The Darkest Glare by Chip Jacobs

Author:Chip Jacobs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2021-02-19T20:55:18+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

BAIT AND RECORD

On the morning he agreed to pose as live bait, twenty-seven-year-old Jerry Schneiderman dressed himself an old man attending his granddaughter’s piano recital. Checked sportscoat. Burgundy sweater. White shirt. Gray slacks. In his palm was a Styrofoam cup of sludgy police coffee that detectives at the LAPD’s Venice Boulevard substation handed him for this 7:00 a.m. hour. Jerry sipped it, though he was plenty awake.

The day marked a week since Howard promised to exterminate him unless he coughed up half the life insurance payout catalyzed by the bullet Howard arranged to have pierce Richard’s window. Yesterday, detective Jamieson asked Jerry if he could handle such a nail-biting assignment, and Jerry said yes, he was up to it. He answered reflexively, unusual for him, without spinning through the myriad ways the self-incrimination trap being set for Howard could go wrong. The prospect of reuniting with his family after weeks apart overrode fastidious logic for sheer emotion.

From sunrise on, everything was novel. Jerry had never been inside a police station before. This one, by the 405 Freeway, was as dingy as the fast-food joints and dilapidated storefronts bunched around it. And he definitely had never been fitted to wear a secret wire and bulletproof vest so the LAPD could record the conversation, hardware now causing the day’s first major snafu.

That’s why the technicians responsible for preparing it were staring at each other with flustered expressions. Even with the loose-fitting clothes they told Jerry in advance to wear, his skinny chest made it obvious he’d been fitted with a lead-lined garment for protection. As in blatantly obvious. They tried smoothing the rigid thing down under his jacket, repositioning it under his sweater, and the difference was marginal. When Jerry looked down at himself, he felt like the Michelin Man. And it wasn’t as if the LAPD could swap it for a kiddy model.

By eight, the quandary was mushrooming. It would be chancy to have Jerry meet Howard in a bloated outfit all but certain to tip him off that his words were being taped. Then again, it would be a gamble—some might say a lethal one—sending Jerry into a nose-to-nose encounter at Space Matters with someone so cunning without any protection from bullets or knife blades. If things turned bloody, the PR blowback against the department would live in infamy.

After agreement coalesced between Detective Jamieson and others, Jerry himself assented. To hasten Howard’s capture, he would sit within arm’s length of Richard’s executioner with nothing but wool and cotton between them. The only foreign object under his clothes would be a small microphone attached by wire to a Walkman-sized transmitter harnessed to the small of his back. Police would be listening and recording every syllable from an unmarked van parked nearby. With any luck, Howard would drop his guard and crow about his accomplishments, just as he did before, all the way into a pair of chrome handcuffs. Should he try to get physical, armed police hiding just outside Jerry’s office would pounce.

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