Copp On Fire, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp, Private Eye Series) by Don Pendleton Page A
Authors: Don Pendleton
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decadence. I love it, so maybe it's a minor luxury too when it comes time for the monthly gas bills. I get triple the mileage from the van, and it sits in the garage most of the time.
So anyway I was driving the Cad. And I decided I needed to go home and scout for signs.
Signs of what? I didn't know what. Maybe I was just feeling a bit paranoid, maybe something precognitive was growling around in the bowels of the mind—I didn't know. I just knew that I should go home and check it out.
On the way, I decided that I should clean up and change clothes while I was there, maybe have a bite to eat to fortify the evening—and that leapt me to the realization that I had not been home for a couple of days and the pantry was probably bare. So I stopped at a supermarket along the way and picked up a few items, got home about four o'clock with my sack of groceries.
I have to confess that I'm a little vain about my home. Maybe it's because I never had one to take much pride in until I was a teen-ager, I don't know. My dad died when I was little and my mother never got over it. All that was good in her sort of died with him, I think. I don't blame her; I can very unemotionally state that my mother was a tramp in all my memories of her—and most of what I feel in that connection is pity, not bitterness.
I spent my teen years in a foster home, and it was the tender influences of that home that led me into police work. I've never been anything but a cop, never aspired to anything else. But I always had the greatest reverence for a nice home, and I am proud to say that I have one of those now. I also have acreage, and I like gardening—do all my own.
Neighbors I don't have, not close neighbors. We like it that way in the hills, respect one another's privacy, and the terrain contributes to it nicely.
I mention all this as background for the next development in the case.
I arrive home at four o'clock to find a strange car parked in my driveway. It is an unmarked police car, the type used by the County of Los Angeles. The window on the driver's side is down and a police radio mutters at low volume.
The front door to my palace stands ajar.
Just inside, on a small foyer table, lies a search warrant with my name and address on it.
In the hallway leading to my bedroom-study I find a cold corpse lying face down in coagulated blood. I don't recognize the face, but his ID, still clutched between stiff fingers, tells me that he was Detective Herman Rodriguez of the sheriff’s San Gabriel division.
In my study, slumped over my desk, I find a second corpse.
I did not need the ID for this one.
This one is my old pal and confidant, Ken Forta .
And now Joe Copp was really on fire.
CHAPTER TEN
Both men had been shot once in the chest and apparently the shooter or shooters knew how to Mm do it right the first time. Death had come quickly, probably without warning. Neither had drawn his weapon. Rodriguez seemed to have been presenting his ID when he got it. In trying to reconstruct, I knew either there had to be two shooters firing near-simultaneously or one shooter using a silenced weapon, because the two officers had died with no evidence of struggle or even self-defense, and within twenty paces of each other.
Either someone had been waiting for me when the officers came, or someone had been surprised by their arrival during a burglary. It read the same either way. So ... had someone let them in?—someone who would not arouse particular suspicion by being there?—or had someone hidden when the cops arrived, then came out during the search to blast clear and get away?
Forta had been sitting at my desk when he got it. He had produced a search warrant and left it prominently displayed in the entry way. Rodriguez was surprised in the hallway, ID in hand. Both had been dead for some time. Molly had told me that she'd been visited by "plainclothes cops" that morning. Same cops? Had they then come up only to search my
So anyway I was driving the Cad. And I decided I needed to go home and scout for signs.
Signs of what? I didn't know what. Maybe I was just feeling a bit paranoid, maybe something precognitive was growling around in the bowels of the mind—I didn't know. I just knew that I should go home and check it out.
On the way, I decided that I should clean up and change clothes while I was there, maybe have a bite to eat to fortify the evening—and that leapt me to the realization that I had not been home for a couple of days and the pantry was probably bare. So I stopped at a supermarket along the way and picked up a few items, got home about four o'clock with my sack of groceries.
I have to confess that I'm a little vain about my home. Maybe it's because I never had one to take much pride in until I was a teen-ager, I don't know. My dad died when I was little and my mother never got over it. All that was good in her sort of died with him, I think. I don't blame her; I can very unemotionally state that my mother was a tramp in all my memories of her—and most of what I feel in that connection is pity, not bitterness.
I spent my teen years in a foster home, and it was the tender influences of that home that led me into police work. I've never been anything but a cop, never aspired to anything else. But I always had the greatest reverence for a nice home, and I am proud to say that I have one of those now. I also have acreage, and I like gardening—do all my own.
Neighbors I don't have, not close neighbors. We like it that way in the hills, respect one another's privacy, and the terrain contributes to it nicely.
I mention all this as background for the next development in the case.
I arrive home at four o'clock to find a strange car parked in my driveway. It is an unmarked police car, the type used by the County of Los Angeles. The window on the driver's side is down and a police radio mutters at low volume.
The front door to my palace stands ajar.
Just inside, on a small foyer table, lies a search warrant with my name and address on it.
In the hallway leading to my bedroom-study I find a cold corpse lying face down in coagulated blood. I don't recognize the face, but his ID, still clutched between stiff fingers, tells me that he was Detective Herman Rodriguez of the sheriff’s San Gabriel division.
In my study, slumped over my desk, I find a second corpse.
I did not need the ID for this one.
This one is my old pal and confidant, Ken Forta .
And now Joe Copp was really on fire.
CHAPTER TEN
Both men had been shot once in the chest and apparently the shooter or shooters knew how to Mm do it right the first time. Death had come quickly, probably without warning. Neither had drawn his weapon. Rodriguez seemed to have been presenting his ID when he got it. In trying to reconstruct, I knew either there had to be two shooters firing near-simultaneously or one shooter using a silenced weapon, because the two officers had died with no evidence of struggle or even self-defense, and within twenty paces of each other.
Either someone had been waiting for me when the officers came, or someone had been surprised by their arrival during a burglary. It read the same either way. So ... had someone let them in?—someone who would not arouse particular suspicion by being there?—or had someone hidden when the cops arrived, then came out during the search to blast clear and get away?
Forta had been sitting at my desk when he got it. He had produced a search warrant and left it prominently displayed in the entry way. Rodriguez was surprised in the hallway, ID in hand. Both had been dead for some time. Molly had told me that she'd been visited by "plainclothes cops" that morning. Same cops? Had they then come up only to search my
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