The Late Show Page 13

  She continued to hear a muffled voice through the wall as she assumed Nettles was asking questions of the counterman. She moved up to the edge of the alcove so she had an angle on the pickup. Just as she did so, she heard the door to the room open. Before looking, she shrank back into the shadow for a moment, opened the mic on the rover, and whispered, “Go. We are go.”

  When Ballard edged back to the corner of the alcove, she saw a man wearing blue jeans and nothing else pushing a cardboard box into the rear of the truck’s crew cab. His back was to her and she could see the grip of a black handgun tucked into the rear belt line of the jeans.

  That changed things. She quickly pulled her weapon out of her hip holster and stepped out of the alcove. The man, who was struggling with the heavy box, did not see her as she approached from behind. She held her weapon up and brought the rover to her mouth.

  “Suspect is armed, suspect is armed.”

  She then dropped the rover to the ground and moved into a combat stance with both hands on her weapon, pointing it at the suspect. In that moment she realized her tactical mistake. She could not cover the man at the door of the pickup and the door to room 18 at the same time. If there was someone else in the room, they had the drop on her. She started moving sideways to close the angle between the two possible danger points.

  “Police!” she yelled. “Let me see your hands!”

  The man froze but did not comply. His hands remained on the box.

  “Put your hands on the roof of the truck!” Ballard yelled.

  “I can’t,” the man yelled back. “If I do, the box will drop. I have to—”

  A patrol car came rushing into the lot off the street. Ballard kept her eyes on the man at the truck but had the cruiser in her peripheral vision. A flood of relief started moving through her. But she knew she wasn’t clear yet.

  She waited for the car to stop, the officers to get out, and there to be three guns on the suspect.

  “Get down!” Smith yelled.

  “On the ground,” yelled Taylor.

  “Which is it?” the man at the truck yelled. “She said hands on top. You say get on the ground.”

  “Get on the fucking ground, asshole, or we’ll put you there,” Smith yelled.

  There was enough tension in Smith’s voice to make it clear that his patience had run out, and the man at the truck was smart enough to read it.

  “Okay, okay, I’m getting down,” he yelled. “Easy now, easy. I’m getting down.”

  The man took a step back from the truck and let the box fall to the ground. Something made of glass inside it broke. The man turned toward Ballard with his hands up. She lost sight of the gun but held her eyes on his hands.

  “You assholes,” he said. “You made me break my stuff.”

  “On your knees,” Smith yelled. “Now.”

  The suspect went down one knee at a time and then pitched forward to lie flat on the asphalt. He locked his hands behind his head. He knew the routine.

  “Ballard, take him,” Smith yelled.

  Ballard moved in, holstering her weapon and pulling her cuffs free. She put one hand on the man’s back to hold him down and yanked the gun out of his belt line with the other. She slid the weapon across the asphalt in the direction of the unies. She then moved up, put one knee on the small of the man’s back, and pulled his hands down one at a time to cuff them behind him. The moment the second cuff clicked, she yelled to the other officers.

  “Code four! We’re good!”

  15

  The man Ballard cuffed was identified as Christopher Nettles. But that came from the wallet in his back pocket, not from him. The moment the cuffs were closed on his wrists, he announced that he wanted a lawyer and refused to say anything else. Ballard turned him over to Smith and Taylor and then went toward the open door of room 18. Pulling her gun free again, she had to clear the room and make sure there was not another suspect hiding. She had already been surprised once this night, by Stormy Monday’s roommate. She wasn’t going to let it happen again.

  She entered to find the room stacked with boxes and items ordered from online retailers. Nettles had quite an operation, taking stolen plastic and turning it into merchandise he could pawn or sell. She quickly determined that there were no other occupants in the room and backed out.

  Because Nettles was on parole for a felony conviction, Ballard did not need to jump through most of the constitutional hoops that protected citizens from unlawful search and seizure. By legal definition, being on parole from prison meant Nettles was still in the custody of the state. By accepting parole he had given up his protections. His parole agent was allowed to access his home, vehicle, and workplace without so much as a nod from a judge.

  Ballard pulled her phone and called the cell number she had for Rob Compton, the state parole officer assigned to Hollywood Division. She woke him up. She had done so in the past on numerous occasions and knew how he would react.

  “Robby, wake up,” she said. “One of your customers has run wild in Hollywood.”

  “Renée?” he said, his voice slurred with sleep. “Ballard, fuck, it’s a frickin’ Friday night! What time is it anyway?”

  “It’s time to earn your keep.”

  He cursed again and Ballard gave him a few seconds to come to.

  “You awake now? Christopher Nettles, you know him?”

  “No, he’s not mine.”

  “Because he’s up here out of San Diego County. I’m sure they know him down there but he’s in Hollywood, so that makes him your problem.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s got a two-year tail on a hot prowl plus conviction and it looks like he’s been up here plying his mad skills for a couple weeks. I’ve got a motel room full of Amazon and Target boxes and I need you to violate him so I can get in there and go through all this stuff.”

