by Alex Moss
Colliding with Anna, her scent left behind.
The burning house, smoke rising.
Shouting and screaming at the Asian man laying on the ground.
Wipers shifting driving rain on the windshield. Anna alongside him.
Stelson in awe at the Fayne mansion.
The Deep end of the pool and that face of nightmares.
In bed, Anna tracing the birthmark on the back of his neck.
The vagrant. Fear on the old man’s face as he’s bludgeoned.
Stelson falling down, exhausted, bloody.
Running through the night to beat the sunrise.
Anna heartbroken, kicking him out her motel room as he bleeds from the wrists.
“Hey?”
Back in the room with Victor, shaking him awake.
Stelson comes around and focuses on Victor’s angular face.
“You okay?”
Stelson nods.
“Your big green eyes were wide open, but for a moment there was nothing there. Gone. Lights out. You sure you’re okay?”
Stelson shrugs. “Anna and I met last year. Until a couple of days ago, that was the last time we met.”
Victor considers him for a moment and then sits back down at his desk.
“You or her?” asks Victor.
“What?”
“Who dumped on who?”
“It’s complicated. I did something I regret.”
“Don’t we all?”
“Is that why you never see each other?” enquires Stelson.
“We let each other down. That’s all I’m prepared to say. It would be dangerous if we spent time together.”
“You’re a cop.”
“A cop’s life is also complicated, comprendez?” Victor has a look that leans on changing the subject. “So now that we’ve broken the ice, why’s she sent you here to see me?”
Stelson looks uncomfortable. He frowns.
“You’re here for a reason. You want something. It’s your emotional investment in a chain of events that you had no intention of getting caught up in, but the fact is, you met the wrong girl and she’s hooked you. Am I right?”
Stelson nods.
“So what do you want, Mr. Floyd. What’s the deal here?”
“It’s not just what I want, it’s what I owe.”
“Explain that to me.”
“I owe Anna for something that happened in the past.”
“Something?”
“I don’t know what. Perhaps something to do with her mother. You’re her father, you tell me?”
Victor remains stony faced.
“She’s got me on a guilt trip and she won’t explain why.”
“It’s her prerogative and she’s not just hooked you. She’s got you by the balls, Mr. Floyd.”
Stelson smiles.
“Do you know what happened to her mother?” probes Victor.
“I think she died, but I don’t know how.”
“Is that all you know?”
“Yeah.”
“At the start of our chat, you said that you had reached a low point. You were having dreams about something traumatic that happened to you in the past. Is there a link, perhaps?”
Stelson shakes his head. “I don’t think so. I’m just whacked and hung-over. A bad trip brought on by your crazy cop buddies.” He’s holding back. A good excuse brought on by a flashback from last night.
Victor doesn’t look convinced. “Yeah, you need to watch those crackers. They walk too close to the edge. But when all’s said and done, if they didn’t, they’d be no good to me.”
Stelson smiles and nods politely.
“So let us chaps cut the crap. What do you really want?”
“I want in.”
“In? You are going to have to enlighten me a little more, Mr. Floyd.”
“One last score,” Stelson says this with deliberation and emphasis. It’s been imprinted on his brain’s frontal lobe.
“I’m a cop. Cops don’t take down scores.”
Stelson looks blankly at him. “Well, I tried.” He gets up to leave.
“Sit down.”
Stelson has his back to Victor.
“You need to try harder, son. If you like this girl, you’ll try harder for her sake.”
Stelson bows his head and sits back down.
“You don’t know what you are getting into. Those amazing eyes you got there. If only you knew.” And then he mumbles something under his breath.
“I’m willing to learn. I got youth on my side. A real piece of work, folks keep telling me. I gotta know why.”
“In good time, I’m sure. Either that or you end up dead. Maybe laying on a beach, minus the cigar and Speedos.”
“I’ll be just fine, Detective Lesko.”
Victor leans forward and holds out his hand to shake on it. Stelson leans forward and grips it. They shake, firmly.
“Our fifth man. We need someone like you.”
“Thanks.”
Victor grins. He’s clearly intrigued by the addition of this new accomplice and the value he can bring to the table. He’s happy to speculate.
“Tell Anna her message got through and I’ll contact her. I don’t want her coming here. It’s not safe.”
Stelson nods.
“Go. My boys will tell you what to do.”
“There’s this other thing,” Stelson says timidly.
“I think you’ve got what you wanted.”
“There’s an errand I need to run.”
“An errand?”
“Well, it’s not really an errand.”
“So what the hell?”
“I’m looking for a commune in Redondo Beach where some blind men live. I’m told they are my kind.”
Victor looks at him, expectantly.
“Do you know anything about it and where I can find these men?”
Victor shoots him a stern look. “You’ll need protection.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“It’s non-negotiable. I own your ass now and I need my fifth man, got it?”
Stelson looks slighted. He doesn’t want to be owned.
“I’m doing you a big favor by letting you go on this errand. And that’s exactly what it is. Tell me what you find. You live to tell the tale and you’re a lock-in for the team.”
“I thought I already was.” Stelson now looks pissed.
