The Oculus Heist

by Alex Moss

  “What are you doing here, sir?” The cops already know who he is, but all the same, they stay on their toes, palms clasping their holstered Smith & Wesson revolvers.

  “I’m on this at every level.”

  “Sir?”

  “You do know what this is, officers…” looking at their name badges, “…Tindle and Blunt.”

  “To do with downtown.”

  “Damn straight. We got hit big time, right at the nerve center of the fucking universe. Our fucking universe. The City of Los Angeles, LAPD, got gamed, ridiculed by rogue players. Am I talking your language, officers?”

  Tindle and Blunt double-take each other, confirming this suited fellow of stature is perhaps a few cards short of a full pack. They look back at the prosecutor and shrug.

  “P-r-e-s-s-u-r-e. That is what is heavy for me. I need scalps and I need them super quick or someone up above is going to take a lot of heat for whatever the fuck really went down today.”

  The prosecutor starts moving around the cop car, poking his head inside the vehicle to get a good look-see. He’s looking for something specific–the items.

  “I wouldn’t, sir, FBI Forensics are rollin’ this way,” warns Blunt.

  “Like I said, I need scalps. This is a detail from up above, catch my drift?”

  “We heard a crew got busted already?”

  The prosecutor sees the item on the back seat of the car. He hides his stress well. Holds a poker face. “Yeah, they’re in custody but the score is still missing.” He skirts the side of the car, pops the rear door, and leans in to move the item from the backseat of the car to his brown sedan.

  “Sir?” Both officers suspect he’s concealing something.

  “Yeah?” He turns to them. His eyes say ‘don’t go there.’

  Tindle and Blunt gesture upward at the police helicopter’s all-seeing eye.

  The prosecutor just shakes it off. It’s something for him to deal with. No dramas, just pull the right strings. He climbs back into his brown sedan and reverses out of the service alley.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Stelson’s eyes flicker open as he regains consciousness. It takes a moment to lose the cloudiness before taking in his surroundings.

  A side-on view of the inside of a jail cell.

  He’s laid out on a bench, knees tucked up toward his chest, shivering. He props himself up and the vacant expression suggests that he’s got no idea why he’s here. His short-term memory is playing catch-up and it’ll need some prompting. Right now, the rewind button is jammed, so he just sits with Zen-like composure and waits for something to happen so that clarity can be restored.

  A filthy looking bum two cells down is glaring at him through the bars, seeking out Stelson’s bright chlorophyll green eyes. When their eyes do meet, the bum just snorts and spits a gob of phlegm that falls short in an empty cell. He stands at the bars, face twisted with aggression. It’s a hateful act, as though Stelson just got rated, in the mind of the vagrant, as something beneath detritus.

  Someone enters the cellblock and walks the line to Stelson’s cage. Stelson’s gaze stays fixed on the bum, his expression calm and blank to taunt this aggressor–someone he would have been motivated to kill in his naïve days. He’s more grown-up now. Controlled, but still able to switch on the dark and lethal ability inside.

  “Hello, Stelson.” It’s Victor. He’s plain-clothed, his left-arm in a sling and he’s chewing gum incessantly.

  Stelson looks at him, confused.

  Victor unlocks the cell and pulls Stelson up onto his feet to guide him out of the block, cuffing him to his own wrist in the process so that they’re shackled together. They awkwardly ascend a cold grey stair well, and push through a swing door into a police precinct rabbit warren that’s buzzing with activity. Uniformed cops taking notes, on phones, a briefing room filled with detectives.

  Many minds and eyes are distracted by Victor’s movements. Heated conversations are paused, and he’s instantly flanked by a smell of suspicion and mistrust. Victor’s clock is clearly running out and he rushes Stelson through some double doors toward his office–the seventh door on the right hand side.

  Victor shoves Stelson inside and slams the door.

  “I made a deal with the devil and now everyone wants to cut out my immunity, given the authority.”