  “What motel?”

  “The Siesta Village on Santa Monica. I’m sure you know the place.”

  “Been there a few times, yeah.”

  “So how about coming out tonight and helping me with this guy?”

  “Ballard, no. I was dead asleep and I’m supposed to go fishing tomorrow with my boys.”

  Ballard knew Compton was divorced and had three sons he saw only on weekends. She had learned that one morning when she went home with him after working a case through the night.

  “Come on, Robby, this place looks like the back room of a Best Buy. And I forgot, he had a firearm. I will really owe you one if you can help me out.”

  It was one of the times Ballard unabashedly used her sexuality. If it could help persuade male officers to do what they were supposed to do, then she wasn’t above using it. Compton was good at what he did but he was always reluctant to come out at night. He still had to keep regular office hours, no matter what extracurricular work he did. On top of that, Ballard liked his company off duty. He was attractive and neat, his breath was usually fresh, and he had a sense of humor that most of the cops she worked with had lost a long time ago.

  “I need a half hour,” he finally said.

  “Deal,” Ballard said quickly. “It will take me that long to get him squared away. Thanks, Robby.”

  “Like you said, you’re gonna owe me, Renée.”

  “Big time.”

  She knew that last line would shave ten minutes off his half hour. She was happy to know he was coming. Bringing the department of parole in would streamline things considerably. Compton had the authority to revoke Nettles’s parole, which would also suspend his legal protections. There would be no need to deal with the District Attorney’s Office or the grumpy on-call judge to get a search warrant for the motel room. They could just enter both the room and pickup truck to conduct full-scale searches.

  They would also be able to hold the suspect on a no-bail booking. Nettles would be out of circulation and heading back to prison before charges in the new cases were even filed—if they were ever filed. Sometimes the return to prison and the clearing of cases w
as enough for the system to just move on. Ballard knew that with prison overcrowding forcing lighter sentences for nonviolent crimes, Nettles returning for a year or two in prison on a parole violation would probably net him more time than he would get if they mounted a prosecution on the burglaries he had committed. The reality was that the gun charge would be the only add-on that would likely get consideration from the D.A.’s Office.

  After finishing the call with Compton, she walked over to Smith and Taylor and told them they could take Nettles to the station and book him on a charge of ex-convict in possession of a firearm. She said she would stay on scene and wait for the parole officer to arrive before going through the property in the motel room.

  Smith didn’t respond. He just moved slowly after receiving the orders, and Ballard couldn’t tell what was bugging him.

  “Something wrong, Smitty?” she asked.

  He kept moving toward her car to collect Nettles, who had been placed in the backseat.

  “Smitty?” she asked.

  “Tactics,” he said without looking back.

  “What are you talking about?” she demanded.

  He didn’t respond, so she followed him. She knew better than to leave something unsaid out there with a male officer—especially a training officer. They carried weight. She wondered if this was about the bad angle she had taken when she stepped out of the alcove, but she didn’t think the patrol officers had arrived in time to see that.

  “Talk to me, Smitty. What about tactics?”

  Smith held his hands up like he wanted to stop the discussion he had started.

  “No, man, you brought it up,” Ballard insisted. “The guy’s in the back of the car, nobody’s hurt, no shots fired, what about my tactics?”

  Smith wheeled around on her. Taylor stopped, too, but it was clear he was at sea as far as what his partner’s complaint was.

  “Where’s your raid jacket?” Smith said. “And I can tell you’re not wearing a vest. Number one, you should’ve had them on, Ballard. Number two, we should have been right here and in on the bust, not driving up to save your ass.”

  Ballard nodded as she took it all in.

  “That’s all bullshit,” she threw back. “You’re going to beef me for a raid jacket and a vest?”

  “Who said anything about beefing you?” Smith said. “I’m just saying, that’s all. You didn’t do this right.”

  “We got the guy, that’s what matters.”

  “Officer safety is what matters. I’m trying to teach this boot the street and you don’t set the example.”

  “Were you setting the example last night when you decided not to tape off a crime scene on Santa Monica Boulevard?”

  “What, with that dragon? Ballard, you’re the one slinging bullshit now.”

  “All I’m saying is we just took down a felon with a firearm and nobody got hurt. I think the kid learned something, but if you want to fill his ears with bullshit, go ahead.”

  Smith opened the back door of Ballard’s plain wrap and that ended the argument. They knew better than to continue it in front of the suspect. Ballard waved off Smith and turned back toward room 18.

  Compton arrived fifteen minutes after Smith and Taylor left the motel with Nettles. By then Ballard had walked off her anger, pacing in front of the open door of the room. Though she had cooled down considerably, she knew that Smith’s complaint would stick with her for several days and would taint her feelings about what had been accomplished by the Nettles arrest.

  Compton was a well-built man who usually wore tight shirts to accentuate his muscles and impress or intimidate the parolees he was charged with monitoring. But tonight he was wearing a loose-fitting and long-sleeved flannel shirt that understated his physical attributes.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah, fine,” she said. “Why?”

