It was after midnight when Sid guided the Volvo up the street toward home. Ronnie said, “The thing that keeps bothering me is why those two in the car had a .308 rifle with them in the first place.”
“I don’t know. I assume they knew we were investigating the Ballantine murder. Maybe they killed Ballantine and were watching us to be sure we didn’t find anything.”
“And they just happened to have the rifle with them, knew we’d spotted them, and didn’t have an explanation for the rifle that the cops would buy?” she said.
“That doesn’t feel right,” Sid said. “More likely they’d been following us since we left in the morning, waiting for a good place to kill us.”
“What if this has something to do with the place itself, that housing development? Maybe they killed Ballantine there because there’s something they didn’t want anybody to see.”
“You don’t kill somebody and then watch the place where you dumped the body for a year just in case somebody looks there.”
“I guess I’m giving them too much credit. The only reason they’d open up on us from their car is if they got surprised when we went after them, and panicked.”
“Right,” said Sid. “I think tomorrow morning we should back up and start over again. This is still a regular homicide. Solving it is going to be done the same way it was when we were cops—footwork and asking the right people the right questions. We should start with the people who knew the victim best.”
“At least when we were cops, the suspects didn’t generally shoot at us until we were closer.”
They reached their gate and Sid pressed the remote control to turn on the electric motor to open the gate. He pulled forward into the driveway and pressed the button again to close the gate behind them. He began to drive up the long driveway toward the house.
“We’ve got a lot to look at,” Ronnie said. “We need to talk to—”
The car gave a sudden violent lurch and dropped abruptly. The undercarriage hit the pavement with a spine-jarring jolt and a loud bang. The front of the car was angled downward into the ground, caught there.
Sid said, “It’s a deadfall. Stay low and get ready to run for the house.” He freed himself of his seat belt, took out his pistol, and switched off the dome light. Then he flung his door open and slipped out.
Ronnie had started to open her door when the first shot came. The round pounded the door and Ronnie pulled the door shut again. She slithered over the console between the two front seats and into the backseat while bullets smashed through the side windows above her head, spraying her with glittering bits of glass. She pushed out through the opposite door onto the driveway beside Sid.
Sid aimed his pistol over the hood of the car at the two spots where he had seen muzzle flashes, fired four rounds, and then ducked down. “It’s coming from the yard over by the porch.”
During a bad case three years ago the Abels had equipped their new Volvo with half-inch steel plates inside the door panels to protect them from small arms rounds piercing the doors. Now they could hear bullets punching through the outer sheets of painted metal and ricocheting off the steel plates to rattle in the space between.
Ronnie hit 9-1-1 on her phone and said, “This is Veronica Abel at 13551 Vista Matilija in Van Nuys. We’re under fire in our driveway from unknown attackers.” She ended the call, and then lay across the driver’s seat to reach the remote control, and pressed the button to reopen the gate to the street.
Sid said, “Is that to let the shooters leave or the cops come in?”
“I’m not particular.”
The firing began again. Three shots came from the right side by the garden, and then two more from twenty feet to the left of it, punching through the rear window and spraying glass into the backseat.
Sid fired at the flashes, aiming by resting his arm on the car door. Ronnie crawled along the side of the car to the trunk, and lay on her belly to look for targets from beneath the car.
The next time the shooting began, the muzzle flashes came from different places. One shooter had moved up the lawn toward the house, and the other was firing while trying to make a run along the hedge. Ronnie fired six rounds at the darker spot in the dark yard that she judged to be one of the shooters, and then two more into what she hoped was the other, then scrambled to hide behind the armored door.
Both shooters fired now, their rounds punching through the far side of the car, across the inside of the trunk, and then pounding against the inner wall, by then mushroomed or fragmented so they didn’t penetrate. Other rounds punctured both rear tires, so the car sat down hard and closed most of the space Ronnie had used as a window for her line of fire.
Ronnie sat with her back to the rear wheel and saw that lights had come on in the upper windows of nearby houses. “It looks like we woke the neighbors.”
“It’s about time.” Sid glanced at the lighted windows across the street as he reached to his shoulder holster pouch and to ok out a loaded magazine. “Do you have a spare magazine?”
“Three of them.” She reached to the passenger seat and pulled out her purse by the strap. “Want one?”
“No. Just be ready to reload.”
“Are you thinking we should make a run for the house?”
“I think that’s what they’re hoping we’ll do,” he said.
“Me too. So let’s not.”
“I think that as soon as they hear sirens they’ll make their last, best attempt to kill us.”
“I’m ready. Are you?”
Sid reloaded. “Yes.”
“Aren’t you grateful that I shamed you into taking more target practice yesterday? Admit it. I’m a good wife.”
“You are. If you light up one of these bastards, you’ll be a great wife, and mother of the year.”
“I think I hear sirens. Ready?”
In the distance there was the whoop of a police siren, then another, and then the sirens blended into a single steady noise, getting louder as the cars moved closer.
The firing had stopped. Sid crawled to the front of the car where he was protected by the engine block and peered across the yard. “I don’t see them.”
They both became aware of a new sound that was overwhelming and drowning out the others—the deep throbbing of a helicopter’s engine. “That explains it,” she said. “They heard it coming and knew they were out of time.”
Sid remained on his belly at the front of the car, his pistol in his hand aimed in the direction where he’d last seen muzzle flashes. The sirens stopped and the road outside the gate was suddenly bright, the canopy of tree limbs and leaves above the street lit by alternating flashes of red and blue.
