Outside, the place looks like a crack house, but inside it looks like something between an upscale Manhattan apartment and a bomb shelter. The walls are loaded with tasteful hotel art, the furniture is durable and heavy, the doors are utilitarian and thick.
Amanda closes the door behind them, punching a code into a keypad below a monitor showing the porch and the street outside. The bolts re-engage, sealing them in.
She points to two doors and a short hallway leading to the back of the house. “Kitchen through there. Three bedrooms that all double as panic rooms through there. Couple bathrooms and in the back’s a full infirmary. Everything you need to patch yourself up conveniently labeled.” She looks at his blood-soaked shirt. “You’re probably gonna want to get some gauze or something on that.”
“Ya think?”
“You can patch yourself up, or you can be sarcastic and bleed all over the place. I don’t really care.” She turns to leave and he puts a hand on her shoulder to stop her. She grabs his hand and spins him so fast his brain doesn’t catch up to his nose hitting the floor until a couple seconds after it’s happened.
“Don’t do that,” she says. “Don’t ever do that.”
“Okay,” he says, the sound coming out in a thin, ragged wheeze.
“You got something to say?”
“No,” he says. “I’m good. Thanks.”
“Glad to hear it. Now go take care of yourself.” She lets him go and leaves him gasping on the floor.
Fitz pulls himself from the floor. The gash on his chest has started bleeding again. Amanda might be scary insane, but she’s got a point. He hobbles down the hall to the infirmary, a sterile, white room with an exam table, sink and cupboards.
He checks the phone. No bars. Why did he go along with this? Has he just exchanged one prison for another?
He needs to get bandaged up and then figure out a way to get the hell out. It’s not that he isn’t glad for the rescue, it’s that he doesn’t trust it. Whoever hired Amanda has their own agenda and whatever it is Fitz wants no part of it.
He opens his shirt to look at the wound. The bleeding has stopped, and he’s already scabbing over. He’s going to need a new shirt. Maybe there are extras in the safe house. The place seems to have everything else.
He finds the antiseptic and bandages and gets to work. It takes a while, he keeps fumbling the tape, but eventually he cleans and bandages it and it doesn’t look so bad after he’s washed it out. He doesn’t think he needs stitches. But what does he know? He’s no doctor.
But it hurts, a dull throbbing that spreads through his chest. He rummages through some cabinets looking for painkillers, scanning the vials and boxes of pills. Antibiotics, some antiemetics. He freezes when he opens one cupboard and realizes he’s hit the jackpot.
Percodan, Percocet, Tramadol, Vicodin, Demerol, Norco, Lortab, Dilaudid, Fentanyl, OxyContin, the list goes on. He stares at them like a kid at a candy counter, starts to drool a little bit. If anything can numb the nightmare he’s living through, this is the stuff.
Of course, he can’t take it all. Not all at one time, at least. He opens a bottle of OxyContin, shakes a couple into the palm of his hand. It’s always struck him as weird that something so tiny can have such a big impact on a human body. He marvels at the medical miracle, and then tosses them back and dry swallows them.
He stuffs his jacket pockets with as many bottles as they’ll hold. It occurs to him that Amanda’s probably going to notice, but he doesn’t really care. He’s not planning on sticking around, anyway.
His jacket stuffed with painkillers and the oxys giving his mind a nice mellow glow, he puts his mind to getting out.
This is a safe house, but it might as well be a jail. The windows are all for show and he seriously doubts that front door is going to just open up for him. There has to be a way to get it open that doesn’t involve trying to fight Amanda. She’s already shown she can kick his ass.
Maybe there’s another way.
He finds a vial of ketamine and a syringe. Fills the thing to the top. He’s not sure about the dosage, hopes it won’t be so much that it kills her, but he knows the shit works fast enough that he’ll only have to deal with her for a couple of minutes at the most before it takes effect.
He caps the syringe and slides it into his pocket. Now he just needs a chance to use it. He’ll want to wait until they’re out of the safe house. No point in knocking her out and being stuck here without the code to get the door open. Maybe he can set something on fire, force her to open it?
