Gathering Dark

by Candice Fox

  Jessica took a moment to swallow her revulsion. ‘Was it really worth it?’

  He shrugged. ‘I could die tomorrow. I’m a highly desirable target in here. I killed a kid. All the other inmates have got a hard-on for me. So I’ve got to get what I can get, while I can get it.’

  ‘You’re a real loony tune, aren’t you?’

  ‘Your face is classic.’ John thumped the steel tabletop in front of him in hilarity. ‘You’re so horrified. You know, I didn’t even catch your name.’

  ‘It’s Jessica.’

  ‘Jessica. Pretty. You’re Latina?’

  ‘Dayly is gone, and her activities in the past few weeks have been strange,’ Jessica said. ‘We know that she was trying to hire a plane. You said in your letters that she wanted to “fly away” into a new life. Those things together suggest to me that you had her pretty convinced that the money was real. Did she leave here knowing it was all a Pull?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he yawned. ‘I don’t really remember. I was pretty distracted during the visit.’

  Jessica sighed.

  ‘The first one was real enough. Burying the cash in Pasadena, that was a mistake,’ John continued. He leaned back on his stool, cupped his hands at the back of his head and stretched. ‘I didn’t think about who might get access to it. You’ve seen the reports. You know a bunch of construction workers found it.’

  ‘I do,’ Jessica said.

  ‘Yeah, well, those guys should have just split it. Instead they handed it in. Can you believe that? Now the government’s got it. It’ll go to paying these idiots’ wages.’ He nodded through the glass at two guards walking by behind Jessica. ‘Maybe I ought to send in some requests for how it’s spent. I mean, it’s my money. I got one pillow in my cell and it’s storm grey. It’s six years old.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Jessica nodded. ‘Almost as old as your youngest victim.’

  ‘Ooh.’ John smiled. ‘A smart-ass. I like smart-asses.’

  ‘If there’s nothing else you can tell me about Dayly’s disappearance, I’ve got to go.’ Jessica stood and smoothed down her shirt.

  ‘I’m sure if I’d thought about it more at the time, I’d have realised hiding the money like that where just anybody could come find it was a mistake,’ John said. ‘But I was pressed for time.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Jessica said again.

  ‘Maybe if I’d needed to hide a second stash, I’d have found a way to make sure I could control who got the money, if it couldn’t be me.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He smiled. ‘I’d make sure I could choose my beneficiary.’

  ‘You know what I think’—Jessica leaned on the table— ‘I think you’re trying to pull me in now. Trying to make me believe there really is more money. Or maybe you’re trying to goad me into thinking Trelles had a partner who’s still out there, and that I have unfinished business. Let me guess: he’ll only talk to me through you. You want to give me a reason to visit you. To keep visiting. Eventually you’ll have me pressing my tits up against the glass for a few years until we can get into the cage together and you can have your grabby-grabby.’

  John laughed, a hard, unexpected laugh that broke into coughs. ‘Now there’s a great idea!’

  ‘A good plan,’ she said. ‘I guess all you’ve got to do in there all day is plan things. But, like your career as a thief, it’s doomed to fail. I’m pretty revolted by you, as I am by most of the men I’ve met in your position. And if there is money, and you did try to pass it on to Dayly, that plan hasn’t worked either. In fact, it might just be the thing that’s got her killed.’

  John sat quietly, a little of the bluster and bravado gone from his posture. Jessica waved and walked away, turning towards the guard station at the end of the room.

  BLAIR

  The night air carried smells up the side of the canyon: Mexican food trucks, fresh paint from the studios, downtown traffic. Ventura was searing with red and yellow lights, and the silver tips of the mountains sliced through the orange sky, an eternal lightning strike dividing land and air. I sat on the bonnet of my car at a lookout on Mulholland, playing with my phone, biding time to indulge my addiction while a night tour bus was reloaded with tourists who had been taking shots of Universal. There were red lights and puffing smoke now and then from the Harry Potter castle. Voldemort’s birthday or something, maybe. I wondered if Sasha had read my son those books, how many hours it had taken at his bedside, Jamie fighting sleep against the pillow. I wondered if she’d done the voices. I would have. As the tour bus roared away I closed my eyes and dialled.

