Shitballs, bitched Atom at himself.
Please God tell me my pants aren’t still around my knees.
A quick glance across his body returned the correct answer. His denims had only made it up to his thighs. His Viagra powered member was, despite both tumbles, still at attention, overblown and overexposed in that wash of bright light.
6
“When you woke up this morning,” said Lucky, “betcha didn’t imagine you’d meet the likes of Mush Man.” Lucky had the black-and-white’s trunk lid up and was rummaging for the first-aid kit.
“Tourette’s?” asked Shia, though it was more of a known than a question.
“Chapter in one of your schoolbooks?”
She nodded that indeed it was. The DSM—or the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders—referred to Mush Man’s bizarre, rat-a-tat of dirty invectives as Tourette’s Syndrome or Tourette’s Disorder or GTS, the classic neuropsychiatric diagnosis where the afflicted often has little to no control over physical tics such as eye-blinking or twitches. For some though, the tics manifest as shocking vocal bursts of anti-social cursing.
“Awful illness,” replied Shia. “And schiz too?”
“His mutts don’t seem to mind,” answered Lucky, finding the kit and unzipping it until it flopped open like a clamshell. He dug for a tube of antiseptic gel, squeezed out a golf-ball sized dose and began working it into his palms, up his forearms, neck and face.
“Interesting taste in dog names.”
“For a minute, SPCA was on his case,” said Lucky as he returned to the driver’s seat. “Somebody in Venice complained. Cruelty to animals bullshit. Hell. He’s a schiz. Rescues dogs. Keeps ’em fed better than himself. Names them after black people he admires. What’s not to love?”
“What happened with the complaint?”
Lucky smirked without meeting her eyes.
“A Tradition of Service,” he said in a mocking monotone.
“Okay,” bit Shia. “I’m the rook. But is that some kinda code I’m supposed to figure out?”
“No code,” answered Lucky. “Mush Man is good peeps. Two-tour combat vet with a bad case of post-war heebie-jeebies. And some of us in Sheriffs have our own ways to serve and protect.”
“So the complaint went away.”
“I can be convincing.”
Lucky assigned Shia to record the stop on the black-and-white’s computer, including Mush Man’s statement concerning “the river.” Suspecting a car or truck accident involving a fire hydrant, the duo proceeded on the short half-mile over to Poinsettia Drive and slow-rolled with their spotlight on full blast. Halfway up the block, the front tires touched wet asphalt.
Shia keyed The Box, recording that both officers had stepped from the vehicle, then followed Lucky onto the street. The pair walked into the car’s flood lamps. There they discovered a gush of water spilling over the crown in the road before splitting into uneven streams in search of street drains.
“Compton fire hydrants are yellow,” said Lucky. “Probably some local drunk. Check the driveways for dented bumpers and paint transfer.”
“Call the FD?”
“Could be from a house,” replied Lucky. “Busted pool or hot tub or main. Find the source first.”
Shia was already making an about-face back to the car when Lucky clucked.
“Where you going’?” he asked. “You take point. I’ll follow and sweep with the spot.”
“Right,” said Shia, trying to sound agreeable. Though something about the point-of-the-spear part of the assignment smelled. As if it bordered on hazing. Still, she reminded herself that she was the Princess of Suck-Up. She’d clarify to others that her personal nickname wasn’t about the act of sucking up. No, ma’am. Her version was about sucking it in, gritting her teeth, and pushing on.
Once she heard Lucky drop the Ford into gear, she began to walk the make-believe center stripe. The road in front of her was blanketed in a blast of white light. The radio unit’s headlamps were clicked to bright and Lucky continued to angle the post-mounted spotlight.
The water climbed to her ankles.
When Shia’s ultra-light boots flooded she cursed herself for not choosing the heavier, waterproof pair she’d left in her locker. The choice of the micro-weight pair had everything to do with optimism and a simple calculation: if she was to get into a foot-chase during her virgin night, she’d hoped to out-sprint both cops and criminals.
The water moved with greater volume, climbing to her lower calves with a chill.
