Demolition Angel by Robert Crais

Author:Robert Crais
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Los Angeles (Calif.), Police Procedural, Police, Mystery & Detective, Police - California - Los Angeles, Fiction, Bombings, Suspense, Women Sleuths, Mystery fiction, General, Policewomen
ISBN: 9780345434487
Publisher: Fawcett Books
Published: 2001-07-03T03:40:10.180772+00:00

PART TWO

• • •

• • •

I Luv L.A.

John Michael Fowles got off the plane with twenty-six thousand dollars, three driver’s licenses, and four credit cards, two of which matched with names on the licenses. He also had the phone number of a twenty-eight-year-old flight attendant with dimples deep enough to swallow you and a tan warmer than a golden sunset. She lived in Manhattan Beach. Her name was Penny.

Just being in Los Angeles made John smile.

He loved the dry sunny weather, the palm trees, the good-looking babes in their skimpy clothes, the cool people, the slick cars, the hunger for wealth, the asshole movie stars, that the whole damned place was so big and flat and spread to hell, the La Brea Tar Pits, hot dog stands that looked like hot dogs, that big-ass Hollywood sign spread across that friggin’ mountain, earthquakes and firestorms, the funky clubs on the Sunset Strip, sushi, the caramel tans, Mexicans, the tour buses filled with people from Iowa, the glittering swimming pools, the ocean, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the G’s with their forties, and Disneyland.

It was a great place for devastation.

First thing he did was rent a convertible from Hertz, strip off his shirt, slip on his shades, and cruise up Sepulveda Boulevard, looking good. He was past his mad now, over his snit; now was the time for cold calculation and furious vengeance. Mr. Red had arrived.

John dropped the shitkicker persona and went black. He loved white guys who acted black. M&Ms. Light on the outside, dark on the inside. Yo, G, ’sup? L. A. was the perfect place for this. Everyone was always pretending to be something they weren’t.

John bought oversized clothes from a secondhand shop two blocks up from the beach in Venice, a new iBook, and the other things he needed, then took a room at a small motel called the Flamingo Arms. It smelled of foreigners. John shaved his head, draped himself with faux gold chains, then signed on to the Internet. This time he didn’t bother with cracking into the NLETS system. He searched for news stories on the Silver Lake bomb, finding three pieces. The first two articles contained pretty much the same thing: the LAPD Bomb Squad had rolled out to investigate a suspicious package, whereupon Officer Charles Riggio, thirty-four, a nine-year veteran of the squad, was killed when the package exploded. None of the news stories gave details of the device, though the detective leading the investigation, a woman named Carol Starkey, was quoted as attributing the bomb, “a crude, poorly made device,” to “an infantile personality.” John laughed when he read that. He knew that the ATF suspected him, and that, therefore, LAPD suspected him, also.

John said, “The dumb bitch is trying to play me.”

John was especially intrigued by the third story, a sidebar article on Starkey herself, who had once been a bomb tech until she had been caught in an explosion. The article said that Starkey had actually died, but had been revived at the scene.

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