Bite Back 05 - Angel Stakes

by Mark Henwick

  How would we meet? Where?

  I wasn’t thinking clearly yet. I ran back to the office and got the colonel’s Ops 4-10 comms equipment.

  It took frustrating minutes to patch in signals to a master commset, linking me with Yelena and Elizabetta.

  There wasn’t time to patch the cell in as well. I’d be able to hear her relayed through Elizabetta’s set, but I wouldn’t be able to talk to her.

  I grabbed the cell back from Elizabetta.

  “Tamanny, listen to me,” I said. “I’m on my way. I won’t be long. Just twenty-five minutes, okay? I need you to go into a store and wait for me.”

  “There’s an Urban River store,” she whispered.

  “Good. That’s a good choice. Go in and wait for me.”

  “What about a police station?” Julie said.

  Elizabetta shook her head. “Long walk. Not a good—”

  But Tamanny had heard as well. “No!” she said, her voice blurring with urgency. “There was a judge. Vering. Veringham. Something! Can’t trust police.”

  Oh God.

  Elizabetta squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. I was afraid she’d be unable to handle any more, but she got a grip on herself and when she spoke again to Tamanny, her voice was bright and soothing. “No need to go to a police station. Just into the store. Amber will come get you. Keep talking to me, hon.”

  I was already running for the garage.

  I heard on my commset that Tamanny was inside the store as I fired up the Kawasaki and Alex settled in behind me.

  We left tire marks down the drive and out onto the avenue that would take us to the Santa Monica, the freeway on the big bridge that Tamanny had walked underneath.

  Like every other major road, it was choked with cars, but I wove in and out. The motorcycle was tall, narrow and powerful, designed for dirt riding, but that also made it excellent at dodging cars.

  Maybe I could make it in fifteen.

  “Tell me about your dress,” Elizabetta said on the commset.

  “’S beautiful. Red. Black pattern on it. Orchids. Looks like birds growing on vines.”

  “That sounds lovely. You tore it? Will we be able to fix it?”

  “I don’t know. It was so scary climbing out. Dizzy.”

  Elizabetta murmured something I couldn’t hear as I screeched past a pair of idiots having an argument through their car windows.

  “Didn’t want to drink it,” Tamanny said. “Thought I was supposed to be on the catwalk. Didn’t want to fall over. It made me sick anyway.”

  That might have been what saved you—vomiting the drugs out.

  I squeezed around a truck and onto the freeway.

  Ten minutes. Come on! I could make it in ten from here.

  They’d have found she was missing after five or ten minutes. They’d be unsure which way she’d gone to start with. Maybe another ten minutes organizing the search. That was a lot of time to get away, but she was a beautiful fourteen-year-old staggering along the road in a torn red dress and crying. People would notice. Her pursuers could be right behind her.

  “I could hear them talking,” she was saying. She’d been calmer once she’d gotten inside the store, but she was crying again now. “They didn’t think I could, but I could.” She hiccupped. “Mom says it’s all right. Everyone in the industry does it. But it’s not, is it?”

  “No, Tamanny, it’s not,” Elizabetta said. “I’m sure…I’m sure your mom didn’t mean it. This must be a misunderstanding. But let’s get you somewhere safe first, and then we’ll talk about it.”

  The wind blasted the tears from my eyes.

  “Amber, I got through to Billie.” Yelena’s voice over the comms startled me. “Most of the Belles are on patrol, but she and a couple of the others are heading into South Central from the other side.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Not so good. She tells me there’s a street market going on. It’s illegal, but down there the cops stand back unless something major goes down.”

  “How major?” Bad things happen in riots, and South Central was the toughest of LA areas, full of gangs.

  “She says it’s usually okay.”

  Usually.

  “Have they closed the roads?” I said.

  “No, but traffic will be slow through there. It’ll hold everyone up equally. We’re stuck ourselves; can’t even get on Santa Monica. How far away are you from Tamanny?”

  “Six minutes. Less, I think.”