“Can you hear a source?” chirped Lucky though the black-and-white’s loudspeaker. The sound came as a shock, causing her to jolt. “If it’s a hydrant it sounds like you’re near a waterfall.”
Shia shook her head and trudged forward, remembering to shoot her tactical light up each driveway in search of dented bumpers and yellow paint transfer. But for the low hum of the Interceptor’s engine and the splashing of each of her own deepening footfalls, the neighborhood appeared abandoned.
Behind the wheel, Lucky kept his left grip guiding the spotlight, his other skipped from the steering wheel to The Box, where he keyed though screens looking for any alerts that might explain the source of the flooding.
Then Lucky felt it.
Like most native Angelenos, his nerve endings had a particular sensitivity to tremors. The earth shook so often that locals would usually register the shaking, coolly measuring for a sign that the shaker was either significant or not worth the worry. The fact that Lucky could sense the ground moving while seated in the shock-absorbing Ford Interceptor was telling.
But there was a visual cue.
The picture in front of him—that panoramic windshield frame of Shia and her flashlight slowly stalking the source of the flooding—shifted and tilted slightly downward. In unison, the asphalt underneath the trainee and the radio unit gave way like a gallows trap door releasing underneath a condemned man. As the black-and-white pitched forward, the headlights tracked with Shia as the ground beneath opened and swallowed her in a forty-foot spray of frothy saliva.
And all Lucky could do was hang on.
7
Oakwood Apartments. Universal City. 3:32 A.M.
Before his job at the Department of Water and Power, Tim Gilligan had managed fast food restaurants. If he were ever to apply for another job, he’d have to worry that his resume would reveal a strange trajectory. The Southern California native had begun his work career in the most menial position at a Carl’s Jr. in Hawthorne, climbing his way up to assistant manager by the time he was eighteen. From there he’d hopscotched to managing a nearby Wendy’s franchise, a Del Taco in Tustin, and a collection of Subways in Anaheim, a stone’s throw from Disneyland. Without a college education, Tim’s next logical step was to raise money from family and friends to buy his own franchise. Instead, a customer introduced Tim to a career with the largest municipal utility in the United States. In a matter of months he’d gone from managing pimpled teenagers and English-challenged Vietnamese and Hispanics to organizing DWP work crews.
As the Department’s manager for maintenance and repairs, Tim was all too accustomed to being awoken at odd hours by a favorite Travis Tritt tune he’d purchased as a ring tone. Not that he was the first call. He had minions who handled the hourly reports and service breakdowns. Assistant managers and field responders were more than capable of jumping into the fray of water main failures and arcing transformers.
Tim Gilligan was upper management, albeit the lower tier of upper management. His hundred-and-seventy-five-thousand-dollar-a-year salary placed him in the higher pay grade echelon of municipality management. Not bad for a city employee and college dropout.
The odd-hours calls had become more frequent of late as the mighty LADWP had been suffering almost weekly water main failures. The overworked pipes, many of which were up to one hundred years old, had been bursting citywide at an alarming rate.
Simple math, Tim had explained in a series of memos. The original riveted pipes,
a full third of which had been sunk below city streets prior to the year 1930, were simultaneously breaching from decades of stress and corrosion. The reason these blowouts—as they were called within the public utility—were occurring in the wee hours of the night was due to low water usage. Pressure in the pipes would build during the hours of minimal utilization. Then ka-boom! The rivets would fail and a gaping chasm would suddenly appear in the middle of a city thoroughfare.
Tim picked up his phone, clicked receive, but before he put it to his ear, he allowed a moment for his eyes to adjust.
Damn.
Instead of the bedroom he’d become used to—a cozy country nest of pine and lacy frills his wife Stacy had cultured—he was slapped back into a dull depression by the plain, Navajo White walls of The Oakwood Apartments.
Damn it all to hell.
The waking reminder of his imminent divorce—number two for Tim Gilligan—and the bad news of what was in all likelihood another blowout waiting for him at the other end of the phone call gave him every reason to bury his head back in his sweaty pillow. Any random nightmare would be more welcome than the life he was living separated from his kids by another vicious cur of a future ex-wife interested in both blood and money.
