Not too late to turn back, she reminded herself.
She kept going. The address wasn't far now.
She thought of how narrowly she had escaped this kind of poverty after her father died in jail. Her mother had worked two jobs to keep up the mortgage payments.
If they'd lost their home, if they'd had to move to a neighborhood like this, would it have changed her? She already had a father who was a felon. Throw in an environment seemingly designed to breed criminals, and what would have been the result? She liked to believe she could have maintained her sense of self even under that kind of pressure. But she couldn't be sure. What dictated the direction of a human life? Nature, nurture, free will, destiny? What was the formula, or was life too complex to be expressed as a formula?
She shook her head. If there was an answer to that question, she wouldn't find it here, now.
She continued driving east, deeper into Watts. Part of her wanted to be angry at Brand for putting her through this ordeal, but she couldn't entirely blame him. He had been given no choice about taking part in the program. In the LAPD, a troubled officer could be ordered to undergo any form of counseling. Being sent to the bank, it was called, because the LAPD's Behavioral Sciences unit, where the psychologists worked, was housed above a bank in Chinatown. To be sent to the bank was to face the possible closing of one's accountthe end of a career.
Brand had been spending a lot of time at the bank. His new course of treatment was only an extension of the mandated therapy he'd been receiving from Dr. Alvin, one of the Behavioral Sciences shrinks. When Alvin had failed to make progress, Brand's case had been labeled treatment-refractory, suitable for experimental intervention. And now he was required to see a new doctor for a therapeutic technique that the patrol cops this morning had characterized as "putting wires in their heads."
No wonder Sergeant Brand was resistant to the idea. He didn't seem like the docile type, anyway. From Alvin's briefing, she knew that Brand had grown up in Pico Rivera, a tough, blue-collar town south of LA. He had been in the department for fourteen years, working the high-crime districts of Southwest, Rampart, and now Newton. His ID photo showed a man with rough-hewn features and a thick neck starting to wrinkle into a double chin. His eyes were dark and hard to read under the heavy tufts of his eyebrows. His head was shaved at the sides, his hair thin and short like black bristles on top. He looked older than his age, forty-one.
Not a man who could be pushed around, she thought. And also not a man who would be easily traumatized. But a fatal shooting was enough to traumatize anyone, especially given the fact that Sergeant Brand had never fired his gun on duty before the night of February 9, three months ago.
That night had changed him. Brand had become a different man. Now, facing a new form of therapy, he was scared, and he was hiding. But not for much longer. She would find him, and in the end, she hoped, he would thank her for it.
The address she was seeking was one-half of a duplex on a cul-de-sacnot a reassuring location, since it afforded no easy escape route. Bungalows and small apartment buildings curved around an oval patch of dead grass that had been a small park. The park's swing set was broken, its seesaw overgrown with weeds. No kids played there. Liquor bottles and cigarette packs lined the sandy verge of the play area.
Robin studied the duplex, two stories high, the ground-floor windows barred, the upper-story windows mostly boarded up. An air conditioner chugged in one window, dripping condensation. Cars were parked around the cul-de-sac, taking up most of the curb space, and more cars rested on the narrow front and side lawns of the duplex. Something was going on inside. She heard no music or voices, but the cars told her of a large gathering of people.
"This is crazy," she whispered as she sat behind the wheel of the Saab, double-parked on the street, staring at the house.
The smart thing was to drive off, hit the freeway, and keep calling Brand's cell phone until he answered. If he never did, she could report him to his superiors.
But then Brand would be even more hostile to her for having squealed on him, and the LAPD brass would have cause to reconsider greenlighting the treatment program. She could hear Deputy Chief Wagner now: "If you can't handle the challenge of establishing a rapport with one of our officers, Dr. Cameron, maybe we'd better reevaluate the whole idea."
She wouldn't let that happen. If Brand was in this house, she would find him.
She got out of the Saab and locked it, activating the alarm, which might offer some protection even with a busted window. Quickly she approached the house, checking her purse to confirm that her cell phone was inside and turned on. It would probably be her only lifeline once she was inside.
