Gathering Dark

by Candice Fox

  ‘It was just like I told Sanchez,’ Tasik gestured to her. ‘I picked Dayly up by chance in a car full of idiot Crips. She hasn’t been living the life like you, Emily. I could see that. She was still a little fresh. High on cheap crack and scared out of her mind. She didn’t know the bag with the guns was there. I pulled her away from the crowd and asked her what the hell she thought she was doing. I was really giving it to her. Maybe I trumped it up a bit, her situation. I told her she was facing jail time, that was a certainty. I told her the type of guns they had in the trunk had been classified as weapons of terrorism, so she was facing thirty years on the inside, minimum. She was crying her eyes out. Panicked. Like a shaky little puppy.’

  Sneak now held the wire mesh screen between them, the cuffs stretched between her wrists.

  ‘I was hoping for a blow job at best,’ Tasik laughed. ‘And then suddenly Dayly started pouring out all this stuff about hidden money and a killer on death row and her junkie mother. I couldn’t follow it at first. It was so crazy. I was shocked, you know? She had to calm down some before she could give it to me straight. She said she knew where millions of dollars was buried. If I helped her out on the gun charges, she would let me in on this thing she had going to dig up the hidden money. I didn’t believe it, but I cut her loose anyway, just to see. Just in case she was onto something, you know? It was worth the gamble. If I came back and it was all just some story, I was going to get my blow job, one way or another.’

  ‘Was she right?’ Sneak asked. ‘Was the money there?’

  ‘I sure hope so.’ Tasik smiled. ‘There’s no way she can check this thing out. You know why? Because this Fishwick guy, he says he buried the cash in the late eighties. Back then the place was a big open field with a fence on it and nothing else. Now it’s got – wait for this, this is just classic – a fucking police station on it. Can you believe that? The only way she can find out if he’s lying or not is to dig to the spot, under the station.’

  ‘And she wanted your help?’ Jessica piped up.

  ‘Luckily for me, Dayly already had everything set up. She’d sourced a young cop from inside the station to make sure nobody who worked there got wind that someone was tunnelling under the building. Then the two of them got together and recruited this plumber with a rap sheet for digging holes under jewellery stores and casinos, a guy who knows how to make a tunnel and get under a place on the quiet. I’m hearing this and I’m thinking, what the fuck? This girl looks like she’s barely old enough to hold a job, and when I go check out the cop he’s the same. A baby. But that’s it, you see? That’s what I was trying to tell you, Sanchez. These people are born like this. They have criminal minds. Scavenger instincts. They’re built in.’ He tapped his temple.

  ‘So the two other guys don’t know about you?’ Sneak asked.

  ‘No,’ Tasik said. ‘It was her fuck-up. My cut was supposed to come out of her end. Dayly tells me that all I have to do is wait for pay day, when the two boys break through to the spot where the cash is supposed to be. Could be tonight, if everything’s still on track.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’ Sneak asked. ‘It sounds to me as though everything was running like clockwork.’

  ‘Your greedy-ass daughter went wrong,’ Tasik said. ‘That’s what.’

  BLAIR

  Everything was blue. The white moon cast the side of Ramirez’s truck a pale, icy blue. The dark blue mountains rising beyond us, reaching into a blue-black sky. Ada switched off the engine, parking right outside 17 Redduck Avenue, behind the truck, only feet from the driveway. She was not a woman who parked discreetly, who crept through back gardens, who scaled fences and ducked under windows. Fred screwed a silencer onto the barrel of his gun. I listened to the metal-on-metal grinding sound of the device in the silence.

  Ada and Mike got out. I reached towards my backpack.

  ‘Leave it,’ Fred said, shuffling towards me across the seat. I popped the door and got out. The air was cold and thin. I thought about running, until Fred’s hand landed on my shoulder. The hand stayed there all the way up the driveway to the front door. Ada and Mike had their own guns out, held close to their chests, pointed upwards. I stood off to the side with Fred while Ada slowly turned the knob. The door came unstuck from its jamb with a cracking sound that was almost wet, sticky. Ada and Mike disappeared inside and Fred shoved me forwards.

  ‘Look’—I half-turned to him—‘I don’t want to be a part of this.’

  ‘The time to make that decision came and went a while ago,’ he said.

