Close to the Ground

by Jeff Mariotte

  “Welcome to Monument Pictures!” she shouted out with all the exuberance of the cheerleader she had once been. “We’re so glad you’re here!”

  As if.

  “My name is Cordelia Chase, and I’ll be your guide today,” she went on. “We’ll be together for the next two hours or so, as I give you a real behind-the scenes look at Hollywood moviemaking. We’ll see everything: the back lot, the soundstages, the recording studios, special-effects labs, our studio museum and gift shop.”

  As she gave her well-rehearsed intro, she scanned the crowd. Another capacity group of thirty-five. There was a family from Japan, another from some Middle Eastern country, several from the United States, a few single people sitting by themselves, and —

  Doyle?

  Sure enough. He was hunched over in the third row, toward the aisle, conspicuously looking inconspicuous. He also looked uncomfortable. Behind him, a boy of about five was buzzing a toy plastic airplane around Doyle’s head, which explained the uncomfortable part but didn’t really explain what he was doing here.

  He made eye contact with her and gave his head a little nod toward the exit. She responded with a tightening of her lips and a tiny shake of her head. She couldn’t speak to him. Olivia was standing in the back room, eyeing her like she was halfway across a wide desert with no water for days. She’d already been chewed out once today for getting a personal phone call, and just now it occurred to her that the caller was probably also Doyle. Having failed to reach her that way, he’d come all the way out to the Valley and shelled out the thirty bucks for a tour.

  It must really be important, she thought. Getting Doyle to lay down thirty dollars for anything that doesn’t involve referees is a major life challenge.

  Seeing him there shook her well-established routine monologue. “Just a . . . a couple of, uh, ground rules, before I take your — I mean, before we go out to the tram for the tour,” she stammered. “First, no, uh, no photos unless I specifically say that you can take pictures. Remember, this is a working movie studio, and some of the things you will see might be things that we don’t want to end up on the Internet or anything. Also, please keep your voices at a conversational level at all times. I’ll be able to hear if you have a question, and we want everybody to be able to hear me. Hands, feet, and heads should stay inside the tram at all times, and if anyone is standing, the tram won’t be going anywhere. You have to be sitting down at all times.” She glanced at Doyle again. He gave a little shrug. “If we’re all ready to go, please follow me.”

  She headed for the exit door. Olivia opened it and held it for the guests to pass through, then followed. She was coming along again. Cordelia led the way to the tram, peeking over her shoulder now and again to keep tabs on Doyle. He was stuck several people back, though, and ended up in the second car.

  She felt his eyes on her as she started the tram. She wanted to just stop it and pull him aside. But Olivia would have her for dinner if she tried anything like that. If she’d been giving the tour unsupervised she’d have done it as soon as the tram was out of sight of the tour office.

  So it went through the tour’s first several stops. She took the group onto Stage 9, which was where the sitcom Danny’s Kitchen was filmed. They walked around on the sets, sat in the restaurant’s chairs, examined prop salt shakers and ketchup bottles. From there, a quick trip through editing, where there were actually some people working on a new medium-budget cop flick. Each time they stopped, Doyle closed in on her, but each time Olivia moved in, too, as if she sensed blood on the air. Cordy waved him off both times, once pointedly asking out loud if he had a question. He hemmed and hawed and backed away.

  After editing, she drove the tram onto the back lot. They drove up New York Street and down Chicago Street, circled around the Town Square, and then took the left that led into the Jungle — really a motley assortment of trees, real and fake, a couple of big fake boulders, and a pond where a waterfall could be started by turning a valve. Past the Jungle was Western Town, a collection of old frame facades that had been built back here in the fifties. They were still used occasionally. Cordelia stopped the tram on the dusty street and told her guests they were free to wander around Western Town for five minutes.

  Doyle stepped out of the sunlight and passed through the doorway of a general store. Cordelia gave Olivia a minute to get involved in answering a detailed question about the two Roy Rogers features that had been filmed here, and then she followed Doyle through the door.

