Gathering Dark

by Candice Fox

I looked at Ada. She was smiling at me. The smile never wavered as she lifted her gun and shot me in the leg.

  A white-hot pain, too sudden and shocking to give voice to. I hit the floor, grabbed my limb, felt the blood bubble up for the first time, seeping into my jeans. Nausea came and went. I braced for darkness, but it didn’t come. I looked up and realised Ada was turned away from me. She was looking at the sewer end of the tunnel, at Sneak, who was bloody and filthy and holding a police-issue Glock pointed right at Ada’s face.

  Ada was stunned at first, but she recovered quickly, a snake rearing and then turning liquid, coiling on itself, reconfiguring for another strike.

  ‘I wasn’t going to kill her,’ Ada said.

  Sneak cocked the weapon.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ Ada laughed. ‘Come on. Why would I have shot her in the leg if I was going to kill her?’

  ‘Get out,’ Sneak said. ‘All of you. Get out.’

  Mike and Fred and Ada grabbed the handle of a case each, lifted them and walked out. As Ada passed me, I realised the wrapping on the last case was covered in crows, their wings spread and beaks open.

  When the crew had been gone a few seconds, and the sound of their footfalls had faded from the tunnel, Sneak bent down to help me up. She was covered in blood. I thought of the man in my apartment in the night, the feel of his hands on me. Those same big, calloused hands having already grabbed me in the West LA police station and shoved me into a wall. The work of those hands on my friend, now. It seemed stupid to have not made the connection before.

  ‘Tasik,’ I said. It was all I could manage.

  ‘Yeah.’ Sneak nodded.

  ‘Did Jessica get away?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Sneak said again. ‘But Dayly didn’t.’

  She helped me hobble to the sewer tunnel.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I told her. I squeezed my friend’s shoulder as we made our way into the dark before us. She didn’t answer me. We walked steadily but slowly along.

  Ada and her guys must have had trouble getting the cases up the ladder, because when Sneak and I reached the street they were only just loading them into the Mercedes. Under the streetlight I saw Fred dump two of the cases – the toucan and crow cases – into the trunk, filling the space entirely. Mike hefted the tiger case onto the back seat and both men got in beside it. Ada looked back at us as she opened the driver’s-side door. For a moment I thought she would wave, but she didn’t, and I realised how foolish the idea had been. We weren’t friends. We had never been friends.

  Twenty-one million dollars. I thought about John Fishwick in his cell, about the kiss with Dayly, the secret note. It had all been for nothing, both his efforts and hers. Dayly was dead and John’s money was now in the hands of one of the baddest women I had ever known. Ada got into her car and started the engine. As she drove away I wondered what John would think of her, what she planned to do with his money.

  His unchosen beneficiary.

  ‘Birds only.’ I breathed the words at the same time as they flickered through my mind.

  ‘What?’

  ‘His chosen beneficiary.’ I was suddenly almost screaming, gripping my head. ‘Birds only. BIRDS ONLY!’

  Ada’s car exploded in a hot, white flash followed by a burst of yellow and red light. The vehicle came to a stop, the windows blasted out, doors thrown ajar, the roof bowed and partially peeled back from the rear pillars like the lid of a tuna can.

  I ran. Sneak ran beside me, both our bodies forgetting our injuries completely, shot through with adrenaline and fear. The back of the car was a mess of blood and carnage, Fred and Mike’s bodies slumped in their seats, the frame of the car on fire around them. Ada was slithering from the front seat as I reached her. I hooked my arms under hers and dragged her away from the burning vehicle.

  She had all her limbs. I silently counted them, like I had once been in the habit of doing when a child appeared on my surgery table just pulled from a car wreck or a house fire. Two arms. Two legs. Ten fingers, ten toes. She rasped a deep, laboured breath and fell into coughs. I dragged her onto the wet lawn of a nearby house and batted away the small flames licking at her clothes.

  Birds only. John Fishwick’s means of making sure he could choose who got his money. He told Dayly, and only Dayly, that she should open the cases wrapped in patterns of birds and not the one patterned with tigers or any other animals. I guessed it was a hand grenade that had gone off in the tiger suitcase, maybe two of them, but I didn’t know. I held Ada while she struggled to breathe, her lungs filled with debris and smoke. Eventually she rolled on her back and looked at me.

