AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“All right,” Letty said. “If they pop up again, let us know right away.”
“I will.”
They put the address for the supermarket in the iPad’s navigation app, followed it on the 405 freeway into the San Fernando Valley and Ventura Boulevard. They rolled through the Vons parking lot; the SUV wasn’t there.
“They went throughthatlight,” Baxter said, pointing, “but theydidn’t make it throughthatlight.” He pointed at a traffic signal at the end of the block. “That means they gotta be in this block.”
“Keep moving,” Letty said. “They could have pulled through the parking lot and gone out sideways on the next street.”
“That street looks big, too. It’s probably got its own cameras.”
They cruised but found no sign of the SUV.
“If they didn’t leave the block, they could be in one of those parking lots across the street, or in that garage,” Letty said, looking across Ventura. “I’m kinda liking the garage.”
Across the street from the Vons, a line of dingy two-story shops sat up like a row of bad teeth, with narrow parking lots between each shop. An auto-repair garage sat in the middle of the block; what had been its advertising sign above the two garage doors had been roughly covered with green paint. When Letty looked at the garage through her binoculars, she saw a “Closed” sign on the front door.
They found a parking spot in the Vons lot that gave them an angular view, between a Ford pickup and a Chevy van, of the front of the garage. They sat watching for half an hour, but nothing moved in or out of the garage. There was some foot traffic past the place, in both directions.
They passed the binoculars back and forth, and then Letty said, “I’m going to take a walk. See what I can see up closer.”
“Call me before you do anything extreme,” Baxter said. “Leave the binoculars, you won’t need them. I’ll watch you, so if you get shot, I can inform the police in a timely manner.”
“Great. I’ll leave the cane. The cane and the limp attract the eye,” she said. She peeled off the knee brace and left it on the car floor, checked her Sig to make sure it was cocked and locked, as always, and it was. She got out of the car and walked toward theback of the parking lot, to a bakery, and then turned left across the lot to Reseda Boulevard, across the boulevard to a Coffee Bean, where she went inside and bought a cup of coffee.
Carrying the cup, she crossed Ventura and walked toward the garage, which was located between a Chop Shop hairdresser and a Katz’ Kids Deli. The three businesses had narrow parking lots between them, while the front of the shops went almost to the sidewalk.
The garage had four long, shallow windows on its side walls, set just below the roofline, facing the Chop Shop on one side and the deli on the other. Letty walked down the hairdresser’s parking lot, then over to the garage wall. She stood for a moment, listening, but heard nothing from inside. She walked down the wall to the back of the building, where she found a steel door and nothing else—no windows, nothing but yellow-painted concrete.
Crossing the parking lot back to the Chop Shop, she turned down the sidewalk and walked past the garage. The two big overhead doors had glass panels, with bars behind the glass. The glass was frosted and grimed with dust. A bulky shape behind the glass on one side might be the back of the SUV, Letty thought.
Nothing moved.
She called Baxter and said, “That SUV isn’t in the deli parking lot and it’s not in the Chop Shop lot. I’ll check the rest of the lots on the block, and then I’ll be back.”
She’d checked four lots when Baxter called back: “A guy just came out of the garage and I think it’s one of the shooters. I’m pretty sure.”
“I’m coming. Stay out of sight.”
“He’s carrying a cloth grocery bag. He’s going into Vons... He’s in the store.”
“At least he’s environmentally conscious,” Letty said.
“Except that he’s littered bodies all over the place,” Baxter said.
Letty was back at the car two minutes later, and ten minutes after that, the shooter walked out of the store, carrying a bag in one hand that appeared to be full of groceries. He had a donut in his other hand, which he ate as he walked toward the corner to cross Ventura.
“That’s one of them,” Letty said. “Good eye, Rod.”
Letty got on the phone to Delores Nowak, who answered on the first ring: “Something happen?”
“Yes. We spotted the hideout. It’s in a closed car-repair garage on Ventura. One of the shooters bought a bag of groceries and is walking back to the garage.”
“Good job. What’s the address there?”
Letty gave it to her, and Nowak said, “We’ve had an extended conference here and we’ve decided with two dead, we need to know who these shooters are. We’ve got the FBI’s SWAT squad ready to roll and they’re not far from you. The FBI and the LAPD are on their way to Barron’s house. The SWAT squad is maybe twenty minutes from you, a half hour at most.”
Letty said, “I need to talk to the SWAT commander. Like, right now.”
