Gathering Dark

by Candice Fox

  ‘Hmm,’ Sneak said again.

  ‘Underground parking lot. Someone’s wine cellar. Basement. Storage unit. Dodger Stadium has tunnels underground.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Sneak sighed. I watched her for a moment, then jerked the wheel and took an exit off the highway.

  ‘What are we doing now? Don’t give me another pep talk. I’ll smack you the fuck out.’

  I took the off-ramp under the overpass.

  ‘Al Tasik was watching my apartment last night. If he’s following us now I want to lose him,’ I said. I popped my door. ‘Swap with me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re the street girl,’ I said. ‘I’m the Brentwood bitch. You’ll know how to shake a tail much better than me.’

  Sneak got into the driver’s seat. A small smile crossed her lips. I was expecting her to have some fun winding around the streets, but she slammed her foot down on the accelerator and sailed through the red-lit intersection, causing a pick-up truck to veer dangerously close to the bridge pylon. She was heading for a field of warehouses, dusty dirt roads between huge steel walls, that stretched as far as the eye could see. Sneak blindly swung the car down an alleyway between the warehouses and I shuffled up in my chair, grabbing my seat belt.

  ‘Jesus, Sneak! There could be people in here!’

  ‘Well, they better get out of my way,’ she said, flooring it. The dust cloud behind us lifted and swirled as we cut wildly between the warehouses, ramming the car sideways into turns, grinding in the dirt. Sneak started laughing and wailing after a while and, despite myself, I joined in. We passed a storage facility auction, where groups of men and women stood bidding on the contents of a row of units yawning open in the blazing sun. I caught a glimpse of old furniture, tubs of toys spilling out over stripped-down motorcycle bodies and stacked boxes. Hands raised to bid. We covered the crowd in dust as we sped past. Sneak was laughing her head off, tears running from her eyes.

  The San Chinto police station had art deco leanings, might once have been a pizza restaurant when prospects for a bigger population out here were imagined. It was beige, surrounded by bushes, and set on the corner of a block between squat, neat houses. Sneak parked a block down from the station and we swapped positions again, sat watching the police station as though expecting Officer Marcus Lemon to emerge and head directly for us to submit to an interview.

  ‘I don’t think we should go in,’ I said. ‘Not in the least because we can’t legally be seen together. But they’ll also have cameras. Jessica thinks whoever’s after Dayly might have broken into my apartment because I made myself known when I went in to report my car stolen.’

  ‘We don’t have to go into the station to find out if he’s there,’ Sneak said, drawing her phone out of her handbag. ‘That’s amateur hour.’

  She googled a number, dialled and waited. I sat beside her and watched. When she spoke it was with an old crone’s voice, high and gravelly and dry-throated, a voice so convincing I was struck dumb at the sound of it.

  ‘Hello? I’m calling with the intention of contacting my grandson, Marcus,’ Sneak croaked. ‘Lemon is the name, Officer Marcus Lemon . . . I’m calling because the young man in question is supposed to pick me up this evening at my home to take me to a dance class at the local hall, six o’clock sharp. I’d like to know if he’s still coming . . . What’s that? You’ll have to speak up . . . Well, I didn’t suppose in the first instance that a man would be allowed to have his personal cellular phone on him while serving and protecting the community . . . My, my, yes, I’ll do just that.’

  She hung up.

  ‘He’s not in there,’ she said. ‘He’s out on patrol.’

  ‘That was simply amazing,’ I said.

  ‘I do the sex hotline in winter when it’s cold out,’ Sneak explained. ‘The old-lady voice is quite popular. I can also do innocent schoolgirl. Horny single mom. Lonely female trucker. The president’s bored secretary left all alone in the Oval Office while the prez is out on the campaign trail.’

  ‘Jesus, that last one is a rather elaborate fantasy. Why does she have to be the president’s secretary in particular?’

  ‘So she can do stuff to herself on the president’s desk while portraits of important historical guys watch on.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said regretfully.

  ‘You asked.’

  ‘Well, I wish the performance just now could have helped us find Lemon. We know he’s not here. But he could be anywhere.’

