Copp In Deep, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) Read online

  The man nervously yelled back, "Sounded like a gun, didn't it."

  I said, "There were some kids on the street just outside when I came up, dorking around. Probably them. Fireworks or something."

  "Sounded like an M-80," the guy agreed.

  "I'll call the police just to be sure," I volunteered.

  The woman smiled at me and went back into her apartment. The guy waved and hurried back to his. He encountered another couple in an open doorway along the way and paused to reassure them.

  Didn't do much for me, though.

  Nor for the Israeli Kid.

  She was white and trembly and fighting tears when I went back inside. "He was waiting here to kill me," she declared in a shaky voice.

  "Why would he want to do that?" I asked her.

  "I do not know why. But it is obvious, is it not?"

  "Doesn't sound like the FBI way," I told her, "but these days we never know, so . . ."

  Look, I was scared as hell, make no mistake. Even if the guy had gone renegade and had been playing some personal game of his own, not a fed alive would buy into a self-defense plea unless there was overwhelming evidence to support it. I had no evidence at all, of anything. And yeah, I was plenty scared. And maybe the kid was right, he'd come there to kill her. If so, were there others just like him? Tom Chase apparently thought so. So where the hell did that leave anything? What kind of crazy weave was I caught in?

  Maybe Tom himself was kinky, this kid was kinky, and they'd been caught playing footsies with "Nicky"

  and the KGB. So maybe I'd been sucked in to interfere in a legitimate federal investigation and I'd just killed one of the investigators. Apparently I had even been turned to LAPD, maybe they'd known all along about the plan to heist the consulate, maybe they'd been watching me even before . . .

  See, that's where my head was at and that is where my guts were at. Not exactly panic but cold clawing fear, to be sure. I have a clean record, understand, and I have friends in the police establishments of this area— even know a couple of feds on friendly terms—but there has been a cloud over my head all the time I've been a cop, followed me from job to job and even into the private sector, and the cloud says that Joe Copp is trouble looking for a place to happen. Don't know how I ever got such a rep because that really is not me. What I am really is a pussy cat and always a soft touch for a sob story—well, to a point—and I never believed that a policeman's job should be fully defined in any book. If you're a cop, dammit, then you're a cop all the time, in every circumstance, with every person. The cop is there to make a society work. Society is made up of people. A cop is part of that people, like white blood cells in a living body, and a good cop always responds appropriately to any attack upon that body. So sometimes there is no time to sit down with a textbook to find a proper response. You just have to do it—quickly, decisively, always with the best intentions, and with a little heart sometimes.

  That's the way I cop.

  Sometimes it gets me in trouble.

  But I had never been in trouble like this before. And yeah, I was really scared.

  On top of everything else, it seems that I had taken on the care and feeding of a homeless waif, one evicted by practical necessity and totally vulnerable to whatever may be coming down the pike toward her. She had no family in this country that she knew of, no friends whom she could trust under the circumstances, and she was scared out of her skull. So we rounded up some of her things and tossed them into a small bag and I took her the hell out of there with me. I knew a place near the high desert where one could hibernate for a while in comfort and safety; what the hell, I couldn't just walk away and leave the kid with a stiff on her hands.

  I stopped along the way and called a homicide cop I know at LAPD, reported the shooting. Told him I'd done it, told him who the guy was, and as much of the circumstances as I felt ready to divulge. Of course he immediately wanted me to come in and make a full statement and I immediately told him to go to hell. "Just put it in the record that I called it in," I requested. "I'm not coming in until I get the thing unraveled."

  I hung up while he was still trying to argue me in; for all I knew, someone had been expecting me to call and was already tracing it. In these days of computerized switching, a trace can be fearfully swift if you are already set up to run it. And, see, I was already totally paranoid.

