“Bassman.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said, lifting the phone. “Bennett here. What’s up, Detective?”
“Hey, where’d you guys go?” Bassman asked. “I’ve been looking all around for you.”
Yeah, right, I thought. We’d been sitting there for hours, twiddling our thumbs. My guess was that he’d somehow heard about our reservation and had finally come up with a way to ruin it. A goose chase, no doubt. The cartels were blowing people away, and the only thing Bassman was interested in was more chop busting. This guy was the full package, a complete ass.
“I don’t know how they do things in New York, Bennett, but this task force is a team. Anyway, I have a lead for you and Parker. A guy arrested for DUI involving a fatality swears he saw Perrine this morning. How about you guys run down to the hospital and talk to him.”
“Hospital?”
“Yeah, he’s in the psycho wing at the Metro State Hospital in Norwalk. Apparently, this guy is on speed or ecstasy or something.”
I knew it. The task force was getting thousands of useless calls a day about Perrine’s locale, and here Bassman was sending us to talk to some guy who was drugged out of his mind. Sure, he saw Perrine. Riding a giant green velvet bumblebee over a rainbow, no doubt.
Whatever, I thought. Tom Cruise would have to eat his Kobe fillet without us. We had to start somewhere.
“No problem. Hit me with the address.”
Bassman harrumphed. He seemed upset that I wasn’t complaining. As if I’d actually give him the satisfaction of squirming.
“Here you go, Bennett. Ready? I’ll make sure and go real slow so you can type it clearly into the GPS.”
CHAPTER 46
The Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk was due southeast from our location, a full forty-minute ride down Interstate 5.
As we rolled along haltingly on the traffic-filled six-lane superhighway, it wasn’t really the traffic but the immense sprawl of the city that made me stare in astonishment. Back east, as an NYPD cop, I only had to worry about five measly, cramped boroughs. Here in LA, they had to cover five counties.
The state mental hospital was housed on a large, leafy, wooded piece of land that might have resembled a college campus if college campuses had ten-foot chain-link, barbed-wire-topped fences running their perimeter.
“Didn’t they film The Silence of the Lambs here?” I asked as we pulled into the driveway. “Or Terminator Two? No, wait. It was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“I’d advise you at this point in to keep a lid on it, Bennett, or they might not let you back out when we’re done,” my trusty partner said.
After calling ahead, we badged our way through the gate and met California Highway Patrol Sergeant Joe Rodbourne in the front vestibule of the new administration building. The burly, bald sergeant got right to it. He slipped on a pair of granny reading glasses as he freed his notepad from the bulging breast pocket of his khaki uniform shirt.
“OK, here’s what we got. At four twenty-five or there-abouts this afternoon, a BMW tried to make an illegal U-turn at a highway patrol turnaround on the Seven Ten near the Santa Ana Freeway in East LA. As the car made the turn, a southbound Peterbilt hauling a trailer ran right over the top of the Beemer, killing the female passenger instantly. Witnesses say the truck and the tanker rode the median for a quarter mile, throwing sparks, but luckily came back down without going over and killing God knows how many other people driving home from work in the middle of rush hour.”
Rodbourne licked a callused thumb and turned the page.
“The driver of the BMW, named Scricca, Mathew J., was miraculously unscathed. He’s a deep-sea fishing-boat captain down at Marina del Rey. He gets around some, apparently, by his priors. His last one was attempted assault with a deadly weapon outside a Sunset Boulevard strip club on New Year’s Eve last.”
“Scricca is on something, they said?” I said.
The weather-beaten cop studied me over his bifocals.
“The attendant at the ER swore it’s GHB. You know, that nifty new date-rape drug all the lovely young club-goers are experimenting with these days? Makes sense. Scricca reportedly had some, eh, visual disturbances at the scene. Kept going on about flowers. ‘Keep the flowers off me. Get the flowers out of my stomach.’ Interesting stuff like that. That’s why they sent him here.
“We called you guys in when he came down, a little over an hour ago. Make that came down a lot, after he was informed of the fatality he was responsible for. He immediately asked to deal. He said he had something big. Something about Manuel Perrine.”
Parker and I looked at the veteran cop, then each other. We could practically read each other’s minds. Boats. Smuggling. Perrine. So far, so interesting.
“Take us to him, if you would, Sergeant,” Parker said with a smile.
CHAPTER 47
Sergeant Rodbourne found an orderly, and we went in through the administration building and then out through a covered passageway to an older, one-story brick dorm.
We were buzzed through a gate and went down a long, worn, once-white corridor. The hospital’s emergency lockup was lined with the kind of heavy doors usually seen on walk-in freezers. The blast doors had peekaboo windows in them, with thick crisscrosses of chicken wire beneath the smudged, shatterproof glass.
“Are you still dreaming of the lambs, Clarice?” I whispered to Parker, who immediately elbowed me in the solar plexus.
As we stopped at a door near the end of the hallway, I looked through the screened window to see Scricca, shirtless and on his back, handcuffed to a hospital bed.
I was surprised to see that he was good-looking. He was deeply tanned, with long, shiny black hair and pale-gray-green eyes, and was muscular in a wiry, rock-climber kind of way.
Even the creeps have to keep up appearances out here in the land of make-believe, I thought.
I saw ubiquitous tattoos, inked only on his torso in a vestlike pattern. It looked like he was wearing a paisley blackjack-dealer vest of snakes and soaring eagles and eight balls and evil clowns.
“Style. I like that in a man,” Parker mumbled as the orderly cracked the clasps on the door.
What Sergeant Rodbourne said was true, I thought, quickly scanning Scricca’s face as we went into the room. Though his eyes were bloodshot, he didn’t look deranged. If anything, his tired, forlorn expression was quite sober, that of a man who had just awakened to find himself as far up shit’s creek as one could go, and without a paddle in sight.
“Hi, Mr. Scricca. I’m Agent Parker,” Emily said with the slow, deliberate speech one would use with a toddler or a stoned-out junkie. “I work for the FBI.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry that girl is dead,” Scricca said, nervously chewing on the thumbnail of his free hand. “I got two girls of my own. One of them near her age, but, like I told them, she was the one with that mind-bending shit. She told me it was coke. It was bath salts or something, right? To tell you the truth, she was the one who suggested I make the U-turn. She dared me, in fact. Said I didn’t have the balls.”
“You’re a piece of work, Scricca,” Sergeant Rodbourne said, stepping toward him. “First you throw your date under a truck, now you throw her under the bus.”
Sensing trouble, I took a quick step sideways, into the brawny and angry cop’s path.
“Thanks, Sarge,” I said, steering him toward the rubber-room door. “We’ll take it from here.”
“We’re not here about the accident,” Parker said after I pulled the door shut. “You made a claim that you saw the wanted cartel leader Manuel Perrine here in LA. Where did you see him?”
“It’s not a claim,” Scricca said, folding his arms as he slowly looked back and forth at us. “I saw him this morning, before all this happened. He was with someone I know.”