by Candice Fox
Take back control.
‘I’m leaving now.’ I stood up.
‘No, you’re not.’
The man had me before I saw him move. He was out of his chair, his hard hand twisting my right forearm and locking it into my back. I smacked against the cold concrete wall, my head, my ribs, my hips. We stopped. His hands were on my wrist and my shoulder. Our breaths were hard. That was something to focus on. That was a clue. Hot breath. Agitated. Why was he agitated? I waited to be read my rights, but he said nothing.
Because he was thinking.
I realised I had a chance. ‘I want my lawyer,’ I said.
‘You don’t—’
‘Lawyer, lawyer, lawyer,’ I said. ‘Now. Right now.’
‘You don’t need a fucking lawyer.’ He pulled my wrist away and shoved my hand into the wall, then lifted my other arm and flung it upwards. ‘I’m going to conduct a routine body search for weapons or other restricted items.’
I closed my eyes, held the wall and prepared to be briefly sexually assaulted. The camera was on us, but I was sure he’d do as the guards in Happy Valley had done more times than I could remember – reach too high, too deep, linger for too long. He didn’t. The man swept his hands over my clothes and pulled me off the wall, jabbed me in the shoulder to get me to move towards the door.
‘Get going,’ he said.
I walked stiffly back the way we had come. In time I looked behind me and realised he wasn’t following. I walked faster, and hit the door to the foyer at a jog. Jamie was slumped in the chair I had put him in, his Nintendo upright on his chest, thumbs dancing on the buttons. I yanked him up and walked fast with him out of the building towards the car.
‘What happened? What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ I told him, laughing too loud. ‘Where the hell did you get that Nintendo? Sneaky, sneaky, sneaky. What a sneaky kid.’
‘Are you okay? You’re all red.’
‘It’s hot. We’re just late, that’s all. Gotta get you home or we’ll be in trouble.’
Trouble. I breathed the word, hardly able to give it sound. My head was throbbing, hands shaking as I opened the car door. Wet handprints on the steering wheel. It took me longer than it should have to figure out what I was supposed to do with the keys in my hand, where I’d even got them. Jamie was watching me, the Nintendo playing looping music, bouncing sounds. We sat in silence while I tried to remember how to put the car in reverse.
‘Hey!’ he said in time. I looked over. He was smiling, pointing through the windscreen. I followed his aim and saw Detective Jessica Sanchez walking across the street before us towards her car, her gaze bent to her phone, a thick binder of papers under her arm. The sight of the woman who had arrested me for murder sent a bolt of pain through my chest.
‘That’s her. My new neighbour,’ Jamie said.
I looked at him, then back at Sanchez, who was pulling open the door of her Suzuki, her black hair caught in the hot afternoon wind. I let my hands fall into my lap.
‘Motherfucker,’ I said.
Jamie laughed.
After dropping Jamie off, I walked to a quiet street five minutes from his house and sat down on a low brick wall outside a random property. My fingers were trembling as I tried to dial. I didn’t even look at the numbers, just listened to the tune they played. The phone rang three times as I tried to regulate my breathing.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi.’ I swallowed. My mouth was bone dry. ‘My name is Blair, and I need someone to talk to.’
There was the usual pause. A shuffling sound. ‘Huh? Who is this?’
‘I just want to talk to you for a minute,’ I said. ‘What’s your name? Where are you? What are you doing?’
I already had some of the details I needed. Deep voice. Not old, but it was hard to tell – he hadn’t said much yet. I formed an image of his face quickly. Closed my eyes to see it better. The man sounded as if he was in a quiet, enclosed space. No background noise. A car? His house? An elevator? The possibilities were endless. I could picture him taking his phone from his ear, looking at the screen. Unknown number.
‘Sorry, who is this?’ he insisted.
‘Who is this?’
‘It’s Steve.’
‘Steve,’ I said. ‘I’m Blair. Are you at home right now?’
‘Woman, whatever you’re sellin’, I can tell you I don’t want it.’
