Robert Crais - Suspect

Scott opened his mouth to say something, but Orso raised a hand, stopping him.

“No one here quits. I’m not going to quit. I’m going to live out this case one way or another. Are we clear?”

Scott nodded.

“My door is open. Call if you want, but if you call sixteen times a day, I’m not going to return sixteen calls. We clear on that, too?”

“I’m not going to call you sixteen times.”

“But if I call you sixteen times, you damn well better get back to me asap each and every time, because I will have questions that need answers.”

“I’ll move in and live with you if it means catching these bastards.”

Orso smiled, and looked like the scoutmaster again.

“You won’t have to live with me, but we will catch them.”

They said their good-byes at the elevator. Scott waited until Orso returned to his office, then gimped to the men’s room. His limp was pronounced when no one was watching.

The pain was so bad he thought he would vomit.

He splashed cold water on his face, and rubbed his temples and eyes. He dried himself, then took two Vicodin from a small plastic bag, swallowed them, then rubbed his face with cold water again.

He patted himself dry, then studied himself in the mirror while he let the pills work. He was fifteen pounds thinner than the night he was shot, and half an inch shorter because of the leg. He was lined, and looked older, and wondered what Stephanie would think if she saw him.

He was thinking about Stephanie when a uniformed officer shoved open the door. The officer was young and in a hurry, so he shoved the door hard. Scott lurched sideways, away from the noise, and spun toward the officer. His heart pounded as if trying to beat its way out of his chest, his face tingled as his blood pressure spiked, and his breath caught in his chest. He stood motionless, staring, as his pulse thundered in his ears.

The young officer said, “Dude, hey, I’m sorry I scared you. I have to pee.”

He hurried to the urinal.

Scott stared at his back, then clenched his eyes shut. He clenched his eyes hard, but he could not shut out what he was seeing. He saw the masked man with a large belly coming toward him with the AK-47. He saw the man in his dreams, and when he was awake. He saw the man shoot Stephanie first, then turn his gun toward Scott.

“Sir, are you okay?”

Scott opened his eyes, and found the young officer staring.

Scott pushed past him out of the bathroom. He did not limp when he crossed the lobby, or when he reached the training field to claim his first dog.

The K-9 Platoon’s primary training facility was a multi-use site located on the east side of the L.A. River only a few minutes northeast of the Boat, in an area where anonymous industrial buildings gave way to small businesses, cheap restaurants, and parks.

Scott turned through a gate, and parked in a narrow parking lot beside a beige cinder-block building, set at the edge of a large green field big enough for softball games or Knights of Columbus barbeques or training police dogs. An obstacle course for the dogs was set up beside the building. The field was circled by a tall chain-link fence, and hidden from public view by thick green hedges.

Scott parked by the building, and saw several officers working their dogs as he got out of his car. A K-9 Sergeant named Mace Styrik was trotting a German shepherd with odd marks on her hindquarters around the field. Scott did not recognize the dog, and wondered if she was Styrik’s pet. On the near end of the field, a handler named Cam Francis and his dog, Tony, were approaching a man who wore a thick padded sleeve covering his right arm and hand. The man was a handler named Al Timmons, who was pretending to be a suspect. Tony was a fifty-five-pound Belgian Malinois, a breed that looked like a smaller, slimmer German shepherd. Timmons suddenly turned and ran. Francis waited until Timmons was forty yards away, then released his dog, who sprinted after Timmons like a cheetah running down an antelope. Timmons turned to meet the dog’s charge, waving his padded arm. Tony was still six or eight yards away when he launched himself at Timmons, and clamped onto the padded arm. An unsuspecting man would have gone down with the impact, but Timmons had done this hundreds of times, and knew what to expect. He turned with the impact, and kept spinning, swinging Tony around and around in the air. Tony did not let go, and, Scott knew, was enjoying the ride. The Malinois breed bit so hard and well, and showed such bite commitment, they were jokingly called Maligators. Timmons was still spinning the dog when Scott saw Leland standing against the building, watching the officers work their dogs. Leland was standing with his arms crossed, and a coiled leash clipped to his belt. Scott had never seen the man without the leash at his side.

Dominick Leland was a tall, bony African-American with thirty-two years on the job as a K-9 handler, first in the United States Army, then the L.A. County Sheriffs, and finally the LAPD. He was a living legend in the LAPD K-9 corps.

Bald on top, his head was rimmed with short gray hair, and two fingers were missing from his left hand. The fingers were bitten off by a monstrous Rottweiler-mastiff fighting dog on the day Leland earned the first of the seven Medals of Valor he would earn throughout his career. Leland and his first dog, a German shepherd named Maisie Dobkin, had been deployed to search for an Eight-Deuce Crip murder suspect and known drug dealer named Howard Oskari Walcott. Earlier that day, Walcott fired nine shots into a crowd of high school students waiting at a bus stop, wounding three and killing a fourteen-year-old girl named Tashira Johnson. When LAPD ground and air support units trapped Walcott in a nearby neighborhood, Leland and Maisie Dobkin were called out to locate the suspect, who was believed to be armed, dangerous, and hiding somewhere within a group of four neighboring properties. Leland and Maisie cleared the first property easily enough, then moved into the adjoining backyard of a house then occupied by another Crip gangbanger, Eustis Simpson. Unknown to officers at the time, Simpson kept two enormous male Rottweiler-mastiff mixed-breeds on his property, both of which were scarred and vicious veterans of Simpson’s illegal dogfighting business.

When Leland and Maisie Dobkin entered Simpson’s backyard that day, both dogs charged from beneath the house and attacked Maisie Dobkin. The first dog, which weighed one hundred forty pounds, hit Maisie so hard she rolled upside down. He buried his teeth into Maisie’s neck, pinning her down, as the second dog, which weighed almost as much, grabbed her right hind leg and shook it like a terrier shakes a rat. Maisie screamed. Dominick Leland could have done something silly like run for a garden hose or waste time with pepper spray, but Maisie would be dead in seconds, so Leland waded into the fight. He kneed the dog biting her leg to clear a line of fire, pushed his Beretta into the attacker’s back, and pulled the trigger. He then grabbed the other dog’s face with his free hand to make the dog release Maisie’s neck. The overgrown monster bit Leland’s hand, and Leland shot the sonofabitch twice, but not before the big dog took his pinky and ring finger. Leland later said he never felt the bite, and never knew the fingers were missing, until he put Maisie into the ambulance and demanded the paramedics rush her to the closest veterinarian. Both Leland and Maisie Dobkin recovered, and worked together for another six years until Maisie Dobkin retired. Leland still kept the official LAPD picture of himself and Maisie Dobkin on the wall of his office. He kept pictures of himself with all the dogs who had been his partners.

Leland scowled when he saw Scott, but Scott didn’t take it personally. Leland scowled at everyone and everything except his dogs.