by Alan Russell
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR
“He has a gift for dialogue.” —The New York Times
“Really special.” —Denver Post
“A crime fiction rara avis.” —Los Angeles Times
“One of the best writers in the mystery field today.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Ebullient and irresistible.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Complex and genuinely suspenseful.” —Boston Globe
“Credible and deeply touching. Russell has us in the palm of his hands.” —Chicago Tribune
“He is enlightening as well as entertaining.” —St. Petersburg Times
“Enormously enjoyable.” —Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
“Russell is spectacular.” —San Diego Union-Tribune
“This work by Russell has it all.” —Library Journal
“Grade: A. Russell has written a story to satisfy even the most hard-core thrill junkie.” —The Rocky Mountain News
OTHER TITLES BY ALAN RUSSELL
No Sign of Murder
The Forest Prime Evil
The Hotel Detective
The Fat Innkeeper
Multiple Wounds
Shame
Exposure
Political Suicide
Burning Man
St. Nick
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Alan Russell
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477825846
ISBN-10: 1477825843
Cover design by Robert Newman
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014939860
To those out there who are serving as our guardians of the night.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: FALLEN ANGEL
CHAPTER 1: ZERO FOR HERO
CHAPTER 2: DEATH IN VENICE BEACH
CHAPTER 3: ANOTHER RUNNER IN THE NIGHT
CHAPTER 4: GET OFF OF MY CLOUD
CHAPTER 5: FADE TO BLACK
CHAPTER 6: GREEN MACHINE, DARK MACHINATIONS
CHAPTER 7: TYGER TYGER, BURNING BRIGHT
CHAPTER 8: ANGEL OF THE MORNING
CHAPTER 9: SILENT MOVIE
CHAPTER 10: A WHALE OF A TALE
CHAPTER 11: A STAR IS TORN
CHAPTER 12: FLIGHT OF THE BUMBLEBEE
CHAPTER 13: GAMES WITHOUT FRONTIERS, WARS WITHOUT TEARS
CHAPTER 14: MATCHMAKER, MATCHMAKER, MAKE ME A MATCH
CHAPTER 15: BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
CHAPTER 16: BEWARE THE JABBERWOCK
CHAPTER 17: THE TELL-TALE HEART
CHAPTER 18: DRIVERS EDUCATION
CHAPTER 19: HEROIC FAILURE
CHAPTER 20: THE K-9 PRAYER
CHAPTER 21: STARGAZING
CHAPTER 22: THE SKY IS FALLING
CHAPTER 23: GAMBLING IN CASABLANCA?
CHAPTER 24: PRISONERS AND CONUNDRUMS
CHAPTER 25: THE LONE RANGER
CHAPTER 26: A BRISKET, A BASKET
CHAPTER 27: PHILADELPHIA STORY
CHAPTER 28: ASHES TO ASHES
CHAPTER 29: COMING HOME FROM WAR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE:
FALLEN ANGEL
Wrong Pauley made sure no one was around before he started down the alleyway toward his burrow. His nightly nesting spot didn’t qualify as a Hobbit hole, or even a rabbit hole. It was a hollow in the midst of a strip of ice plant above a cinderblock wall that overlooked an alley. The hollow was in a flat stretch resting near to a scraggly American sweet gum tree. The only sign of Wrong’s nest was a concave depression in the greenery, but the bald patch couldn’t be seen from below. When Wrong settled into the hollow for the night, he was all but invisible.
Scrambling up the incline, Wrong approached the patch of ice plant from a westerly direction. He always took different routes to his nest for fear of leaving a telltale path in the ice plant. Wrong liked the privacy of his burrow and didn’t want to jeopardize it. That’s why he always came to his spot late at night and left early in the morning. He was afraid of other homeless people encroaching on his territory. There were offices overlooking the alley, businesses that wouldn’t tolerate a shantytown in their midst. He wanted to keep it as his private patch.
As usual, Wrong brought with him only his bedroll and bottle. Before setting out to his burrow, he always stashed his other meager possessions. He was more willing to lose those than his sleeping spot. Wrong always packed in and packed out. His bottle, invariably empty by the morn, went out with him. He also collected any other trash he found in the ice plant. He kept his home, such as it was, neatly maintained.
Keeping low so as to minimize the chance of being seen, Wrong sidled into his space. He unrolled his bedding, an old sleeping bag, and then settled on top of it. A sigh of contentment escaped his mouth, but even that was muted. Wrong was glad he didn’t snore, or at least he didn’t think he did. When he had shared a bed with his wife, Kim, she always commented on how quiet he was.
“You sleep like the dead,” Kim had told him. “You don’t move, and you never make a sound.”
Of course he hadn’t shared a bed with her for ten years now. No, it was closer to fifteen. They had been apart for a lot longer than he and Kim had been married. Like a lot of couples who married young, they had drifted their separate ways, and then Wrong drifted away permanently.
She probably remarried, he thought. Maybe she’s a mom like she always wanted to be. Wrong was glad they hadn’t had any children together. At least he wasn’t a deadbeat dad.