‘I’m not selling anything,’ I said. My breaths were slowing. I could see Steve’s face. A kind face. Big hands. I added a ball cap. Blue. Dodgers. ‘I just want to know what you’re doing.’
‘Me?’ he said. ‘I’m waitin’ on somebody.’
‘Who?’
‘I drive Uber. Some guy. Is this Rebecca?’ Sceptical. I could see him narrow his eyes.
‘It’s Blair,’ I said. I wiped my sweaty hand on my jeans. ‘What kind of neighbourhood are you in? How long have you been driving Uber?’
‘A year. What . . . Oh man. What do you want?’
‘I just want to talk.’
‘This is so weird.’ A smile in his voice.
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘You just some random chick calling people looking for someone to talk to? About nothin’?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I do it all the time.’
‘Hell, why?’
‘Because it makes me feel good.’
‘It makes you feel good to know it’s Steve here, sittin’ on his ass in a car outside some goddamn house in the middle of nowhere, waiting for some dumb fuck to come get his ride.’ His voice rose and rose until it cracked with laughter. ‘That’s stupid, girl.’
‘I know,’ I said again. ‘But it’s a thing now. It’s something that I do. And I’m real grateful you answered.’
Steve the Uber driver laughed again and hung up. I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face, focused on him sitting in his car, watching as his passenger emerged from their house. As always, I inserted the details I needed to latch on to the dream – the passenger’s suitcase rumbling as he wheeled it along the concrete drive outside his meagre home. The smell of Steve’s car, cigarettes behind a wall of hibiscus air freshener. A dancing plastic sunflower on the dash. A scar on Steve’s wrist, old, from a fence nail. In time, my fantasy was as real and vivid as it would have been if I’d been sitting next to Steve in his vehicle. I forgot all about Jamie, Dayly, Sneak, the detective at the police station, the feel of his hard hands running up my thighs, over my shoulders. I sat and watched Steve greeting his passenger, putting his car into drive, adjusting the air conditioning, putting his phone into the holder and tapping the screen to tell the app he had his man.
I’d been dialling random numbers and speaking to strangers for six years. The addiction had started in prison, when Sasha had forgotten to tell me that she and Henry were taking Jamie camping and I’d called their house a hundred times, trying to get an update on my child. The whole weekend I’d called and called, receiving nothing but her calm, authoritative answering message, the prison common room around me swirling and crashing with activity. I’d imagined fires. Home invasions. Sudden fatal accidents, illnesses. I’d imagined Sasha and Henry had taken my child and run off to Australia. I’d dialled a random number by mistake, my finger slipping onto an eight instead of a five. An elderly man’s voice croaked through the receiver. As I’d ached and burned and shaken with terror at the fate of my child, the old man’s confused voice had disrupted the violence my mind was inflicting on my body. He’d never received a call from a correctional facility, he’d said. He was curious to know who I was. We’d talked for fifteen minutes, and my addiction had begun.
JESSICA
She had never before arrived unannounced. Never in the bright light of day. But Jessica pushed a discreet gold button beside the ornate stained-glass door of a house nestled in a leafy street in Beverly Hills and waited in the shade. Her every limb was burning with tension and hatred. She was buzzed up and she crossed the small foyer of the home,
climbed the stairs.
The house yawned around her, still and silent beyond her crashing thoughts. She always came here with a loaded mind, noticed the quiet. Right now she was screaming internally at her colleagues. The truth was, this was not the first time she’d felt abandoned by other police officers.
The Sanchezes were an auto family. They had been for decades. There was no need to change things, her abuela warned Jessica and her brothers as they grew up. You worked with what you were proven to be good at, and they were good at cars. The Sanchez men fixed and serviced and reupholstered cars, either in their own oil-slicked, sunbaked shops or in the shops of cousins or friends. The women went into sales, worked the cracked concrete in heels, toting clipboards, haggling over prices with customers. Jessica had been trained in negotiation tactics since she was a kid standing in the shade of beat-up vans in their lot in Vernon, listening to her mother talk smog checks with men in big, dirty boots.
