by Devin Hanson
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to make it hard for you. You are doing me a lot of favors right now.”
Ethan muttered something under his breath. “Honestly, Alex,” he said, “I’d rather have you around wrecking my sleep schedule than Elaida, even with her tits.”
“Sounds like the honeymoon period is over.”
“I probably shouldn’t have asked her to stay over. She was only going to be in town for a few days, so it didn’t seem a big deal.”
“You just met her?” I frowned at him.
“We’ve run into each other a few times before,” he shrugged. “What guy doesn’t want a European mistress?” he waggled his eyebrows at me. “It was hot at first, but now it’s just a drag.”
“Just can’t get the help these days, huh? My scooter dealer says he’ll be ready in an hour.”
“Great. Let’s surprise him, then. Need anything before we leave?”
I held up my phone, the only possession I had to take with me. “Ready when you are.”
Purchasing the scooter went about as smoothly as I could have hoped for. I talked the guy down to a grand, did a lap around the block just to make sure the scooter actually ran, and left him with a fat stack of twenties.
Ethan made some excuse about having to prepare for a client, probably preparing the groundwork for explaining why he had to stay out of his house the rest of the day and left me to make my own way back home.
The helmet the guy sold me with the bike smelled like the inside of a gym bag and was several sizes too big. I wore it long enough to ride to a motorcycle shop, then shot a three-pointer right into the dumpster with it.
Inside, I found myself a full-faced helmet for a reasonable price. I could have gotten away with an open helmet, but I had no desire to get hit in the face by a wasp at fifty miles an hour. The clerk talked me into getting a matching jacket to go with the helmet, and I hurried out before I burned through the rest of my rapidly dwindling cash.
Now what? Having spent half of what David had paid me, I felt like I should do some sleuthing to even the ledger somewhat. Rapid results might give me an excuse to visit David again. I pulled my thoughts away from that image, but not before my body eagerly reacted.
“No. Bad Alex,” I muttered to myself. I could feel myself getting wet. Christ Almighty. I had just had the stuffing fucked out of me less than twelve hours ago and already I wanted more.
Work. I had to work. Work meant tracking down djinn. I frowned thoughtfully as I stripped the tags off the jacket and shrugged into it. There were Kevlar inserts along the spine, shoulders and elbows. It felt like a suit of armor, and I felt absurdly comforted by it. If I got into a fist fight with a marid, no amount of motorcycle padding would help me, but it offered a wonderful boost to my confidence.
Where was I going to find a djinn thief ring? Lei was already looking into the mysterious marid who had trashed my apartment. I didn’t have any illusions about being lucky enough that the two investigations would overlap.
There were a few places I knew of where djinn liked to hang out. A portion of my clients over my years as an investigator had been djinn of one description or another. Those would be as good a place to start looking as any.
I settled my helmet on and breathed in the new-car scent. An immeasurable improvement over the other one. The morning had passed quickly, and it was getting near to noon. Before I headed out to knock on doors and make a nuisance of myself, I decided a fast stop by Ethan’s place to get lunch was in order. I hadn’t eaten anything since dinner the night before, and I’d had a lot of exercise since then.
Fortunately, the challenges of riding my new scooter forced my mind out of the reliving the prior night again. The scooter was an entertaining vehicle to drive. It had a narrow enough profile that I felt comfortable splitting lanes, making the lunch-hour traffic only a minor inconvenience and I made record time back to Ethan’s neighborhood.
I was reviewing the contents of Ethan’s fridge in my head (frozen pizza and hungry-man meals belonging to Ethan, and humus and evil-smelling green slop belonging to Elaida) when I came to the light where I would turn and head up into the hills. I was walking my scooter forward between the lanes of cars, wondering if Ethan would mind if I threw away Elaida’s food, when one of the turning cars caught my eye.
