James Patterson - Gone

“Have I?” I said. “These cartel people are engaging in the kind of unhinged, deranged behavior usually reserved for serial killers. Is it that crazy to believe that there’s some sort of ideology behind it? I think we have to at least consider it. We have to stop thinking that this is just about a bunch of greedy dope dealers.”

About an hour later, on our way to get a bite to eat, I knocked on the dash of Parker’s metallic-brown Crown Victoria as we pulled out of the Olympic Station lot.

“What’s up with this ride, Parker?” I complained. “As my preteen daughters would say, this car is ‘so not cool.’ You’d think, this being LA, that they’d assign you some kind of convertible, at least.”

Parker smirked at me from behind her Ray-Bans.

“Tell you what, Mike,” she said. “You bag Perrine, I’ll see to it you get first bid on his Bentley at the government auction.”

“Bentley, huh?” I said, scratching my chin. “How many passengers can a Bentley fit? I need seating for a dozen, two of them car seats.”

Parker laughed.

“Just a dozen? Aren’t you leaving someone out? What about Seamus?”

“We usually put him in the trunk, or on the roof with the cat.”

Parker shook her head, sighing.

My chop busting was, of course, just show. I actually loved the Crown Vic, the FBI radio crackling beneath its dash, even the bad gas-station coffee in the holder beside me. In fact, it felt fantastic to be back at work.

I was even more excited about our dinner plans. Parker had spoken to Agent Rothkopf, who, with the help of a cousin or something, got us reservations at some hip restaurant called Cut, in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. It was a Wolfgang Puck steak house where Tom Cruise supposedly ate from time to time. I couldn’t wait.

It was our LAPD hosts who had been less than accommodating. As I’d watched them read reports and brood about them, it’d become painfully obvious to me that the cops in this clique of LAPD heavy hitters were doing their own thing, working their own leads, their own contacts, while completely leaving the feds in the dark.

Though I’d been pretty tribal myself about my home turf back in NYC, the fact that I was now among the feds being boxed out kind of pissed me off. I didn’t come in off the farm to be a benchwarmer.

Parker’s phone rang.

“One second,” she said. “I’m driving. Let me hand you to Detective Bennett.”

“Who is it?” I asked, holding her BlackBerry against my thigh.

“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.”

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.

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.