  ‘This will help us find him,’ Sneak said. She bent and pulled a heavy grey radio unit out of her handbag and heaved it onto the dashboard. She plugged it into the car’s cigarette lighter socket and flipped it on.

  ‘A police radio scanner?’

  ‘You thought I was out all night getting high, suckin’ dicks, stocking up on energy pills? That was the night before, Neighbour. Last night I got this, and a few other useful bits and pieces.’

  We sat and listened to radio calls coming through. It was warm in the car, getting warmer. Desert heat carried between the mountains on a heavy breeze. The voices were too old or too female to be Lemon for the first twenty minutes.

  ‘How are we going to know when it’s him?’ I wondered aloud. ‘They’re all reporting car numbers, not their names or badge numbers.’

  ‘Here’s a contender,’ Sneak said, holding up a hand to silence me as a young male voice came on the line.

  ‘Dispatch, this is L81, I’m stopping for a possible 11-25 on Wilson and Harlow. No assistance needed. Over.’

  ‘Copy that, L81. And did your grandma get on to you? Over.’

  ‘My grandma? Over.’

  ‘That’s our boy.’ Sneak smiled.

  On the corner of Wilson and Harlow Streets, not far from the San Chinto surf shop, a large pane of glass had slid from its holdings on the side of a truck and shattered on the road. Sneak and I watched from a distance as Officer Lemon put out road hazard cones that he extracted from the trunk of his cruiser.

  ‘He certainly looks like the guy from the video,’ Sneak said.

  ‘So what’s our play here?’ I asked. ‘One of us just goes up and starts questioning him?’

  ‘I don’t know about that. I mean, all he’s got to say is, “We were dating. She dumped me and moved to Alaska,” and where do we go from there?’

  ‘He doesn’t even have to say that,’ I reasoned. ‘He could just say “Fuck off” and we’re in the same position. We’ve got to get this right, because the moment we let him know we’re snooping around, we’ve played our hand. We have to know that if we speak to him, he’ll talk.’

  ‘We don’t have anything on him to make him do that,’ Sneak said.

  ‘Well, I’m not putting him in a hole in the desert, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  Sneak tapped the door of the car, a rhythmic strumming. Lemon was standing in the middle of the sunbaked road, adjacent to his cruiser, lazily directing traffic.

  ‘Look at that ass,’ Sneak said suddenly.

  I frowned. ‘Are you checking out your daughter’s possible boyfriend or killer right now?’

  ‘Look at his ass, though,’ she said. ‘Those pants are tight. I don’t see the outline of a cell phone in that back pocket.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So if the phone’s not on his body, it’s in the car.’ We watched Lemon for a while before Sneak unclipped her seatbelt.

  ‘All right, here’s the play,’ she said. ‘You pull out, drive past him slowly, drift over and ram the front of the car into that traffic light.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t ram it hard. Just bunt it. Enough to cause a distraction. The front’s already scratched up from me busting into that hangar.’ She was pulling wads of tissues from a packet in her purse. ‘You ever faked a car crash before? Bite down on these as you make impact but try to let the rest of your body go limp. A good bump can rattle a tooth out real easy at your age.’

  ‘I’m only a few years older than you!’


  ‘Get out and make a scene if you can. Maybe cry. Yes, definitely cry.’

  ‘This is—’

  ‘Just do it.’ She got out and I watched her walk to the surf shop and browse the windows, only feet from Lemon’s car. Seconds ticked by in which I waited for her to return to the vehicle and admit that her idea was ridiculous. She turned around and looked at me, raised her eyebrows. I shook my head. She made a menacing fist.

  ‘I’m the best friend in the world,’ I told myself aloud, pulling my seatbelt tight across my chest. ‘I’m the best possible friend a person could have.’

  I pulled out into the street, slowed by the hazard-cone ring Lemon had made in the right-hand lane. I made eye contact with the young man so that he would know I was gawking at the scene. In the rear-view mirror, I saw Sneak push off the surf shop window, heading for the cruiser.

  The car behind me beeped at my slowness as I passed the glass crash zone. The perfect form of encouragement. I stuffed the wad of tissues into my mouth, bit down and hit the accelerator as I aimed for the traffic light pole.

