Heat 2 by Michael Mann & Meg Gardiner

Five minutes earlier, at 11:45 a.m., Vincent Hanna of LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division had received a tip about the armed robbery in progress. Hanna, his detectives, and units of uniformed police raced to the bank as McCauley, Cerrito, and Shiherlis were crossing the sidewalk on their way out. In the next moments, downtown LA erupted into urban warfare.

Hanna had been pursuing this crew since he arrived at the scene of a violent armored van robbery. Pulling in, he found the typical crime scene paradigm: the ordered regularity of street furniture—curbs, lampposts, utility boxes—and then the anomalies appeared: brains, bone shards, irregular pools of blood, the underside of an armored van on its side like a petrified mammoth.

The armed robbers’ identities were a mystery. But what Hanna knew at first glance was they were a heavy-duty crew of highline pros.

There were signs, like discarded shards, leavings, that contained messages about what happened. Reversing how they got there told Hanna the sequence of events and about this crew’s methods. The spot they picked had good escape routes—on-ramps to two freeways. They ignored loose cash, and the two-minute elapsed time of the robbery meant they knew how long it took LAPD to respond to a 211. The skillful use of shaped charges to cut the precise, rectangular opening in the armor plate told Hanna this crew could go in on the prowl. They could do sophisticated highline burglaries as well. That meant they were capable of taking down a variety of scores any way those scores needed to be taken down. And, if they went in strong, they’d rock and roll at the drop of a hat. They killed two armored guards when one reached for an ankle-holstered handgun. They executed the third off a cold calculation: Since it had become a murder one beef anyway, why leave a living witness? If you happened into this crew’s way, that was going to be your problem.

Hanna finished taking it all in before speaking to the detectives, technicians, and uniformed officers from other divisions.

Robbery-Homicide Division was LAPD’s elite major crime unit. Its purview was citywide. Hanna had the authority to appropriate any case in any division. He wanted this one. RHD took over.

Working his network of informants, Hanna identified one crew member, Michael Cerrito. Surveillance on him led Hanna to the others, except the elusive McCauley. Hanna knew, as a foregone conclusion, given this crew’s proficiency, they were unlikely to leave behind enough physical evidence at a crime scene to tie them to it. So Hanna’s strategy became to surveil them, discover what they were taking next, and be there when they walked in the door.

Neil McCauley became aware that somebody was on him. When it happened, his reaction was calm and smooth because smooth was fast. Fast wasn’t fast. Shiherlis was inside a precious metal depository, cutting a hole in a metal vault door with a hollow-core drill at three in the morning. Cerrito was up a telephone pole monitoring his alarm system bypasses. Trejo, on lookout, was circling the block.

Outside on the sidewalk the night air was cool on Neil’s face as he watched the dark, vacant streets. He heard a sound. It was sheet metal hit by a solid object. It was a sound that should not be there. It came from a row of delivery vans parked across the street in a lot for an industrial bakery. The sound was out of place. They were supposed to be empty. They weren’t.

Coolly, Neil reentered the building. Shiherlis, guiding the hollow bit, was moments away from accessing the lock box. After that it would be open sesame. Neil gave the order: walk away. They left behind tools, work clothes, six weeks of preparation. That was their discipline.

Hanna watched it all play out on FLIR images from hidden cameras inside a bakery delivery van. His SWAT teams were staked out and well hidden.

He let them go. He wasn’t settling for breaking and entering. He wanted them for real.

Afterward, Neil gathered Shiherlis, Cerrito, and Trejo outside a DWP electrical substation, where the exposed high-voltage conductors created so much RF interference that any transmission from bugs they hadn’t found on their cars would be scrambled.

They had to decide there and then—split and go their separate ways right now, or figure out who the hell had cut into them, dump their surveillance, and stay and take the bank anyway.

For Chris Shiherlis it was an automatic. His marriage was on full tilt. He was solid, with a lethal sobriety and pinpoint focus, when he was in the groove on the job. They had been scoring, month in, month out. It was in normal life that Chris was a fuckup. A reformed gambling junkie, he fell off the wagon on a Saturday morning two months earlier at Santa Anita. He lost a load on the third race and started betting wildly on “meta-coincidences” based off numbers and names, including a horse named Dominick, the same name as his son. It lost, too. He blew half of what he and Charlene had stashed after a year and a half of solid scoring.