I recognized the driver, Eric the Uber stalker, at the same moment I recognized Elaida in the seat beside him. I stared after the car. What were the odds Eric was also driving Elaida around? I knew Elaida had her own car, a fancy white BMW. Getting into Eric’s economy Hyundai must have been like pulling her toenails out for her.
A horn blared, startling me out of my daze. The light had changed and I was blocking two lanes of traffic. I waved an apology and gunned my scooter after Elaida. There was coincidence, and then there was serendipity.
I was fairly confident Elaida wouldn’t recognize me. I was riding my brand-new scooter, wearing a jacket she had never seen, and had a full-face helmet on with a darkened visor. Still, there was no purpose in making it obvious. I wasn’t too afraid of being ditched since the traffic was heavy enough to keep them at a pace with everyone else, so I kept a few cars back and stuck to the middle of the lane.
Where were they going? What were the odds that Eric randomly accepted an uber client from the same address? I smiled wryly. Actually, now that I thought about it, Eric might well have been hanging out hoping to see a potential client from my address so that he could get a chance to drive me again.
Maybe it was a completely innocent coincidence. Maybe Elaida’s car was broken, or she was heading out for the night and expected to be drinking before coming home again. I almost turned around and went back to Ethan’s house. I was getting hungry and I had no idea how far Elaida was going to travel. But I was curious. It seemed like too much of a coincidence to be accidental.
We were going up Sunset Boulevard, heading east. The closer we got to the Walk of Fame, the worse the traffic got. I expected Eric to turn and head south, but he kept going. We passed under the 101 and the traffic magically cleared. Then, instead of turning south, he made a left on Vermont and pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall.
I followed them into the parking lot, slowing down enough to avoid being right on their bumper. The strip mall didn’t have much of interest. There was a Rite Aid and a Vons, along with a score of dingy-looking outlets. Certainly nothing that would attract Elaida’s patronage.
Eric drove to the far end of the parking lot, where it hooked around and pulled into an open spot in front of a fish and chips shop. I grabbed a parking spot behind a dry-cleaning service van where I was hidden from their view and climbed off my scooter.
I walked toward the Rite Aid and loitered at the corner, looking back toward Eric’s car. Maybe that fish and chips joint was really a secret five-star restaurant. I saw Eric and Elaida get out together with a sudden surge of excitement. That was very much against the rules for an Uber driver.
Instead of going into the restaurant, Elaida led the way across the parking lot and down a little ramp to Hollywood Boulevard. I was glad I hadn’t given up on following Elaida now. Whatever she was up to, I wanted answers. I followed after them a few hundred feet to the rear. After a moment’s consideration, I took off my motorcycle helmet and carried it. If they happened to glance back, someone walking behind them wearing a full-face helmet would be suspicious.
I got to Hollywood just as they turned and entered the park behind the strip mall. My curiosity grew and I picked up the pace a bit. A big sign proclaimed the park to be Barnsdall Park, home of the Hollyhock House, art center and theater. I hadn’t been to this park before, but I knew there was supposed to be some sort of architectural masterpiece here. Maybe Elaida was going to a play?
There were a few dozen people in the park, strolling around or exercising. I spotted Elaida and Eric halfway up a long flight of stairs leading to the top of the hill. I was losing ground to them. I hurried in pursuit, worried that they would disappear into the b
uildings at the top.
I lost sight of the two of them for a minute when they reached the top of the stairs. I was glad they hadn’t turned around to look behind them. Elaida couldn’t have missed me puffing up the stairs in plain sight.
I reached the top of the stairs and looked about for Elaida. After a moment, I spotted her on a path wandering through a copse of pine trees. Eric had fallen a few paces behind her, and she was walking next to a towering man at least six feet ten and hugely muscled.
I didn’t want to be seen, so I skirted the copse and pretended to have business in one of the rather blunt-looking art-deco buildings scattered around the crown of the hill. Banners belled in the breeze, promoting some sort of pottery exhibit at the art center. I paused at a building corner and turned far enough to see Elaida without looking like I was staring at them.
