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Nowak didn’t argue: “I’ll fill him in and have him call.” And she hung up.
Letty waited a restless five minutes, long enough for Baxter to ask, “You think they’re fuckin’ with us?” then took a call from a man who said, simply, “This is Jackson. FBI. You wanted to talk to me?”
“Did Nowak tell you who I am?”
“Yes. Whatcha got?”
“The walls of the garage you’re headed for are made of pouredconcrete, not concrete block. They look like bunker walls. There are two overhead garage doors in front, with frosted, dirty windows that you can’t see through and they’re barred. One regular door, but the regular door has steel bars behind the glass and is set in a steel frame. I don’t know if you could bust it with a handheld ram. The only other door is a steel door on the back wall. There are no windows in back, but there are four windows on each side. The windows are up high—probably fifteen feet off the ground, and they’ve got a chain-link mesh behind them. I suspect they look out from a loft. There are two cameras on the front of the building, covering the sidewalks. I don’t know if they’re real or if they’re even functioning, but the cameras look clean, like they might be new.”
“Okay. Thanks for this. We’ve got a scout car out ahead of us... Is there any place where we can lookdownat the garage?”
“Not close,” Letty said. “All the buildings on that side of the street are the same height and kind of old. They look like they were all built at the same time. There’s a deli on one side, people are coming and going from that, but there’s no line, not a lot of people. There’s a hairdresser on the other side, and that’s the same thing, a few people coming and going.”
“Do you think there might be roof access from inside the garage?”
“Can’t tell, but I can probably find out.”
“Don’t risk your neck to find out—and don’t take a chance of tipping them off. We’ll be coming.”
“I’ll get back,” Letty said. She hung up and said to Baxter: “I’m going into that deli to see if there is roof access. The SWAT team is still a ways out, there’ll be a scout car ahead of the full team. No, I won’t get you a ham and cheese, so don’t ask.”
“You want me to come with you?”
“I would, but somebody’s got to stay here and watch the front of the garage,” Letty said. “I’ll call you from the roof if I make it up there. If somebody comes out of the garage, or the SUV comes out, call the SWAT guy and then call me.”
Letty crossed Ventura again,at the corner, walked past the front of the garage to the deli and went inside. In the back, at one side of the kitchen, she could see a set of stairs going up. She stepped past a single customer, who had a finger pressed against the glass front of the meat case, about to order, and said to the counterman, “I gotta talk to the manager. Right now.”
The counterman frowned at her over the top of his mustard-stained apron and said, “You gotta wait. I’m already serving...”
“Right now!” Letty said. She walked around the end of the counter and headed toward the kitchen, where a single cook was leaning against a sink and was picking his teeth with a red-flagged cocktail toothpick. The counterman yelled, “Hey! You can’t go back there,” and the cook, a knobby-looking Asian man, moved to block her, but she snapped, “Get out of the way.”
She took her hand out of her pocket, with the 938 in it. The cook got out of the way. The counterman had picked up his cell phone and she turned and said, “I’m FBI. Lock the doors. In a very few minutes, an FBI SWAT squad will get here. Some heavy shit is about to go down and you don’t want to get caught in the middle of it.”
The single customer, a florid, heavyset man wearing a yellow shirt, said, “Fuck this,” and walked out the door. As Letty watched, he turned away from the garage and disappeared down the sidewalk.
The stairs started halfway through the kitchen. Letty ran up them, and at the top of the stairs, found a landing, and on the other side of the landing, through double doors that appeared to never have been closed, she could see an office-loft, with a wooden desk, computer, and some filing cabinets.
To her right, a short hallway led to a bathroom—she could see a toilet—and to one side of the bathroom door, a ladder. She went that way and looked up. The ladder, made of gray-painted two-by-fours, led to a push-up hatch. She put the 938 back in her jeans pocket and climbed the ladder. The hatch was dogged down with a steel push-bar. She pulled it loose, and when she pushed up on the hatch, years of dust and dirt fell onto her face and hair. She ignored it, and pushed the hatch all the way open, and crawled up onto the roof.
The roof, half the size of a basketball court, was covered with gravel chips embedded in tar, and worn with age and too much sun: cracked, hard, bare tar showed through in a dozen wide spots; she could smell it. There was nothing on the roof, except a variety of chimneys and vents, and an air conditioner housing. The odor of cooking ham came from one of the vents.
The roof over the garage, across the deli parking lot, had a collection of star-shaped concrete planters all pushed into a corner, with nothing in them. In addition to the planters, vents, and air conditioner housing, a hutch-style shelter sat at one side, apparently covering stairs that came up from below. She walked to the end of the deli roof to get a better angle on the hutch, and saw another steel door.
Letty got back on her cell phone and called the SWAT team leader. He said, without preamble, “Ten minutes out, the scout car should about be there. What do you got?”
“I’m on the deli roof, next to the garage,” Letty said. “It looks like the garage has stairs that go right up to the roof, with a shelter over them. So, you could have somebody above you, looking down.”
“Thanks. Good to know. We could see a square on the satellite view, but we didn’t know what it was. Somebody thought it might be a housing for a garage hoist.”
“Got a door on it,” Letty said. “You know, for people.”
“Okay. Ten minutes. You stay safe.”
A minute later, a nondescript gray car rolled down the alley at the back of the line of shops. Letty watched it go by, pause by the garage’s back door, then go on and turn at the corner. She walked to the front of the roof and saw the gray car roll by the front of the garage. A man in the passenger seat was looking out at the garage.
The scout car? She thought it probably was. The car went to the end of the block, made an illegal U-turn, rolled back to the Vons parking lot, found a space, and parked where the occupants could watch the garage.
A two-foot-high parapetran around the perimeter of the deli roof, with crenellations sticking up another six inches. When Letty kicked the parapet, it gave back a hollow thump. Plywood covered with tar paper, not highly recommended as cover in a gunfight, though it offered some concealment. She moved close to the parapet and sat down, prickly little stones pressing uncomfortably into her butt.