  ‘Just let me walk away.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  A narrow passageway. In the darkness, things were brushing against my arms – the gentle slicing of magazine and newspaper pages from volumes stacked as high as the ceiling. There was a light on in one of the back rooms, illuminating a wild forest of items crowding in from every corner. An undergrowth of paint buckets, bicycle parts, rubber tubing, stuffed toys. A waist-high maze of plastic tubs filled with Tupperware, silverware, picture frames, clothes, cans of food. Against the walls, rolled-up rugs and strips of carpet leading to a canopy of broom and mop heads, ladders, kites and clocks of every conceivable shape and size haphazardly hanging, some working, some not. I smelled rotten meat and curdled milk as I passed the kitchen, which was covered in knee-deep debris. I spied three fridges, a table turned on its side. A fly or moth batted weakly against my cheek as I walked into a second hallway, the insect drunk on the endless spoils around it or exhausted from trying to find a way out through the blocked windows.

  The lit room was crowded with a sea of books, clothes, shoes numbering in their hundreds, twisted and dry models that made me think of collections I had seen in photographs of concentration camps. In a filthy bed in one corner lay an ancient man, buried under blankets so that he was almost invisible. I pushed past Ada and Mike and rushed to him.

  ‘Oh god.’ I reeled at the smell, brushed damp hair from the man’s forehead. ‘Sir, are you okay? Oh, Jesus. Jesus.’

  I peeled the duct tape from his mouth. His eyes were huge and wet.

  ‘Help me,’ he rasped. There were no teeth in his mouth. ‘Help. He-elp.’

  ‘It’s okay. We’re here now. I’m going to lift you—’

  ‘Put the tape back on,’ Ada commanded. She pulled my arm back and made me face her. ‘Leave him.’

  ‘I can’t leave him like this,’ I pleaded. ‘He’s severely dehydrated. Look at the whites of his eyes. Look at the colour of his skin. At any moment he could go into cardiac arrest.’

  ‘I said put the tape back on.’ Ada’s eyes were burning in the light of the lamp on the floor beside the man’s bed: two distant, gold flames. ‘He’ll still be here when we get back. He makes a fuss now and he’ll blow our cover.’

  ‘There are . . . t-two m-men,’ the old man wheezed. The blankets sank and rose as he drew ragged breaths. ‘And a wo-ooman. They c-came and . . . I’ve been h-here, trap-ped, and . . . I don’t know h-how many days . . .’

  ‘The woman,’ I said. ‘Young blonde? Curly hair?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘Where is she? Is she alive?’

  ‘She stop-ped c-coming,’ the man said.

  Fred appeared in the doorway, murmured to Ada. ‘Tunnel’s in the kitchen. No sign of anyone.’

  I turned and saw Mike raising his gun towards the old man’s face. I slapped it away without thinking, an electric pulse of terror hitting my heart like a punch. The big man grabbed a hank of my hair and I felt the sharp edge of the square gun barrel in my throat.

  ‘That was a stupid thing to do,’ Ada said, stepping close to me. Her face was expressionless, like a wax mask, only the eyes alert and following mine closely, curiously. ‘Swiping at a man’s gun like that.’

  ‘He was going to—’

  ‘Yeah.’ Ada nodded. ‘He was going to waste the old guy. Are you catching on now, Blair? We’re not here for Dayly. We’re not here to rescue filthy old coots from their reeking beds. We’re. Here. Fo
r. The. Money.’

  Mike’s gun was crushing my windpipe. It was impossible to swallow. I looked at Ada and eased out pained words. ‘Jessica warned me about this,’ I said.

  ‘And you should have listened.’ Ada tapped my nose with the end of her pistol. ‘You’re too trusting. Smart, yeah. Capable, of course. But way too trusting. And for god’s sake, you eat up a bleeding heart story like no one I’ve ever known.’

  ‘Just leave me with the old man,’ I said. ‘Do what you’ve got to do. I’ll stay here. I won’t make a sound.’

  ‘You’re as bad as Dayly, trying to save your dying, dirty animals.’ Ada knocked a naked Barbie doll off a cluttered shelf. It cascaded down a mountain of trash, dislodging magazines and paper cups, wooden toys. ‘This man is a pig.’

  ‘Please let me go.’

