Hero, p.2
Hero, page 2
The Mercedes was just all wrong. Those young guys couldn’t afford that Mercedes unless they were cryptocurrency speculators or a singing group he hadn’t heard of, and if they were, why the hell would they be circling Mystique? There were twenty clubs within a half mile that catered to people without gray hair, and at ten-thirty they were full of women who had made themselves beautiful to come out in twos or threes to meet somebody. He took out his cell phone and his finger moved down the contacts list toward the “P” for “Police.”
He could call them now, but he had always resisted calling them until he was watching the suspect make an unambiguous move. Calling the cops too soon only irritated them. They needed to know whether they were being asked to arrest a few young men because some older guy disapproved of their wardrobe and posture, or if they were being invited to blunder into an ambush by a squad of terrorists carrying machine guns. He looked at the word “Police” again, and then touched the name below it with his index finger.
“Poole,” said the familiar voice.
“Hey, Justine,” Spengler said. “I’m on the Pinskys. They’re in Mystique and I’ve got about four or five young guys in a Mercedes gliding past every few minutes. Have you still got Marcia Min?”
“I just took her home. She has a six o’clock call tomorrow. Where do you want me—the restaurant or the Pinskys’ house?”
“The house would be best.”
“I’ll see you there,” she said. “Let me know when they’re moving.”
“I will. Stay out of sight until we know what the plan is.”
Justine was in her car looking at her phone for the fastest route to the Pinskys’ house. She had been there a couple of times, but she was a night shift person, and she knew that sometimes the best route could be blocked by accidents or road repairs. Tonight, the GPS estimated the trip would take eight minutes.
The Pinskys lived in a big house in a part of Beverly Hills where nearly every house belonged to somebody who had screen credits, but theirs had been built forty or fifty years ago, before people had stopped feeling any discomfort about building a place that was as big as Justine’s high school. She had studied the Pinsky house the first time she’d been assigned to work a party there. The lot had originally been part of the director Miles Moncton’s ranch in the early 1920s, and she had seen an old picture of it online. There had been a few gentle hills covered with dry grass and a few California oaks scattered about fifty feet apart.
The hills were bulldozed flat at some point and the land cut into two- and three-acre parcels, but some of the old trees were still visible, probably spared to shade the houses. The road was now lined with fifteen-foot hedges like green walls, and at intervals there were iron gates blocking private roads.
She approached the Pinskys’ address and saw that neither Ben Spengler or the Pinskys had arrived. She pulled up to the gate, looked at her work phone, and found the four-digit gate code. She pressed the numbers and the gate rolled out of her way. She drove in, pulling her car up the driveway and around the garage to the parking lot that had been built there for party guests. She put on her utility belt, picked up her flashlight, got out, and walked around the house to the front.
The Pinsky house was a long, low structure that had been a typical wooden ranch house of the sort that celebrities of the 1970s still had until Jerry and Estelle Pinsky had become concerned about the fires that had burned through some Southern California neighborhoods. They had hired an architect to transform the ranch into a simulated Spanish colonial adobe rancho with a red tile roof, white concrete-and-stucco walls, and a yard that was carefully re-landscaped to ensure that nothing that could burn was within twenty feet of the house. The wooden doors and window shutters had been reinforced with steel, and the outer walls were raised to ten feet. Low desert gardens ran along the inner side of the perimeter walls. Much closer to the house were the pool, spa, patio, and tennis courts—all things that didn’t burn.
What Justine liked about it was that all the fireproofing had accidentally turned the place into a fortress. It was too bad that the rest of the world couldn’t afford to do that, but the rest of the world hadn’t produced three or four long-running television sitcoms and two dozen movies.
She knew exactly what the next step of her job had to be. She went past the front gate and moved along the perimeter to be sure that the crew stalking the Pinskys hadn’t sent friends ahead to secure control of the place. Her search told her she was alone. She left the gate open to make sure the Pinskys could drive straight in without waiting, continue up the long driveway to the door beside the garage, slip inside the house, and engage the locks.
Justine knew where she wanted to be—close to the front gate on the inner side of the perimeter wall. That was where the gate’s electric motor was, bolted to its own small concrete foundation and shielded from view by the gray steel housing that protected it from weather and dust. Justine stepped to the other side of the motor, sat down with her back against the outer wall, and looked at her phone. There was no message from Ben Spengler, which she assured herself meant that the Pinskys still hadn’t left Mystique and Spengler was watching over them.
She put the phone away and checked her gear. She had three pairs of handcuffs on her utility belt, along with her Glock 17 and two ten-round magazines loaded with 9-millimeter rounds. When she’d left the car, she had also brought the tactical flashlight with its brutal eye-searing glare. She’d had no use for any of this equipment or place to carry it earlier tonight while she had been watching over Marcia Min at the Comedy Pit. The thought made her remember Marcia joking about the black Spengler-Nash outfit she and the others sometimes wore. She wished she were wearing hers now, instead of street clothes. She would have been more comfortable and harder to see in the dark.