  “Your face is red. So where’s my guy?”

  “We had a little excitement taking him down. My patrol team took him to be booked. I can hook you up with the watch commander if you want to no-bail him. I told them you would.”

  “That’s fine. How do you want to do this?”

  “There’s a lot of stuff in the room. I think we start there. The truck is empty except for the box he was loading when we took him down. It’s a flat-screen, and it’s broken.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  “I called the watch commander and somebody’s going to bring over the surveillance van we’ve got at the station. Hopefully we can fit all of this stuff in.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  They worked through the rest of the night, taking an inventory of room 18 and loading the boxes and other property into the van. They had an easy rapport from working together previously. Along the way, they found a cache of credit cards with eight different names on them, including the card taken from Leslie Anne Lantana’s purse. They also found two other firearms, which had been stashed under the room’s mattress.

  Once back at the station, Ballard was able to connect five of the other names from the credit cards to burglaries reported in Hollywood Division in the prior seven days. Meantime, Compton borrowed a desk and computer and started a trace of the three guns with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. None of the firearms had shown up on the burglary reports Ballard had found but Compton learned that the Glock—the weapon Nettles had in his belt line—had been reported stolen in Texas two years before. Details of the theft were not available on the computer. Compton then made a request for further information from the ATF but both he and Ballard knew that the return on that would be measured in days if not weeks.

  By six a.m., all the merchandise recovered from the motel room had been placed in a storage trailer outside the back door of the station, the pickup truck had been impounded and towed, and an inventory and full report on the Nettles arrest had been placed on the desk of the burglary unit supervisor. Although he would not return to work until Monday morning, there was no hurry, because Nettles was going nowhere. Compton had formally placed a no-bail hold on him.

  The three recovered pistols were the last items to be taken care of. All firearms were stored in gun boxes before being placed in lockers for firearms in the property unit office. Ballard left Compton in the detective bureau and took the weapons back. Her banging the door of the gun locker drew the attention of Lieutenant Munroe, who came down the hallway and stuck his head into the property room.

  “Ballard, nice work tonight.”

  “Thanks, L-T.”

  “How many you think he’s good for?”

  “I have eight different names on credit cards that connect to six cases so far. My guess is they’re all going to be victims.”

  “And the guns?”

  “One was reported stolen out of Dallas two years ago. We’ve asked ATF for the details. We’ll hopefully know more next week.”

  “A one-man crime wave, huh? Sweet bust. The captain will like it.”

  “The captain doesn’t like me, so it doesn’t matter.”

  “He likes anybody who clears cases and gets dirtbags off the street. Funny thing is, this guy Nettles said no on the withdrawal room.”

  Munroe was telling her that Nettles had denied being a drug addict and turned down a padded jail cell for detainees who were going through withdrawal. This was unusual. Most burglaries were motivated by the need for money to buy drugs and feed addictions. Nettles might be different. Ballard had seen no physical indications of drug addiction in the short time she was handling him during the arrest.

  “He was building a bankroll for something,” she said. “He had twenty-six hundred in cash in his pocket. I found another thousand in the truck along with a bunch of pawn slips. He was stealing the plastic, ordering stuff online before the accounts were shut down, and then pawning it for cash.”

  “Which pawn shop?”

  “A few different ones. He spread it out to fly under the radar. The mystery is that there was no laptop in the room or th
e truck.”

  “He must’ve been going to office centers and using rental computers.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he had a partner. Burglary can figure that out Monday.”

  Munroe nodded, and there was an awkward pause. Ballard knew he had something else to say and she had a good idea what it was.

  “So,” she said. “Did Smitty beef me?”

  “He said something about tactics, yeah,” Munroe said. “But I’m not worried about him. On my watch, if you get results, you get a pass.”

  “Thanks, L-T.”

  “Doesn’t mean I’m not worried about you, though.”

  “Look, Lieutenant, it was the best way to take the guy down. Even now, if I had it to do again, I would do the exact same thing—draw him out of the room. Only I’d put on a vest and a raid jacket just so Smitty wouldn’t get so fucking confused.”

  “Take it easy, Ballard. Sometimes you’re like a feral fucking cat. Smitty wasn’t confused, okay? He just wanted his boot to know how it should be done.”

  “Whatever. You said you weren’t writing me up.”

  “And I’m not. I told Smitty I’d talk to you, and I have. That’s it. Learn from it, Ballard.”

  She paused before responding. She could tell he wanted some kind of acknowledgment from her in order to put this to rest, but it was hard for her to give it up when she knew she wasn’t wrong.

  “Okay, I will,” she finally said.

  “Good,” Munroe said.

  He disappeared back into the watch office and Ballard headed back to the detective bureau. Her shift was over and she regretted that she had been pulled away from the Ramona Ramone case for most of the night. She felt fatigue weighing in her bones and knew she needed sleep before thinking about next steps regarding Thomas Trent.

  When she got to the bureau, Compton was still there waiting for her.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Where?” he said.

  “Your place.”