  Yelena went quiet.

  “Tamanny? Tamanny?” Elizabetta was calling.

  “What happened?” I yelled.

  “I don’t know. We were talking about her mother. The line just cut.”

  “Call the Urban River store on the landline,” I said. “Let the manager know the problem. Get me the exact location as well.”

  “Okay.”

  Alex slapped my arm to draw my attention.

  “Switch to the Harbor freeway,” he said. “First exit take Adams. Crosses San Pedro in the right area.”

  I twitched the Kawasaki through a couple of gaps and down the exit ramp.

  We were so close; less than four minutes away.

  What if they’ve found her?

  They wouldn’t be able to get away in a hurry. I’d find them.

  Elizabetta was getting no answer from the store, but then Tamanny called back.

  “Thank God! Are you all right?” Elizabetta said.

  “Yes. I’m sorry.” She was crying again.

  “What happened?”

  I could hear the street sounds again. She was back outside.

  “I called Mom. You said she…I had to…”

  Elizabetta’s voice was so quiet I could barely hear it. “What did she say?”

  “I should go back.”

  I didn’t have time to swear and scream. I’d come up against the outskirts of the street market. A scatter of market stalls sprawled out into the street and an accident with a truck ahead completely blocked the way. There were too many people on the sidewalks.

  I pulled in next to a stall and flicked the side stand down.

  “Here’s fifty.” I slapped a bill into the surprised stall holder’s hand. “You get another if the motorcycle’s still here when I come back. Half an hour.”

  Alex and I ran, weaving between the people.

  “Liz,” I spoke into the comms as we ran, “get her back inside, but first she has to get rid of that cell. Give it away, or toss it in a car if she can. Anything.”

  “What? Oh, they’ll be able to track it, of course.”

  I heard her talking to Tamanny.

  She couldn’t go back in the same store. The manager had closed the shop. He didn’t like the look of the crowds.

  Elizabetta got her searching for another store and a handy vehicle to carry her cell away.

  I could understand the store manager’s concerns.

  Coming down to this area from the Fashion District, along San Pedro, it might as well have been a different country. North of the Santa Monica, there were palm trees on the side of the road and open spaces, clothes factories. Further on, the skyscrapers of downtown, the shopping paradises of Hollywood, Rodeo, Melrose: the glittering streets of plenty. South of the freeway, single stores of essentials, hardscrabble and discount, handwritten signs and peeling paint, bars on the windows and lots of places to buy liquor.

  And maybe earlier today, it had been just the market stalls feeding on the Christmas glut of shoppers, expecting any minute to be moved on by the police. Then, when that didn’t happen, it had become a street party. Forty-gallon drums had come out onto the sidewalks and were being used to grill meat to the smell of charcoal and firelighters. Sharp operators were selling cheap booze out of stolen shopping carts. A competition was running to find who had the loudest boom box.

  But as the day faded, and crowds started to move rather than loiter, the carnival atmosphere attracted others as surely as blood in the water called sharks.

  Smoke
from the fires mixed with city smog and hung over the streets as the lights began to come on. The faces that came out of it seemed stranger the further we went.

  More storekeepers were lowering their shutters. Not good business anyway with the street market there, and no incentive to stay open late.

  Stallholders were starting to eye each other to see who would move first, who would make that call on the balance between losing the last bit of business and risking everything.

  Cars started moving easier, cruising, lights gleaming on their shadowed windows.

  And now people were staring at us, a pair of gringos running through South Central like our tails were on fire.

  Yelena came on the comms, confirmed the Belles had gotten near the top end of Avalon and had to leave the bikes. “Billie says she’s worried, Boss. She’s seen Vagos and Mongols, Five-deuce and Conejo. Those hombres don’t mix well in small areas.”

  Shit. We were about to be in the middle of a turf war between southside LA gangs and motorcycle clubs.