Justine hated this part of the job—the waiting when she knew the threat was real and she was putting the body she lived in, the creature that she was, at risk. She also loved this part, when she was crouching in a well-chosen spot, knowing things the adversaries didn’t suspect yet, and sure that the most crucial thing they didn’t suspect was Justine Poole. She could feel her heart gradually increasing its beat, like an engine warming up.
She knew she must not stand up or try to look out through the gate. She needed to see her opponents well before a confrontation happened, but she also had to be alert to the possibility of an advance scout sent ahead to detect the presence of professional security. Just today Ben had sent her security footage to help her learn how the latest group of follow-home robberies were being choreographed. They hadn’t had time yet to talk seriously about how to go about stopping one.
She knew that Spengler’s method tonight would begin by following the robbers’ Mercedes and taking good, clear pictures of it that showed the license plates. When the Mercedes reached the gate—closed or open—he would pull in behind it so he could block the robbers’ escape and do whatever would get their attention away from the victims while the police caught up. Why hadn’t he called her by now?
And here came the Pinskys. She watched the glow from their headlights moving along the canopies of the trees, but she heard only the whisper of the tires on the pavement as their electric vehicle approached. The car began its turn toward the gate and a slight brightening appeared in the driveway that allowed Justine to see the paving stones. The car completed the arc and straightened, and its headlights shone up the driveway and lit the garage door as the car kept going. Jerry must have pressed the remote control in the car because the electric motor beside Justine turned and the teeth of its main gear meshed with the chain and the gate began to close behind it.
Justine rose to a crouch, keeping her head low and on the safe side of the motor housing, and waited. The garage door at the end of the driveway started to rise.
The Pinskys’ car pulled ahead and its headlights illuminated the back wall of the garage. Justine could see their silhouettes through the rear window, Jerry’s head on the left side, and Estelle’s on the right. The lights went out. Get out, she thought. Get into the house. Didn’t they know?
Outside the wall there was an engine noise and more lights. Justine returned her attention to the gate. The Mercedes arrived and pulled forward, and the first man was already out and running. He stuck his leg into the space in front of the moving gate in time to interrupt the beam of light to the electric eye. The gate stopped instantly and then began to roll back in the other direction.
The three passenger doors of the Mercedes swung open and men sprang out and ran to join the point man in the driveway.
Everything felt unsettled, almost unreal. She thought, Act now or miss the chance to save this. She stayed low, drew her pistol, aimed at the first man and shouted, “Hold it! Stay where you are or I’ll shoot!” She held the tactical flashlight as far from her body as possible and pushed the switch, bathing the men in its wide, blinding glare. They all looked young and large, all wearing black masks and dark clothes.
The point man and one of his companions raised pistols she hadn’t seen in the dark, and fired at her light.
She fired back, the shot hitting the point man in the chest, and as he collapsed backward toward the ground, she shifted her aim to the second gunman and fired. He had been the driver, last out of the car, so he was closest to her. He fell too, dropping his pistol on the pavement. A third man fired at her and she felt the bullet cut the air a foot above her ear. She fired in response and he went down, but she was sure she had missed him and he was just ducking. She turned off her light and sprinted for the gate with the vague idea of using their own Mercedes as a shield. Even though it was probably stolen, they might hesitate before damaging their means of escape.
As she ran, a volley of wild shots ricocheted off the inner side of the wall where she had been, and when she dashed behind the Mercedes, she heard the front door of the house slam shut. She inhaled and felt her lungs swell in elation. The distraction must have done it. The Pinskys were inside. She kept running past the rear of the Mercedes, made it to the gate stanchion and twenty feet past it along the outer wall, pivoted, dropped to her belly, and aimed her pistol at the mouth of the driveway.
She used her left hand to take out her phone and thumb-dial 911, then returned her eyes to the open gateway.
“Nine-one-one, what is the location of your emergency?”
“Five-oh-seven Mirabella in Beverly Hills,” she said. “Five men with masks and guns are trying to pull a follow-home robbery of Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Pinsky, the residents. Two of the men fired shots at me so I had to defend myself. We’ll need two ambulances.”
“Your name, please?”
“Justine Poole, with Spengler-Nash Security. I have to hang up now.” She did and saw Ben Spengler’s car appear around the last curve in the road and then stop in the street blocking the Mercedes in the driveway. As he got out and crouched behind his car, Justine popped up, aimed her flashlight at the ground so he could see her, and waved. He waved back, so she advanced along the wall to within a few feet of him.
Spengler advanced to the other side of the open gateway and pulled out his pistol. He said, “I’m sorry, Justine. They looked like they were going to try to drive the Pinskys off the road for a carjacking, so I had to stay close, and then I got scraped from the side by another car trying to pull into my lane. What’s going on?”
“There are five of them. They kept the gate from closing, I yelled at them to stop or I’d shoot, but two of them fired and I had to shoot them. There are three more of them inside the gate. They fired too, but didn’t hit anything.”
“Did the Pinskys make it into the house?”
“I’m pretty sure. And I called the cops.”
“Good,” he said. “All good.” He edged up against the concrete-and-stucco wall and leaned out to get a view up the driveway where the two men she had shot were lying. “I see the two casualties. I don’t see the three who are still lively.”