  Stelson has no idea what Victor’s talking about.

  The room looks like the aftermath of a shit storm. Literally. It’s been smeared all over the once bright white walls. The old leather sofa has been ripped apart, its coarse stuffing erupting from torn fissures and scattered across the office. Victor’s desk has been turned over and the drawers are smashed and broken. If there was any tangible hard content inside these drawers or the tipped cabinets, it’s gone. In general, the space could be mistaken for some hopeless modern art project. It all seems contrived–so much of what you might expect to find is missing.

  Stelson is taking this all in while swapping glances with Victor. There is nowhere to sit, so they stand in the middle of it all where Victor removes the cuffs and they’re left to dangle from Stelson’s right arm. Victor moves away and they stand apart and face each other.

  “Do you remember who I am, Stelson?”

  Stelson says nothing. He’s either holding onto his cards or he’s genuinely suffering amnesia from the fall.

  “Do you know how you got here?”

  Stelson shrugs.

  “You were outside the gates, delirious. Somebody dropped you off, probably while they were still moving.” He knows who that somebody is. He planned it all along–getting Bobby Floyd to do his dirty work. Victor would never let a young pretender get the better of him and he’s held on tight to the status quo by the skin of his teeth so far.

  “Hair of the dog,” Stelson says.

  “Huh?”

  “Takes a trauma to remember a trauma.”

  Victor stops chewing his gum.

  “The trauma. That day. It’s all I remember.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know my name?”

  “Detective Lesko. It was on the door. We’ve met before, that I know for sure. Seeing your face helps.”

  “The left side of your skull is swollen. Can you explain that to me?”

  Stelson feels the side of his head that feels tender. He grimaces. “I remember falling. That’s all.”

  Victor weighs up Stelson for a few seconds. Stelson seems passive, no ticks, no deception in the way he holds Victor’s gaze. He makes a quick judgment call. “I don’t have much time to dole out psychotherapy, kid, but go on. What’s on your mind?”

  “When I was a kid, I killed someone.”

  “Jesus. Sure you wanna ‘fess up to a detective. You talked to a lawyer about seeing this through?”

  “I don’t care. I need to unload.”

  Victor nods, knowingly. “It gets heavy, doesn’t it?”

  “I killed the mother of a girl I used to know. My Pa told me it was okay, that it didn’t matter because the woman was rotten. That she had demons. She was hitting the girl, scratching her eyes and pulling her hair. She was drunk or on drugs. It was a day in Summer and she enters this huge beautiful garden and she looks like a movie star, but she sees the girl, her daughter, talking to my brother who is just trying to get on and clip the rose bushes for our Pa so we can get paid and get out of that place and onto the next client. She comes up to me first. I smell the booze and I see the look in her eyes but I’m not afraid because I’m wearing the clown mask that Pa made me and Bobby wear. And she says to me–‘a woman walks into a bar and leaves without her mind.’ She leaves that hanging with me. It was the look on her face. Distorted and in pain. She tries to smile but gets frustrated and she strides away, straight toward the girl, and she attacks her. Bobby freezes but carries on clipping the rose bush
es as if nothin’ is going on, n’ so I have to do something.”

  “And where is your pa while this is going down?”

  “I dunno. Up a tree on pickers or something. He’s a spectator. Whatever. The woman drags the girl by the hair to the swimming pool and that’s when I come up behind her and rake the back of her dress. Tearing it. But she keeps on at the girl, even drawing blood, so I swipe her again around the head and the girl is watching me do this and she’s looking at my eyes as she falls backwards into the pool and I do it for her. I take out the woman’s legs from beneath her with the rake. She’s no movie star now and her head hits the edge of the pool. I hear the skull crack after the splash.”

  “And the girl?”

  “We leave her. My Pa leaves her in the pool, thinking she’s drowned as she’s been under for maybe a minute or two and he wants to clear up and leave nothing behind. He protects his family and later tells me I am forgiven and I did nothing. I was never there and later I don’t know what he is talking about because the memory has been put away somewhere deep inside myself.”