  ‘I wasn’t going to kill you,’ she wheezed. ‘I’m too nice.’

  ‘Shut up, Ada,’ I told her.

  The sound of a car trunk popping drew my attention away from Ada. People were coming out of their houses all around us. I followed the sound I had heard and saw Sneak across the street, loading the battered and singed but still mostly intact toucan suitcase into the trunk of Al Tasik’s car, where the crow case already lay. The precious contents had survived the blast. I looked back and saw that the trunk of Ada’s burning Mercedes was open and empty.

  There was nothing I could do to stop my friend. I was exhausted, wounded, and Ada lay across my lap, drifting in and out of consciousness. Like Ada had done, Sneak looked back at me as she slammed the trunk shut on the suitcases full of cash and went to the driver’s door of her vehicle. But unlike Ada, she did wave. And she mouthed the words ‘Thank you’.

  I watched her drive away as sirens began to sound in the distance.

  JESSICA

  It was five o’clock in the morning by the time Jessica unlocked the front door of the Bluestone house. Something had brought her here instead of home, when all she longed for was her shower, her bed, the cold caress of her pillow against her cheek. Perhaps it was the decision she had made about the house as she walked down the mountain after witnessing Tasik’s death. She had walked until her feet hurt, until her shoes had rubbed blisters into her heels, her phone only relenting to the influence of reception as she hit the silent city of Glendora. From there she had called her station, asked someone to rouse Whitton and get him to call her. He hadn’t been at the crime scene on the mountain when she was driven back up there to show crews where Tasik’s body lay, the general area in which he had indicated he had thrown Dayly’s corpse to its final resting place. When Whitton called her now she answered the phone standing on the back porch of the Brentwood mansion, stepping quietly through the early marine mist towards the pool gate.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I just got back,’ she said. ‘They sent me away. Didn’t want me contaminating the scene. I’m at the Brentwood house.’

  ‘Well, get your ass here,’ Whitton said. ‘I want a full explanation of what happened on that goddamn mountain.’

  ‘No,’ she said, slipping off her shoes and bloody socks. ‘Not yet. I’m checking the house here, then I’m going to go home and sleep. This afternoon some time I’ll come in, and I’ll be bringing a stack of affidavits for IAG with me. One on the Linscott Place shooting. One on my arrest at Goren Donnovich’s house. One explaining my position on the Brentwood house, and one about what happened last night on the mountain.’

  ‘While you’re at it, you can write one about what the hell you did to Wallert’s place,’ Whitton snapped. ‘I’ve got three teams of boots still over there, cleaning up. You know what a couple of thousand people on a rampage does to a person’s property? They’re saying there isn’t a shred of glass intact in the entire place. The garage burned to the ground.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Jessica said. She rolled up her dirty jeans and slipped her sore feet into the cool water. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  She hung up and opened her news app. The swarm party at Wallert’s house was the lead story. There was a short video of police storming the premises in riot gear, firefighters blasting the flaming garage with hoses. Teens and young peo
ple running everywhere, ducking under the coiling paths of tear gas canisters. Jessica scrolled for photographs of the interior of the house, the graffitied walls and smashed furniture, an artistic shot of a pink plastic cocktail glass shaped like a naked woman lying on the trashed kitchen floor. Young Beansie, a man she had arrested a year earlier for organising a similar sort of party on a golf course, had outdone himself this time. The article was saying five thousand people had been on the scene.

  For a second, to Jessica, it seemed as though thinking about Wallert had suddenly summoned his ghost. She smelled bourbon, sweat, his familiar stale reek. But then she felt his hand on the back of her neck and knew he was real. He yanked her upwards and Jessica almost fell into the pool.

  ‘You fucked with the wrong guy,’ Wallert snarled.

  His fist hit her like a hammer blow, exactly on point, crunching against her temple and cheekbone at once. She saw blackness, begged it not to envelop her completely. The deck of the pool area was against her mouth suddenly, tasting of chlorine. He was on her back, punching downwards. She managed to roll and slap the gun away as it came up towards her face. It clattered loudly on the deck. She could hear her own desperate cries but not control them. It didn’t matter. What mattered now was fighting back. She doubled up, grabbed his shoulders, rolled with him, got some blows in. But he was in a fury so dark it gave him strength beyond anything she had ever felt. In seconds he had her pinned again, his big hands closed around her throat.

