Savage

by A. J. Llewellyn

  “He’s your lover, isn’t he?”

  I had never told Veo. Would this be the end of my career?

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. I have no problem with it. I just saw…how he was with you tonight. He acts like a wife. Like my wife. Which is why I leave her at home.”

  That made me chuckle.

  “Look…nobody wants to hurt Ludo. And he doesn’t need to be a part of this. Not really…I don’t want to compromise his position as a witness in the Luke Masterson trial. I do want to know who Ludo thinks is behind all this. Who this…cabal is. Get me some names, Cavan, and I can keep the pressure off him.”

  “I’ll do that, sir.” I understood completely. I had to get the names…if I did, my sexual secret would be safe in Veo’s hands. If I didn’t…holy heck. I didn’t want to think about that. What I wanted to do was get Ludo and my mom out of town somewhere safe.

  But I knew both of them well enough to know they’d never go for a plan like that.

  We arrived at Felicity’s house. I put the car into park, opened the door and slid out of the driver’s seat. Veo moved into the seat and, with a breezy wave, was on his way again. I walked over to my car in the beach lot opposite. I was about to get in when something made me drop to the ground and look underneath it. I felt a little silly lying on the grubby, sandy cement, but I had to know. I checked around the tires and the base of the vehicle. Nothing. I was about to get up again when I noticed the rear bumper had been tampered with. I crawled along the ground and reached up but couldn’t wedge my fingers into the small space.

  “Whatcha doin’?” a voice asked. I almost peed my pants. I lifted my head from under the car and looked up at Harry Stocker. “We’ve been keeping an eye out for you,” he said. “Is something wrong?”

  “I think I’ve got a tracking device under the bumper.”

  He didn’t say a word. His face took on a hard set and he moved away. He returned a moment later with his cell phone and a flashlight. I watched him work his phone for a moment.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “It’s remarkable what apps you can find these days,” he muttered. “Hang on. Downloading now.” He frowned. “You’ve got two. A Trackstick under the bumper and, hmph…a different one under the dash. Is the door unlocked?”

  I was floored now. I passed the keys up to him.

  “It’s a Spy Hawk Rapid X-Track GPS,” he said over his shoulder.

  I felt sick. Who wanted to keep track of me so badly they had two different devices on my car? I got off the ground and saw Harry was now wearing latex gloves. He held up a small, square black unit that he showed me had been plugged under the glove compartment.

  “The one under your bumper was easy enough to get there…but somebody spent some time angling the one inside your car just right,” Harry said, almost to himself. “When you buy these things they tell you how easy they are to install but the reality is that they take some time to get in there. Everything interferes with their reading. Hmph,” he said again.

  “Don’t tell me there’s a third one.”

  “Nope.” He walked to the back of the car and using the end of the flashlight he pulled the bumper out a little. He flipped the light around and looked down the length of the bumper. “Sorry,” he said, looking up at me. He wedged it out more and it made a sickening sound. I watched as he removed the tracking device somebody had Velcroed to the inside of the bumper’s tubing.

  Holy cow!

  He pushed the metal back in. “This one went in first…six weeks ago according to my app. It is nonfunctional. My guess is that it stopped working once it was installed.” He tapped the bumper with the end of the flashlight. “Tracking devices don’t work against metal. Whoever put this here thought they’d be smart and laid down the Velcro not just to keep it in place but they thought it would act as a buffer against the metal. It still didn’t work so they got into your car on July seventh.”

  “My God…you even know the exact date?”

  He gave me a look. “I’ve become quite adept at this stuff.”

  “Okay. So somebody planted the second one, so why did they keep this one here?”

  “Good question. Do you remember where you were that day?”

  I thought for a moment. With my crazy work schedule and my complete absorption in Ludo in my free time the days ran into each other for me. July seventh…it rang a bell but I couldn’t come up with anything right now.

  “Think about it,” he said.

  “Wait… Ludo and I went up to Cambria. We took my mom. That was on the eighth. We had a wonderful day. On the seventh I pulled a double twelve-hour shift from the day before. I stayed at the station that night…slept two hours and went right back to work.”

  “Okay.” He nodded. “So your car was in the lot for over twenty-four hours. Plenty of time for somebody to get to work on it.”

  “I don’t understand why nobody saw that,” I said.

  “Maybe someone in uniform did it?” He snapped his fingers. “Late at night you’ve got a skeleton crew with your low-crime area.”

  That was true.

  “You must have some surveillance footage.”

  “No. Our station’s pretty quiet. Wait… We’re right next door to the impound yard. They have twenty-four hour surveillance on it.” My mind raced. I’d go in and ask the guys to look at their tapes for me.

  “I’m gonna bag these units up. You need to dust ’em for prints,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  He set the trackers on my hood, went inside and came out with two baggies. He dropped the units inside and ziplocked them. “We’re not dealing with professionals,” he said. “That’s one good thing.”

  “How come you have this handy dandy app on your cell phone?” I asked, taking the bagged evidence from him.