  I made another stop, at an all-night supermarket in the East Valley for vital groceries, then took my charge straight from there to the hideout. Place belongs to a friend who now lives in Mexico, it's away up in the boo- nies in San Bernardino County about 75 minutes from the L.A. Civic Center, and I've had a key for a long time. Good spot for fishing and philosophizing, sits on the bank of a little mountain stream that runs strong and steady during the snow and melt, reduces to a step- across trickle during the summer but is always pretty and even fishable at trickle state.

  It was nearing onto four o'clock when we got up there, and my frightened nymphet had calmed enough to fall asleep on my shoulder. She'd been curled up there for at least twenty minutes and awoke with a disoriented start when I killed the engine. Guess it isn't proper to refer to her as a "nymphet" although she sure looked like one, especially sleeping. See, I'm six-three and weighed two-sixty last time I looked. I'm just a bit on the down side of forty, too, and though I make this "kid" at twenty-eight at a minimum, considering her history, she has the slender undeveloped look of an undersized teenager—and the face doesn't help you that much, either, because it looks an old-soul fourteen. You know what I mean—that sweet-sober look of super intelligence that some kids have and never lose no matter how old they get. This one looked very frail and vulnerable on top of it, but I was to discover the illusion of that before the night was over.

  The place is built sort of like a ski chalet, you know, all woodsy and fireplacey, very snug and comfortable but not a hell of a lot of room. Two rooms, in fact, one up and one down—and the one "up" is merely an open loft that sleeps ten communally, twenty if the mood is right and the inhibitions are down. I guess that loft has seen a few twenty-somes in its time but never with me. I'd been invited to a few of those group-gropes but guess my inhibitions were never that far down. Come to think of it, maybe I am more the old-fashioned kind of guy. Not shy—not when it's one on one, guy and gal, right time and place—no, I'm not shy but I am a bit choosey.

  I would not have chosen the nymphet.

  Not that she wasn't appealing as hell and all that, she was just not the kind to usually get my juices stirring and I wasn't even thinking along those lines when I took her there. I mean, this was community service on my part . . . period.

  She loved the place.

  I carried the groceries in and built a fire while she wandered around and explored the facilities. The "down" room was an all-in-one living room, dining room, kitchen, game alcove, bar—all of it dominated by a massive fireplace that covered an entire outside wall. Had the usual couches and chairs, tables and all the gracious trimmings, big furry rug across the hearth. The kitchen was modern and well-equipped with all the amenities, so was the bathroom, so was all of it. This

  was designed as a party pad, see. The "game alcove" featured a Jacuzzi and sauna, had a compact fold-down ping-pong table for when you weren't spa-ing, a shelf loaded with board games and other quiet diversions.

  No television.

  My friend hated television. The opiate of the masses, she called it, paraphrasing Karl Marx. My friend loved to party, but now she was doing it all in Mexico and this place was mine any time I needed it.

  So now I needed it and I figured we might as well get comfortable.

  I put on coffee for me, hot water for tea for the nymphet, and she went delightedly to the shower. The fire was leaping and crackling, warming the chill night air and lighting the room with a rosy glow when she came out of there.

  She came out stark naked, I swear.

  And I immediately had to revise my assessment of her womanly charms. Funny, isn't it,
how clothing can so confuse the eye. What looked frail and girlish in skirt and blouse had bloomed out entirely womanly in the naked truth, perfectly proportioned and downright voluptuous with perfectly sculpted breasts and softly flowing lines in total harmony all the way.

  She walked past me as though I were not there and went to the kitchen to make her tea, brought it back to the hearth and knelt there on one knee to gaze into the flames while she sipped the tea—turned once to give me a sweet smile as though saying "thanks"—and I was damn near thunderstruck through all of it, I mean this

  was a rare vision of absolute beauty—you know, the dance of flames in the fireplace, that glowing skin reflecting the firelight—that pose, damn, that pose, like something you would see on display at the Louvre as a masterwork, and it just simply wiped me out.