The phone buzzes.
SAFE HOUSE COMPROMISED, the text reads. Well, what do you know.
“Hey, jackhole,” Amanda yells from down the hall. “We’re gettin’ gone.”
“What the hell does this mean?” he yells, buttoning his tattered shirt and running down the hall waving the phone out in front of him like he’s flagging down a train.
“Means we got shit incoming and we need to get the hell out of here.”
“No, I mean I don’t have a signal, so how did I get a text?”
“Priorities. man. Come on, move it.”
He follows her to the door, his pockets rattling with the sound of all the pills. His head is beginning to feel a few sizes too large.
When she reaches the door, Amanda draws a pistol from a holster at the small of her back, stops when she hears the rattling in Fitz’s pockets.
“Do I even want to know?” she says.
“Found some pills in the infirmary,” he says, seeing no reason to lie.
“Well, maybe it’ll keep you quiet,” she says. “Stay behind me, head to the car, whatever I say to do, do. Got that?”
He gives her a sloppy Benny Hill salute. “Got it, chief.”
“Okay, then.” She looks at the monitor next to the door. The Impala is parked out front. Looking over her shoulder, Fitz can’t see any traffic out of the ordinary.
“How’d you know we have to leave?” he says.
“Because I got guys watching the neighborhood five blocks in every direction. Anything weird, they call me.”
“They saw weird?”
“Weird enough,” she says. “Folks who got no business being in this neighborhood.” She punches a code into the keypad next to the monitor and the locking bolts disengage. She throws the door open, runs toward the Impala, Fitz on her heels.
Amanda slides over the hood of the car to get to the driver’s side and Fitz throws open the passenger door as a blue minivan comes screeching around the corner.
The driver is a young blonde woman with wild eyes, disheveled hair, her face twisted in a snarl. She lays on the horn, still trying to steer the van out of the too-fast turn she’s put it in.
She fails; the van tips, skids along the pavement, spinning and showering sparks along the sidewalk, until it’s turned completely around and on its side. It comes to a grinding stop against a palm tree on the other side of the street.
Fitz and Amanda stare at the smoking car. The van’s license plate says NO1MOM and has those little family decals on the back showing mom, dad, a couple kids and a dog. There’s a bumper sticker that reads COEXIST made out of a bunch of different religious symbols and another that says NAMASTE. In the rear window, barely hanging on and wobbling back and forth, is a yellow, diamond-shaped BABY ON BOARD sign.
Is this a false alarm? Some drunk yoga mom who finally snapped, took the wrong exit off the freeway and ended up here? Fitz wants to help, but there’s something pushing through the oxy numbing his mind that holds him back.
“Get in the car,” Amanda says.
“But she—”
Fitz doesn’t get to finish. The door to the minivan explodes into the sky and the blonde yoga mom, face bloodied from a gash in her forehead, one arm twisted at an insane angle with a bone sticking out, leaps ten feet into the air and lands on the pavement with a loud thud.
“I’m getting in the car now,” Fitz says.
“Good plan.” Amanda slides behind the wheel
of the car. She pops off a couple of shots at the screaming woman before slamming the door shut and stepping on the gas.
The bullets have no chance to hit; less, Fitz thinks, because it’s a wild-ass shot, and more because the woman has just vaulted straight up into the air like she’s goddamn spring-loaded.
Amanda peels away from the curb, the Impala burning rubber. Doesn’t get far before the blonde lands on the car. There’s the sound of metal twisting as the hood buckles under her weight, but also a nauseating pop as one of her legs snaps, tearing through the back of her calf.
Amanda hits the brakes and the blonde goes flying, then she throws the car into reverse and pulls a bootlegger, spinning the car the other direction and gunning the engine. She leaves the blonde trying to pick her broken body up from the pavement behind them.
Amanda stomps on the gas and pushes the car faster than a crappy Chevy has any right to go. The Impala is surprisingly nimble and fast. Fitz is somewhere at the crossroads of nauseous, terrified and impressed as she punches her way through the traffic, weaving between cars like a bumblebee zipping through fields of flowers.