It was here in the lot, at five years old, that she had encountered her first police officers up close, when two white patrol cops came in for a quick replacement tyre on a squad car. Jessica had watched in reverent awe as the men exited their vehicle, leaning around her mother’s legs to look into the car at the shotgun installed in the front cabin. As her mother went to assist the officers at the counter, Jessica heard the taller one mutter to his partner.
‘We gotta make this quick, bro.’
‘They’re brothers,’ little Jessica had proclaimed to her cousin Hernan, who was also watching from the auto shop break room doorway, but with the feigned disinterest of a twelve-year-old.
‘No they’re not,’ Hernan had replied.
‘Yes they are. I heard him say it.’
‘Okay. Sure.’ He’d rolled his eyes. ‘They’re brothers. All cops are brothers. They’re one big happy family.’
Jessica had taken the boy literally, had believed from that day on that all police officers were biologically related, that an enormous family encompassing thousands of people of different races composed the city’s uniformed law enforcement. She’d learned the truth with quiet embarrassment at twelve, when a newspaper article about a Mother’s Day picnic with the moms of police officers from the local station had appeared in the newspaper. Though she’d felt like an idiot for believing all cops were actually brothers and sisters for so long, an excitement had stirred in her chest, a door formerly closed now wide open. Her destiny didn’t have to be spark-plug replacements and wheel-alignment deals. It could be the uniforms, guns and flashing lights she had so admired of the police who came into the shops and those on TV. Jessica didn’t have to be born a cop. She could become one.
She’d signed up to the force at nineteen, sitting in the recruitment centre looking at posters of cadets standing in lines in ceremonial uniform. The men and women in the pictures had all looked the same. Shining buckles. Sharp, peaked caps. Stern faces. Jessica had assumed donning the uniform would allow her to slot right in with her fellow officers. She’d felt a yearning to be a part of something so large, so welcoming. A perfect fit, the snug and warm hole in which she’d always belonged.
It was at the academy that she realised her new family would require her to earn her place. She’d found her room in the featureless brick accommodation block on her first day and noticed right away that the entire floor was populated by other Hispanic recruits. They were being segregated from the rest of the intake. She wasn’t pure cop blood after all. That blood was white. There were cops, and then there were Hispanic cops. Above the bathroom door of the dorms, someone had nailed a sombrero, and apparently nobody had ever been defiant enough to tear it down.
It had taken her reaching detective rank for the jokes about wetbacks, taco trucks and siestas to fade out. Snide remarks about ethnic quotas and questions about her quinceañera. Had she worn a huge dress with big balloon sleeves? Were there pictures? When she made detective, she’d finally been let in, and all the racist bullshit had stopped.
And now she was out again, just like that, over a stupid house. Wallert and Vizchen were white. They were male. They were older than her. Card-carrying boys club members. ‘Bros’. Of course her colleagues were going to side with them over the Beauvoir inheritance. Jessica should have seen this coming. Should have known she was always a foster sister, and never a real part of the family.
Goren met her in the doorway of the second-floor bedroom now, filling most of it with his muscular frame. He was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans. She’d never seen him this way. It was usually suits, tailored Hugo Boss, sometimes a bare chest if he was running clients back to back. Jessica thought for a moment that perhaps she’d caught him on a day off.
‘Jessica.’ He smiled warmly. The corner of his mouth twitched a little as he took in the bandages, the bruises. He never asked. It was part of his policy. You brought to him what you wanted him to see, and he probed no further. ‘You know I need you to make an appointment.’
‘I was hoping you’d make an exception, just this once.’ She heaved a sigh. ‘Everything is . . . Everything is so completely . . .’