The two front doors of the duplex were closed. A hand-scrawled, misspelled sign on one of them read GO ARROND BACK, the same message repeated underneath in Spanish.
She threaded her way between the parked cars on the side lawn and came to a small, fenced backyard, empty except for two preschoolers squatting in the grass and examining a crowd of ants. Neither child looked up as she found the open rear door.
Inside, there was a great deal of noise, all of it electronic in originTV sets blaring different channels in different rooms, a radio competing with the din. She saw a man with a shaved head and a bodybuilder's physique lounging on a sofa with a dazed look on his face. He was no more interested in her than the children had been.
Moving into the kitchen, she heard voiceslive voices, not TV and radio chatter. She found an open door to a stairway leading down into a cellar. People were down there, a lot of them. She stepped onto the staircase.
"Who the fuck are you?"
She turned. The bodybuilder had come out of his daze. He stood at the other end of the kitchen, staring her down. She noticed something strapped to his left arm and was dismayed to see that it was a knife.
"I'm looking for someone," she said over the noise of a TV on the kitchen counter, tuned to a game show.
"The fuck you are. You don't know nobody here. You ain't never been here before."
There was only one way to play this, and that was to bluff.
"You're right," she snapped. "I've never been to this shithole, and you can bet I'm not coming back. I just came to find Brand. He down there?"
"Fuck, I don't gotta tell you nothing."
"Is he down there?"
She knew there were several possible outcomes to this conversation. She could be ejected from this house, or she could be beaten up or raped, or she could be allowed to proceed. An odd feeling of calm came over her as she understood that the decision was out of her hands. She could only wait and see what the man with the knife would do.
"Yeah," he said after a long moment. "Brand's here. You his woman?"
"I'm his friend."
"Friend." The man smiled, showing a gold tooth. "Yeah, right."
He left the kitchen. Robin took a breath and went down the stairs into a large cellar, the ceiling overlaid with plumbing pipes, bare lightbulbs shining down amid the meshwork of conduits, illuminating a noisy, jostling crowd. Most of the cellar's occupants were men, a mixture of ages and races, nearly all of them wearing dirty overalls or ragged jeans, a few in business suits. The scattered women were young or trying to look young, with big hair and silicone breasts and collagen lips.
Robin wished she had worn different clothes. Her blue skirt and white blouse were all wrong for this place. In jeans and a sweatshirt she might have looked less conspicuous. As it was, she had to hope she didn't draw too much attention in the dim light and the pressing crowd.
She moved through the room, still not sure what was going on. She heard two men arguing, their voices raised.
"He's a fuckin' land shark, gonna have that pussy piece of shit for lunch."
"Bullshit. He ain't got game enough for Driver."
"Driver's fucked up. Last time took too much out of him. He's meat."
"C-note says he pulls an upset."
"You're on, asshole."
Had to be a
fight coming up. Like that movie, the one with Brad Pitt, Fight Club. But where was the boxing ring? There ought to be a raised platform, but she saw nothing but a crush of people pressing everywhere.
Most of the heads were turned away from her. She sidestepped along the back of the crowd, her back against the cellar wall. She saw nobody who looked like Brand. To really scope out the crowd, she would have to move forward into the thick of it, where she could see the men's faces.
She took a breath and pushed into the mass of bodies.
The first thing she noticed was the reek of sweat all around her, the smell of men jammed together in a hot, airless place. Then there was the heightened volume of noise, a hundred voices yelling at once in an unintelligible roar. An elbow jabbed her shoulder. A careless hand brushed the nape of her neck. She heard someone shouting that the last bets were being taken. Somebody else was calling Rambo a motherfuckin' coward while the man next to him protested, "Rambo ain't no coward; Rambo got cojones; you better believe he's one badass hombre." Two other men yelled at each other in Spanish, waving fistfuls of cash. A woman with peroxide blond hair that clashed with her dark complexion caught Robin's eye and gave her a wink, as if they were girlfriends sharing a joke.