They heard the scream of sirens in the distance. As the sound grew louder and more high-pitched, he said, “That sounds like good news. But this is where it might get hairy, so make sure they can see who the good guys are right away. Do nothing that might look like resistance.”
The sirens trailed off, and the street was awash in light—blue and red lights spinning to splash bands of alternating colors over everything, glaring white headlights, flashlights sweeping from place to place. Several spotlights found Justine and Ben and stayed on them. A voice shouted, “Put your weapons on the ground, step back from them, and lie down!” Four police officers emerged from the glare and ran to them with pistols drawn. One yelled, “Face down on the ground! Now!”
Ben and Justine both lay on the ground with their arms out from their bodies as two of the officers dragged their wrists behind their backs and handcuffed them. As soon as she felt the cuffs click Justine said, “I’m Justine Poole. I made the 911 call.”
Neither cop answered, which she supposed was an answer.
The cops frisked them and then helped them up. “All right, come with us. You’ll have to sit in a car while we clear the scene.” They took them to two different police cars and locked them into the caged rear seats.
Justine could see at least a dozen police officers gathered on both sides of the open gate where the Mercedes and Spengler’s car were stopped. She said to the officer who was with her, “There are five of them. Two opened fire on me, so they’re on the ground, wounded. I’m almost sure the Pinskys made it into the house while that was happening. They’re clients of Spengler-Nash, and we were here to protect them.”
The cop spoke into the radio microphone on his shoulder. “The female says there are five armed suspects inside the gate, and two are down. She thinks the intended victims are in the house.” That sounded accurate to Justine, so she remained silent.
There was radio chatter, which sounded to Justine like acknowledgments, and then an older male voice said, “We’re standing by for SWAT.”
The cop who was with her got out and walked to join the others at the wall. Now that she was sitting alone in the back of the police car, she began to feel the letdown after the adrenaline rush of the confrontation and gunfight. She felt exhausted, almost sleepy, but tears had formed in her eyes. She had no way to wipe them, so she had to endure the feeling and wasted no more time thinking about it. She leaned back in the seat and tried to turn in a way that would not increase the tension on her arms and handcuffed wrists. She could see into the side window of the other car where Ben Spengler was, and he seemed to have decided on a similar position. He had been in the bodyguard business since before she was born, so she supposed this was another of the thousands of tiny bits of knowledge he’d accumulated the hard way.
The SWAT truck looked a lot like a UPS delivery vehicle, but bigger and darker. The cops in battle dress and body armor streamed out of the back doors. They all carried M4 rifles except one, who had a marine sniper rifle with a big scope. They milled around behind their truck for a few minutes while their commander conferred with a couple of high-ranking cops in black uniforms who had been among the last on the scene. Then the SWAT team formed themselves into a single big cartoon creature with twenty-four legs, twelve heads, and rifle barrels pointing outward in all directions and shuffle-footed through the gate, up the driveway, and to the house.
Justine listened for gunshots but didn’t hear any, and she allowed herself to feel tentatively optimistic: the cops hadn’t been under fire, so maybe the Pinskys were safe. She waited, but she was at the wrong angle to see the front door open, if it did, and there was no noise. Silence could mean the Pinskys were dead, so she tried to prepare herself for that kind of outcome, but she couldn’t find a way of getting ready. They were a nice old couple who seemed to treat everybody kindly. Jerry had always called her “Kid,” and Estelle seemed to call everybody under seventy “Honey.” Maybe the closed doors of the police car had just kept her from hearing what was going on, and everything would all be okay.
The cops outside the gate began to move around, they holstered their pistols and spread into the street. Two SWAT team members, a man and a woman, came out of the driveway, each of them guiding one of the Pinskys to a waiting car, and then it pulled out and they were gone. Justine smiled, closed her eyes and whispered, “Thank you.”
2
“…With live, late-breaking news. Tonight, television and film producer Jerry Pinsky and his wife were the latest victims of an attempted follow-home robbery in Beverly Hills. Police say the attempt was foiled by a member of the security company Spengler-Nash. The female agent fought off the alleged robbers in a gunfight while the couple took shelter in their house. Two of the suspects were hit by the agent’s bullets, and three others tried to escape on foot but were captured by police.”
Mr. Conger pressed the remote-control channel button, not because he thought the story would be better on a different channel, but because he couldn’t stand to listen to the news anchor’s comments. The disaster had happened. Hayzen and his squad of morons had let themselves be defeated by a lone bodyguard for celebrities and had run away to save themselves. For the first few minutes he had imagined the bodyguard and assumed he was a sixty-five-year-old retired male cop issued an old .38 revolver that usually served only to weigh down his belt so he needed to keep tugging up his pants. Mr. Conger had thought that was a devastating image, until he had learned who the bodyguard really was—a lone girl.
His people—and he—would shortly be this month’s joke around town. The shooter couldn’t have been anyone worse. Anybody else and the television stations would have reported the story once. Because this security guard was female, they had already started making her into a hero. They would repeat the story, and probably lead each broadcast with it, for weeks. Every time they did, people in town would have less respect for Mr. Conger. This woman would probably be the grand marshal of the Hollywood Christmas Parade.