  A whump, dull and heavy in my centre mass, like a punch to the sternum. The air left me and I doubled over, slamming my head into my arms, which I managed to cross over the steering wheel at the last second. The car had hopped the kerb unevenly, the left-side tyres still on the road. I flopped into the passenger seat and spat out the napkins.

  Shrill, all-consuming pain hit me. It was both my tensed muscles spasming, grinding bones and joints, and awakening sleeping, rarely used muscles, but also a mental flash of myself as Adrian Orlov, the bullet I had fired at the man slamming into his middle, folding him in half, sprawling him on the hard floor of his home.

  I righted myself, grabbed the radio from the dashboard and threw it into the passenger-side footwell, dragging Sneak’s jacket over the top of it. I kicked open the door of the car and slid out. Marcus Lemon was on me immediately, his hands under my arms, guiding me back into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ he said. ‘Try to take it easy, ma’am.’

  I burst into loud, hysterical tears.

  ‘Oh my god! Oh my god!’ I wailed. ‘I hit something. I hit someone! Someone call nine-one-one!’ I folded my arms and leaned on the horn, buried my face in my arms.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Lemon laughed, easing me off the horn. ‘I’m a police officer. You’ve barely dented your front bumper. Sit there and take a load off while I call this in to dispatch. How’s your neck?’ There were people gathering behind him, staring worriedly at me. ‘You’re fine, ma’am. There’s no need to cry.’

  The scene I had caused was working, apparently. Cars were slowing on the other side of the street to take in both accident sites. People were exiting shops and gathering on corners of the intersection. As Lemon radioed his station for backup, I watched a baby-blue Porsche Cayenne cruise by, the elbow of a leather jacket hanging from the driver’s window.

  Fred and Mike. Ada’s men. They stared impassively at me as they rolled by. I shook my head. What were the chances? I told myself the shock of the crash, and my nerves at making it happen, were playing with my mind.

  I sat back and looked in the rear-view mirror. Sneak was nowhere to be seen.

  JESSICA

  The car sat facing down the slope of the ravine north of Glendora, sunken on melted tyres, the empty, glassless windows like dark eyes that absorbed nothing of the daylight. Molten metal had made a shiny skirt for the front of the scorched vehicle, silver rivulets dried into tendrils in the sand. Jessica ducked under the police tape surrounding the car and held it up for Diggy. Her friend was surprisingly unsteady on the loose ground for a big man with wide, flat feet. He stumbled over a rock and had to right himself against the car, brushing cactus needles from the hem of his jeans.

  ‘Do we know this is the car?’ Diggy asked.

  ‘It’s a Honda, so that’s a start,’ Jessica said, checking the notes on her phone. ‘Some rangers reported it just four days ago, so the timing’s good. Urgh, the smell.’

  The air tasted of burned rubber, petrol and leather. She looked out over the Glendora Mountain ranges around them, rolling, scrubby slopes. Cactus and mesquite on some of the mountainsides was chest high and so tangled it was impenetrable. Though she could see no movement, Jessica knew the sheer hillsides would come alive at night with howls and screams and squawks, mountain cats and coyotes digging rodents and rabbits out of tunnels, owls waiting for those brave little souls that escaped the paws and claws to venture out onto the rocky flats. This was a place of danger, of hunting, of feet scrabbling in sand and thorns hooking into flesh and blood spilling on stone. Whatever stage this had been in Dayly’s downfall, Jessica sensed that the girl had been chased here, up against the rocks and cliffs, cornered by some predatory thing.

  Diggy was sweating as he jimmied open the back door of the car with a crowbar. The trunk was ajar and empty. That was how burned-out cars were treated by the LAPD. After the initial report, the vehicle was searched for bodies, drugs or weapons, then taped off and left to bake.

  While Diggy checked the car, Jessica looked at the sand around the vehicle. There were the telltale footprints of rangers, police officers and perhaps a couple of looky-loos. But there were two trails that led off between the creosote bushes away from the car, away from the road, into the hills.