Still no Brand. Maybe Wolper and the bodybuilder were both wrong, and he wasn't here.
She had maneuvered her way near the front of the crowd now. A curved metal railing came into view. Men were leaning against it, gazing down, while others craned their necks for a better view.
It was some kind of recessed arena, about twelve feet in diameter, probably too small for two men to fight in. A cock-fighting ring, perhaps. Were Rambo and Driver two roosters? She'd never heard a chicken described as a badass hombre. Then again, this was LA. Any form of insanity was possible.
Officer Brand, she wondered, where are you?
She was jostled from behind by a crew of guys straining to get closer to the arena. The impact pushed her sideways into a narrow gap between two men at the railing. "Hey, sister," one of them said. His face was shiny with perspiration, and there was a long scar stitched like a seam down the side of his neck.
She was saved from deciding how to reply by a stentorian voice that broke through the babble. "No more wagers taken."
Robin looked down into the arena. It was a circular depression in the cellar floor, four feet deep, possibly the remains of an artesian well. Sawdust, strewn over the floor of the pit, was dark with dried blood and a few blotches of fresh blood, glossy and vivid.
Rambo and Driver were in the pit, facing each other, each one held by his owner, who knelt outside the ring and reached through the railing. They were not roosters. They were dogs.
One animal was a pit bull. The other one, larger, looked like a mastiff, a crossbreed engineered for power and viciousness. Both were scarred from other battles. They were suited up for combat, wearing studded chest protectors and leather collars. Their tails and ears had been cropped so an opponent would have nothing to grab hold of. They glared at each other with programmed malice, every muscle stiff with tension.
"Let 'em go," boomed the voice of whoever ran this show, and instantly the two owners released their grips on the dogs.
The mastiff struck first, lunging at the pit bull and seeking to lock its large jaws over the smaller dog's throat. The pit bull dodged the attack and barreled into the mastiff, slashing a deep gash in its foreleg. Then the two animals were all over each other in a fury of snarls and bites and kicking legs.
There was new blood on the sawdust, and more blood painting the walls of the arena in a spatter pattern. Robin looked down and saw flecks of red on her blouse.
She wanted to turn away, but the press of men against her back pinned her to the railing. She shut her eyes. Everyone was screaming now, even the other women in the room. The voices blended into a chaos of curses and exhortations to kill: "Go for the neck," "Get his eyes," "Cut him again," "Cripple him," "Maim him," "Maim the fucker."
Her head hurt. Bright lights flashed behind her closed eyelids. As an undertone to the shrieks and howls of the crowd, she heard the savage struggling of the dogs. No barks, no whimpers, only the tearing of flesh and the awful, relentless gnarling and the snapping of jaws.
"Get him, Rambo; kill that cocksucker! Kill him!"
"Fight back, God damn it! Driver, you dumb piece of shit, you're only good for bait!"
Rambo was winning, it seemed. Despite herself, she opened her eyes and saw the pit bull's teeth buried in the mastiff's neck, below its collar. The mastiff, unable to defend itself with its jaws, was slashing and scrabbling at the pit bull with both forelegs, fighting to tear itself loose, inflicting deep cuts across the pit bull's back, but the smaller dog hung on, blindly tenacious, smelling blood.
"God, somebody stop this," Robin whispered, her voice lost in the uproar.
The mastiff dropped to its knees. It shook its head feebly, delivered a few more perfunctory cuts to the pit bull's side, then slumped on the floor of the arena, its limbs shivering in a lake of maroon blood. The pit bull, Rambo, held on to the mastiff's neck until the twitching had stopped and the bleeding ebbed. By then there was space around the railing, as the winners collected money from the house and from the various side bets that had sprung up.
Rambo's owner, or handler, or trainerwhatever he was calledstepped into the pit and tended to his dog. The man responsible for Driver stripped the collar and chest protector from the carcass, leaving the dog where it lay, a torn and wasted thing, its throat open, limbs askew, fur stiff with drying blood.