Charlene had had it after that. She wanted a version of adult life for them and their son. She had pulled herself up out of a downslope life. To her, Chris was staying “a child, growing older.” For Chris, dumping the cops who had cut into them and taking the bank’s $11–$12 million was worth the risk.

Sitting in night shadows beneath the soaring ramps of the 105–110 interchange in a Cadillac, Neil was handed a package of counterintel, including Vincent Hanna’s personnel file, by his fixer and middleman, Nate.

Nate was an old-school SoCal bank robber. He and McCauley had done time in McNeil Federal Penitentiary in Puget Sound. Now he was a broker of scores and Neil’s fence. Tall, skeletal, and careful, with stringy long hair, Nate worked out of a blue-lit lounge he owned in Encino called the Blue Room. Right now, he was searching to find compelling words to frame his urgent caution.

This Vincent Hanna in RHD wasn’t on the job “to serve and protect.” He wasn’t a careerist working up the admin ladder. He was on to a third marriage because he was out there all night on the prowl. He was one of those dedicated types. And he was all over Neil’s crew—all except Neil.

Neil’s mantra was split in thirty seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner. Nate reminded him of that. And Hanna could make mistakes. Hanna could hit or miss. Neil could not miss once.

Neil considered and rejected all of it. He felt no obligation to explain why he’d stay, break his own tenet, evade Hanna, and take the bank anyway.

No one needed to know. He told himself, initially, Eady was a one-night stand and he’d make do with the memory. Her life was a million miles from Neil McCauley’s. She was a freelance graphic designer, originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains, working a day job at an architectural bookstore in Santa Monica. With her a door had opened that Neil didn’t think was there anymore. It had been closed on a bloody two-lane blacktop outside Mexicali years earlier. He wanted to be with this woman. This score and the life it bought them, somewhere far away, is why he’d stay. He hadn’t planned for this, but a future without her had come to count for zero.

At one moment in time, after Vincent Hanna discovered his surveillance on Neil McCauley was blown, he and Neil came face-to-face.

It was because staying covert didn’t matter anymore, Hanna realized.

He pulled over McCauley on the 105 Freeway. He wanted whatever he could learn about McCauley, and he could learn more by talking to him face-to-face than from his blown surveillance.

McCauley, too, knew he might have a split second in the not-too-distant future to intuitively decide to zig or zag. So he wanted the sensory intake of who Hanna was.

They sat down at Kate Mantilini on Wilshire Boulevard. They both knew blunt facts about the other, but they were devoid of color. Each man’s intake of the other was highly sensitized and raw. They were both predators.

Neil knew about Hanna’s burned-out marriages. Hanna confessed it was the price paid for chasing guys like him around the block. Neil confessed he had a woman, but he didn’t talk about her or what he had said to her one night: My life’s a needle starting at zero and going the other way, a double blank. That was until she came into it. He convinced Eady to leave with him.

While revealing nothing that might compromise themselves, they talked with the intimacy sometimes occurring between strangers. They discovered that they took in the real world and the way life rushed at them in similar ways.

Hanna was haunted by dreams, dead bodies at a long table looking at him. They didn’t say anything. Their look imposed obligations. McCauley didn’t acknowledge obligations. He had dreams he couldn’t breathe. He was drowning. Maybe he was running out of time, Hanna offered. They were the same in that both knew life was short, we are footprints on a beach until the tide comes in. And each navigated the future racing at him with eyes wide open. Raw. Polar opposites in some ways, they were the same in taking in how the world worked, devoid of illusions and self-deception.

At the same time, each would blow the other out of his socks with no hesitation. They knew that, too.

But that might never happen. They might never see each other again.

That’s how the meeting ended.

In the chaos of the Far East bank robbery, Breedan was killed at the wheel of the Lincoln by Hanna’s detectives, Drucker and Casals. Cerrito, shielding himself with a five-year-old, was shot through the head by Hanna. Hanna’s partner, Bosko, was gunned down by Shiherlis. Three uniformed LAPD were dead and eleven wounded, three seriously. Shiherlis was hit above his body armor by a 5.56 mm round traveling at 3,100 feet per second. It slammed him to the ground and shattered his clavicle, sending bone shrapnel throughout his upper thorax. Neil half carried him into a supermarket parking lot, where he carjacked a station wagon. They had to get the hell out of LA.

Neil never made it.

Hanna killed him under the approach lights at the foot of an LAX runway. Eady was waiting for him in a Camaro on the driveway next to the Airport Marquee Hotel on Century Boulevard.

Only Chris Shiherlis survived.