The marid she was with had on one of those sleeveless exercise shirts, with his bulging arms and deltoids on full display. Despite his size, he moved lightly. Even from my distant vantage, I could see the inexpertly applied makeup hiding his nose grooves. To the uninitiated, it probably looked like a skin condition, or perhaps the result of a tanning bed accident.
Out of the nearly twenty million people living in the greater Los Angeles area, there were probably a few thousand marid. They tended to keep to themselves, and the ones without permanent cosmetic surgery didn’t usually make a habit of wandering around public areas in the middle of the day. I wished I was close enough to hear them speaking.
The three of them were moving away from me and I was having trouble keeping sight of them through the trees. I followed after them, moving parallel along the sidewalk running down the side of the copse. A half-dozen young people roughly my age were coming up the sidewalk behind me, chatting about architecture and some guy named Frank Lloyd Wright.
Sensing the opportunity, I fell into step with them and quickly passed by the djinn. The architecture students entered the art gallery and I followed, peeling off from the group once I was inside. There were large, mirror-tinted windows looking out onto the park, and I had a good view of Elaida and her companions, while being fairly confident they wouldn’t be able to see me.
I got my phone out and took a few pictures of them, zooming in and getting a few closeups of the marid’s face. They were grainy, but it would be enough to identify him if necessary. As I watched, a man in a suit walked up to them and greeted Elaida with a European cheek-kiss. He was smiling broadly and talking with his hands.
I photographed him as well, then realized the four of them were heading for the doors to the art gallery. I looked around, suddenly panicked, for a place to hide. My options weren’t great. The promoted pottery exhibit was a bunch of tables, scattered with pottery of various qualities and shapes. I knew little and cared less about the exhibit and its subject matter. There was a partition set up on the far side of the room, close to the wall, hung with posters offering little-known pottery facts.
I reached the partition as the door swung open and leapt the last couple feet to cover. Elaida and her companions entered the gallery, talking in a language I couldn’t identify. Now that I was on the far side of the partition, I had a look around to see what else was in the gallery. The students had moved on deeper into the displays, into what looked like more permanent installations. They were currently gathered around a miniature model of the Hollyhock House, thirty feet away and oblivious. The partition obscured an emergency exit, probably in an attempt to make the gallery display look fancier than it was.
There was no way I could cross over to the rest of the gallery without stepping out from behind the partition and being painfully obvious to Elaida. I was stuck.
Elaida was speaking, her tone full of irritation. I wished they were speaking English. I only knew two languages, English and bad English. I needed a recording of them talking. Maybe I could play it back and get someone to help me figure out what language they were talking in at least. I called myself on my phone and waited for it to go to voicemail, holding my finger over the speaker to muffle the sound of my voice.
“You have reached Alex’s cell phone. Do your thing.” I waited for the beep, then put it on speaker to get better pickup.
The voices on the other side of the partition went back and forth. Elaida was arguing with someone, probably the new arrival in the suit. She was explaining something, clearly trying to convince the man. Whatever the argument was about, Elaida didn’t seem to be winning.
“You’ve reached the maximum length of your message,” my phone blared. “To send, press one.”
Chapter Eight
Shit! I fumbled at my phone, trying to take it off speaker, but the damage had been done.
“To record a new message, press—” I got it silent, then opened the dial pad and pressed one. I could hear the heavy footsteps of the marid approaching.
I needed to be gone. Trying to dodge the marid and make a run for the entrance was out of the question. I would never be as fast as him. There was the emergency exit though, with all its lurid warnings about alarms sounding if the door was opened.
Better the police than the marid. With the police, at least, I could try and charm my way out of a citation. I made a move for the door and the man in the suit stepped around the side of the partition, his hands spread in an attempt to block my path.
Without thinking, I swung my motorcycle helmet by its strap as hard as I could, aiming for his head. I caught the briefest flash of surprise, then he was spinning to the ground. I jumped his body before he had come fully to rest and slammed through the door.
