Last Breath Read Online Free PDF Page A

she want to do this?
    Ramon was out of his mind—his wife, Maria, had been very clear on that point, expressing herself vigorously in both English and Spanish. He was drunk and angry and out of work, and when he got that way, no one could reason with him. She’d called 911 from a neighbor’s home, and the RTO had put it out over the air ten minutes ago.
    “Any Newton Area unit, possible four-fifteen in progress at Fifty-fifth and Sloan.”
    C.J., riding shotgun in an A-car, had listened to the crackle of static over the cheap speaker. She and her partner Walt Brasco had been on duty since 6:15 A.M., chasing the radio for most of that time. Now it was one o’clock, and they’d been thinking about taking a Code 7 for lunch.
    But Fifty-fifth and Sloan wasn’t far from where they were cruising. C.J. looked at Brasco, who nodded and said, “Take it.”
    “Thirteen-A-forty-three,” C.J. reported into the handheld microphone hooked to the dashboard. “We’ll take the four-fifteen.”
    “Roger, forty-three. Monitor your screen, incident three-seven-one-four. Code Two High.”
    Brasco flipped the toggle that activated the car’s light bar and accelerated through a yellow traffic signal. Storefronts flashed past, bearing signs in Vietnamese and Korean and Spanish. A blind beggar held up a cardboard sign at a street corner, in front of a brick wall spray-painted with gang
placas
.
    Welcome to Newton Area division. Shootin’ Newton, as it was known among Officer Caitlin Jean Osborn’s colleagues in the LAPD. A few square miles of multiethnic slums bordered by five other high-crime divisions, a semicircle of blasted hopes: Hollenbeck, Central, Southwest, Seventy-seventh Street, and Southeast. The infamous Rampart Division, now synonymous with police corruption, was wedged between Central and Southwest, not quite touching Newton but close enough, perhaps, to spread its infection here. Crime rates might have dropped in both the city and county of LA, but no one could prove it in Newton.
    C.J. kept her eye on the squad car’s computer until it displayed the address of the crime scene. She read it to Brasco, He turned left at the next intersection and pulled to a stop alongside a curb littered with fragments of beer bottles.
    A crowd of two dozen was waiting in front of a converted garage that served as somebody’s home. Half the spectators were children with nowhere else to be on a school day.
    Officers Osborn and Brasco got out, surveying the neighborhood. It was like so many in Newton, a barrio of one-story buildings that might have been nice once. Cars sat on blocks and faded in the sun. Graffiti webbed the walls and fences and even the tree trunks; there were gang names sprayed on and X’d out with what the gangbangers called “dis marks”; the number 187—the section of the California Penal Code that covered homicide—appeared prominently, a bright promise of death. Rap music blared from an open window down the street, and somewhere a dog wailed in counterpoint to the throbbing beat.
    C.J. approached the crowd. The kids wore pants several sizes too big in the approved gangsta style, their sleeves rolled up to show off crude, malevolent tattoos. The adults glanced at her suspiciously and looked away.
    “Who telephoned the police?” she asked in Spanish. Brasco was letting her handle it. He knew she was better at dealing with people.
    A thin, frightened woman elbowed her way forward from the rear of the crowd, answering in uncertain English. “Me, it was me.”
    “Okay, senora. What’s your name?”
    “Maria Sanchez. It is my husband in there. My Ramon.”
    “You had a fight?” The dispatcher had called it a 415—domestic disturbance.
    “No, no fight.” Tears welled in the woman’s large brown eyes. “He lose his job. He get drunk, try to shoot me. He has a gun, he is crazy!”
    Drunk and crazy with a gun, C.J. thought. Terrific. “What kind of gun?”
    “It is, how you say, six-shooter.”
    “A