  “I have an ex-wife with a penchant for crazy shit like this. She’s done it heaps of times. Oh…listen, you can actually find out who bought these by going to the websites and checking the barcodes. Only problem is I’d do it tonight if I were you. Whoever stuck these on here could delete the evidence before then.” He turned and looked over his shoulder.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “The big gray stone wolf that used to be on the roof next door is gone. Ky’s all flipped out. He thinks that the wolf’s come to life and is going to come over and kill us all in our beds.”

  I saw Felicity coming out of the house looking for Harry. She was wringing her hands, poor thing. She’d taken on her son’s nervous habit.

  “One more thing,” Harry said. “These are easy units to buy online. They can be easy to purchase without leaving a name, but I’m guessing whoever did this had no idea you’d find out.”

  “I’m going to check right now.” I extended my hand to him. He removed the latex glove and shook hands with me.

  “Let me know how it goes.” He ran off to deal with his problems and I drove off to deal with mine. I went straight to my police station. The West Los Angeles Police Division on Butler Avenue in the very nice neighborhood of Brentwood had enjoyed an almost unblemished record until I rescued Ludo. Within days of that, I found a wanted man living in a house with registered sex offenders.

  Actually I can’t claim full responsibility for the change in our reputation. I had a bit of help from O.J. Simpson and the notoriety of the brutal murder of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson. There were a lot of years between that terrible case and Ludo’s…but now bloggers and TV commentators liked to talk about Brentwood’s unhappy brush with infamy.

  At the station, I noted the two units’ barcodes and serial numbers, then dropped them into a forensics pouch for dusting and took it over to the detectives’ division. I put a rush code on it. With any luck I’d have news by lunchtime tomorrow.

  My cell phone rang. Ludo. I took the phone outside and told him what had happened.

  “I wondered about that Porsche,” he said. “I’m telling you babe, the cabal is behind this. They’re h
ere. Get home. I’m waiting for you.”

  “Be there soon,” I promised. In the squad room I accessed the website for the Trackstick. I was shocked how easy it was to see who’d purchased it. Doubly shocked when I saw the name of the purchaser.

  It was my ex-lover, Vince.

  What the hell?

  The Hawk tracker had been purchased anonymously in an online transaction. I suspected he had bought both units unless I’d suddenly developed two different stalkers in the last six weeks.

  My cell phone rang again. It was Harry. “I forgot to remove the batteries from the units…” I could hear Ky’s pitiful, agonized screams in the background. “On second thought, maybe that’s a good thing. Whoever stuck ’em in your car will think they’re still active. And they might also have some fingerprints. Aw crap…this kid’s gone nuts. Later.” He hung up on me.

  I printed out my findings. I debated telling Veo. I would certainly tell Erik. I checked my watch. Almost midnight. I had to tell him. He was my partner. I hated waking him so late but it was important.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “No. I’m watching the stupidest TV movie Ana DVR’d. It’s about cupcakes, and Dean Cain is in it. The man never ages. He’s either a hologram or he’s got a painting in the attic.”

  “Plastic surgery?” I ventured.

  “Naw. He doesn’t have that surprised look all those other actors get. What’s up?”

  I laid it out for him then noticed the background noise suddenly vanished.

  “We need to get over to the impound yard and check their tapes,” he said.

  “We?” I echoed.

  “Hell, yeah. Somebody’s following you, man. We gotta know who it is. Give me twenty.”

  He hung up on me. People were doing a lot of that lately.

  In the time I waited for him I went back online and Googled my ex, Vincent Pascale. I was trying to absorb all the shocks that had been coming all night. I kept thinking about the missing stone wolf. Was it possible it had…come to life? I shook my head. I was a cop. I dealt with reality.

  Yeah. And my boyfriend is a cursed werewolf.

  It’s a funny thing about life. It never ceases to astonish me that you can be with somebody who means the world to you and then they are just gone from your life. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said, “Oh, how quickly love turns to hate.” He was right. Any cop who answers a domestic violence call can tell you that. For my part, I’ve tried hard to let go of the feelings of utter despair I experienced over the collapse of my relationship with Vince.

  I used to think we had a great connection. Like a lot of stressed and busy individuals in Los Angeles, he’d harbored a fantasy about moving up north. He’d wanted to buy a farm in Klamath Falls, Oregon. The reality of rural life hit him as hard as his feelings apparently for an alpaca farmer a couple of ridges away from us. I lost my man and soon learned I was about to lose the farm as well.

  Inexplicably, Vince had really turned on me, taking money out of our mutual account and changing his cell phone number. I’d heard via acquaintances that he was in love. I left him alone.

  I’d been forced to buy him out of the farm and had originally planned to sell it, but I’d held onto it. Once I’d paid him, we had no further contact. So why was he coming after me now when we’d had no communication in almost eighteen months?

  I’d salvaged the farm and had taken Ludo and my mom up there for a small vacation. My sister had brought her stepson, my nephew Max, up to visit and I’d harbored a childish fantasy of buying him a horse and teaching him to ride. Max is a sweet kid…I guess…but he hated the farm and was allergic to animals, according to his mother. He wasn’t allergic to Ludo, however. He loved Ludo like everyone else in the family. So I’d recently sold the property and severed all ties with the past.