“Well you just created another hoop to jump through. It’s all for the best, you’ll see.” Victor seems smug.
Stelson exits Victor’s office in a cloud of red mist. He’s not happy but he needs to play along, for Anna’s sake. He owes her, and he owes it to himself to find others that suffer a similar affliction. His pale green eyes squint with a willful steely edge.
FIFTEEN
Stelson pushes through some double doors into bright sunlight. He doesn’t squint. He’s outside the windowless, warehouse-like police precinct building. It’s a car lot outside. Most of the vehicles are unmarked. There’s a clear hierarchy and demarcation in the car pool, ranging from shit heap rust buckets to pimped-up BMW and Cadillac 4x4s, all in the name of blending in.
A Dodge Charger pulls out of a parking bay and swings alongside Stelson. Inside, Kenny doesn’t even look at him, too hung-over to rotate his neck even an inch. Stelson opens the rear door and climbs in. Kenny hands Stelson a pair of cheap, fake Wayfarer sunglasses. Stelson takes them, puts them on, and sits back for the next ride.
They drive. Not a word is uttered. The stereo is on. A song called “Babylon Feeling” by a rap artist. The volume goes up as they hit the Santa Monica freeway heading West to the 405. Tilman keeps flipping across lanes to disrupt the flow of monotony. Just some simple kicks. He follows a lowrider pick-up with a couple of Mexica
n homies in the back. He stares them down but they have the sense to deflect the confrontation toward the swaying palms and large-format billboards that face the freeway.
It’s an odd moment of serenity.
Tilman gets bored and changes lanes again. Kenny nudges Tilman just before an off-ramp heading South toward LAX and San Diego.
The drag from the 405 along Inglewood Avenue is uninspiring. Every block looks the same. This is where identity is lost. If you lived around here, you might be hard pressed to find meaning in the world around you. With every turn, you get more of the same, like some sick joke. It’s only the ocean that nullifies this. As they get closer to water there is more pride attached to some of the abodes, and more people out and about, chewing on their day with a little more purpose. The sign for Redondo Beach labels that change in attitude, and Stelson, Kenny, and Tilman, all seem to perk up a little.
A left turn is made into Paulina Avenue. This is harmless suburbia, and from the outside, all is well. Small bungalows with white picket fences, larger houses owned by insurance salesmen, and the occasional unloved home where the owner is too old or drunk to care about upkeep.
“This is it,” exclaims Kenny.
Stelson peers between the headrests to get a look at the building up ahead. It’s a large ugly bungalow with a two-story annex set back from the street and gated. It’s not like anything else around here but somehow doesn’t look out of place. It just gives off the impression that the inhabitants are private people who want to separate themselves from the community. It has an inward-facing stance–small-windowed and drained of color with lengthening cracks that are taking over the outer skin, virus-like. The “ignore the rot and it might go away” mindset prevails in this place–there are no signs of life.
Tilman parks on the opposite side of the street about thirty meters from the commune.
“Go see what you need, Stelson. We’ll be right out here waiting.” Kenny keeps his eyes forward.
“How do I get in?” Stelson asks.
“Like everyone else, you knock or ring the buzzer.”
Stelson pops his door open and hoists his right leg onto the tarmac. He hesitates–half in, half out.
“Well go. Vamos.” Kenny seems a little too deadpan.
Stelson knows something feels wrong but he ignores his gut and climbs out of the car, slams the door, and jogs across the street, sauntering up to the external security gate to the commune. There is a buzzer with an intercom, and a CCTV camera bracketed to the eaves of the bungalow roof, set back behind the steel gate and fencing. He presses the buzzer and waits. It’s a long wait. He presses again, and almost instantaneously, the gate buzzes open. He steps inside but keeps the gate ajar. When he turns back to the bungalow, he notices that the front door is now wide open with no one to greet him. He edges inside the entrance hallway.
He lifts up his shades. There’s not much light but there’s just enough to get an impression of the place. It’s all very low key–neat and tidy, but a cluttered kind of neat with large piles of items stacked up, ranging from magazines and paper shopping bags to empty potato chip bags and flattened take away boxes.
“Hello?” Stelson moves into a lounge room with a thick pile carpet, but also an assortment of rugs stacked waist-high near a blocked alcove. There’s no furniture apart from a weathered old piano.
He gets it.
Bored blind men need to feed their other senses–everywhere he looks, there are things to touch and feel, even music. Everyone’s soul needs feeding, no matter how dark it gets.
He moves into another room that also seems like a lounge if it had furniture, but the existence of food that remains caught up in the carpet would suggest that the inhabitants eat in here. There is an odd gap in the wall at the far edge of this room. It looks like a hidey-hole, but when Stelson edges his face around it’s revealed as a narrow tunnel to another room. The whole structure of this place is odd and seems more suited to mice than men.
Stelson breathes in as he passes down the narrow tunnel. He can almost feel the walls closing in on him. This space is so dark and foreboding and he gets the sense that he’s about to be crushed. He’s spat out into the room he was shooting for and his attention is immediately drawn to a creaking sound above. Floorboards. The distraction catches him off guard – the rapid movement of an incoming figure beside him is too quick to defend against.
