Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

“You’re doing the right thing,” I said.

“Fuck you, ghost.”

He was still standing there like that when I walked back to the ladder and followed Lin off the roof.

Chapter Seventeen

Parker Center is a big modern building with plenty of parking. It sits on the corner of First and Los Angeles streets, in an area they keep trying to clean up—I think revitalize is the word the mayor’s office is using.

It’s only a few short blocks from the Nickel, but worlds apart. It’s close to a few major corporate offices and banks, and close to the Japanese area, too, so you’re more likely to see a dark blue business suit than a bottle of Mad Dog.

When you walk in the front door, you almost always walk in with a crowd. I was surrounded by two three-piece suits, both navy blue, a woman in a dark green power suit, and two uniforms. We all moved in together. The others showed some ID and moved on past the reception area.

They stopped me at the reception desk. There were a couple of uniforms sitting behind a raised desk. With a cold politeness that only a cop can really master, they gave me a can-I-help-you-sir that really means who the hell are you.

I told them they could help me. That didn’t make them burst into song, but they did say I could see the information officer. I had to turn over my driver’s license before they would let me past the desk.

Then I had to fill out a couple of forms describing the documents I wanted to see. I sat in a small room on a hard chair and filled out the forms with a pen on the end of a chain.

I still wasn’t quite sure how I’d ended up here. Somehow the whole idea of somebody in the command structure killing the McAuleys was still too dumb to take seriously.

And somehow that made me take it seriously. At least my subconscious did. I really had thought I was driving back to the hotel; instead I found myself standing in the street in front of this building.

The talk with Spider had left a bad taste in my mouth. At first I thought it came from pushing the kid the way I had, breaking him down to get what I wanted.

But then I realized I hadn’t had to push that hard. Like Nicky’s front door, he was ready to collapse under the lightest touch.

No, the bad taste was coming from the killer. He had used the kid up and tossed him in the garbage—literally into the dumpster, from the roof. It hadn’t mattered to him whether Spider lived or died.

What kind of person was I looking for? A white guy. A white guy who had been cruising the worst area of the city during a riot, apparently unafraid. That could easily be a cop.

But then he had picked up about one hundred sixty pounds of kid with one hand and flung him through the air. Then he had shot Hector perfectly, casually, gone hand-over-hand up a rope and disappeared—

What the hell kind of person was this?

My thoughts had started steering the car. While I wondered who could do all that and still put pressure on an investigation, my thoughts continued to drive without me. I was lost inside them, and all the time moving down the freeway and out into Spring Street.

And I came to standing in the street in front of Parker Center.

I had just stood there for a while, looking up at the building and feeling stupid. This didn’t make any sense. I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be home, on my boat, poling across the flats towards a tailing permit. I didn’t want to be in Los Angeles, trying to find out if a killer kept office hours in Parker Center.

But it had started to make sense. All the complaints I’d heard about the high command during the riots—there could only be a few people in a position to do any real damage. What if one of them had?

Astronomers have a theory. If planets don’t act the way they’re supposed to, then maybe there’s a dark planet, an unknown source of gravity.

If the high command didn’t act the way it should have in the riots, and if there was somebody in high command leaning on the investigations—two very unlikely events—then it could have been the same somebody.

So suppose for a minute that there was a racist in the high command. Not just somebody with an attitude problem about black people, but somebody with an active, secret agenda.

A big if, but let that go. What would somebody like that do? Stir the pot a little to keep the riots going, make them a little worse. Intercept orders, delay them or fail to send them. Issue contradictory instructions and sit back and watch things get worse.

And then, when rumors about Hector and what he was doing had come out, this hypothetical ranking cop had gone in, tracked down the posse, and eliminated the threat to all that disorder. Then he’d come back and leaned on the investigation, and that was that.

Did that make sense?

No, it didn’t. It was stupid. The LAPD was not perfect, but it didn’t promote people who did those things.

Still, what did make sense?