  “And now it’s back.” Victor studies him. “That’s quite a story. Confession is always good for the soul, right? Sets you free.”

  Stelson is giving nothing away.

  Victor sidesteps him. “I’ll be back in a moment and we can continue. Stay.” He’s heading for the door.

  “You ain’t coming back,” Stelson exclaims.

  “I will. Give me two minutes.”

  “There’s not an ounce of remorse in you.”

  Stelson grabs Victor and shoves him against a wall.

  “Compos mentis the whole time. Well, aren’t you, the smart ass?” Victor says.

  “I wanted to see how you’d react, but you don’t give a shit. You should feel somethin’. You weren’t there that day to protect your family from mine and you musta never investigated the murder, otherwise we woulda been caught a long time ago.”

  “My wife, Anna’s mother, was a bad apple. She got famous, rich, arrogant, and then fell from grace. Sure, I used my power to compromise the investigation, but for my own selfish means, and I ain’t ashamed to say it. I’ve been following you and your brother ever since. Kind of protecting you at arm’s length. You should thank me.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. I protect valuable assets from vultures. But protection is exhausting and has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Like I said, I made a deal with the devil.”

  “Fuck you! You used us.” Stelson tackles him to the ground. They wrestle like children, all scrappy, clothes getting tugged and ruffled. Victor strains and gurgles as Stelson wraps an arm around his neck and applies pressure to the gunshot wound to the shoulder–a cheap and low-class wrestling move.

  Victor is hissing and gasping for breath.

  “You’re going to tell me about this deal with the devil.”

  “I ain’t going to tell you shit.”

  Victor overcomes the agony to his shoulder, cries out, and elbows Stelson in the gut. Then he swivels around and grabs Stelson’s right arm and latches the free open hand cuff to a hot water pipe running above the floor.

  Stelson looks blindsided by the fact that he’s now shackled. A prisoner.

  Victor is dragging and pulling his body away but Stelson is hanging on for dear life to Victor’s injured left arm, now out of its sling. “Let go of me, you goddamn piece of work.”

  “No. Stay. You can’t leave me like this, besides, you said the truth would set me free. This isn’t free.”

  “Sue me, I lied. Wanna know why? You left our crew. You left with the product. You fucked us over.” Victor is glancing at the scars on Stelson’s left wrist. “And you tried to take a more valuable asset from me.”

  “She’s not an asset. She’s your daughter and I was protecting her from people like you.”

  “Sure you were.” Victor breaks free of Stelson.

  “I need to get back to her, Victor. She’s all I care about.” Stelson rattles the shackle on the pipe, hoping it would miraculously flick open and free him.

  Victor cracks the door. “That is because you are young and stupid. You need to care more about surviving, kid.”

  Victor exits.

  Stelson shifts his body to a position that would enable his feet to be planted on the wall and he lifts them to his chest and thrusts with his thighs, tugging the metal pipe to find out whether brute force will remove it from its fixings. It’s not happening. The lead-work is robust and solid. The pipe just vibrates in the struggle and the pain to Stelson’s wrist is excruciating. He cries out in frustrated rage.

  Minutes pass.

  His mood flips back and forth between rage and despair, which is solitary to begin with and then goes public as the door to Victor’s office flies open and a group of police detectives and cops stand back and observe this thrashing, yet exhausted body.

  “What the fuck are you lookin’ at?” He rattles the pipe with futility.

  The observers–jaded, frazzled, and overworked–just watch him apathetically, as though he were some caged animal at a zoo and his piercing bright green eyes remind them all that he is different–perhaps to be cautious of, or feared.

  They judge his intent and desire to go after Victor and one of the observers boldly says, “Release him.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The prosecutor’s brown sedan trails a SWAT van and two black and whites travelling west down Sherman Way and under the 405 in Van Nuys. Their lights are blazing and the outside lane remains clear for their approach.