  It wasn’t difficult to find Vince. A voracious social networker, he had Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr and sundry other accounts. I couldn’t access his Facebook account without being his friend, and his tweets were protected, but according to MyLife, which is one of those pesky online communities that knows everything about everybody, he was living in Santa Barbara.

  That was a good two-hour drive from here. It was too close for my comfort, especially if he was spying on me. I couldn’t get further without technically breaking a few laws so I waited until Erik arrived. He ran in a few minutes later, toting a sack of dry cat food and a bag of cans.

  “Here.” He thrust the bag of cans into my hand. “You can tell him these are from you.”

  “Him being…who?” I asked.

  “Lawrence. The night manager of the impound yard. Listen, you don’t have a problem with cats, do you?”

  “No. I love cats.”

  “Cool. He has a feral colony right in the yard. He makes little houses for them.”

  I stared at him.

  “Come on…for a bit of cat food he’ll let us look at his surveillance footage…if he still has it.”

  We left the station and walked next door. Floodlights came on outside the chain link fence that was attractively topped by acres of razor wire.

  A large man who could have been Baby Huey’s younger, meaner-looking brother came out, squinting at us. He clicked his cell phone and I knew he was taking a photo of us. He unlocked the gate to Hades and let us in, then quickly locked it again.

  “Rough night?” Erik asked him.

  Lawrence nodded. He was rather sweet-faced and nice, a fact which took me aback considering his brutish appearance. His head was almost completely shaved and he had a handlebar moustache that set off his appearance as a dangerous militia type. Especially with his Fuck the Government T-shirt and black pants. He shook my hand when Erik introduced us and I saw his tiny teeth. They now gave me the impression of being a total softie.

  “Hey,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

  In the floodlit yard I could see his face was red. I wasn’t sure if it was his blood pressure but I had a feeling it was acute shyness.

  “You’ve had some problems?” Erik asked.

  “You can say that again.” Lawrence looked a little stressed. “I towed this vehicle for CHP and the woman turned up with her entire gun-totin’ family.” His expression turned bleak. “This place is a freak show at night. Even with all the stuff we have on the fence and walls, they still try to get in and think they can liberate their vehicles.”

  I looked at the decrepit Ford Escort he’d brought in and wondered why on earth it had been towed from the freeway to a police impound yard and more importantly why the woman had tried such extreme measures to liberate it.

  “She was driving on a suspended license on the 405 going the wrong way…” Lawrence’s eyes bugged out. “Can you imagine?”

  I shook my head. “Nobody was hurt, I take it?”

  “No…but I plan on asking one of you guys to watch my ass when I drive home in the morning in case they get some funny ideas about shooting me on my way out.”

  “Done,” Erik said.

  I heard a long, low, plaintive meow.

  “Aw…darlin’.” Lawrence bent down to pet a sleek black cat. “This is Mama Kitty,” he said. “She had kittens three weeks ago. I built a house for them. Wanna see it?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He led us from the driveway to the side of the building. Mama Kitty jumped into a wooden enclosure that had windows and curtains. Sheesh…these kitties were living better than some humans I knew.

  “Cavan and I bought the kitties some food.” Erik nudged me and I handed over the canned goods.

  “Wow, that’s so nice.” Lawrence screwed up his face as he took custody of the dry food too. “Why do I get the feeling I’m being buttered up for something?”

  Butter. Did he have to go and mention that? I couldn’t remember when I’d eaten last. I was so hungry. I’d had three sips of a Dr Pepper at the barbecue and that was all since breakfast.

  “Actually we do have a favor to ask,” Eri
k admitted.

  “No problem. Come on in.” Lawrence blew kisses at the furry brood in the little wooden house and we followed him into the impound yard’s office. It was about as ugly as you’d imagine it to be, with ancient coffee in a pot plugged into a wall and candy in a dish that had probably been there for a decade. I eyed a bowl of peanuts and wondered how long they’d been there.

  “Don’t eat those,” Lawrence said, apparently catching my gaze. “Some of the guys sucked all the chocolate shells off M and M peanuts…that’s what’s left.”

  Eeeew!

  “You were able to leave the radio for a long time there,” Erik observed.

  “Naw…I have the portable with me but I got two guys out there just in case we have any trouble.” He glanced at a TV monitor showing four split screens. “What can I do for you?”

  I gestured to the monitor. “Somebody broke into my car July seventh. I have no idea what time but I’m guessing late because it must have been dark.”

  “We can see the entire lot from here and we keep the tapes for twelve months. Then they get shipped over to Central. You’re in luck. We’d still have that stuff.” He moved to the back room and came back with a packet of CDs. “Good thing it’s quiet.”

  He slid the first one in and we watched the playback on the bottom left hand corner of the screen.

  His radio squawked. He pressed fast forward and took the call. Some apartment manager in Brentwood whining about an unauthorized vehicle parked in a resident’s spot in their building.

  Lawrence kept up his end of the conversation whilst whizzing through the footage.

  “You have the Mustang, don’t you?” he asked me.

  “Yeah.” I was surprised he knew. He slid the CD out and slipped another one into the player. “Let’s try this one.”