He reached for his 7-Up bottle and unscrewed the top. Usually Wrong transferred his vodka into soda bottles. That’s what he’d done earlier in the day after putting a good dent into his bottle of Kamchatka. Or was it Popov? He bought whatever was on the bottom shelf and whatever was on sale. Though he knew there was really no point in camouflaging the booze, it was a charade Wrong persisted in. The cops knew what was in his soda bottle, but they turned a blind eye to it. If you kept up appearances, the cops in Venice Beach were mostly cool. You never wanted a cop to get a hard-on for you. When that happened, it was time to get out of Dodge. Before coming to Venice Beach, he had been rousted and sent packing from Glendale and Pasadena.
Venice Beach was more tolerant than most places, but it had plenty of its own dangers. Still, for three years he had made it his home. Or was it four? And what did it matter anyway?
He took a long swallow from his bottle. As the warmth trailed down his throat, he sighed, partly out of contentment, partly out of a sense of loss. Wrong took another drink. In an hour or two everything would be all right.
Wrong stared up at the night sky. Overhead the stars were burning bright, as if to compensate for the waning moon. There had been a time when Wrong had studied many things, including the stars in the sky. That was when he was known as Ron and before he became Wrong.
As he took another drink, his
eyes scanned the heavens, and he found familiar constellations and stars. That was another thing he liked about his rabbit hole. The lights in the alleyway didn’t intrude on his nest or obscure the stars. Wrong stared up at the cosmos. He didn’t want to think about the past, present, or future. He didn’t want to feel bad, or feel anything, so he drank some more.
It was an unusually quiet night for Venice Beach. Wrong’s nest was a few blocks inland from the boardwalk, but in the stillness he could hear the waves breaking as if they were right on top of him. He was nearing the oblivion he wanted, that place where he wasn’t awake, but not quite asleep either. His hand moved in reflexive action, periodically lifting the bottle to his lips with the thoughtless regularity of long practice.
In the back of his closed eyelids, Wrong became aware of flickering lights. He tried to ignore the intrusion, but then he heard a whining as invasive to his ear as a circling mosquito.
His first thought was that an electrical storm was approaching. There were several moving lights in the sky, but they didn’t look like lightning, even if he wasn’t sure what they did look like.
Around him the humming was growing louder. It wasn’t music—not exactly—but Wrong felt as if the sounds were reaching out to him. It was like the Pied Piper was playing; the hair on his head and body began dancing to another’s tune. There was this sensation of static electricity running up and down his body. He didn’t like being touched that way. It felt like trouble. Wrong had survived on the streets by running from any potential danger. He scrambled to his feet and grabbed his pack and bottle, but before he could flee, a burst of light detonated all around him. It was like a thousand camera flashes going off right in front of his face. He covered his eyes, but it was too late. He couldn’t see anything. Everything was black.
Wrong dropped to his knees. “I’m blind!” he screamed.
No one answered.
He began clawing at his eyes, trying to free his face from an obstruction that wasn’t there. He pulled at his eyelids and waved his hands in front of his eyes. At first he saw nothing, but then he began seeing kaleidoscopic images of dark circles and stars and shapes exploding. Wrong’s breathing steadied. He wasn’t completely blind.
As his sight slowly began to come back, Wrong tried to make sense of what had happened. By keeping his mind occupied, Wrong could feel his panic subsiding. Once upon a time he had used his mind and enjoyed making sense of intellectual riddles. Had L.A. experienced a nuclear explosion? Could the burst of light have been the result of a meteorite falling? Or maybe the eruption of light had occurred when a gas line ruptured. No, no, and no, he thought. There had been no sound of an explosion. And there was no ready answer for the flashing lights in the sky that preceded the blinding flare.
With his mind occupied, Wrong stopped fixating over his eyesight. He was still puzzling over what happened when he became aware of the stars overhead. The starlight seemed muted, and he suddenly realized the alley was aglow with light. His temporary blindness made him cautious about looking directly at the light, so he did his viewing out of the corners of his eyes. It looked as if there was a spotlighted figure sprawled down in the alley. It was almost as if a piece of the sun was now resting on the asphalt below him.
Wrong recalled all the warnings he’d heard while growing up about the dangers of staring at a solar eclipse with your naked eye. Everyone said you’d go blind if you looked at the darkened sun, but Wrong had never been able to resist a few quick glances, just as he couldn’t now.
He raised his hands, opened up slits between his middle and ring fingers, and peeked at the figure. The shock of what he saw caused his hands to drop. Wrong wasn’t sure whether he should be terrified or fall on his knees and give praise.
The figure was bathed in light. What he was looking at wasn’t ghost-like or wispy or insubstantial. It was ethereal, and it wasn’t human.
He was staring at an angel, a fallen angel.
CHAPTER 1:
ZERO FOR HERO
It had been a long, hot afternoon of canvassing, and because of that, I began venting to my partner.
“No good deed goes unpunished,” I said.