  Presently I got up and poured my coffee, took it with me to the bathroom, sipped it as I shaved and showered and wondered.

  Wondered, yeah.

  It came as a surprise to realize that I wasn't scared anymore, I was breathing all the way without pain or stricture, and the raw scratches along the whole length of my body were not smarting under the soapy scrub- down.

  She was still there beside the fire just as I had left her when I came out, the same way she'd come out. She looked at me with a smile, that same sweet "thank you" smile, and spoke her first words in the naked truth. "Does your body hurt?"

  "Not anymore," I told her. "How 'bout yours?"

  I guess she'd refilled her teacup. I could see the steam rising from it as she delicately sipped the brew. "I will massage it if you would like."

  "Sounds nice," I said, and went to both knees at the other side of the fireplace.

  "When I was a little girl . . ."

  "Yeah?"

  "I would awaken sometimes in the night, frightened. My father would come into my bedroom and lie down beside me. He would touch me lovingly and rub my tummy until I was no longer frightened."

  "Sounds like dangerous stuff to me," I told her.

  "Yes, and so my mother felt. It is why she divorced my father. But I have missed my father ever since."

  "Especially when you wake up frightened."

  "Yes. And there is no one to rub my tummy."

  She set the teacup down and stretched out on her back in front of the fire, that beautiful head touching my knees, looking up at me with those Siamese eyes. They had gone sort of smoky, mysterious, inviting.

  "I'm not your father, kid," I warned her.

  "Believe me you are not," she warned me back.

  So what the hell, I rubbed her belly. To tell the naked truth, I rubbed every delightful thing she had.

  Chapter Five

  Spectacular sex is the quickest and nicest way to forge an intimate bond between a man and a woman. I'm sure that most women mean well and think they're onto something very important when they delay sex with a guy until they think they know him well, but there's something paradoxical about the idea. First, you are never going to know each other well enough until you've shared each other in sex, that's basic to the male-female mystery; and, secondly, the very process of getting closely acquainted often sets up little deceits and dishonesties that eventually get in the way of good sex.

  On the other hand—listen up, ladies—the quickest way to a man's honest feelings, to really open him up, is to fuck his brains out. Sounds simplistic and crude, I know, but it's true. What you get then is the raw man, as he really is. If that's what you're after. Need to be honest with yourself too, of course. Do you really want to get to know the guy?—or do you just want to know how amenable he may be to a long-term commitment? See, there has always been something basically dishonest—you know, like cold and calculating—in that approach too. I mean if you're dangling the possibility of sex in front of a guy's aroused masculinity while really you are going for the rest of his life ... see, that's a con right there and the guy knows it. So he cons you back, and maybe you deserved it. But if you both go into it for the magical moment that is there, then you both get that moment—and the rest is going to play out the same in either approach anyway, and meanwhile you've cut through all the fancy footwork of bait and trap. You have to be sensible about it, of course. Don't start with an obvious sleazebag, but you don't want to start there in any case—so if you start with a nice guy, why inject your own soft brand of sleaze into it?

  I'm not trying to sound like Doctor Ruth, don't get me wrong, but I've had a lot of experience with the male-female mystery and also I have given it a lot of thought lately. Nothing turns me off faster anymore than to have a new lady trying to get into my head while I'm trying to get her into my bed. I don't believe in casual sex either, but maybe you and I don't mean the same thing by that. See, if you're focussing on my head instead of my glands then you're having casual sex with me. I believe in commitment too—commitment to the act, and total focus on the emotional states of loving.

  If you are wondering how committed I may become to your general care and feeding, then you're focussing

  on the future instead of the now—and good sex, my dear, is always in the now.

  It certainly was that night with Gina. Maybe we were partially set up for it by the shared experience of danger and anxiety, but I think primarily it was simply the fact that a man and woman with no expectations of each other and a very brief shared history came together in a spontaneous burst of electricity and there was nothing between us to serve as insulation.