  He turned around when he heard her come in.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “Do you have any idea how fragile my job is here? I know it’s not much of a job, but being fired from a job that’s not even worthy of your talents is much more demeaning than being fired from one that’s way over your head, and I won’t have it.”

  “Angel’s missin’,” he said simply.

  “So if you think you’re — what?”

  “He didn’t come home this mornin’.”

  “So . . . maybe he’s with somebody?”

  “Try to keep in mind who we’re talkin’ about.”

  “Right, sorry. You try his cell phone?”

  “Of course. No answer.”

  “Did you try calling the Willits house? He left the number, right?”

  “Tried it. I talked to Karinna. She came home by herself last night. In his car. With a big dent in it. Someone rammed ’em. Angel was last seen fightin’ off about a dozen guys, while Karinna escaped in the convertible. He said he’d meet her there, but he never showed up.”

  “Oh,” Cordelia said. The possible meaning of this started to sink in. “Oh.”

  “I don’t even know where to begin lookin’, but I got a bad feelin’ about it all.”

  “So do I, Doyle,” Cordelia agreed. “But there’s really not anything I can do about it now. That woman, Olivia, is watching me like a hawk. I’m about this close” — she held her fingers up, very close together — “to losing this job. A couple of carsick tourists hurling in the tram and they think you’re worthless. So I feel really bad for Angel, I mean, I’m scared, you know? But I don’t think I can help. Can’t you just, you know, have a vision or something and find him?”

  “You know it doesn’t work that way, Cordy.”

  “I guess so. But really, what’s the point of the whole vision thing if you can’t use it for your own purposes once in a while? I think the Powers That Be really didn’t think this thing out all the way.”

  “I’ll tell ’em that next time they ask my opinion.”

  “When was the last time they did that? Ask your opinion about something.”

  “Never.”

  “Oh.”

  “So what you’re sayin’ is, your job’s more important than Angel.”

  “No. I mean, what I’m saying is — yes, I guess that’s what I am saying. But I don’t mean it the way it sounds.” She thought about it — about what Angel had done for her, since she made the big jump from little Sunnydale, where she knew everybody, to sprawling Los Angeles, where she had to admit that she was only a tiny fish in a big, big ocean. And she realized there was a lot more to life than pointing out imaginary sites to a bunch of short attention span tourists who’d be here one day, at Disneyland the next, and go home thinking they’d seen California. “What I mean is . . . well, never mind what I mean. In fact, never mind the whole thing. Let’s go.”

  “Go?” Doyle asked.

  “You think I’m going to leave something this important up to you? If Angel’s missing, we need to find him. You’re going to need my help for something like that.”

  “Okay, then,” Doyle said. “Let’s go.”

  They stepped back out into the sunlight. The tourists were still wandering around the Western buildings, snapping pictures of each other in front of the saloon and through the barred windows of the jail. Cordelia climbed into the driver’s seat of the tram and started it. Doyle jumped onto the bench seat behind her.

  “Great time
to tell me this,” Cordelia said. “We’re as far from the exit as we could possibly be and still be on the lot.”

  “Hey, I ain’t the one who didn’t want to talk,” Doyle reminded her.

  Cordelia put the tram in gear and started down the Western street, back toward the Jungle and civilization. Behind her, she could hear Olivia screaming. A couple of the other guests came running.

  “Where are you going?” one of them asked, panting. “We’re all back that way!”

  “You’ll see more if you walk back,” Cordelia told him. “This is an emergency.”

  “You’re fired, Chase!” Olivia shouted.

  “You can’t fire me, I quit!” Cordelia snapped back.

  After a couple of minutes they could no longer hear the yelling.

  By the time the tram pulled up to the tour office, security had been alerted. Cordelia figured Olivia must have either had her cell phone with her, or gone into one of the office buildings that stood between the Town Square and the Jungle. There were six burly officers in short-sleeved blue uniform shirts, striped pants, and gun belts, waiting for them with angry expressions on their face.