  ‘Station Twenty-two,’ a man answered. ‘Burke here.’

  ‘Oh, hi. My name’s Blair. I’m just calling to speak to someone.’

  ‘Someone who?’

  ‘Just anyone. You know. I just need a minute with someone.’

  ‘Ma’am, are you suicidal right now?’

  ‘I . . . No. No! Sorry, what kind of station is this?’ I asked.

  ‘This is Station Twenty-two of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Montebello.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry. I don’t want to tie up the line. I’ll go.’

  ‘You’re not tying up the line. You’ve called the mess room on the accommodation floor. But I can’t understand what you want.’

  ‘Well, I—’

  ‘She sounds hot!’ came a muffled voice. ‘Put her on speaker!’

  ‘Yeah, put her on speaker, Burkey.’

  ‘How many people are there?’ I asked, smiling.

  ‘We’ve got me, Betts, Carlisle, Jonesy and Fitz,’ Burke said. ‘And we’re trying to play a poker game here, so if you wouldn’t mi—’

  ‘I’ll talk to her.’ A new voice, a rattle as the receiver was snatched. ‘This is Johnny Carlisle. I’m six-five, blond, big hands, nice square jaw. Stubble. I can bench one-twenty. Think Daniel Craig, only taller and not fucking British. What’s your name, girl?’

  ‘If you’re six-five, I’ve got a baseball bat for a dick,’ someone said.

  ‘Six-five my ass.’

  ‘It’s Blair,’ I laughed.

  ‘Blair, sweetheart, that’s a good name. I like that name. You know, most people call here looking for someone to come put out a fire,’ Carlisle said. ‘But I got a feeling you want someone to start one for you. I can hear it in your voice.’

  A low moan of appreciation from the crowd.

  ‘Smooth, Carlisle.’

  ‘Where you at, baby?’

  ‘Can we get back to the game, please? Jesus Christ. I got a good hand here!’

  Lights fell over me. I hung up, tossed the phone into the front seat of the Gangstermobile. As the enormous Escalade pulled to the side of the road, I realised how lonely I had been as I drove from Brentwood to the Hills after my visit with Sasha and Jamie. Living on the outside meant times of loneliness. It meant uncertainty, trouble, unexpected events, people breaking up and getting together, people moving to Wyoming. I’d known as I turned off Cahuenga that I was going to do something dangerous. The time between dangerous acts was shortening. Alejandro stepped from the car and adjusted the cuffs of his black shirt, a strangely embarrassed downward glance. This was not a man who started casual liaisons with ex-cons who worked in gas stations. This was a man who had models and aspiring actresses dripping all over him in expensive nightclubs downtown. I’d been surprised that he answered my call, even more surprised when he said he’d come to the lookout.

  ‘I did not expect to hear from you again,’ he said, mirroring my thoughts.

  ‘You left your number.’ I shrugged.

  ‘I’m strangely optimistic sometimes.’ He pushed me against the Gangstermobile and kissed me hard, grabbed my ass in both hands and dragged me against his hips. With every car that came around the bend, I expected an eruption of blue lights, the blip of a police siren. I was dancing on the edge again, tempting life to take me away from the hurt and panic over Jamie’s custody, Sneak’s grief, the endless years of ordinary life ahead filled wit
h unpredictability and danger. I held Alejandro’s shoulders and looked out over Los Angeles and thought about my prison bed, and how close it really was.

  JESSICA

  Jessica had taken a quick, half-hearted tour around the Bluestone Lane house and was standing in the living room, just locking the back door before she left for the night, when she saw the boy’s head pop up over the gate like a blond, grinning Whac-A-Mole. She still held the key in the lock. A baby had cried on the flight back from San Francisco that evening, two seats away, kicking its legs and thrashing in its carrier, splintery, squealy noises making mincemeat of her brain, of any attempt to make sense of what John Fishwick had told her or not told her in the prison. She wasn’t sure she could do another minute’s interaction with a child, but before she could turn away from the door the boy hefted himself over the gate and landed on the grass.

  ‘I’ve had a long, long day,’ she said, opening the door a crack. ‘I’m going to go home and sit on the floor of my shower with a cold beer.’

  ‘Have a swim instead,’ the boy suggested brightly. He was heading for the pool, tearing his shirt off. Jessica sighed and trudged out to greet him.

