by Alan Russell
This time there was no mask obscuring Kurios’s vision. He could see the filth for what it was; the bad thing was that he had to smell it.
The box cutter came at him before he could react. Kurios heard it better than he saw it. The blade sliced upward but missed his throat. The sharp edge didn’t go thirsty, though; it cut through to the bone of his jaw. Blood began streaming down his shirt.
Kurios backed up, instinctively raising his hands. She sliced open his palm and kept coming at him. He found himself screaming. It wasn’t only the surprise and the pain; she looked inhuman. Her face was white, her flesh pallid, and there were wounds all over her body. She had acted dead, and looked dead. She was growling and making subhuman sounds.
She lunged at him again with the box cutter, and Kurios almost fell over. For a moment he thought about running away. He could escape and lock her in the tomb forever. But there was no need to run. She was panting, and weak. Losing all that blood had taken its toll.
No, he wouldn’t run. He was the lord, and she was the lowest of the low. She had thought she could escape her cesspool, but he’d put her where she belonged. He would disarm her and then break her. She was a pile of shit, and he would wipe her from the bottom of his shoes forever.
She went for his face, but he threw his head back and she was only able to nick his ear. It was a movement that exposed her, and he grabbed her arm. She tried swinging the box cutter, but his grip gave her no leverage. Squirming, biting, and kicking, she did everything possible to free herself. But he wouldn’t let loose. He bent her arm to the point of breaking, forcing her to drop the box cutter.
Without a weapon, she tried to use her nails, tried to rake his flesh, but he was taller than she was and had longer arms. His hands wrapped around her neck, choking the life out of her.
Stars came to Heather’s eyes. She had done everything she could, but her last desperate gamble hadn’t worked. She had completely humbled herself, had lain in her own waste, but even that ruse had failed. Lack of food and water, and her own spent blood, had done her in.
She heard something over the rushing sound in her ears. It was some kind of trumpeting. Were the angels coming for her? She hoped that was so. But no, it wasn’t trumpeting. It was a different kind of triumphant sound. It was baying.
That sounds like Angie, thought Heather, and passed out.
CHAPTER 42
UNLEASH THE HOUNDS
The driver and I were both holding our breath. Angie seemed to be on the scent again. From the backseat, I was keeping her from jumping out of the opened passenger-side window by holding on to her leash. She was pulling hard, ready to run after the scent. But then her body suddenly went slack, and she settled back into the front seat.
“Shit,” I said. Steven joined my chorus.
It had been stop, and start, and stop again. Angie had caught the scent, and then lost it, and then locked in once more before losing it.
Steven wet his index finger and then raised it in search of the wind. It had come to that.
“Not much wind,” he said. “And what’s there isn’t consistently coming from one direction or another. Maybe that’s why she lost the scent.”
“Head that way,” I said, signaling with my hand. “I think that was the direction she was pulling.”
He began driving, but I think he was watching Angie more than he was the road. I was more obvious in my staring. And I was gauging her leash like an anxious fisherman might his fishing line. Angie hadn’t given up on her sniffing, but she couldn’t find that elusive scent.
“It’s not like the movies, is it?” said Steven.
I shrugged dispiritedly. Maybe it was like the movies. After all, the bloodhounds had come up empty in The Shawshank Redemption and Cool Hand Luke. Of course I’d been glad the hounds had come up short in those films. I wasn’t so glad now.
“She’ll pick it up again,” he said.
It might have been lucky that Angie had picked it up at all, I thought. Neither Heather Moreland nor her abductor had walked this route. Their spoor wasn’t on the grass or brush.
“I hope so.” Heather’s elusive scent was out there in the ether.
“Maybe we need to get Angie out of the car,” he said. “It’s possible her being in an enclosed space makes it difficult to pick up the scent.”
“That didn’t stop her earlier.”
Angie’s nose had taken us throughout much of Sherman Oaks before she’d lost the scent.