  ‘I don’t know if I’ll need you down there or not,’ Ada said, nodding her head the way we had come, towards the kitchen. ‘So for now you’re coming with me. But as a favour to you, because you’re a good person, I’ll leave the old man alive. How about that? See. I can be good, too. Mike?’

  Mike moved the gun away from my throat and pushed me aside. He took a roll of duct tape sitting on the dusty carpet by the bed and grabbed a handful of the old man’s lank, greasy white hair, lifted, rolled the tape around his head twice as if he was binding up a leaking pipe. I watched Mike drop the man’s head back on the pillow and brush his hands off.

  Ada pushed me towards the kitchen. Shielded from view by a pile of debris, a hole in the linoleum floor gaped four feet wide, leading to blackness as pure and impenetrable as ink. Fred climbed backwards into the hole ahead of me, and I heard his feet hit the rungs of a ladder.

  ‘Get down there,’ Ada said, prodding me in the back with her gun.

  JESSICA

  ‘I saw it coming from pretty far off,’ Tasik said. They were rolling slowly now along the cresting road, looking for something. ‘If there’s one thing a practiced liar like you would know, it’s that you find a story and you stick to it. Dayly’s story started wavering. Suddenly she couldn’t tell me how much money was supposed to be under the police station. Was it ten million or fifteen? Then, what do you know? She’s suggesting it might only be two. She wouldn’t answer her phone. Wouldn’t let me speak to the old man, Fishwick. I wanted to talk to Lemon and Ramirez, become a full partner in this thing, but she’s telling me if they find out about me they’ll flip. I’ve only got her word on everything that’s happening, and I’m starting to discover that she’s lying. She would tell me she was alone, when there I am sitting outside her apartment, looking at her inside with Lemon, the cop. She became unreliable, and that’s when I knew she was going to double-cross us.’

  ‘How?’ Sneak asked.

  ‘The money.’ Tasik nodded. ‘She was going to use Lemon and Ramirez, the plumber, to get the cash out of the hole. She was going to have me sitting nearby like an idiot waiting for my cut, keeping her safe from jail, and them expecting her to share the cash when she goes and swipes it out from underneath them. She was going to run off with all of it by herself. I could feel it. It’s what I would do.’

  Tasik seemed to find what he was looking for, pulled the car off the road onto an unmarked fire trail. Jessica’s grip tightened on her gun. She knew she had to take control. Disarm Tasik, cuff him. But her yearning to hear the rest of the story, to know what happened to Dayly, had her frozen in her seat. She knew that if she moved, if she broke Tasik from his spell, she might never get a full confession out of him. He liked the sound of his own voice. Wanted them to know how clever he’d been. But all of that could dry up in a second. A part of her wanted to believe this was his surrender. That he wasn’t leading them out here, into the dark of the mountain ranges, to kill them both. She couldn’t accept that another cop would do that. Didn’t want to accept it. Because that would be the final nail – that would show her once and for all that not only was she not a part of this family, but she didn’t know the members of it. Not at all.

  The headlights illuminated a horizontal white boom gate. Tasik nudged it open gently with the bumper of the car.

  ‘Greedy little girl,’ he said, almost to himself.

  Jessica watched the wide dirt road ahead of them, dust swirling in the lights, desert bugs flickering and flapping gold in the beams. She wondered if Dayly had been alive when she was driven out here. If she’d sat in the dark as her mother was sitting now, knowing this was the last road she would ever travel down, her final destination.

  ‘I confronted her in her apartment,’ Tasik said. ‘I’d had enough. She was telling me they’d hit a snag. There was a rock the size of a Volkswagen Beetle in the tunnel and they’d have to blast through it. She’d tell me when they were through, but she didn’t know how long the delay was going to be. I called bullshit on that. She was buying time to make her escape, I knew. I figured I knew where the guys were, I could tap their phones and find out when they hit paydirt. I didn’t need Dayly anymore. But she fought me at her apartment and got away. I know from pursuing girls like her my whole career that the best thing you can do is let them think they’re in the safe zone. Let them calm down. So I grabbed her laptop and phone from the apartment and followed her on the quiet. She hit a gas station for some cash and a car and was headed out west, probably to see Lemon and Ramirez. That’s when I took her down. I chased her up into the mountains here and ran her car off the road.’

