Gina commented, “Suddenly you’ve got that thousand-yard stare.”
“Yeah.” Because I could all too easily envision my little boy as a bored, alienated teenager dropping down from the ceiling and making off with a sack of cash before the wide-eyed tellers could react. Oh, God, please let that not be my future. Note to self: Lesson for Petey: We don’t steal.
I came back to reality. “OK, shut up for a minute while I get George over here. We’ve all got to get together on this.”
“You shut up,” she said reflexively.
“Because until that murderous asshole is locked up, we can’t ever feel safe. I can’t bring Petey back. Can’t have my life back.”
I picked up the phone. “Plus I gotta call Sylvan and ask for a favor,” I remembered.
“The animal wrangler guy?”
“Yeah, and Chino again, and Yvonne. Yeah, that ought to do it.”
George said he’d come right over. Then I reached Sylvan. “Doing anything tomorrow night?” I asked.
“Want to catch a show?” he suggested.
“I want to catch something else,” I began.
Chapter 31 – Rita Rises to the Depths
“I need ten minutes of your time,” George Rowe told Dale the Whale, “but I have a select feeling it’ll be a good ten minutes.” Vargas, pleased to see him, indicated one of the chairs in the science room. “What do you have for me, Jimmer?”
It was past midnight now, on Friday night, and Rowe and Rita had finished working out their master plan. She was getting some sleep.
A couple of male vice presidents, stripped to the waist, were busy at a lab table, weighing mannitol and heroin on digital lab balances, and mixing the powders together in stainless steel bowls, like you’d mix flour and sugar to make a cake. It was a warm night.
“First of all, I sold the two ounces and I have your money.”
“That was quick. But I don’t handle funds directly, you know. Put it in that drawer there and I’ll have my account man take it in the morning.”
“OK. Second, most important, this: you know I like weapons, and you know I can bust into places. Your organization already has firepower, but if you want to get bigger, you don’t want any heavier of an arsenal lying around than what you absolutely need.”
“That’s right!”
“I propose firepower on a just-in-time basis. You don’t want to over-inventory. Like the heroin. You do just-in-time with that, mostly, right?”
“That’s right, too risky otherwise.”
“An opportunity came my way yesterday. So I put my brain to work on synergizing. And I came up with a plan for more guns, exactly when you need them, all hinging on reliable resupply.”
“What’s your plan?”
“Let me just say these three words: U.S. Olympic Shooting Team Training Camp.”
“Ahh.” The Whale sounded as though he’d just gulped a cold beer after five sets of tennis. “You think like I do, Jimmer.”
“I can come in tomorrow night, no earlier, and tell you all about it.”
“Why not right now? I’m not tired.”
Rowe said, “I needed to hear the interest in your voice. Now that I have, I’ll go ahead and procure a sample for you, to prove what I said.”
“Little Jimmer.”
“Yeah?”
“What is your goal?”
“To move up.”
“No, I mean your ultimate goal.”
“To be honest? You’re too smart not to know, Dale. Sure, I want your job someday.”
“Hahaha! That’s the honesty I would expect from a person like you! Come on in tomorrow night. Midnight sharp.”
Rowe let out a long breath. The most important point was established.
_____
“What about my boy?” Amaryllis wanted to know, her voice metallic with anxiety as she swept the mission’s long kitchen floor. “My Nathan behind bars, at the mercy of those thugs that do for the Whale.”
“George got word to him to commit some infraction that would get him put in isolation for a few days,” I explained, straightening a stack of clean towels. “He’s done it, and now George knows he’s safe. We can proceed.”
“What did he do?”
“I don’t know, he spit on the warden’s shoes! What difference does it make? Now, listen. Your first job is to make Wichita disappear tonight. Ideally for the whole evening, but she’s gotta be out of there no later than eleven-thirty. I know you own the day and the Whale owns the night, but you’ve got to work late tonight, you’ve got to require her help on some critical errand.”
Amaryllis’s broom had a wooden handle and bright purple straws. I’d never seen such a broom. “What about the rest of the guards?” she asked. “I can’t get rid of them all.”
“I know, I just want to reduce their numbers.”
“Well, Saturday night, most of them are going to be out making deliveries anyway.”
“OK. But see what you can do specifically about Wichita, she’s the loosest cannon among them.”
“Amen to that.”
_____
“Gina, you’re going to make sure Denny’s busy all night.” I talked to my sister as she chopped parsley for some tabouli she’d decided to make for lunch. Saturday now. The day of The Night. We were expecting a few friends. “Take a drive somewhere, then stop for dinner.” The fresh green herb smelled good in the kitchen.
“What do I do if he wants to bail early?”
“Well, you guys have been sleeping together, right?”
“I am not going to sleep with that creep tonight or ever again. I’m only doing this for you. I never want to see him again after tonight. My God.”
“You don’t have to. But you’ve got to keep him away from the mission at least through one a.m., and that’s cutting it close. Do whatever you have to do, just keep him with you.”
“OK.”