  Stepping carefully, Jessica followed the trail to its conclusion, knelt and looked at the marks in the sand and gravel. There were scrapings she recognised from similar crime scenes she had seen in the past. The soft, wide indentations of a pair of buttocks and shoulders. Below them, maybe two or three feet down, sharp, curved semicircles: the heels of shoes digging in, trying to find traction. Someone on their back, struggling. There was no blood here, but the moons in the sand made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

  ‘This doesn’t look good,’ Diggy said when she arrived back at the car.

  ‘I was about to say those exact words,’ she said. ‘I’ve got signs of a struggle over here.’

  ‘I’ve got this.’ He tossed her a tiny shred of metal. Jessica looked at the blackened, L-shaped piece in the light.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s part of a sim tray from an iPhone,’ Diggy said. ‘It pops out the side so you can put your sim card in the device. There’s a little door with a hole in it you have to open with a key. When I was in college I worked in a phone repair shop. I’d know that shape anywhere.’

  ‘So where’s the rest of the phone?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Diggy said. ‘That minuscule shred of the phone is all that I can find. The rest was probably consumed in the fire. We also have this.’ He placed a flat shard of burned metal on the bonnet of the car. Jessica had to peer closely at the object to discern what it was.

  ‘A laptop?’ she asked.

  ‘Just the base,’ Diggy said. ‘The screen has melted away. The extreme heat scorched the outside to a crisp. This was the keyboard.’

  She watched him run his finger across a slash of burned black plastic melted to the top of the shard.

  ‘Laptop and phone in a burned-out car,’ Jessica said. ‘This is bad news. Blair Harbour said Dayly didn’t have anything on her when she robbed the gas station. Just a gun. No laptop. And if she’d had the phone with her, why would she have called Sneak from a payphone? Doesn’t make any sense that both should be here right now, with the car we know she was in.’

  ‘So, what . . .’ Diggy thought. ‘She’s stolen Blair’s car, gone back to her apartment and retrieved her phone and laptop?’

  ‘Possible,’ Jessica said. ‘Unlikely. Would she go back to the place where she was attacked just to retrieve these items? Or is it more likely she was attacked again here, and whoever had her phone and laptop brought them along and disposed of them in the car fire?’

  ‘The latter sounds more likely.’ Diggy gave a rueful sigh. ‘Will you tell the mother or keep it to yourself for now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not much point. We won’
t learn anything solid from this. The phone’s gone, and if this was Dayly’s laptop, any chances we have of searching it for clues are well and truly fried.’

  ‘Don’t lose heart.’ Diggy gave a shifty smile. ‘I’ve actually seen a laptop come back from a worse state than this.’

  ‘Come back?’

  ‘Yes, come back, return from the other side, be resurrected,’ he said. ‘Become the undead. Zombie tech.’

  ‘You think you could still get something readable off this?’ Jessica picked up the shard of laptop and watched chips of ash fall from it to the bonnet of the car. ‘It looks like burned tree bark.’

  ‘Stranger things have happened.’ Diggy took the remains of the laptop from her carefully. ‘First we have to figure out if it had a hard disk drive or a solid state drive. If a hard drive is exposed to contaminants, like soot or smoke, it damages the metal that holds the actual data. An SSD drive isn’t affected by particulate matter, though. The components might still hold some recoverable data inside the protective casing. Hard drive cases are generally sealed with an industrial-strength rubber gasket that can withstand temperatures of 620 degrees Fahrenheit.’

  ‘What temperature do cars burn at?’

  ‘About fifteen hundred degrees.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But you never know. There are variables.’

  ‘You seem excited,’ Jessica commented.

  ‘Oh, I am.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve never done this before. There’s something almost archaeological and redemptive about it. As if we’re reassembling the artefacts destroyed by ISIL in Palmyra. All those shattered and burned and busted treasures meticulously put back together. If I hadn’t gone into forensics, I certainly would have pursued a career like that.’

  Jessica nodded encouragingly and looked for a numberplate on the car. There was none. She lifted the hood to check the VIN number, took her phone from her back pocket to check it against the stolen car report Harbour had entered at the West LA station. As soon as she looked at the screen, it went dark. Unidentified number calling.