‘Come in.’ He led her into the bedroom. She sat on an overstuffed leather ottoman at the end of the bed and he stood behind her. The view out of the windows was blocked by foliage, gentle afternoon light illuminating some of his equipment. A massage table was set in one corner of the room with its candles, oils and bottles of aromatherapy ingredients. On the wall by the door hung the stuff of very different experiences: a rack of chains, straps, belts and buckles. Another rack of whips, paddles, knives. A glass cabinet full of masks, both cloth and leather, ball gags, blindfolds. There was a long trunk against the wall filled with things she had explored with him more than once, devices of pleasure in every conceivable shape and colour. Goren took the back of her neck in his big hand and she let her weight fall there while he gently slid the tie from her hair. He worked the fingers of both hands into the soft recesses between the hard cords and bones at the back of her neck.
Jessica had met Goren Donnovich more than fifteen years earlier. She’d been a patrol cop, participating in an unsuccessful raid of his property for drugs. She’d come down the stairs and locked eyes with the man in the foyer as he was questioned by a detective. They’d held each other’s gaze for mere seconds, but when she’d arrived a month later for an appointment, he hadn’t been surprised to see her.
‘You’re injured,’ he said now. She explained, as vaguely as she could.
‘Have you been tested for the bug?’ he asked.
‘Got the text this afternoon. We’re all good.’
‘Text.’ He laughed. ‘They’re doing texts now? Well, that’s going to save me some time, at least.’
‘Mmm.’
‘What kind of experience are you seeking today, Jessica?’ he asked.
‘Gentle,’ she said. ‘I’m hurting.’
He peeled off her T-shirt, lifted it over her head and folded it neatly, placed it on the ottoman beside her.
‘My whole world is upside down,’ she said.
‘Let’s get it all out of you.’ Goren worked his hands down her spine, avoiding the bite mark on her shoulder. ‘We’ll begin on the table, and then I’ll bathe you. We’ll wash it away together, the pain, the tension. Then I’ll hold you in the bed for a while, and if you decide you’d like to advance into an intimate experience, we can do that.’
‘How long have you got?’
‘I can do three hours,’ he said.
Jessica sighed again, her whole body releasing, exhaustion shuddering through her. ‘That sounds great.’
He guided her up, drew her to him, kissed her on the mouth, hard and long, the way he knew she liked. She could feel his cock, erect already, through his jeans.
‘Let’s reverse the order, though,’ she said.
He smiled and lifted her off her feet.
BLAIR
Ada Maverick’s strip club, The Viper Pit, opened at 5 pm, in time to catch the after-work crowd. Sneak and I waited on Olymp
ic Boulevard, squinting through the low afternoon sun at the big iron doors, trying to find refuge from the heat in a bus shelter that reeked of urine. There were four men waiting outside the doors for opening time, glancing at their watches or phones, rolling their shoulders and wiping sweat from their brows. After a while, as we watched, a preacher in a black shirt and trousers arrived and started counselling each of the men in turn, appealing with his hands out. Before long a huge white man in a suit came out of the iron doors and seized the preacher by his collar, lifted him off the ground and dropped him a few yards down the street, shoved him so hard to get him going that his head snapped back as though on a spring.
‘This is your big idea, huh?’ Sneak asked. ‘I can see why you didn’t want to do it.’
‘I’m still iffy about whether we should or not.’ I shifted uncomfortably, watching the club. ‘It might be a bad idea.’
‘You’ve got to risk it to get the biscuit, I suppose.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Tell me about this alert thing before we go in,’ Sneak said, trying to light a cigarette in the warm breeze.
‘As soon as I asked the counter cop about Dayly, I was whisked away into a back room by some detective, Al Tasik.’ I told Sneak about Tasik’s behaviour. The roughhousing and the questions about how I was connected to the case. ‘There must have been a flag on the file. He was called up when I said Dayly’s name. Tasik didn’t sound like a guy who wanted help. He was . . . kind of angry.’
‘Did you get the feeling he’s looking for Dayly, too?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe the scene at the apartment was an arrest gone wrong.’ Sneak gave a worried sigh. The thin, hesitant sigh of a mother pushed to the edge. ‘They came for her. She fought them and escaped. Bailed out of town. Maybe she kicked this guy Tasik in the nuts on the way out and now he’s got a hard-on for her.’
