“Dope. As usual. This was after he was fired at Achievement House and didn’t show up at his probation appointment. Up till then, Burns had been nonviolent, as far as I could tell. His juvey record began at age nine and it was sealed. His adult crime career commenced the moment he was old enough to be considered an adult: one week after his eighteenth birthday. Petty theft, drugs, more drugs. Yet more drugs. A whole bunch of plea bargains put him back on the street, then he finally had to stand trial and got probation. The last bust was more serious. Burns was caught trying to peddle heroin to some junkies on the Venice walkway. The junkie he picked was an undercover officer and the arrest came during one of those times when the department claimed to be fighting The War On Drugs. All of a sudden, Burns faced a ten-year sentence and the court imposed a fifty-thousand-dollar bond. Burns went to Boris Nemerov, as usual, and Nemerov posted for him and accepted Burns’s promise to work off the five grand. But this time, Burns skipped. Nemerov called around, trying to locate Burns’s family, friends, got zilch. The address Burns had listed was a parking lot in Watts. Nemerov started to get irritated.”

“Started?” I said. “Patient fellow.”

“Cold winters on the steppes can teach you patience. Eventually, Nemerov put the bounty hunters on Burns’s trail, but they got nowhere. Then out of the blue, Nemerov got a call from Burns. Guy claimed to want to give himself up but was scared the hunters were gonna shoot him in his tracks. Nemerov tried to put his mind at ease, but Burns was freaking out. Paranoid. Said people were after him. Nemerov agreed to pick up Burns personally. East of Robertson, near the 10 East overpass. Nemerov set out late at night in this big old gold Lincoln he used to tool around in, never came home. Mrs. Nemerov went crazy, Missing Persons prioritized it because Boris was well-known at the station. Two days later, the Lincoln was found in an alley behind an apartment on Guthrie, not far from the meeting place. Those days, the neighborhood was serious gang territory.”

“Meeting Burns alone there didn’t worry Nemerov?”

“Boris was self-confident. Big, jolly type. Probably thought he’d seen the worst and survived. The Lincoln was stripped and gutted and covered with branches—someone had made a half-baked attempt to conceal it. Boris was in the trunk, bound and gagged, three holes in the back of his head.”

“Execution,” I said.

“No good deed goes unpunished. Del Hardy and I got the case and worked it all the way to nowhere.”

“You would think something like that would make the papers. Burns’s name pulled up zilch.”