“But you might be right,” I added. “Let’s wait a minute or two, though. Walking would slow us up.”
I didn’t add that I wasn’t even sure if I was up to the task of acting as her handler. My accident had caught up with me. Just breathing was causing me pain.
We came to a stop sign. “Where to now?” he asked.
My fish wasn’t pulling. I pointed in the direction of North Hollywood and said, “That way.”
We started down a quiet road in a residential section of Sherman Oaks. The leash was still slack. My bobber still wasn’t bobbing. I watched Angie’s nose twitch, saw her breathe in, but the air offered no secrets.
The foreboding that awakened me at the hospital had grown worse. I had this feeling something bad was either happening or imminent. The anguished tune in my head kept playing.
“The war is coming, and there’s no shelter from it,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
I didn’t have to explain. Angie did that for me by suddenly going ballistic. Her earlier baying was just a warm-up for the big show. I had to hold tightly to her leash. There was a whale on the line. Angie had radar lock-on. The target was fixed, and she wanted the missile to fly. I could barely hold her inside the car.
“Stop,” I said.
Steven braked hard. I was losing the tug-of-war, and Angie was trying to jump out her half-open window. “Hold the leash!”
Steven grabbed it, and that gave me the chance to throw open my door and step up to Angie’s door. With Sirius at my side, I inched open the passenger door, getting a grip on her leash and collar.
Then I made the mistake of opening the door all the way.
Angie leaped out and almost pulled my arm out of its socket.
I ran as fast as I could, but it wasn’t anywhere near fast enough for Angie. She began dragging me, and I had to let go of the leash. Sirius came to a stop next to me, but I had enough breath to go German on him: “Voraus!” He heard my command to “go” and didn’t need to be told twice.
There had been a reason Dr. Padgett had advised me to not leave the hospital. My cracked ribs were now on fire.
“Are you all right?”
Steven had caught up to me. It hurt too much for me to reply, so I let the dogs do the talking. Sirius and Angie were running around an eight-foot-high privacy fence that ringed a home’s large backyard. Angie was desperately looking for an entrance into the yard.
“Help the dogs over that fence!”
Steven assumed I knew what I was talking about. He sprinted to the dogs. I watched him lift Angie high enough for her to scrabble over the fence, and then he began hoisting Sirius. I arrived on the scene just as my partner disappeared from view.
“Now me,” I said.
He interlaced his fingers, offering me a stirrup. I stepped up and he gave me a boost. His lifting up my body was bad enough; the torque of my swinging over the fence made me scream, but my cries of pain were covered up by the urgency of Angie’s baying.
I didn’t need to take any time figuring out where to go. Angie was scratching at the door of a backyard shed. Unfortunately, it was locked. Whether I kicked it in or hit it with my shoulder, it was still going to hurt. I took a step back.
And then I heard a sound coming from behind me and watched as Steven rammed into the door. Maybe he really did like playing cops and robbers. The door flew open, and the dogs jumped over his downed form. I moved around him and joined Angie. She was scratching at a throw rug, and I pulled it aside. The shelter dog had found the underground shelter
.
I gripped a metal ring and lifted the hatch up. The rungs in the concrete walls had lost their battle to time, but had been replaced by a portable fire-escape ladder that extended to the floor below. The drawbridge was down. It was time to storm the castle.
I started down the ladder. Maybe I should have first consulted with Angie. Going down second apparently wasn’t to her liking. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t room for the two of us. I was only halfway down the stairs when she jumped through the opening. I tried to catch her with one arm and hold on to the ladder with the other, but succeeded only in falling. Luckily, I cushioned her landing, but at the expense of my own body. I would have screamed, but the wind was knocked out of me. From above I could see Sirius’s anxious face, and knew he was ready to do his own high-wire act.
“No!” I gasped, and then found breath enough to say, “Sitz! Bleib!”