Because I’m a dirty, whore-loving SOB.
“Yeah,” said Tim into his phone. “What time is it anyway?”
“Half-three,” said the Irish-accented managing engineer.
“Oh. Hey, Liam,” said Tim. “Blowout?”
“And the hits just keep on comin’,” quipped Liam.
“Where this time?”
“Compton.”
With the news, Gilligan let out a sigh of relief. At least the blowout wasn’t located in a high profile zip code. The worst case benchmark being the 2014 collapse of a section of Sunset Boulevard, right in the heart of Bel-Air. Millions of drinkable gallons gushed onto the UCLA campus, flooding famed Pauley Pavilion, home of the storied Bruins basketball program. That same year, there’d been a blowout in tony Encino and one next door in equally posh Sherman Oaks the year before. Each came with monumental headaches for the utility both in man-hours, money, hassle from the community, and all-important public relations.
But Compton? A blowout there was likely to remain under the radar.
“You at the hole yet?” asked Tim.
“’Bout ten out. How long for you to get down here?”
“Gimme forty minutes.”
Tim reached for the TV’s remote control. Not to check the news. For the noise. He hated being alone. A flaw, a marriage counselor had surmised, that would continue to get him into another marriage quicker than was advised or into marital hot water when a relationship got sticky.
Then Tim saw what was on the TV.
“Aw, fuck me with a fork,” Tim exclaimed.
“Rather you buy me dinner first,” joked Liam.
“Goddamn Channel 5’s already got a helicopter on it.”
“Big hole with a Sheriff’s cruiser in it?”
“Don’t tell me we got hurt cops.”
“I won’t tell you,” said Liam flatly, “but I reckon your imagination can put it together.”
It was agreed. Tim Gilligan should throw water on his face, find the nearest quadruple espresso to suck down his gullet, and hustle his ever-widening rear down to Compton.
Compton, Tim. You know the place.
Tim sure as hell did. He had a dirty secret down that way. And he hoped to Satan’s hell to keep that secret buried and forever off of Stacy’s divorce lawyer’s forensic radar.
A secret and now a big ass hole in the ground.
Tim Gilligan hadn’t the faintest that his dirty secret and the latest DWP blowout would soon be one in the same—that when the pipes blew and the earth opened, the hole would swallow a hell of a lot more than just a sheriff’s black-and-white.
It would soon swallow just about everything and everyone else with chips in the game.
8
From street surface to underbelly, the sinkhole was two inches shy of eleven feet deep. When the asphalt gave way under Shia’s lightweight boots, it felt exactly like that horrid Disneyland attraction she loathed to her bones—the Hollywood Tower of Terror. Modeled loosely after the historic Hollywood Tower apartments on Franklin Avenue, the ride is a hairy, out-of-control elevator violently propelled up and down in random fits. In Shia’s opinion, the drops were the worst part, forcing her stomach up into her throat. After each group trip, she swore to Jesus she’d never partake again.
A foamy explosion of water, crumpling asphalt and mud had buffered her fall. Instinct had kicked in, as did her feet, as she struggled to find buoyancy amidst the churn. But her duty belt—including her pistol and extra ammo mags—acted like diver’s weights, repeatedly tugging her back down. When she reached for her buckle, it wasn’t at her navel as the belt had twisted. But which way? Left or right? Without her arms to help propel her upwards, she sunk deeper with every search for the clasp. Her chest screamed for air, her calm all but submerged with the rest of her.
Shia felt her feet hit bottom. How far down? Jesus, was she going to drown on her first shift? She pushed off and, using her arms for lift, she aimed for the surface, ignited from above by the Interceptor’s angled headlamps. So close, she thought. Home. Closing fast. All she had to do was reach up and grab the bumper guard. The lights though, weren’t waiting for her. They were upon her, charging downward as the black-and-white plunged into the hole. Four thousand pounds of metal and gravity. Shia snap-twisted her torso. A reflex. Her back to the behemoth, she fully expected the grill to pin her to the bottom of the hole. Her lungs would give in and her last breath would be spent inhaling liquid instead of air, a deathly return to the womb.