  Lanky pin-headed palm trees become more frequently spaced beyond the Taco Bell on the corner of an avenue where they turn right, head north, and then cross the on- and off-ramps to the 405 and take another right and screech to an orderly halt outside Bobby Floyd’s industrial unit at the dead end of the street.

  This time, all the lights are off. The large halogen security bulbs are blown. They don’t trigger when the SWAT team push in and storm the unit. The place is deserted. All the evidence of a bomb-making factory has been cleared apart from a stack of haz-mat suits piled up outside the main warehouse. The remaining space inside is densely filled with outdoor plants and shrubs–the unsold stock of Bobby’s landscape gardening front.

  It’s as dark as night and like a jungle; the six-man SWAT team uses the night sights on their AR-15 rifles to navigate and sweep the warehouse.

  Pushing in deeper, one man on the unit picks out the bright eyes of a wounded target. Through the night sight, Bobby Floyd’s eyes seem to glow like SOS flares, the radiance overwhelming and obscuring. It’s hard to tell through the sights, but he seems to dip his head and the flares extinguish.

  The SWAT team pushes in close and tight.

  Bobby is slumped on the floor, back resting on a large terracotta pot, a perennial shrub planted firmly inside it, supporting his weight. His head is bowed, face shadowed from view. He is breathing heavily, the gunshot wound at his collar bone now the overpowering source for a newly poisoned being, afflicted at the deep and cellular core of existence.

  He is surrounded by each of the six men who are trained on him, tense, nervy, as though he were an unpredictable wounded predator who could lash out with lethal effect at any moment. But that’s doubtful. Bobby is done. Spent.

  The prosecutor wades through the palm fronds and shrubbery and cuts through the SWAT unit semi-circle to stand over Bobby.

  “BOOM! That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Here’s the muthafucker. For somebody that cares so much about other people’s environments, you made a real goddamn mess downtown.”

  “You got me mixed up with somebody else, sir,” Bobby responds flatly.

  “Look at me.”

  Bobby keeps his head down.

  “Who sold me out–Victor Lesko?”

  “I said look at me.”

  “What did that buy
the sonofabitch?”

  “I’m not the selling kind.”

  “Yeah, right. I know who you are. I know what you do.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “I seen your stinkin’ ego on TV. You’re just like me. A man of the town. A man of the law in this city, yet you operate above it. I can smell it.”

  “You look at me when you’re speaking!”

  “What with?” Bobby looks up. Both of his eyes have been gouged and severed from their sockets and there are streams of hot blood running down his warped face.

  The guys in the SWAT unit lose their composure and step back in disgust and stand down. A man without sight poses little threat.

  “Oh my. I suppose every clown has a silver lining,” the prosecutor says in jest, but behind the sarcasm is an air of concern about what led to this horrific consequence for Bobby Floyd. The prosecutor waves the SWAT guys away. “Wait for me outside.”

  “Sir?”

  “I said go. I need to talk to this asshole alone.”

  The unit retreats through the dark greenery.

  The prosecutor crouches down and looks at Bobby. “The pessimist inside is telling me that it’s not safe.”

  “Safe? What the hell are you talkin’ about?” Bobby asks.

  “I’m not speaking to you.”

  Another figure steps through the mock jungle, hands covered with bloody surgical gloves.

  Bobby starts to shake. He thought the demon intruder had gone. To let him be and rot alone amongst the plant life.

  “It is not safe. Not at all,” says Benjamin Koit.

  The prosecutor doesn’t even want to look at Koit.

  A red canvas shoulder bag lands on the floor next to him. He unzips it and looks inside. At first, it seems that the items are all there but it’s an illusion. It’s just a heap of trimmed and peeled flower bulbs mixed in with common garden dirt. “Shit.”

  Bobby takes a lung full and rolls out that awful cackle of his. “Something tells me it’s not what you were expecting, which means we’ve both been duped by her.”