Even though Sirius was the one with the coat of fur, he was still sympathetic to my whining. My partner doesn’t complain, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t feeling the heat. Dogs don’t need words to say a lot, but their humans need to know how to listen to them. I noticed he was slightly panting.
“Water break,” I announced.
Sirius wagged his tail. We stopped at a brick planter that extended along the front yard of a house and paralleled the sidewalk. I took a seat on the edge of the planter and used the wrought iron as a backrest. The shrubbery made for a good sun break for the two of us.
I poured water into my partner’s collapsible water bowl which was adorned with a display of a paw print and the words “Good Dog.” Some marketing director must have thought it would be cute to write the words “Good Dog” like a five-year-old might, with reversed letters and smudges.
“I guess we’re supposed to imagine that’s how a dog writes,” I said. “But who would be silly enough to think they could speak for dogs—or write for one?”
It was a rhetorical question, but I didn’t bother to tell that to Sirius. Besides, the question was meant for me. I was the one guilty of impersonating a dog.
“I knew you wouldn’t mind my writing back for you,” I said. “And it’s not like you’re a very good typist.”
Sirius finished with his drinking and offered my hand a forgiving lick.
“I’ll bet you would have thought it was funny,” I said. “Too bad the public defender, Francisco ‘I-am-going-to-sue-your-ass’ Garcia, didn’t.”
Garcia wasn’t the only one who was unamused. Captain Brown had called it a “juvenile act,” and Captain Becker had been upset I’d used the official letterhead of her station in my correspondence. Chief Ehrlich had told me he was disappointed, and when the Chief was disappointed, you got assignments like this one. “Our” letter was no doubt the reason we were now doing our canvassing.
I joined Sirius and took a long drink.
“It’s a tempest in a teapot,” I said, “but Garcia is trying to play it up in the hopes of getting a better deal for his scumbag client.”
Garcia was representing a lowlife named Enrique Castro; before his capture the LAPD had called Castro “Robbing Hood” because of the hoodie he always wore when doing his purse snatching.
“Garcia is trying to hoist me by my own petard,” I said. “You wouldn’t happen to know what a petard is, would you?”
Sirius rolled over and exposed his chest. He might not have known what a petard was, but he did know he liked his tummy scratched.
“If Garcia was stupid enough to send that first letter,” I said, “what did he expect?”
Garcia had written to “Officer Sirius” asking him to supply a report detailing his involvement in the arrest of his client Enrique Castro. “Officer Sirius” had written back. Well, that wasn’t quite true. I had promoted “Officer Sirius” to “Detective Sirius.”
“My father was a patient man,” I said. “He was much more patient than I am. But even he had his limits. Once or twice I heard him say: ‘That fellow couldn’t count his balls and get the same number twice.’ I guess Garcia detected a little bit of sarcasm in that letter ‘we’ wrote.”
Sirius nudged my hand. My partner has a better sense of humor than Garcia.
“Lawyers,” I said.
My ranting about Garcia was more misplaced than not. It was another lawyer, and the client she represented, who were playing on my mind more than Garcia. Criminal defense lawyer J. Gloria Keller, better known as “J. Glo,” was now the mouthpiece for Ellis Haines, a.k.a. “the Weatherman,” a.k.a. “the Santa Ana Strangler.” Haines was back in L.A. to testify on a case. The city was aflutter with the return of its serial-murdering
prodigal son. Sirius and I had apprehended Haines, but not before he shot us. We had captured him in the midst of an inferno; the fire had left its mark on all of us.
J. Glo was working on Haines’s appeal. The testimony he was giving was in regards to one of Haines’s purported victims. Now the thinking was that someone else had strangled the woman called victim number nine. Haines’s return to L.A. meant the circus had come back to town, and J. Glo wanted me to be a part of it. Haines was requesting a face-to-face with me and Sirius during his expected short stay in the downtown L.A. County Jail.
It had been months since I had seen Haines. But that didn’t mean I hadn’t heard from him. Just the week before, I had received an email that I knew had originated from him. For a man locked behind bars, he seemed remarkably unfettered, with minions only too ready to do his bidding. The subject line on the email read: “The Burning of Los Angeles.” The message said,
What sustenance is there for you in a land stripped bare by locusts? Do you cry? If so, you are an optimist, for it was written, “Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears.” And I wonder if it is you screaming or if it is a police siren, or if there is even a difference. We can talk of this when you visit.
The tone of the email told me Haines was its author, even if I didn’t know what he was talking about. After I googled “the burning of Los Angeles,” I was led to Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. It was a book I hadn’t read, but it seemed like something Haines would love. West’s L.A. consisted of masqueraders and the dispossessed. It was a city on the brink, a city bankrupt in spirit and culture. The synopsis of the book talked of riots and deaths, and spoke of the artist and main character, who dreamed of painting the burning of Los Angeles and all the lost souls contained therein. It wasn’t a book I was going to read, but it fit in perfectly with Haines and his apocalyptic visions.
The email was untraceable; the sender had made sure of that. But I knew who the sender was.