By late afternoon, everything was set:
Gina had scored tickets to tonight’s exclusive Earth Puppets benefit concert up in Ventura, featuring Shock Baines, Denny’s favorite jazz saxophonist. At the proper time, Amaryllis was going to send Wichita out with the ABC van to pick up five gallons of Tülky’s ice cream for the mission, which I’d remembered was Wichita’s favorite brand, which was going to be left over from a private party hosted by Khani Emberton, who was going to make sure she got pleasantly delayed in the process.
My friends Yvonne and Chino showed up, and after we ate Gina’s tabouli, they helped me get ready.
_____
By six o’clock I was alone in the apartment. I drank some water and stood on the patio, going over tonight’s sequence in my head. I listened to the sounds of North Curson Street, my little street in West Hollywood—cars whooshing by, sparrows chittering in the trees, a siren way off in the distance somewhere, a kid laughing out by the curb.
And as the lemon light of this Los Angeles late-summer day disintegrated into evening, my feelings arranged themselves in layers, like one of the big sandwiches at Canter’s or someplace: excitement laid over fear, laid over wondering, laid over feverish thinking to make sure I get everything right, plus mustard.
I waited, and the lights came up in the city around me. I thought about my fellow humans here in Los Angeles. Night in L.A!: everybody with their dreams, everybody with their heart’s desires. The sky deepens into that blue-vein color and you evaluate your day, what you’ve done and—you can’t help it, you relax because the earth is relaxing, even if you can only allow yourself a little relaxation, because you have much to do yet. Because everybody knows night here in Los Angeles is unlike night anywhere else.
You look out for excitement when it’s nighttime. Excitement could be coming straight at you—in the form of an out-of-control druggie driving a carjacked Porsche at 110 mph—or in the form of a handsome stranger in the candy line at the movies who turns to you with a smile and a funny question.
Movies, movies, movies. You’ll be driving at night and you�
�ll gain altitude on an overpass and you’ll see searchlights sweeping the sky at a premiere, and your impulse is to follow those swinging cones of energy to their roots. Something new is happening there, something is happening that has never happened before.
_____
George, as Jimmer, picked up me, as DeeDee, at ten o’clock, and we drove to MacArthur Park where I would catch a bus to South Central right away. He would get moving half an hour later.
On the way, to break the tension, I asked George how it was going living at Gonzalo’s.
“Oh, fine,” he said. “I was looking online at apartments the other day.”
“If all my stuff had gotten wrecked in a fire, I’d be so lost. What’s been the hardest?” I asked, thinking I could surprise him with something, buy him a little something.
“You know,” he said, “I had stuff, and I liked some of it quite a lot, but I just don’t bond tightly with property. You can replace just about—” He stopped.
“What is it?”
“I do miss one thing.” He shook his head at himself. “Funny. A little blue china bowl I had. Just a little blue bowl from when I was little. My mother gave me soup in it when I was sick.” He smiled inwardly.
My heart turned for him. It was getting harder and harder to keep my emotional distance.
“Boy, it’s been hot,” he said, changing the subject.
“Yeah, the dog days. I want to see Sirius.”
“The Dog Star—in Canis Major. You’ll have to stay up pretty late to get a glimpse of it, I think.”
Then he got quiet. “You know,” he warned, “once I get in there with him, it could go very fast.”
“Yes. We’ll all be ready.”
He shook his head. “This plan’s got way too many moving parts for my taste.” Then he brightened. “Well, nothing’s fail-safe, is it?”
_____
At eleven-thirty, I tiptoed up to the ABC Mission through the back alley, as I had the last time. Now, at this hour, the exterior door to the kitchen corridor was locked.
This time, however, I had a key.
And I was glad for that, because of the feral dog pack; I heard them baying along the edges of the grown-over athletic fields out back.
I slipped inside, toting a duffel bag containing clothing and a few supplies. I didn’t intend to meet up with anyone, but I’d gone to the trouble of becoming DeeDee just in case. If someone accosted me, I could be searching, confused, for the dormitory or a bathroom.
Amaryllis had suggested I hide in the small kitchen office, but I saw a light under the door—perhaps a volunteer working late—and kept moving silently on my ugly rubber shoes. I didn’t want to have to talk my way out of anything. All I needed was a place to change identities and wait until I was needed. My heart was pounding, and I realized I was beginning to like the feeling of adrenaline.
I skirted the dormitory area, hearing the homeless guys snoring and coughing like a thousand grampas with TB. The women were quieter, but not by a whole lot, I have to tell you.
I kept going, away from any activity. At a place where two corridors joined, I heard a couple of guards chatting, coming my way, and I quickly slipped through an unlocked door. Which turned out to be the stairwell to the basement.
I had seen—and auditioned for—enough teen-scream flicks to know Don’t go down the basement, but I had little choice at the moment.
The institutional-cleanliness smell of the mission gave way to that verging-on-turpentine smell of mold in a dry climate. In California, you rarely smell the typical dull mold reek in dark places; here it’s a thinner, old-dirt type of smell.
I descended the concrete steps, the metal railing cold under my hand. The lights, a series of caged bulbs, were on. Hm. The stairwell emptied into a concrete-block corridor, which led ahead to the main boiler room or whatever it was. Now I was hidden and I knew I didn’t have to be here long.
