. “I think we’re going to need another car,” he said.
Steam poured out from under the hood. A gasoline smell filled the air.
Ty handed Galante back his gun as an LAPD patrol car turned onto the block.
“Thanks,” said Galante. “Do me one tiny favor?”
“What’s that?” said Ty.
“Let me do the talking.”
“Anything else?”
Galante winced again at the smoldering front of his car. “Try to keep your pants on.”