  Jessica watched Tasik’s eyes as he switched off the engine. A coyote yowled somewhere nearby in the dark, a high, anxious sound.

  ‘You killed her,’ Jessica said. She could feel how wide her own eyes were in the dark. Disbelieving, but also tensed, ready. ‘You torched the car with the laptop and phone inside. And you brought her here and dumped her.’ Jessica looked out the window beside him.

  Tasik said nothing. His eyes were hard, challenging her in the dark, both his hands on the steering wheel. Jessica thought for a moment of quick-draw cowboys on dusty streets, tumbleweeds blowing by, a comic image thrown up by her brain to try to quell the terror in her heart. She drew her weapon, and her veins flooded warm when Tasik didn’t draw his.

  ‘Don’t you fucking move,’ she snapped.

  She was twisted sideways awkwardly in her seat, the gun close to her chest, her elbows splayed in the small space. A smile was playing on Tasik’s lips. Her training and experience over the two decades she had been in the job hadn’t prepared her for disarming a man sitting in the same car as her. She’d never been stupid enough to get herself into this kind of fix.

  ‘Keep your hands right where they are,’ she said. She had two options. Have Tasik reach down and pull the gun from his own hip, or lean over and do it herself. Neither was good. She was trapped and he knew it. Seconds were ticking by in which Jessica knew he would be formulating a plan, so she’d better put her own into action. She took a hand off her gun and reached forwards.

  She grabbed the gun, lifted it from the holster on his hip, leaned back. She relaxed. He was waiting for that, for the fraction of a second that her muscles loosened. His fist came up, outside of her range of vision, smashed her jaw in a brutal uppercut that pounded her head into the window.

  Darkness. Only seconds’ worth. Her hearing sucked back before she could control her body. She was flopped sideways in the seat. Her brain wouldn’t issue commands to her limbs. She sagged helplessly as Tasik disarmed her.

  ‘Get out,’ he said to Sneak.

  ‘You’re not going to kill me,’ Sneak said from the back seat. ‘You’re not going to kill a fellow cop. Four people from the Pump’n’Jump will be able to testify that Sanchez and I got into your car. There’ll be CCTV at the gas station.’

  ‘I’m not going to deny I arrested you, or that Jessica came with me,’ Tasik said. ‘I’ve been playing this game a long time, Emily. You know that. All I have to tell them is that you slipped your cuffs to the front, as I knew you would do, and you waited until we were in a quiet backstreet in Koreatown so you c
ould fake a seizure in the back of the car. Sanchez and I stopped to assist you, you attacked her. Took her gun and killed Sanchez, then made me put her in the car. You forced me to drive up here into the mountains, where you confessed to killing Dayly. You told me you’d dump me and Sanchez in the same spot you did her.’

  Jessica tried to keep her breathing even, stopped trying to move. She knew she had to regain complete control before she launched her attack on Tasik. She couldn’t groan, couldn’t struggle. While he thought she was unconscious, he might delay finishing her.

  ‘She’s down there?’ Jessica heard Sneak ask. ‘You threw her down there?’

  There was silence. Jessica didn’t need to hear an answer.

  ‘I’ll tell them I was lucky enough to overpower you,’ Tasik said. ‘But you put up a good effort.’

  Jessica felt blood running from her mouth, down her limp arm, onto the seat. She opened her eyes a crack. She wondered if Tasik kept a backup weapon in the car’s glovebox, only a couple of feet away from her. Most cops she knew did.

  ‘You know that Ada and Blair are onto the money,’ Sneak said. Her voice was lower, thinner than it had been. She was losing hope. ‘You’ve got to, right? You know we’ve been asking questions. You saw us there at the gas station with the maps. You know Ada and Blair will be heading there right now, to San Chinto. They might get there and get the money before you, while you’re wasting time here with us. Let me go. Leave me here so I can find my child. Go get the money and run.’

  ‘I’ve got time,’ Tasik said. ‘I’ve been monitoring Ramirez’s texts. He thinks he’s got another three hours until he breaks through. Best case scenario for me is the two parties run into each other and there’s a shoot-out, and I walk in to find the cash sitting by a neat pile of bodies, waiting for me. Lemon and Ramirez won’t be expecting Maverick and her goons and Harbour. But no one at all will be expecting me.’