“Gotcha. I’ll probably wait till tomorrow. Denise does the writing.”
Ballard knew that routine. The male detective assumes the alpha role, makes the female do the housekeeping and paperwork.
“So, Hollywood Division — where?” Bettany asked.
“We can meet in the task force room,” Ballard said. “It’s not being used.”
“What’s a task force, right?” Bettany said.
The question was rhetorical. He was referring to the drought of proactive police work going on these days. Ballard decided not to engage with that.
“I’ll see you then,” she said.
She put her cell away and watched as the Mercedes G-wagon she was tailing parked in a blue-painted disabled parking slot in front of the store. Ballard just stopped in the parking lot aisle to watch. She checked her mirror and saw another car pull into the lane behind her, but he had room to go around. After a few seconds, the door opened on the G-wagon and a woman used the side step on the vehicle to get down to the ground.
She looked like she was in her sixties, with white hair pulled into a ponytail. She wore a black mask with big red lips printed on the front. It was garish but Ballard figured the woman probably thought it was funny. She carried her reusable shopping bags toward the automatic door to the store. She did not appear to have a physical handicap.
The woman was far outside the age range of the three known victims. Ballard guessed that if the streetlight across from her house was put out by the Midnight Men, then their intended victim was someone else on Outpost. She decided she would check with Neumayer on their follow-up on Outpost after she had slept.
From Gelson’s it was only ten minutes to her building. After entering her apartment, she went directly to the bedroom, put her gun, badge, and cuffs on the bed table, dropped her clothes right there on the floor, and changed into the sweats she had left on the bed from the last time she’d slept. She set a six-hour alarm on her phone, then crawled under the covers of her unmade bed, too tired even to brush her teeth.
She put in foam earplugs from the bed table to help blunt the normal daytime sounds of the city and pulled on a sleep mask to keep out the light.
And she was gone from the world in ten minutes, plunging face-first into a deep sleep, where the water that swirled around her was black and there were garish red lips floating in the emptiness.
PART TWO
USE OF FORCE
29
Ballard felt the weight on her ribs and arms before anything else. She opened her eyes to darkness and realized she had been blindfolded. No, it was the sleep mask. A hand covered her mouth and gripped her jaw. Her first thought was the Midnight Men — How did they find me? Did they see me on Outpost? Her memory flashed on the car she had seen in her rearview mirror pulling into the lane behind her at Gelson’s.
She tried to struggle but the weight on her was too much. She violently turned her head to the side to loosen the grip of the hand on her jaw so that she could scream, but just as quickly the grip tightened, she was pulled back faceup, and pressure was applied to her chin, pulling her mouth open.
She heard the distinctive metal click of a gun cocking and that threw thoughts of the Midnight Men askew. None of the victims had mentioned a gun. It was two against one — they didn’t need a gun.
Ballard realized all the weight was on the top half of her body. Her attacker was straddling her ribs, his legs pinning her arms to the bed. She couldn’t move her upper body but her hips and legs were unrestrained. That was the flaw in the attack.
With all of the panicked, adrenaline-charged effort she could muster, she brought her knees up, planted her feet in the mattress and thrust her hips up, tipping her attacker forward into the headboard.
The move was unexpected and the attacker hit the hard wooden headboard with a clunk. The barrel of the gun scraped down Ballard’s chin but the weapon didn’t fire. Ballard’s right arm broke free and she used it to shove the attacker to her left and off the bed. She heard him hit the floor. She yanked off the sleep mask and saw a man she immediately recognized on the floor.
It was Bonner.
He was struggling to get up. His left arm was swinging up and toward her with the gun — her gun — in his grasp. Ballard drew her right elbow back and then pistoned a strike forward into his throat.
Bonner fell back to the floor, dropped the gun, and brought both hands up to his neck. His face flushed red and his eyes widened as he realized he could not take in air. Ballard realized she had crushed his throat with the fist strike. She untangled herself from the blanket and sheet and rolled onto the floor. She now straddled him, swept her gun across the floor behind her, and reached up to her phone to call 911.