  It certainly was spectacular, and it certainly did open us to each other in a way that probably would never have occurred otherwise. We lay in front of the fire and talked until dawn. She told me things that she'd probably never told another man. I know damn well I told her things that I'd never told a woman. We got to know each other in the way that counts, and in a way that I guess we could never take back if we wanted to.

  Don't get me wrong. I couldn't have written this lady's biography from what I learned about her that morning. That's not the kind of "knowing" I'm talking about. I couldn't tell you what she liked for dinner, or what she liked in a man, certainly not how she might react to this situation or that. But I felt very close to this woman and I would have defended her life with my own, without stint or hesitation. That's the kind of knowing that counts. It's nonverbal and indescribable, but it is the kind of knowing that makes true friendship possible in a dog-eat-dog world.

  Problem was, I still did not know whether she was friend or foe. At the moment, I did not particularly care.

  But I guess I should have given it some thought.

  We fell asleep by the fire as the sun was rising and she was gone when I woke up several hours later. Gone, yeah, split—stolen away like a thief. Take that literally, because gone also was the little packet of stuff I'd filched from the consulate. Also my gun, the S&W I'd been packing around all those years—a very sentimental loss.

  As bad as anything else, I was marooned up there with no telephone, no neighbors, no wheels, and only my feet for deliverance.

  About the only consolation I could find was that I was still alive. I was mad as hell, sure, but mostly at myself. If she'd conned me then at least she'd done it honestly. I mean, those hours we'd had together beside the fireplace had been genuine.

  I had some eggs for fortification—it was a five-mile walk to the crossroad, the nearest civilized point—then I tidied the place up, locked it up, and started my trek.

  You can do a lot of thinking on a five-mile walk. I thought of many things but came to no specific conclusions about anything. I could only hope that Gina was straight, that Tom was straight, and that she was genuinely committed to helping him through the mess. Didn't know where that left me, of course, but I had already decided to hang it up. While we lay there talking in front of the fire I knew that I was in a foolish game and that I needed to get out of it. So I'd already made the decision, before I fell asleep that morning, that I was going in. I would return Tom's five-grand retainer and turn everything else over to the cops, let them s
ort it out— and if I had to cool my heels in jail for a while, well okay, I could live through that too. But I did not want to play this cloak-and-dagger game.

  I didn't mention this to Gina, of course, but maybe some of it was communicated to her nonverbally. Maybe she sensed my lagging spirit in the matter and decided to preempt me.

  She would do that, yeah.

  On the other hand, if she were not straight . . .

  Well, see, I had reason enough to wonder about that, too, but not for very long. I didn't quite make it down to the junction, not on foot. This car came along, headed the other way, and stopped for me. A Mercedes with tinted windows, couldn't see into it very well and didn't need to because a rear door opened and this guy got out.

  It was Ivan the Terrible.

  I said, "Hi", and he said nothing, just stood there with a gun on me until I voluntarily surrendered my only remaining armament, the little stun gun, then my new pals the Russkies gave me a lift back into town.

  These guys were no great conversationalists. Maybe they spoke no English but they didn't speak much of anything else to each other either. I was in front with the driver and another guy kept Ivan company in the back. Ivan would not have fit into that front seat, I'm not kidding, and he did not put his gun away the whole time. Every time I moved in the seat he waggled it at me as though to remind me that it was there, but hell I needed no reminders.

  Funny thing happened on the way to the consulate, however.

  We were moving sedately along the Santa Monica Freeway just east of the East L.A. interchange when a motorcycle CHP pulled us over. The driver looked mad as hell about that—we'd been cruising at 55 on the button all the way. He brought the big car to a smooth halt on the shoulder, grabbed his papers and jumped out to meet the cop at the rear. I had just a glimpse of him pointing to his license plate and had a mental image of what that might look like, in terms of diplomatic immunity, before another car pulled in behind the motorcycle and two guys jumped out.