Private #1 Suspect (Private 2)

CHAPTER 119

TOMMY’S FACE WAS knotted with anger and disbelief. He asked, “What the fuck are you doing?”

The operator came on the line, said, “What is your emergency?”

I disguised my voice, spoke softly with a Spanish accent. “I heard shots fired in a house on San Francisquito Canyon Road.”

I gave her the house number and said that I’d gone inside to see if someone needed help. That I’d found one person in the house, a man, and he’d been shot.

“Is he breathing?” the operator asked me.

“No. He’s dead.”

“What’s your name?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t say.”

I hung up the phone.

Tommy was asking me again what I thought I was doing, repeating that he’d shot Clay Harris in self-defense.

I wasn’t sorry that Harris was dead, but it would have been better for me if he’d lived, if we’d gotten him to turn on Tommy and testify that they’d conspired to kill Colleen.

Tommy was highly agitated, his cockiness entirely gone. He was saying, “Jack, let’s get the fuck out of here. I’ve got to get rid of my gun.”

His only concern was to get rid of the gun. One thing I had to say about Tommy: He was a shit, just like my dad.

I aimed my camera phone at the bite mark on Clay Harris’s hand, took three or four shots to be sure I got what I needed, frames that included both his bitten hand and his dead face. Then, I left the house by the open front door.

I disarmed the car with the remote, and my headlights flashed a hundred yards away. I walked along the dark roadway with Tommy following.

There wasn’t another car traveling on this road. Not a soul.

I reached the car and got in behind the wheel. Tommy was at the passenger side, trying the door, but I’d locked it. He yanked on the handle several times, then pounded on the window with the heel of his hand. He cursed at me, sounding completely desperate.

He was still begging me to open the door as I started the engine.

“Jack. Come on. Please open the door. You know I was just horsing around. You know he was going to shoot me. You know he was worthless.”

I let the window down a couple of inches. “Tell it to the cops,” I said. “You’re very persuasive, Tommy. They’ll be here in a couple of minutes. Or you can start walking. Maybe you’ll get away.”

“Jack. You don’t want to leave me here. Come on. Don’t do that. I’ll tell them you were here. I’ll say you did it.”

I buzzed up the window and pulled out onto the road that stretched from nowhere to nowhere two miles in both directions.

When I was back on Copper Hill Drive, I called Eric Caine and filled him in.

Then I just listened to what my Harvard-educated, street-trained lawyer had to say.

CHAPTER 120

ERIC CAINE SAT next to me in an interrogation room at the police station downtown. He looked calm, like he’d had a good lunch, a nap, and had checked the balance on his retirement account and found that it was good.

My stomach felt like it was full of snakes.

They hadn’t said why they wanted to see me, but I was pretty sure Mitch Tandy hadn’t summoned us to North Los Angeles Street so he could tell me that I was a great guy.

I forced myself to think of fluffy clouds and rainbows, not that Tandy had sworn to put me in a federal prison for life for killing Colleen.