  In the terrifyingly calm place between losing the ability to breathe and blacking out, she spied Jamie standing ten feet behind Wallert. She knew the boy was screaming, pleading, but couldn’t hear him. Her face and neck felt hot with trapped blood, her legs spasming. Jamie had the gun pointed at the back of Wallert’s head. Jessica could see the boy’s mother in him then. She could see Blair Harbour standing over Kristi Zea and Adrian Orlov in their house eleven years earlier, begging, pleading, trying to save a life.

  Jessica felt a sadness rush through her. Not for her own life, which was sliding away from her in great, heavy chunks, like ice melting into the sea. The sadness was for him. He knew he had no choice. It was her or Wallert.

  Jessica watched as the boy baulked in desperation, turned the gun in his hands and hurled it by its barrel at the back of Wallert’s head.

  The aim was true. The butt of the pistol glanced off Wallert’s thick skull, hard enough to shock him, to break the chain of fingers around Jessica’s throat. She rolled and grabbed the gun as it landed, smacked Wallert hard against the side of his head.

  The man collapsed beside her. Jessica coughed and held the ground with both hands as her brain tried to deal with the sudden rush of oxygen. Jamie was standing there with his hands by his sides, sobbing madly. It occurred to Jessica how young he looked then. How terror had instantly stripped him of the strength and power and heart she had seen in his face seconds earlier. She rolled over beside Wallert’s body, dragged his arms behind him, cuffed his wrists.

  She beckoned the boy and he came, and she held him at the edge of the pool while he cried against her chest.

  ‘Great job, kid,’ she said. She gave him a few encouraging thumps on the back. ‘Great job.’

  BLAIR

  She was in the gas station for about five minutes before I noticed she was there. She was that quiet. That patient. The man I was serving, who completely blocked her from view, had to be six-and-a-half feet tall, a gentle giant counting out his gas and sandwich money in quarters, making little stacks of coins on the countertop beside my crossword.

  To merit: Deserve.

  I tidied the bowl of peaches by the register while I waited, checking the clock on the wall to calculate how long until the end of my shift. It was a Sunday. A Jamie visiting day. I’d taken the early shift with the hopes of getting him down to the pier for lunch, but at the rate my customer was going, I was starting to lose hope.

  When the big man turned away, I saw Jessica Sanchez standing in the middle of the Pump’n’Jump, reading a magazine from the rack. She was still bruised and battered from her ordeal a week earlier, when my son had saved her from an attack by a colleague of hers at her house in Brentwood.

  Sasha had told me about the attack on Jessica Sanchez while I laid low for a week in my apartment, recovering from my gunshot wound. I’d spent my days twitching at the sound of every car door slammed in the street, wincing when the phone rang. It was easy to convince myself that the police knew of my involvement in the events at San Chinto, though I’d done my best to disappear from the scene without leaving a trace of myself. After Sneak had driven away I’d abandoned Ada on the lawn I’d dragged her to, knowing she’d be fine, and gone back to the old man in the hoarder house. I’d unbound him, given him water, and dragged him out to his own front lawn, where emergency personnel responding to the car explosion would find him. Then I ran as best I could. Like a prison escapee fleeing into the growing dawn, I’d run as hard as my leg would allow, stopping two suburbs over when it seemed safe to hail a cab. I’d gone home and tended to the wound myself. For days I’d stayed inside, peering out the curtains, waiting to be arrested after a witness identified me, or my prints were found on the shovel in the tunnel, or Jessica Sanchez connected me to the murders, the heist.

  But the arrest never came. And now she was here.

  She saw that I was free, put her magazine down and came to the counter. I looked out at the lot, half-expecting to see squad cars screaming in. There were none.

  ‘I didn’t think I’d see you again,’ I said. I tried to collect my thoughts. ‘What . . . ah. What are you doing here?’

  ‘I just came to say hello,’ Jessica said, leaning on the counter. ‘And to see if you’d heard from Sneak.’

