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“You’re too late!” the man with the folded arms yelled back. “It’s clearly marked ‘No Parking.’ Why do people ignore the signs?”
Ballard walked into the channel between the garage and the car. The man unfolded his arms and held his hands up as if to stop her forward progress.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You ignored the warnings and you’ll have to pay Venice Tow if you want it back.”
Ballard held up her newly returned ID card. “I was on police business,” she said. “Talk about signs—you didn’t see the sign on the visor?”
“Uh, what sign?” the man asked.
“Go look.”
“I will.”
He went all the way around the Defender to get to the front and had to crane his neck to see theOFFICIAL LAPD BUSINESSsign attached to the visor. Ballard followed him and used the key fob to unlock the car.
“That’s too small,” the man said. “Nobody would notice that.”
She opened the driver’s-side door, and the man put his hand on her arm to stop her from getting in. Ballard reacted quickly, mostly out of instinct and partly out of the anger she felt at having to let the Delsey duo off the hook. She grabbed the man’s wrist with her left hand, seized his elbow with her right, and spun him hard into the passenger door of the Defender.
“Do you want to go to jail for assaulting a police officer?”
“Assault? That was no assault.Youassaultedme.”
“You touched me. It was unwanted. That’s assault.”
“Look, you—”
“No, you look. Go back inside and set your parking trap for somebody else.”
The man’s mouth dropped open.
“That’s right,” Ballard said. “I know. You get a nice kickback from the tow yard.”
She let him loose. The man turned and silently walked over to the tow truck operator, shaking his head.
Ballard got in the Defender and started it up.
13
BALLARD HAD Aview of the entrance to the Eldorado from a spot at a red curb at Paloma and Speedway. There was a lot of pedestrian traffic in and out of the one-star hotel, mostly young people. Ballard guessed that there were other businesses besides the Lion’s being run out of the Eldorado. If the Lion was paying cash for stolen goods, there was probably a place to spend that money nearby. The likely products for sale were drugs and sex.
She couldn’t get a sense of the security arrangements from outside. She knew she would have to go in blind, and for the first time she started second-guessing her off-the-books maneuvering to get her badge and gun back. She thought maybe it might have been better to just report the thefts and take the heat.
Now it was too late.
She watched a skinny white teenage boy go into the hotel, carrying a laptop case. Ballard guessed it belonged to one of the kid’s parents and he would trade it for pennies on the dollar to get a hit of fentanyl or crystal meth. The Eldorado was at the low end of nowhere.
She opened her phone’s text app and composed a text to the Lion.
Lion, it’s Bobby D. New phone. I’m sending my girlfriend to you. We hit it big 2day—iPhone 15 and GoPro Hero 12. Brand-new shit. Stupid german touristas. She’s on her way. What room should she go to?
She waited to see if there would be a response. It came two minutes later.
If this is Bobby, what did you give me last time?
The Lion was no chump. Ballard just had to hope that the Delsey duo hadn’t cashed in anything else after the theft at Staircases. She typed in what she knew.
Badge and Glock.