“What in the unholy fuck was that?” Fitz says, scrambling to fasten his seatbelt.
“Don’t know. Don’t want to,” Amanda says. “Keep an eye out for more.”
“More what? Crazy Terminator yoga moms?”
“Yep,” she says. “Just like that one.”
A Mercedes SUV barrels into the lane in front of them. Different make, different model, different driver, but it’s got the same Beverly Hills all-organic, gluten-free, save-the-world, let’s-have-three-kids-because-I-am-the-goddamn-Earth-mother-hear-my-uterus-roar vibe coming off it in spades.
Amanda dodges the oncoming SUV with the skill of a NASCAR driver, jogging over to clip the rear bumper in a PIT maneuver just before she clears the SUV, sending it careening onto the sidewalk.
Fitz looks behind them as they pass, sees the same Baby On Board sign, those same family stickers, this time with two mommies and three kids, that always put Fitz in mind of the kill symbols WWII fighter pilots painted on their planes.
The driver, a frizzy-haired redhead, kicks the SUV’s door off its hinges and leaps out of the car, screaming at them as they drive away, her eyes just as wild as the last one’s.
She reaches into the SUV and pulls out something shiny and round. Flings it at them with the accuracy of a ninja. A flash of silver hits the rear window of the Impala, shattering the glass. It flies through the car and embeds itself into the middle of the dashboard, slicing the car’s clock in two.
“What the hell was that?” Amanda says.
Fitz tugs the CD out of the dashboard. “Indigo Girls.”
“Of course it is.”
“Is that it? Are there more?” In answer two more cars come out of side streets, a Mini Cooper with an empty baby car seat in the back, and another SUV, a hybrid.
“Crazy women drivers?” Amanda says.
“How’d you guess?”
“Noticing a pattern.”
Fitz is noticing a pattern, too. The closer they get, the more of a buzzing he gets in the back of his mind. Like when he saw Medeina, when he ran into the Agent. Only it’s more distant, less pronounced. A reflection of power rather than the power itself.
The Mini Cooper brushes against the Impala, forcing Amanda to correct or spin out, and the taste of bad wine fills Fitz’s mouth. Thick and cloying, stinking like something a hobo would drink out of a paper bag. It pushes against the oxy in his system and for a moment the drug passes away and he feels a powerful drunk coming on, but then Amanda pushes the Impala ahead and it passes.
“You all right there?” she says. She crosses the Fourth Street Bridge toward Downtown, cuts right across two lanes of traffic to hit Alameda hard, narrowly avoiding a collision with a panel truck.
“That a rhetorical question? What now?”
“They’ll try to cut us off up ahead,” Amanda says, pushing the car up past Second Street. “Try to get us at Temple. Maybe First. Least that’s what I’d do.”
They hit First Street and she takes a hard left. Horns honk, tires squeal. Half a block down and the SUV passes them from the other direction, brakes smoking as it tries to stop and turn to give chase.
Fitz has been down here enough times to know that in a few more blocks they’ll be at City Hall and the LAPD headquarters. And then yoga moms in SUVs will be the least of their problems. The last place Fitz wants to be is in a cell where he can be found.
Surprisingly, they haven’t passed a police car yet, but it’s only a matter of time before they do and it’s all over. High speed chases never end well in a city where the news helicopters do a better job of tracking you than the cops.
But instead of continuing down First, Amanda takes a hard left onto Los Angeles Street toward Skid Row. “We need to ditch the car. I’ve got another one in a lot past Fifth. We’ll switch there.”
“Won’t they just find us again?”
“Of course not. We’ve already lost ’em.” Another two cars pull up behind them as they cross Third, another minivan and SUV.
“You were saying?”
“Goddammit.”
The cars flank the Impala, keeping pace with it no matter how Amanda speeds up or slows down. Same pattern as the other two cars. Screaming women at the wheels of cars that should be ferrying kids to baseball practice, dance recitals, Montessori classes.