  Behind the guards, Don Davis, the tour manager, stood, also with an unpleasant scowl. The rest of the tour department was standing at the windows inside, watching the show.

  Cordelia pulled the tram to a stop. “I know, I know,” she said. “We’re going.”

  “You most certainly are,” Don told her. “We don’t take kindly to joy riding here at Monument Pictures.”

  Cordelia shot a grimace at Doyle. “I can assure you, there was very little joy involved,” she said. “But I quit, about thirty seconds before Olivia fired me. There are more important things I need to be doing with my life than entertaining the rubes who come here.”

  So much for not being a quitter, she thought. But then, flexibility is a virtue, too. Adaptability to changing circumstances. Quitting isn’t always the worst thing to do.

  “You’re just lucky I’m not charging you with grand theft, Ms. Chase,” Don proclaimed. “You may leave. But you’re not welcome to return to Monument Pictures, ever.”

  Cordelia locked eyes with Doyle and smiled. “Ahh, show biz,” she said. “There’s nothing like it.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  No one on the street knew anything.

  Doyle could hardly believe it. Criminals, for all their talk about Codes of Silence and Honor Among Thieves, were the least discreet people out there. They bragged about everything, no matter how lame their accomplishments. Most of them were too stupid to keep their mouths shut, but shared the slightest thought that popped into their tiny brains.

  And yet, there was no word on Angel anywhere.

  Which meant that whatever had happened to his friend, it didn’t involve the criminal community. Which meant Doyle was even more scared. Angel up against a bunch of crooks would be a situation Angel could handle.

  If it wasn’t the criminal underworld that had done something to Angel, then it was the other underworld. The one from which the demons came. And Angel, Doyle knew, was tough enough to take care of himself, even in that company — so if this was a problem that he hadn’t been able to deal with, then what could Doyle do against it?

  He stood on the corner of Hollywood and Highland. The day had turned into a real scorcher and the sidewalk radiated heat into the evening, but despite that there was a constant stream of traffic — tourists in short pants, street people in layers, wearing what they could and carrying the rest, hustlers, punks, gangsters. All of them trying to get by or get over, one way or another. Doyle knew the streets well enough to blend in, to keep out of the way of the square citizens and pick out the ones who might know something and be willing to share.

  And yet, nothing. He hoped Cordy was having better luck back at the office.

  Cordelia was having no luck.

  She had agreed to wait at the office while Doyle went out hunting, on the off chance that Angel might call. The sitting around and listening to the thundering silence from the telephone was getting to her, though. A few minutes before, it had occurred to her to try calling Detective Lockley, with whom Angel had developed something resembling a working relationship.

  And again, no luck.

  “I’m sorry,” the officer who answered the phone told her, “but Detective Lockley is out on a case. Would you like to leave a message for her?”

  And that would be what? Cordelia wondered. Tell her I’m concerned about her friend Angel because daylight has come and gone. I know he’s not officially a missing person until forty-eight hours have passed, but does the same rule apply to vampires?

  “No, thanks,” she told the voice on the other end of the line. “I’ll catch her later, I guess.” She hung up, then lifted the receiver and punched out one more number. One more thing had been bothering her all afternoon.

  She’d met Mike Dailey when he was cameraman doing a commercial shoot she was on. He had asked her out a couple of times, and she had been putting him off so far because she had already done commercials. If he’d worked on a series, or features, maybe. But he seemed to know everything that happened in town. He was as tapped in as the trades were, and he was a better source because he’d talk to her.

  He answered on the third ring, and after she rushed through the initial pleasantries, she got down to the point of her call. “I saw Blake Alten on the Monument lot today,” she said. “Is there a sub-stance abuse problem or something, there? Because he was practically sleepwalking. I almost — he was almost run over by one of those trams. And he didn’t even seem to notice.”