The helicopter arrived overhead, circling, as three police cars sped past the others and bumped up over the gate’s track into the driveway. An amplified voice said, “Place your weapons on the ground and move away from the car.”
Sid and Ronnie obeyed. They kept their hands up with their fingers spread and their palms visible. The world brightened as the light from the helicopter shone down on them and the spotlights mounted on the police cars swept the yard.
In the lights they could see the reflected golden glow of brass casings that had been ejected from the attackers’ guns on the far side of the yard. There were also casings from their own Glocks scattered at their feet on the driveway.
Police officers rushed to Ronnie and Sid while others fanned out all over the property with guns drawn and flashlights dissolving the pockets of darkness along the hedges and near the fountain. There were sounds of more police cars that arrived and never stopped. They continued up the street and then turned in various directions to search for the shooters.
The four police officers who stood by the Abels kept close watch on them while a sergeant spoke to them.
“What happened here?”
Sid said, “They dug a trench across our driveway and covered it, so when we drove in tonight the car got caught in the trap. Then they started firing.”
“Who are they and why did they want to kill you?”
“We’re private investigators, and we’re on a case that seems to be worrying someone. Last night, two men shot out the windshield of our BMW up in the North Valley, and now this.”
“Did you get a look?”
“Not really,” said Ronnie. “There were definitely two of them both times. We opened the gate, thinking we’d see them when they ran off, but they didn’t go that way. They were firing at us, and then when we heard the sirens and the chopper, the shooting stopped.”
The sergeant surveyed the driveway and gestured at the brass. “I see you returned fire. Is there any chance you hit one of them?”
“I doubt it,” Sid said. “They would fire and then move in the dark. We were always firing at the place where they’d been. And they kept us pinned down pretty well. I think they were using compact semiauto rifles—Uzis, Tec-9s, or something like that.”
The sergeant spoke into his radio. “We’re looking for a minimum of two shooters. Possibly on foot. Any pedestrian you meet could be one of them, so proceed with caution.”
A cop hurried up to the sergeant, and handed him a brass casing.
The sergeant looked at the end of it, and spoke into the radio. “We’ve got lots of brass from the shooters at the scene, 9mm. Could be a compact tactical weapon, like an Uzi or Tec-9.” He didn’t need to say the rest, because the other police officers knew the implications—that the weapon might be hidden under a coat, or that the suspects might be at a distance aiming at them right now.
The sergeant’s radio squawked a rapid series of short messages, units in the search conveying their locations and directions. After a few seconds there were some overriding instructions from an unseen supervisor to redirect a couple of units. The sergeant turned to the Abels. “Is there a chance they got into your house?”
“It’s possible,” Sid said. “We didn’t see them leave. We reopened the front gate so they might leave if we returned fire, but they didn’t go that way.”
“All right,” said the sergeant. “Can you lend me the keys?”
“They’re on the keychain in the car ignition.”
“Sit tight.” He took the keys from the car, assembled six men, and sent them to take positions around the house. An assault group of another six appeared, three of them carrying shotguns.
In a moment they were in the front door, and as they cleared each room they turned the lights on and moved to the next. The sergeant kept silent as the team reported their progress.
Five minutes later the team declared all the rooms cleared, and began to leave the house. The sergeant said to the Abels, “They didn’t get into your house.”
“Cops!” said Sid.
“What do you mean?” the sergeant said.
“The only people we’ve seen are cops. That’s how the shooters got off the property,” he said. “They must have been dressed as cops.”
“Sid’s right,” said Ronnie. “They knew that if they fired rifles in the middle of a residential neighborhood, police would be arriving in serious numbers in a few minutes. After a couple more, there would be officers going in every direction. All they had to do was wait until then and walk out after them.”
The sergeant said into his radio, “The shooters may have left the yard dressed as police officers. Look at faces. Look at badges and equipment. Ask yourself all the questions when you approach another team. I repeat. The suspects might be wearing police uniforms.”
Three miles away, Ed and Nicole Hoyt sat in the alley behind a row of closed restaurants and stores on Nordham Street in Northridge. Nicole pulled a gray sweatshirt down over her black, short-sleeved police uniform shirt and handed Ed his plaid flannel shirt. He pulled it over his head, and then buttoned the top two buttons. Nicole adjusted the radio scanner beside her to 506.975. It clicked and then a male voice said, “One zebra twenty-six. We went on a burglary at the Springfield Cleaners yesterday morning. They thought a few uniforms might have been part of the missing property.”
“Copy,” said another voice. “Any security video?”
“Negative,” the cop said. “The detectives were planning to check the cameras on other businesses that might have picked something up.”
“We know they won’t find any pictures of us,” Nicole said. “It was as dark as the inside of your pocket that night, and we had ski masks on.”
Ed started the engine and the car crawled down the alley toward the next street. “Even if they don’t catch us, tonight was crap.”
“I know,” said Nicole. “I still don’t know why they’re alive. I’ll bet we put sixty rounds each into that car.”
“We broke a lot of glass, but the shots didn’t go through the doors.”
“Why not?”
“I’m guessing Abel put steel plates in the door panels. That’s when they should have died—right away, when they were still strapped in their seats and ducking their heads.”
“But are you sure there were steel plates?”
“Pretty sure. They should have tried to run. Instead they stayed behind the car, because they knew the doors were armored. We should have learned more about them, and we’d have known they’d pull something like that.”
She knew better than to press him about what they should do to kill these people now. When he was in a bad mood, Ed Hoyt had a tendency to go nonverbal.