God, please make it quick.
The bumper missed and stopped halfway to the bottom. The turbulence and churn spun Shia and she found herself breaching towards the surface. She flailed, unable to turn her face to the sky, only to find the Interceptor pushing her under yet again.
Jesus, no!
Then she felt the hook.
Like that terrible amusement park ride, the elevator was again propelling her body upward. Suddenly clear of the water, she found herself thumped upon the angled roof of the black-and-white with her legs tangled in the fixed light array.
“You breathin’?” she heard Lucky ask. Yet somehow the shock of the moment had left her too breathless to form a word. So Lucky reminded her, “You’re okay! Now, you gotta move with me!”
With his hand still hooking the back of her Kevlar vest, Lucky dragged her across the rear windshield, up the canted trunk, then at last onto the jagged asphalt.
“Stand or crawl!” demanded Lucky. “Just get the hell away cuz I don’t know if this hole gets any bigger.”
Shia found her feet and stumbled after her T.O. to the sidewalk and a scrubby lawn. Lucky pounded on the ghetto-bars at the front door until the porch light ignited and the robed occupant answered. He borrowed a cellphone, called 911 for assistance, then asked for a couple of towels and a plastic bag packed with ice. Ever grateful, Lucky slipped the ice bag between his waistband and the small of his back in defense of certain and painful inflammation.
In minutes, the scene was secured with Sheriff’s units shutting off access to the street. Fire engines were scrambled and, as a crowd of neighbors rimmed behind yellow police tape, paramedics checked out both Lucky and Shia for signs of injury.
“Only thing broke is her first night cherry,” Shia overheard one distant deputy guffaw.
“Stuff the ten-cent commentary,” barked The Mustache, aka Lieutenant Torres, who’d arrived at the scene to supervise. “Don’t make me assign gender sensitivity training!”
While the sheriff’s deputies and first responders kept the sinkhole safe and surrounded until officials from the Department of Water and Power arrived, Lucky and Shia were shuttled back to the station house. Once they were showered and back in their civilian garb, Lucky remanded Shia to the drudgery of wri
ting reports. In addition to the chores generally reserved for trainees—writing the incident and end-of-watch summaries—Shia also had to complete the accident and damaged vehicle reports plus requests for all replacement equipment ruined in the water. As Shia toiled, Lucky commandeered an empty desk chair in the dispatch room, propped his sneakered feet on a table, sipped orange Gatorade and watched the blowout story unfold on the KTLA Channel 5 News. When his new deputy interrupted with printed pages for his approval, he’d suggest corrections and return to the TV, contemplating everything from what it might take for the DWP to repair the massive mainline to whether or not he should capitulate on Gonzo’s desire to make an offer on the Altadena house they’d been co-renting, to the always fleeting memories of his deceased younger brother—a still-festering wound that was never far from emotional reach.
Lucky was finally satisfied with Shia’s written reportage as the clock ticked minutes from their shift’s 7:00 A.M. conclusion.
“Leave your service weapon in the dehumidifier and go get some rest,” was Lucky’s final remark to Shia. “I’ll see you back in a new car at nine.”
If the new deputy was uncomfortable with the arm’s length affect employed by Lucky, she would need to swallow and get used to it. There wasn’t much warm or cozy about Lucky. The veteran cop wasn’t wired that way and, from his own prismatic perspective, doing things his way had served him well enough.
The early morning trek back home to Altadena was full of yawns and a couple of strong air conditioner blasts just so Lucky could stay awake. He was half hoping the suburban rental house he shared with LAPD pilot Lydia “Gonzo” Gonzalez would be empty. If he’d driven any slower—or stopped and shopped for shaving cream or some other distractible item, he would’ve been assured of a family-free path from the driveway to a bedroom blacked out with opaque motel curtains.
Family-free?
The Lucky Dey Thriller Series: Books 1-3 (The Lucky Dey Series Boxset) Page 66