  “There’s a place still open.” Tamanny’s voice came thinly in my ears. “Called Trabajo. They’ve got a sign says five-dollar clothes. It’s between a liquor store and a place that says…uh…Reparacion secadoras y lavadoras.”

  “Tell her I’ll find her there.”

  “Please hurry,” she said when Elizabetta relayed the message. “Okay. The cell’s going in the back of a truck just pulling away now.”

  Tamanny had gone, and with any luck, Forsythe was tracking her cell and would spend an hour or two chasing it down to Harbor.

  All we needed was a couple of minutes more.

  But the crowd in front of us wasn’t thinning or drifting away. It was getting younger, more hyped every step we took. Alex and I slowed down. Nothing like starting a fight by jostling someone.

  And we were out of place and in a hurry. Bad combination.

  Just one more minute!

  But this wasn’t shoppers in front of us. It was packs of gangbangers squaring up against each other.

  On our side: Five-deuce—African American, floppy forage hats and beards, chunky gold rings and hand signals.

  On the other side: Conejos—Hispanic, shaved heads and sharp mustaches, full sleeve tats and big shirts with plenty of space for guns.

  Most of the market stalls were gone. Three had simply been abandoned. Whatever it was they’d been selling had been stripped clean.

  No cars moved along this block. A couple were parked at the side, doors open and loud music coming out, and the street itself was like two rivers touching that didn’t mix.

  At the boundary in the middle, a couple of youngsters strutted, out to show how hard they were by insulting each other.

  The good thing was that most eyes were on them.

  We slowed to a walk, careful where we stepped. We needed to go single file. Alex thought about it and nodded at me to take the lead, so he could watch out for me. He kept close behind me.

  The gangs swirled and simmered like broth in a cauldron. Up in front of us, a knot of muscle loomed on the sidewalk that we couldn’t edge around, and beyond them, I glimpsed biker leathers.

  Crap.

  It started with a nudge. One of the guys caught sight of us and elbowed his friend, who turned around with a mouthful of swearing that ran down to silence when he saw me.

  “Oooh, eeee! Lookee. Now you talking, bro.”

  He and his friend swaggered toward us, blocking the whole sidewalk. Deuce One and Deuce Two.

  The pair of them were nothing. But they had another twenty gang members who’d find party time with me more interesting than their friend in the street, if they turned around.

  We didn’t have time for this shit.

  “Look, guys.” I put up my open hands. Might as well try talking. “We just need to get past.”

  “What? Past us? That no friendly,” Deuce One said. He looked over my shoulder at Alex. “You wanna take a walk, man. This ain’t gonna involve you ’less you stick around. Then it gonna involve you bad.”

  Deuce Two reached out and grabbed my arm, pulled me close and breathed beer down at me. He was very strong. And stupidly arrogant.

  “I’m staying,” Alex said calmly.

  “You worry ’bout your girl?” Deuce One said. “You should, she ain’t gonna wanna come back t’you, by time we finish.”

  Alex didn’t waste energy responding. I could feel him gauging the right attack, waiting for me to lead.

  I twisted. Deuce Two didn’t let go, but my movement took his arm away from his body. I punched, putting everything behind it, striking him in the nerve center on the inside of his upper arm.

  His arm was paralyzed, and he didn’t have time even to shout.

  Alex picked him up and threw him into the street, far enough that he crashed into the back of the young blood swearing and shouting at the Conejos.

  Every girl should have a freakishly strong, six-two werewolf to toss the trash out of the way.

  Deuce One’s mouth was opening and closing silently.

  I punched him in the throat to make sure he kept silent for a good long time.

  Luckily for us, out in the street, the young Conejo found he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get a boot in when his opponent fell at his feet.

  Deuces surged forward and a path opened in front of us.

  Except for one guy.

  I guessed he had to be Deuce Three.

  Big didn’t begin to cover him. There was an NFL defense coach somewhere in the land who was crying because he didn’t have this hulk in his line of scrimmage.

  He was no drooling fool either.

  Everyone else was distracted by the melee in the street, but not Deuce Three.