Robin finally had the space behind her to turn aside. She stood drawing deep breaths and fighting the pull of nausea. And then she saw him.
Brand.
Across the room, near the cellar stairs, wearing a black button-down shirt and black pants.
And laughing as he collected a wad of cash. He'd backed the right combatant, evidently. The mastiff's death had paid off for him.
"You son of a bitch," Robin said aloud, startling a man next to her, who thought the comment was directed at him.
She slipped through the dispersing crowd and closed in on Brand as he pocketed his winnings.
"Alan Brand," she said, getting in his face.
"Who the hell amp;?" But then he knew. Somehow he knew, though they had never been introduced.
"Oh, shit," Brand said.
"Sorry to spoil your fun."
"Shit," he repeated. He seemed slow to react, less intelligent than she'd expected. Maybe it was more than a love of the streets that had kept him from advancing higher in the ranks.
"You forgot your appointment," she said.
He presented a stupid smile apparently intended to charm her. "I didn't forget. Had more important things to do."
"So I see."
"Hey, sorry about that. We'll reschedule."
"That's not necessary."
"You mean you're giving up on me?"
"I mean you're doing your session today."
He blinked, processing this statement and finally producing a startled response. "Now?"
"Yes. Now."
"I don't think so."
"I do. Or we'll see how your superiors feel about the kind of entertainment you enjoy."
He puffed up, a man defending his rights. "What I do in my off time"
"Watching dog fights is a misdemeanor, Sergeant."
"You gonna arrest me?" He said it with a sneer.
"I'm going to report you."
"Go ahead."
"But not to Wolper or anyone at Newton. I'll go over their heads. I'll bring it up with Deputy Chief Wagner."
"Your fucking angel in the department. The dickwad that approved this half-assed psychiatric bullshit."
"I doubt he'd appreciate being characterized that way."
"How'd you get him on your side? A little mouth action? Oral report? You give his baton a few good licks?"
"Stop being an asshole."
His flippancy abruptly vanished. "You're fucking serious
, aren't you? You'd rat me out to the D-chief?"
"I'm calling him right nowunless you follow me back to my office for our first session."
"You're a regular ball buster, aren't you?"
"Is that a yes?"
"God damn it," Brand said, and he headed up the stairs.
Chapter Eight
She watched Brand's eyes tick nervously as his gaze shifted around the office. Possibly he'd been expecting a mad scientist's laboratory or a chamber of horrors, but all he saw was a large room furnished with the plush sofa he was sitting on, and an assortment of thickly cushioned chairs. A desk and a file cabinet occupied one corner of the room. Framed diplomas and other credentials hung on the walls. Sunlight trickled through curtains rustling in the breeze of the central air-conditioning. The floor was carpeted. A potted fern stood near the doorway to the kitchenette.
All very normal. She hoped Brand took some reassurance from that fact.
He didn't seem tomaybe because of one other chair in the room. It had metal arms and a straight back. Wires ran from it to a bank of computer consoles and heart and brain monitors. Nestled among this gear was the MBI appliance, a metallic cap sprouting wires.
Brand's gaze kept coming back to the appliance. His hands twitched in his lap.
She had produced waivers for him to sign. So far he had merely stared at them, his face grim.
"Before we get started," Robin said, "I want to explain a little about the theory behind my work." She tapped an illustration on the wall. "As they say in those public service spots, this is your brain."
Sometimes she got a smile out of a patient with that line, but not this time.
"See this almond-shaped structure just above the brain stem? It's called the amygdala. A primitive part of the brain, responsible for tying together the data that come in from your sense organs. Sight, sound, smellthey all meet here. The amygdala not only puts all this incoming information together, it also instantly applies a kind of nonverbal value judgment. Dangerous or safethose are the two main judgments it hands down. And it does all this before your conscious mind, operating in the neocortex, has even received the data. Do you see the implications?"
In Dark Places Page 6