I began to rise gingerly, but that was before a man began screaming. His terror not only got me to my feet, but got me running. I ran toward the sounds and saw Dr. Alec Barron trying to fend Angie off. Most dogs have to be taught to bite. It’s not in canines’ nature to clamp down on humans. But Barron was on the wrong end of Angie’s teeth, and she showed no signs of letting up. His hands and arms were bleeding from multiple wounds, sacrificial victims to the shielding of his neck and trying to keep his jugular from being torn apart.
“Angie!” I yelled. “No!”
She ignored me and continued lunging at Barron.
“Angie!” I yelled again, trying to get her attention.
I didn’t want to have to hurt her, but wondered what else I could do to stop her from ripping Barron apart.
And that’s when a form raised itself from the shadows and began violently coughing. That got Angie’s attention a lot more than my shouting.
And then Heather Moreland whispered, “Angie, come!”
Angie forgot her prey and bounded over to the still-coughing Heather. Then the woman threw her arms around Angie and held on as if she was the world’s largest life preserver. Heather began sobbing uncontrollably, and all the while Angie desperately tried licking away what she perceived as Heather’s sorrow.
The mother-and-daughter reunion was almost too personal to watch. The two survivors consoled each other and let their love speak. It would be a memory, I knew, that would sustain me for the rest of my life; it would be my own perpetual night-light that I could call upon to stave off the darkness that sometimes comes upon me.
Out of the corner of my peripheral vision, I saw Alec Barron trying to crawl away. I didn’t let him get very far. I read him his Miranda rights and then secured him with flex cuffs.
He said only two things to me: “I need a doctor. And I need a lawyer.”
I was glad he chose not to say much. Glad that he seemed to be in even more pain than I was. And I had the ready relief that he didn’t. All I had to do was look at Heather and Angie. That was better than pain meds. That was better than anything.
CHAPTER 43
ANSWER UNCLEAR, TRY LATER
“You want to go for a ride?”
It was a question I needn’t have asked. Sirius always wants to go for a ride.
“We’re going to see a friend of yours,” I told him.
That was reason for more tail thumping. Just being alive, Sirius knows, is reason enough for tail thumping. My partner reminds me of that every day, and shares his contagious joy. He keeps me from being a grump, which qualifies him as a miracle worker. I would nominate him for sainthood, but the Catholic Church has always discouraged any canine veneration.
The weeks since the car crash were supposed to have been a time of healing, but work had conspired against that. Sometimes the aftermath of a case proves to be more problematic than the solving of it, with a flurry of required reports and meetings.
As I drove, I tried to get comfortable. The car crash had thrown my body out of alignment. I sang my woes to Sirius: “Your backbone connected to your shoulder bone, your shoulder bone connected to your neck bone, your neck bone connected to your head bone.”
My cell phone rang, and I looked at the display. Lisbet was calling. Uh-oh, I thought. And then I finished the lyric: “I hear the word of the Lord.”
I suspected I was busted but pretended otherwise in my best mellifluous on-air voice: “This is the love doctor, and right now I’d like to give a shout-out to a special L.A. lady named Lisbet.”
“And I’d like to ask the love doctor why a certain L.A. cop didn’t go to physical therapy today,” said Lisbet.
“Temporary insanity?” I waited a moment for her to laugh, and when that didn’t happen, I said, “I had to take a conference call with the assistant DA.”
“You can’t keep putting off the therapy. You have to prioritize it.”
“I’ll make it tomorrow,” I promised.
“Why is it that the bad guys have time for physical therapy, and the good guys don’t?”
“Thanks to Sirius,” I said, “James Rhodes needs to do a lot more PT than I do. Of course, his scumbag defense lawyer is trying to claim that his client’s wounds were a result of excessive force.”
“Saving your life constituted excessive force?”
“When you have a client looking at the attempted murder of a police officer with special circumstances, assault with a deadly weapon, and assorted other charges, lawyers tend to grasp for any straws they can. And we’re not even taking into account the premeditated murders of Andrea Rhodes and Langston Walker.”