  ‘No,’ I said, truthfully. ‘I haven’t. If I had to guess I’d say she’s in Jamaica by now. We had a Jamaican chef in the kitchen at Happy Valley for a while, and she always liked the food. I heard they found Tasik’s car at the airport, so . . .’ I shrugged.

  ‘She’ll come back for Dayly’s funeral,’ Jessica said. ‘Surely.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Dayly’s body had been found flung down an embankment off a fire trail in the Glendora mountains, the same road where Al Tasik had been killed attempting to take Sneak and Jessica’s lives. Los Angeles news outlets had had a hell of a time trying to account for the dead cop’s actions, how they were connected to the body on the mountain, whether they were connected to the bodies in the tunnel, the bodies in Ada’s car. I assumed Jessica herself was trying to straighten the police out on the whole case.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ I said to Jessica. ‘If I do see Sneak, whether she comes back for her daughter’s funeral, or she comes back because she’s a drug addict and a thief and those kinds of people are creatures of habit, I won’t be telling you. No offence.’

  ‘None taken,’ she said. ‘I’m not trying to pursue Sneak.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘From what you told me on the phone, it sounds like Sneak murdered Tasik right in front of you. She drove over him multiple times.’

  ‘That’s what I told you, yes,’ Jessica said. ‘But that was only twenty-four hours after the event. I was still shocked. Traumatised.’ She shrugged helplessly. ‘I’m not sure I remember clearly exactly what happened that night,’ she said, avoiding my eyes. ‘All I know is that Sneak and I defended ourselves. Perhaps Sneak used the car to try to incapacitate Tasik, and then ran over him multiple times by accident. It wasn’t her car. She wouldn’t have been familiar with the controls. I wasn’t in the vehicle with her, so I don’t think I can assess her intention.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. A small smiled played at the corner of my mouth. ‘But what about her theft of John Fishwick’s hidden millions from the tunnels?’

  ‘What am I going to charge her with?’ Jessica asked. ‘I can’t prove the cash from the tunnel ever existed. I don’t even know if that was Sneak. All I’ve got from the witness accounts is a bruised and battered blonde woman at the
San Chinto scene putting two suitcases into a car. The suitcase in Ada’s car was full of shredded paper and explosives. It might be that wherever Sneak is, she’s flat broke.’

  I bit my tongue. Then I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘I think it was about fourteen million,’ I blurted.

  Jessica laughed. ‘I hope she doesn’t spend it all on blow.’

  ‘What about Ada?’ I asked. ‘Are you going to go after her?’

  ‘I’d like to see Ada behind bars again,’ Jessica said. ‘I’m not going to lie. She’s a dangerous person. But from what I hear, that’s going to be a losing battle for whoever takes on the case. She’s already out on bail. She has the best lawyer money can buy, of course, and she’s blaming the whole thing on her dead goons. They forced her to go there. They killed Lemon and Ramirez, and made her watch.’

  ‘Slick,’ I said.

  ‘The slickest,’ Jessica agreed.

  Jessica seemed to be examining my face, wanting to say more, wanting to promise, perhaps, that she also wasn’t coming after me. But that seemed obvious. There were no squad cars on the lot. No cuffs on her belt. I fiddled with the crossword pages.

  ‘How’s your face?’ I said eventually.

  ‘It’s all right.’ She touched the stitches in her cheek tentatively. ‘In fact, it’s better than all right. You come that close to death, leaving the fray with a punch in the face and a bruised throat feels like a win. Look, truth is, I wanted to come here today to see if you’ve got a minute to discuss me giving your kid a reward for his efforts. He saved my life. He deserves it.’

  ‘Oh, well.’ I smiled. ‘I don’t know. I guess I can get behind that. What were you thinking? He likes Nintendo games.’

  ‘I was thinking more along the lines of giving him his mother back,’ Jessica said.

  A splinter of pain lodged in my chest. I stood watching Jessica’s eyes as she recounted her recorded conversation with Kristi Zea to me. She told me about the bush outside the laundry window of the Orlov house. The forensic analysis of the bite mark in the cheese sandwich. Adrian’s brother and the cocaine in the bedroom on the night of the murder. I listened silently, my hands on the counter, hardly able to breathe. Jessica finished talking and wiped a tear from her eye discreetly.