They keep it up for most of a block, then Amanda slams on the brakes and turns the wheel to the left, clipping the rear of the SUV and shattering the Impala’s headlight. The cars shoot past and Amanda pulls the Impala down an alley, gunning the engine. Sparks fly as she scrapes the car across a dumpster.
Fitz hears the screech of tires behind him, the bone-jarring crunch of the cars they left behind plowing into oncoming traffic. His heart is just about to start pumping again when Amanda says, “Shit,” and hits the brakes.
Two new SUVs block the end of the alley, and when he looks behind them, Fitz can see one backing up and limping in behind them, its front end a mangled heap of twisted metal.
“Get out. Get out and run.”
“Run where? Who the hell are these people?” he says, hoping he sounds sincere. This would be the perfect opportunity to get away from Amanda if he weren’t being hunted by a bunch of wild-eyed mothers who look likely to tear him to pieces rather than let him get away. He’s starting to think that leaving the safe house was a bad idea.
Amanda yanks her seatbelt off and shoves the door open. “Doesn’t matter. Just go. I’ll try to draw them off.” She takes aim at one of the cars with her pistol and pops off a couple of rounds.
Fitz doesn’t need to be told twice. He bolts from the car, looking for any exit from the alley that doesn’t involve going past the SUVs. The buildings are flophouses, old brownstones on the edge of Skid Row with fire escapes leading to apartments with shattered windows. He jumps and pulls down one of the ladders.
He ignores the sounds of gunfire and screaming, focuses on getting up and into the building. If he can get inside, maybe he can find a back door or a place to hide. The shots have to be attracting attention. The police will be here soon. And much as he doesn’t want to be locked up in a cell where he’s a sitting duck, better that than gunned down in a Skid Row alleyway. Alive is better than dead any day of the week.
He hears a snarl and Amanda cries out. When he looks he sees one of the soccer moms on top of her beating and clawing at her, roaring at her like a pissed-off tiger.
Fitz is terrified, but there’s no way he’s letting her get killed for him. He starts back down the ladder. He expects to have to fight these women off tooth and nail, but when he gets to the bottom he sees one of them pointing an evil-looking black gun at him.
She pulls the trigger, but instead of a bullet, twin barbs shoot out and stick into his chest. It hurts like the mother of all bee stings, but he thinks it could be worse, he could be dead.
And then the voltage hi
ts him and he wishes he was.
CHAPTER SIX
IN 1965 WHEN Blake Kaplan was fifteen, he heard the Righteous Brothers single “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” for the first time, on a jukebox in Ship’s Coffee Shop on La Cienega, and it changed his life.
Fifty years later and it’s clear as yesterday. He was out for dinner with his parents, eating one of the restaurant’s signature ‘Ship Shape Hamburgers’ and a side of fries, though what was supposed to make the burger particularly special he could never tell.
But the song, Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield crooning about a lost love, that was special. That was sublime.
He hated it.
Even at fifteen, he knew insipid trash when he heard it. Knew that it was total garbage. The lyrics were dull, their voices were boring. But the arrangement, the layering of instruments, the way they all blended into each other to make brand new instruments.
He hated the song, he loved the production.
He got the record the next day, listened to it over and over, trying to understand how the sounds all fed into each other, somehow making something new. He hunted down the record label, found out about the producer Phil Spector and his Wall of Sound method, where he would record in echo chambers and have instruments play into and on top of each other, making hit after hit after hit.
Well, until he got old and batshit crazy, started wearing bad afro wigs and shot a woman in his mansion in Alhambra. But nobody’s perfect.
The thing about Spector that Blake could see even fifty years ago, even before he was at the height of his career, was that he had built a legacy. Something lasting, something great. He had, in his own way, created an empire.
And before 1965 ended, Blake knew that what he wanted to do more than anything else in his life was to make records.
Too bad he sucked at it.
“Jesus, Blake,” Sam says, looming over Blake’s shoulder as he taps at the computer keyboard. “You sure? I mean, this is Fitz we’re talking about.”
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