  On the bottom of the pool, their legs crossed and their cheeks full of air, the two stared at each other, mentally counting. After thirty seconds the boy released his lungfuls in a huge laugh and rose to the surface in an explosion of electric-blue bubbles.

  ‘No fair!’ he cried when Jessica rose up with him. ‘You made me laugh. Cheater!’

  ‘I was literally staring at you without a single emotion on my face. How is that cheating?’

  ‘Your hair was going everywhere, like a mermaid.’ The boy giggled. ‘Like Mendosa.’

  ‘Medusa?’ she asked, grabbing him and nudging him into the floating position.

  ‘That one.’

  They floated side by side. Jessica calculated that Beansie would be entering Wallert’s house around that very moment. Terror and excitement roiled in her stomach.

  ‘Why was your day so long?’ the boy asked. She could barely hear him through the water gushing in and out of her ears.

  ‘I went to San Francisco.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To see a guy in prison.’

  ‘Whoa! Why?’

  ‘Because I thought he had some information I needed. He didn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Look,’ Jessica said, ‘I can’t talk a lot about this. The President asked me to go, and just you knowing that I went could be kind of risky. Both for me and for you.’

  ‘Really?’ The boy dropped his feet. Jessica did the same and stood before him in the pool.

  ‘Yeah, really. The White House called me this morning. Well, they tried to call, but I was still asleep, so instead they sent a couple of guys in suits round my apartment. They gave me the mission files to read on the helicopter. I got out of the prison alive. Only barely though. The guy I went to see, he’s pretty dangerous. He has a whole wing of the facility to himself. Guards round the clock. Laser-maze technology.’

  ‘Oh my god,’ the boy said.

  ‘He has to wear this special helmet made from graphite,’ Jessica continued. ‘So that he can’t read your mind.’

  Jessica and the boy stared at each other. A moment passed.

  ‘Aw, you’re such a jerk.’ Jamie splashed her.

  She laughed for what felt like the first time in months. The kid was too easy. She dunked his head under the water for good measure and went to the edge of the pool, where her phone sat with the screen lit, a message tone dinging for the second time.

  It’s Kristi. I want to talk.

  ‘Gotta fly, kid.’ Jessica climbed out of the pool. ‘It’s the Prez. He’s thrown up the bat signal.’

  She watched the child climb out of the pool, shake off like a dog and head back towards his house.

  I’ll be right there, she typed into her phone.

  Grunions Bar was difficult to find from Sepulveda Boulevard; a cream building that could have been offices or a medical clinic, surrounded by car dealerships at Manhattan Beach. Jessica circled the block twice then parked behind the bar, trudging through gravel to the side door. She found an enormous space dominated by a U-shaped bar, television sets visible from every angle, a section with diner-style booths and sports memorabilia. In the semi-darkness, men and women on stools at the bar turned and watched her arrive. Every panel in the ceiling had been bought in some fundraiser or another by locals, and was scrawled with artwork from the simplistic to the complex – single names hastily written, airbrushed space-scapes, hand-drawn Dodgers and LA Kings logos. The wizened Irishman behind the bar asked her what she wanted, and she ordered a bourbon. At the front windows, Kristi Zea was sitting at a high stool and table, lazily tapping her phone.

  Jessica thought that, just like Blair Harbour, the woman had aged far more than the ten years that had passed since she had seen her. Kristi Zea had been a battered and bruised mess when Jessica interviewed her after her boyfriend’s murder, but she had lightened and tightened into a pale, freckled, waifish girl with spunky blonde hair and lots of ear-piercings as she dealt with her throughout the trial. The woman Jessica sat down before now had lines around her mouth that were too deep, giving her a sullen expression, and her piercings were gone, leaving little stitch-like indentations in her ears. The sports jacket she was wearing floated around her as she picked up her beer glass.

  ‘Well, look at you.’ Kristi nodded. ‘You haven’t aged a day.’

  ‘I bathe in the blood of my enemies.’ Jessica put her phone on the table beside her glass. ‘What made you change your mind about talking?’

  ‘It was just like you said.’ Kristi shrugged. ‘The sleepless nights. The guilt.’