I felt calmer.
Until I saw a bright red spatter on the concrete floor.
And another one.
Just as I had done when, seeing Kip Cubitt being beaten, I rushed into the street without even stopping to go Oh, God, I quickened my pace, following the blood trail, so hideously fresh, glistening wet, so very totally red.
And I realized that the blood was not exactly in droplets; it had been tracked along, smeared from the soles of someone’s shoes.
The boiler room was a tight mishmash of pipes and ducts, rusted tanks and rivets and gauges. There were five-gallon buckets here and there, drizzled with the institutional gray paint they’d held, and in one place it seemed a few of them had been arranged in a little meeting circle.
The blood trail disappeared beneath a steel door that was held shut by a sliding bolt the size of my arm.
I put my ear to the door. Nothing.
I slid back the bolt.
A scuffing sound as I opened the heavy door, and a soft moan.
As the door swung open, I saw it had been lined inside with thick drywall, with an air space about two inches wide between the drywall and the inner surface of the door. The doorway was gasketed with weather stripping.
Someone was cringing on the floor in there. It was a woman, her back against the bright white drywall, beneath a dangling lightbulb, bleeding from the face. The walls of this soundproof chamber were no longer pristine, as George had seen them; one awful smear of blood traced an arc away from the woman, as if her assailant had brushed a hand against the wall upon leaving her.
The woman’s hands were cupped at her face. Her legs stuck out in front of her like doll legs, black shoes pointing straight up, and she wore a blue service dress, and her black hair was done in a bun, with two tendrils coming down from the temples. She shrank from me. I reached and tilted the bulb to see her better.
“Neneng?”
She mumbled something through her blood-wet hands. Her forearms were bloody up to the elbows, and her wrists, I saw, were cuffed with a plastic zip tie. Blood had dripped from the tips of her elbows into her lap. I saw, also, that her ankles had been bound with a zip tie.
Above her head was the steel ring, bolted into the wall, that George had mentioned. My feet sank a little as I stepped in: an incongruous plush rug, in corporate-office beige—another sound muffler, just as George had said. Neneng hadn’t been fixed to the ring, but the simple sight of it made my flesh creep.
I realized she didn’t know me in my DeeDee makeup. “I’m Rita,” I said. “I came to see you and Mrs. Keever.”
She grunted in comprehension.
I squatted and tried to see where her wound was. She was bleeding from the center of her face. For a moment I thought, oh, somebody punched her in the nose, but then I saw that she had no nose.
It was simply gone, sliced off.
My stomach dropped, and I rocked backward from the impact of the sight.
She was breathing mostly through her mouth, but now and then some air escaped from the hole in her face, bubbling blood as it went.
“Oh, God, oh, God,” I murmured, my whole body cold with horror.
“Help me,” she gurgled around her hands.
I got out a small towel from my duffel and folded it into a pad. She pressed it to her face as I rummaged again in my bag, wildly, listening for anyone coming. In a few seconds I grabbed the fingernail clippers I knew to be in the bottom, the only cutting tool I had.
I set to work on the zip tie around her wrists. It was tight, and the blood made things slippery. There wasn’t the amount of blood you’d expect at a slaughterhouse, but it was in the way, and I wondered whether this woman could simply bleed out right here, direct pressure or no direct pressure.
Her shoes scraped anxiously against each other as I worked. I heard my own breathing in my ears, and I smelled the wet dankness of her blood.
“What happened?” I asked. It was slow work using the nail clipper, its tiny jaws gnawing away the tough plastic bit by bit.
“They surprise me. They take me.”
“They who?”
She shook her head. “They ask me—uhhhh—my people in the Philippines. I tell them of my family. They ask about drugs—they think I send drugs. I no send—guh”—she gulped, swallowing blood—“I no send. They say I a drug dealer, they ask who, who, where, where send money. I say no, no. The fat man cut me. I no understand.”
“Oh, my God.”
“He say you sit, you think. I come back.”
“Oh, Neneng.” I worked the tiny clippers as hard as I could.
“It OK.”
“What?”
“He no cut my fingers. Help me leave here before he come back.”
I hurried.
Chapter 32 – Rats Hate Pandemonium
George Rowe knew everything was set. He had taken care of his final preparation many hours earlier, at dawn, when he had quietly entered the mission to meet someone and do a bit of work. He allowed himself the hopeful thought that when all this was over, maybe he and Rita and Petey could take a little vacation, maybe a camping trip. They all enjoyed the outdoors.
For good measure and the hell of it, he’d told the Whale, “I’d like this meeting to be private, just this once. I trust you a hundred and twenty percent, but you understand I can’t run risks, what with vice presidents I don’t know very well yet.”
Vargas had said, “All right.”
“Ah, good. I was afraid you’d say, ‘I trust these individuals with my life, so if—’”
“Oh, no,” interrupted the Whale. “Actually, I don’t trust them equally myself.”
The shirtless vice presidents, whom Rowe realized were shirtless to make it harder for them to steal heroin as they cut it, had listened without comment.
The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Page 59