THWACK!
He’s on the floor now, face down. His legs have been pulled from under him. He flips over onto his back and there is a young man, strong, lean, and well-groomed. His face looks mixed European and broad like a boxer–last seen with a cargo full of groaning Saints who managed to get the better of him and run free.
A smug smile creeps onto this young man’s face. He has two gold incisor teeth that look as though they’ve been filed down into sharp canine points.
The young man closes his mouth and looks deeply at Stelson and then reveals the eight-inch blade that he’s hiding behind his back.
Stelson moves fast, rolling across the floor as the young man dives toward him. He loses his shades in the process. The knife is released and skitters across the floor. The young man tries to reach for it but Stelson grapples his legs and gets a swift boot in the face that stuns him. The man has the knife now and is mulling over his next angle of attack as he squats down.
“Who are you?” gasps Stelson.
The young man tosses the knife from hand to hand. “I’m just someone who’s making his way in the world,” and then lunges at Stelson, who catches his wrists and uses all his force to keep the blade away from his face. They strain, both of them gritting teeth, snarling–a momentary stalemate that ends with a blunt object to the back of the young man’s head.
He collapses sideways, but slowly, as Stelson takes the weight and pulls him over onto the floor like a father settling a baby that’s just lost the fight against tiredness. And now to slumber in peace.
There is another person in the room–the young man’s assailant. Stelson turns and the man is in his face. It’s a shock. An invasion of space.
A gaunt white-robed older man with dry, wrinkly sunken wells where his eyes used to be–he is blind, of course, but using all his remaining senses to capture Stelson’s external persona. He seems clean and well-groomed as well.
Stelson climbs up and moves backwards and the older man goes with him.
“His name is Benjamin Koit,” says the older man, “the man on the floor.” He is gripping a heavy door wedge. “Are you one of us? Is that why you came?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“You need to get out of this place before he wakes up.”
“Did he do this to you?” Stelson reaches for the blind man’s face.
“Yes.”
Stelson doesn’t know what to say next.
“We were offered money to go through with the therapy. Lots of it.”
“Therapy?”
The old man turns away, seemingly embarrassed. “It’s all about becoming good.”
“Where are all the others like you?” Stelson asks.
“Praying upstairs.”
“Praying? What for?”
“Come with me, but quickly. When Koit wakes, he’ll kill you.”
Stelson follows the blind man who seems to know his way around without the need for sight. He ascends a narrow-tiled staircase to a corridor lined with rooms that are occupied by white-robed men, sitting cross-legged on thin makeshift mats cut from carpet ends. They all seem to be quietly praying. The blind man stops outside the one where there is a free mat that’s probably his own.
“We pray. We are thankful for our newly found goodness. You see, we’re all Saints now. Do you understand?” He doesn’t seem so sure about this last statement and the question was tinged with skepticism.
Stelson looks at him and frowns.
“You can b
e like us. It’s easy. It just takes therapy.”
“I don’t need any therapy.”
“That’s what I used to say after I beat up my wife.”
The old man enters the room, sits down on the mat, and joins the others in prayer.
Stelson looks at him, sickened. He wants to shake and beat this fool and wake him from his idiocy. Not for what he is now, but for what he says he did before his so-called therapy. There’s some goodness in that, isn’t there? Stelson smiles to himself and goes back downstairs where Benjamin Koit is starting to rise up and regain his focus. Stelson turns and leaves the room as fast as he entered.
Exiting the gate to the street, Stelson searches for Kenny and Tilman’s car. He doesn’t see it.
They’ve bailed.
He breaks into a run and it’s not long before Benjamin Koit slings out onto the street behind him and they’re both sprinting up the street.
Stelson takes a right and then ducks down a single lane service road that runs behind parallel streets. It’s all car garages, scrub, weeds, and trash bins and Stelson quickly realizes that this was a bad move. He hesitates and slows to a jog. It’s too quiet. Koit is no longer tailing him. He’s lost the guy too easily. He continues and now the sun is beating down on him like some ridiculous cliché from a movie where the hero is on his proverbial knees and at wits end.
He keeps looking for entry and exit points. All of the garages are closed. There is nowhere obvious that wouldn’t require vaulting a high wall. It’s tunnel vision all the way to the other end of the road.
Then a car pulls in at the far end. It’s driving straight at him at high speed, engine growling–closer now–Kenny Hackett behind the wheel of the Dodge Charger. His lights hit full beam. Stelson is like a rabbit and maybe that’s Kenny’s intention. He’s honking his horn as Stelson leaps sideways in the nick of time into some trash bins–a human missile. Kenny speeds past at about fifty and then hits the brakes. They screech like banshees.
A dark shadow leaps from a garage roof and lands behind Stelson. The shadow rises up into the figure of a young man–it’s Koit and Stelson doesn’t see him. He’s stunned, pulling himself up off the ground.
A whining sound cranks up like an air raid siren as Koit is about to attack Stelson. Kenny’s car is in reverse at full tilt–the whining gearbox at its limit.