After the fact, we’d learned that James Rhodes had run down his wife when he discovered she was having an affair. On the surface it was a crime of passion, but scratching that surface showed all the planning that had gone into her murder. Rhodes had targeted a problem drinker, and stolen Donald Warren’s car after determining the man was in a drunken stupor. After running down his wife on a residential road as she was biking home, Rhodes had returned the damaged car to where he’d stolen it. There was a reason Warren had no memory of having driven his car on the night Andrea Rhodes was killed—he hadn’t driven it, after all. It wasn’t a blackout like everyone had assumed. Warren’s death from cirrhosis of the liver was the only thing that had spared him a trial and a jail sentence.
“I’d rather you cared more about yourself than your cases,” said Lisbet. “You think I can’t see how much you’re still hurting?”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Then why is it you’ve worn loafers ever since the crash? You can’t even bend down to tie your shoes.”
It was nice having a girlfriend who cared, but there were times I wished she wasn’t so observant.
“I promise I will be better about going to physical therapy,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “I hate having to act like a schoolmarm.”
I found myself laughing at her use of the word “schoolmarm.”
“Schoolmarm,” I repeated, and then attempted an urchin voice and said, “I have been naughty, teacher.”
“Yes, you have,” she said, “and I’m not about to be bought off with an apple.”
“Then how can I go about currying your favor?”
“You can bring over a variety of kebabs for dinner. While you grill them up, I can make some rice pilaf and a Greek salad.”
“Do you want some falafel with the kebabs?”
“That sounds good, but baklava sounds even better. In fact, I’m already salivating. What time will you be over?”
“Six,” I said, and then added, “I think. It’s possible I’ll be late, but no later than eight. Then again, I might even be early.”
Now it was her turn to laugh. “Was that you, or the Magic 8 Ball, being ambiguous?”
“Reply hazy,” I said. “Try again.”
“You do plan on showing up sometime tonight?”
“You may rely on it,” I said.
“And it will be sometime between five and eight?”
“It is decidedly so.”
“Do you t
hink you’ll get lucky?”
“Signs point to yes,” I said.
“I think you must have an old Magic Eight Ball,” she said. “Mine says, ‘Answer unclear, try later.’”
Even before I reached the door, Angie began barking. I rang the doorbell and waited for the door to open, listening as deadbolts and locks were unlatched.
Heather Moreland offered up a big pretend smile, and I was reminded of how I’d presented the same faux cheeriness while recovering from my fire walk. My mantra had been, “Fake it ’til you make it.” I was sure that’s what Heather was doing.
Despite wearing makeup, she was pale, and under her eyes were deep, dark circles. She wasn’t quite as haggard-looking as when I’d found her three weeks earlier, but she still hadn’t regained the weight she’d lost. She had proved her resilience, but her ordeal had taken its toll. Now she looked worn and fragile. Handle with care.
I hadn’t seen her since our time together in the dungeon. That night she’d clung to Angie and had clung to me. She’d wanted to clean up before being taken to the hospital, but the best I could do was wrap a coat around her. The cardinal rule of investigation is to preserve evidence and not contaminate a crime scene. Sometimes that means you can’t be the human you want to be.
Heather extended a hand to shake. I think that was her way of making sure I didn’t try and hug her. We shook and she said, “Thank you for coming, Detective.”
Sirius had already invited himself in, and he and Angie were romping around the living room.
Heather gestured for me to come inside. “Please take a seat wherever you’re comfortable.”
I chose an armchair, and Heather sat in a rocking chair, but only for a second. “I didn’t realize the room was so dark,” she said, getting up and opening the curtains halfway.
She stood in the light, blinking, and then said, “Can I get you something to drink? I have lemonade and cookies already made.”
“Lemonade and cookies sound great.”
She hurried off, first returning with a plate of oatmeal cookies, and then coming back with a pitcher and glasses. Only after pouring did she sit in her rocker again.