Alarms blared, and I was bounding down the steps outside the door four at a time. I heard the marid drive his bulk into the door, sending it crashing back against the wall. Someone shouted a command and I glanced back as I reached the first landing. The marid stood in the doorway, hunched over and filling the frame with his mass, glaring after me but not giving chase.
I hurried away, only slowing to a fast walk once I was out of sight. People were staring at me, but were starting to lose interest when they saw I wasn’t running anymore. I thanked my blessings that there were people in the park. The djinn couldn’t risk chasing me down in public, not where a dozen people would be witnesses.
I got out of the building complex and jogged back to my scooter. Had I been recognized? The man in the suit would have gotten a brief look at me before I dented his face with my helmet. The marid would have caught a glimpse when I looked back at him, but my hair had been all over the place, and I doubt he had seen more than the color of my hair and that I was a woman.
The two that would have recognized me immediately, Eric and Eladia, had not seen me. My pounding heart gradually settled back to normal as I pulled out of the parking lot on my scooter and merged with the traffic. At most, Elaida would get a vague description of a woman. If she wasn’t already suspicious of me, it was unlikely she would connect the dots.
I hoped.
Either way, there wasn’t anything I could do about it now. I pulled into a gas station and filled the tank on my scooter. While I was waiting, I listened to the message I had sent myself. The audio sounded hollow, muffled by the partition maybe, but was clear enough. I couldn’t be certain, but it almost sounded Italian.
I needed someone, or something, to translate it for me. Fortunately, the internet is an amazing tool for sleuth work. These days, I found I could do most of my investigative work on the computer without ever having to leave my apartment. I opened the app store on my phone and in about twenty seconds had downloaded an audio translator from Google that claimed to be able to understand dozens of languages.
Feeling victorious, I fed the app my recording and… nothing. The app crunched through the recording, claimed the language was Italian, but couldn’t process anything meaningful. I was fairly certain that Elaida wasn’t talking about serpents eating coins, despite Google’s best-guess.
Well, so much for the easy solutions. I put my phone away and got back on the scooter. Des
pite my curiosity about Elaida, I had work to do.
I spent the rest of the afternoon motoring about Hollywood and the neighboring cities, checking with every djinn I was on speaking terms with about newcomers from out of town. I didn’t learn anything useful.
At one of my stops, a quiet houri couple I had aided in driving off a poltergeist were in the process of helping their parents immigrate into the United States from Italy. I played my recording for them, and they both agreed it wasn’t Italian. A romance language of some sort, but not any language they knew.
Other than that, I got a whole lot of nothing.
With the sun starting to set and my stomach growling, I gave up the search for the day and returned to Ethan’s house. The scooter had performed wonderfully the whole day. It wasn’t the most powerful vehicle I had ever driven, but it hardly used any gas and being able to slip through traffic had saved me at least an hour over the course of the day.
It wasn’t until I pulled into Ethan’s driveway and saw Elaida’s car that I remembered the incident at Barnsdall Park. Thoughts about where else I could ask to find leads fled, to be replaced with worry about Elaida. Would she know it was me? Ethan’s car wasn’t parked, so if Elaida was home, it would be just the two of us.
I climbed off the scooter and tucked my helmet under my arm. I was achy and stiff from riding all day. The feeling of overflowing energy I had felt last night and this morning had ebbed down to an echo. I entered through the front door and shut it softly behind me.
The TV was running in the living room and I peeked in long enough to recognize the back of Elaida’s head before tip-toeing upstairs to my room.
I showered and changed into spare clothes. I had money now, and I really needed a proper wardrobe. I didn’t have enough to splurge, but I could get a few more outfits just so I didn’t have to do laundry every other day.
Half an hour spent on my phone browsing Amazon and I had a handful of outfits picked out without spending more than a few hundred dollars. They weren’t up to Elaida’s high expectations, but to hell with her.