  I really had no more time for this. I had the HK in my shoulder holster, but as soon as I took it out, someone would match it. I wanted to be away from here before the AK47s came out.

  Deuce Three towered over me like a cliff face.

  Then he blinked.

  He knelt down like a crane collapsing, his knees making separate thunk sounds as they hit the ground. A look of utter bewilderment on his face faded to blankness. His eyes rolled up slowly and he pitched face-forward into the sidewalk.

  Standing behind him, Billie spun a big adjustable wrench like a baton and slid it back into her boot.

  “Come on. The shop’s just back there.”

  We ran while the going was good and we were just in time; the steel shutters were rolling down, pulled by a guy inside.

  I grabbed the bottom and lifted it back up, practically jerking the shop clerk off his feet.

  He screamed at the sight of all the leather gear and a large, still pissed-off Alex crowding into his shop.

  The store sold working clothes, recycled from the other half of the city, where execs bought clothes for a dirty job on the weekend and tossed them rather than clean them. It was narrow, and the racks of clothes crowded into the channel up the middle.

  There was nowhere here for Tamanny to be hiding.

  “We’re not here to screw with your store,” I said. “There was a girl here, in a red dress, just a few minutes ago. Where is she?”

  “That little hoochie, she was up to something.” He’d gotten braver now that I’d told him we weren’t interested in turning the shop over. “Tryin’ to boost my stock. I know she ain’t got no green anyhow, so I chase her raggedy little ass right outta here.”

  I grabbed him by his jacket and lifted him off his feet.

  “She was trying to hide until we got here, not steal your stuff. Where did she go?”

  “Out the door,” he said.

  I threw him back into his clothing rack and we rushed back out.

  The shutters slammed down behind us.

  Where is she?

  I had a growing sense we were too late. What had we done wrong? What had we missed?

  The fighting down the block hadn’t really erupted. It was still more pushing and shoving than fists and boots. Tamanny was no str
eet girl, but she was smart enough. She wouldn’t have gone that way.

  I turned south. That way was deeper into the wrong area, but what choice did she have?

  How had she gotten past Billie?

  A gringa in a red dress? Billie would have noticed.

  And then I saw the dress in the distance, coming out from another closing store.

  I took off, sprinting down the street.

  The others followed me without hesitation.

  It’s not Tamanny.

  I could see that from fifty yards away.

  It was a girl, older than Tamanny, but about the same size. She was showing off the dress to an imaginary audience, holding it out to one side and sweeping it back and forth, making ballerina steps.

  She spun around just as I got there, fell over and screamed at the sight of us rushing up.

  “Sorry.” I held up my hand to calm her. “No lastimarte.”

  She crawled backwards.

  “Dónde vestido?” I said, wanting to shake her. “Where did you get the dress?”

  Billie was on my shoulder. A stream of Spanish and the girl shrugged.

  “Don’ need no shouting at me. Got it from the crazy.” She jerked her jaw to show down the street.

  “Which crazy?”

  What had happened? Some hobo attacked Tamanny?

  “Crazy girl. Crazy wan’ my traposo clothes. Give me her dress. Shit! Fix that tear, this dress is worth fitty least.”

  No, Tamanny isn’t crazy. She’s a clever girl. She’s hiding.

  “What did your clothes look like?”

  “Gray pants an’ black Cali shirt.”

  “She went that way?” I pointed south.

  The girl nodded.

  “We got to hurry,” I said to Billie. My gut was screaming at me.

  “You got time. She ain’t gon’ run far.”

  I looked back at the girl.

  “I wanted her shoes,” she said. “Sweet, sweet heels, man. Offered to pay. No deal. She no go far in them.”

  We ran on, Billie grabbing passers-by and asking if they’d seen a young girl in street clothes and red shoes.

  All claimed she’d only just gone past a few minutes ago. Heading south. Until: “Down that way.”

  An alley, next to a closed autoshop. Trash spilled out of dumpsters and no street light reached the depths.