Page 28 of Hanging and Burning

“Manny,” one of the other men said to the one using me as his punching bag.

“What?”

“The siren, it’s gettin’ closer.”

“They got sirens all the time in this city, man. Prob’ly chasin’ down some nigger or spic.” Then, to me: “You gonna start talkin’ sense?”

“Gimme a hint what you’re lookin’ for.”

“Manny,” another gunsel warned.

“What?”

“The elevator.”

“I thought it was locked.”

“Yeah, but there’s a key for firemen, and—and for the police.”

“You got people with you?” Manny asked me.

“No, sir.”

At the first crack of the elevator door the invaders opened fire. Thinking about it later, I figured that the first volley must have been aimed over my captors’ heads, because they all ducked and seemed not to be wounded.

“Police!” a bullhorn screeched. “Everyone on the floor!”

My captors began to scatter.

The man called Manny made the mistake of taking out a gun.

I threw my weight to the right, falling flat just as a volley of shots was released. One of the bullets caught Manny in the cheek.

The rest of the gang went down on their knees with their hands up. Two of them were wounded, but that didn’t keep them from assuming the posture of surrender.

Seven burly, uniformed, SWAT-like policemen entered the room. They carried serious hardware and laid into my inquisitors like hunching hyenas on wounded prey.

Half an hour later I was being treated by a city paramedic and three of the abductors had been put in various forms of restraint, in spite of any wounds. The man called Manny was being carried away on a stretcher.

I was sitting in the chair again.

“What were you doing here?” a plainclothes LAPD officer, probably of some rank, asked me.

“I was looking for a woman, for a client of mine back in Manhattan—”

“What’s her name?”

“Teala—Teala Brown.”

“And she was supposed to be here?”

“No. Last night I met this guy, calling himself Fred. I asked Fred if he’d ever heard of a woman with that name and he told me about a guy that knew Teala, a guy named Finley Pettis. I gave Fred twenty dollars to ask Finley to give me a call. He said he’d do that, and he did. The guy called me and after I told him who I was looking for, he asked me to come here.”

“Which one’a these guys is Pettis?”

“The one they just carried out.”

“Convenient.”