  The two women sat in silence for a long time. At the bar, a group of locals started shouting at the Dodgers game.

  ‘I want immunity,’ Kristi said.

  ‘Yeah. I thought you’d ask for that. You’ve been watching too much television,’ Jessica said. ‘The case isn’t officially reopened. If it was, another officer would probably be assigned to it, not me. They might be in the position to offer you immunity on a perjury charge, but that would only be if you admitted in court, on the record, that what you said about what happened on the night of the murder wasn’t exactly correct.’

  ‘So why the hell am I talking to you if the case isn’t being reopened?’

  ‘Because I asked you to.’

  ‘Why’d you do that?’

  ‘Because I care,’ Jessica said. ‘I know the woman, Harbour. I know her son.’

  ‘The kid.’ Kristi nodded. ‘It’s all about the kid for you. It has been for me, too, the past ten years. I think about that kid being born in prison. I read a thing in the LA Times about it. About how they give you an hour with the baby before they take it away.’

  A bartender came by and wiped their table. Kristi grabbed his arm. ‘Can I order another beer?’

  ‘Afraid you’ll have to go to the counter, ma’am.’

  ‘Oh, come on, just—’

  The young man wandered away. Jessica went to the counter, keeping her profile to Zea so she would see if the young woman decided to run off. She brought a beer and a bourbon chaser back to the table.

  ‘The woman was pregnant.’ Kristi gulped the bourbon, didn’t wince. ‘I mean, fuck. Who does that? Who goes running into the middle of—’

  ‘Kristi—’

  ‘Of something that’s not even—’

  ‘What happened?’ Jessica dared to put her hand on Kristi’s, to grab the fingers firmly. ‘Just tell me. Forget about who’s to blame. It’s time to let it all out and tell the truth.’

  ‘If I can’t get immunity, I want cash.’ Kristi blinked a little too slowly. Jessica wondered how long she had been in the bar. ‘Ten grand for my confession now. Twenty to say it in court.’

  Jessica slipped off her stool and took out her wallet, fished for a couple of bucks. She lifted her empty glass and slipped the notes
underneath, then turned to leave.

  ‘Okay.’ Kristi made a swipe for her arm, knocked the table stem with her knee, rattling the glasses on the table. ‘Okay. Okay. Okay.’

  Jessica sat back down. Kristi drank half her beer and rubbed her face, hard, as if she was trying to remove a stain from her cheeks. In time she lifted her eyes from the tabletop, and Jessica realised it was the first time the girl had made eye contact since their meeting began. Kristi took a deep breath.

  ‘There was eight hundred grand’s worth of coke in the house,’ she said.

  BLAIR

  At the Pump’n’Jump, my mind was full. Alejandro’s breath in my ear and his hands shoving my jeans down. Dayly’s frightened eyes behind the gun that wavered in front of my face. The crunching, shuddering halting of the car against the traffic light pole. I absently served customers and let these things cycle through my brain, anything but Jamie and Henry and Sasha, the breaking up of my son’s family, the plunge into icy, turbulent waters. I thought about the plumber, Ramirez, at the hoarder house in San Chinto. What had Officer Lemon been doing inside the house while the plumber came out to speak to me? Why hadn’t he heard us talking? Was it his house, or the house of a relative or friend? I hadn’t had any experience with hoarding during my time as a doctor. I’d heard horror stories from other paediatricians of children from such places coming in with rat bites, malnourishment, bedsores from sleeping on filthy, bare mattresses for months on end. Lemon had seemed like a regular, stand-up cop. He’d looked and smelled good as he leaned over me in the dented Gangstermobile.

  At ten o’clock I started cleaning the drinks fridges, restless and bored. Plenty of questions, no answers. I thought about Lemon’s messages to Dayly.

  Are we on track?

  A week left, maybe less.

  Where are you?

  Where are you?

  Where are you?

  A pair of long-haired, guffawing teenage boys used the distraction that the drinks fridge was providing me to pour themselves a mega blue slushie and slip one of their own hairs into it. They feigned horror and disgust, threatened to post a picture of the contaminated drink to Instagram. I let them have the slushie, as I had three months earlier, and a few months before that. They were obviously too stoned to realise they had played the gag on me before, or perhaps they did it so often they couldn’t keep track of their hits.