  “Alten’s been getting progressively weirder for the last week or so,” Dailey said. “From all reports, anyway. He hasn’t been seen in public much. Dinner at Morton’s a couple of nights ago, but he sat by himself. People kept asking him about the Monument deal, but he blew everybody off. Didn’t hear that he drank to excess or anything, just that he seemed to be spaced-out, noncommunicative. Somebody said maybe he had a cold or something.”

  “It didn’t seem like a cold to me. More like, lights on, but nobody home.”

  “Well, this is the movies you’re talking about, Cord. Nobody said he had to be a mental giant. Just good-looking.”

  “He was that,” she admitted.

  “You could ask his girlfriend, Sherrie Dupree,” Dailey went on. “Except that, suddenly, she seems to be his ex-girlfriend. Word is he hasn’t spoken to her in days. She’s not happy about it.”

  Somehow I don’t see Sherrie Dupree taking my calls, she thought. She made a few vague promises about going out with Dailey, then hung up.

  She found it interesting that others had noticed Alten’s odd behavior recently. But she didn’t know what it meant. And in terms of getting closer to figuring out where Angel was, she was no better off than she had been. She hoped Doyle was having better luck.

  * * *

  Kate Lockley drove. Special Agent Glenn New-berry sat uncomfortably in the passenger seat. He had wanted to drive, but she had insisted on taking her car, and she didn’t let FBI agents drive her car. Or anyone else, she told him. She was very protective of some things, like her car.

  And her cases. She let Newberry come along because at least this way she could keep an eye on him. She’d know what he knew, and if the price was that he would also know what she did, that was a price she could pay. She didn’t really mind sharing information, she just didn’t want to be kept in the dark.

  They parked a block from the corner of Avalon and Slauson, where Kate had located an abandoned gas station that might have been the one Chuey had told her about.

  His story made a certain amount of sense. Gas stations, she knew, had large underground storage tanks where the gasoline was kept. Once the stations were abandoned — but before they were razed to make room for a new corner mall, which was usually defined as progress in L.A. — the tanks were empty. An underground tank like that could provide the perfect staging area for a tunnel job, giving the robbery cr
ew a bit of a head start and someplace safe to dump the loads of dirt they pulled from their tunnel.

  Kate couldn’t imagine having spent such a hot day digging. The morning had started cool, but the mercury had edged up into the nineties by midafternoon. Finally now, at ten-thirty, with the sun long gone, it started to slack off. A faint breeze whispered down the oddly quiet street. She wiped sweat from her forehead as they looked at the gas station from across the street.

  She glanced at Newberry, who seemed cool and composed in his dark suit. Ice in their veins, she thought. A physical requirement for the Feebs.

  “So that’s it?” he asked.

  “That’s the gas station my informant told me about. Whether there’s anything to his story or not, I don’t know yet. That’s what we’re here to find out.”

  “We’re not going to do it from here, are we?”

  “That’s not what I had in mind, no.”

  They waited for an ancient lime green Ford Fairlane to lumber down the street, and then crossed at a fast walk. The street was wide and they didn’t especially want to be spotted, if there was a lookout posted.

  There was no movement from the gas station that they could see, though. A tall chain-link fence surrounded the corner property, but even from the street they could see a place where the gate had been padlocked shut, only now the lock hung, broken, and the gate was open a couple of inches. Kate caught Special Agent Newberry’s eye to be sure he saw it, too, and he nodded. Her hand went to her weapon. He drew his from a small holster on his belt and ticked his head at the gate.

  Wordless, Kate pushed the gate open far enough to slip through. She went first, and Newberry had to shove it a little wider to accommodate his bulk. He came up behind her and off to the side, trying not to present a single target in case there was anyone inside drawing a bead on them. Kate drew her own weapon now.

  Straight ahead, at what would have been the entrance to the service bay on the side away from the pumps, was the boarded-up entrance that Chuey’s friend had mentioned. The boards had clearly been disturbed.