by Devin Hanson
Silence was my only response. I didn’t need to turn back to know she had disappeared again. At the other end of the block, I saw the panel van turn onto the street and slow to a stop in front of the gates. At last, something was happening!
I stood and shaded my eyes against the sun, trying to see what was going on. David stepped out of the side entrance where he had entered, the blonde woman at his side. They seemed engrossed in their discussion and paid no attention to the van.
Behind them, dent-face exited and turned to walk up the sidewalk toward where I was watching. Then, moving smoothly, he pivoted and extended his arm out toward David. David jerked and collapsed to the sidewalk, his back arched in a convulsion.
I gasped, but there was nothing I could do, I was a hundred yards away. The panel van swayed on its shocks and I saw the marid jump to the curb. Sunlight glinted on something and the blonde fell to the ground. Then the marid snatched David up and threw him bodily into the van. Dent-face and the marid climbed in and the van left the curb smoothly.
The whole thing had taken less than ten seconds, from start to finish. The van was coming up the street toward me. The driver hadn’t peeled away from the curb or accelerated past the speed limit. Except for the blonde woman lying on the sidewalk, there was nothing to draw anyone’s eye.
What should I do? I jogged to the crosswalk and hammered the button. The van was close now, and I turned my back as soon as I could make out Eric in the driver’s seat.
Shit, shit, shit! The light changed and traffic started moving on Grand again. I swallowed against my dry throat and turned around cautiously. The van had pulled up into the crosswalk with its blinker on, waiting for an opening in the traffic to make a right turn.
I crossed the street, keeping my head down and my hair in front of my face, hoping that Eric wouldn’t look in his mirror and recognize me. Then I was behind the vehicle, and out of sight.
The panel van was a contractor’s vehicle. The logo of an electrician’s company was blazoned on the back, the stencil broken in places where a ladder was bolted on. On impulse, I took my phone and jammed it behind the ladder in the gap above a bolt, between the riser and the door. Then, before I could change my mind, the van pulled away and merged with the traffic.
I turned and sprinted down Temple. The blonde woman was laying on her side and didn’t move when I skidded to a halt beside her. I dropped to my knees and rolled her onto her back. The hilt of a knife protruded from her chest, centered in a dark, wet splotch on her black blouse.
“Oh, shit. Shit!”
Her eyes fluttered open and she coughed wetly. “David…” she whispered.
She was alive! “Take it easy,” I said softly. One of her hands reached up to her chest and I caught her fingers before she could feel the hilt of the knife. “I’ve got you. Where’s your phone?”
“Purse,” she sighed. “What happened?” She coughed, and her eyes sprang open in sudden pain.
I fumbled through her purse and found her cellphone. She touched the hilt of the knife with her other hand and I grabbed her wrist. “Don’t touch it. You’re going to be fine. I promise.”
I called 911 on her phone and cut the operator off halfway through her opening statement. “I have a lung puncture stab wound on Temple and Grand, just outside the cathedral courtyard on Temple Street. She’s awake, but in shock. Stab wound is high on the left side, looks like it missed the heart by an inch or so.”
The blonde woman grabbed my ankle, painfully hard. I looked down at her, ignoring the operator’s response.
“No hospitals,” she whispered. Blood stained her lips.
Yeah right. I hung up the phone. “You’re going to die without immediate medical care,” I told her. “There’s a fire station four blocks from here. You’ll be in an ambulance in less than five minutes. Just hang in there.”
I looked around. We had started to gather an audience. I pointed at a priest in the back. “You! Get over here. Hold her hand. Keep her talking and awake. You!” This time I pointed to a man in jogging clothes. “Get up the street to Grand, direct the ambulance this way when it shows up. Move!”
The jogger ran off and the priest knelt down on the other side of the woman, muttering a prayer.
“Hey!” He looked up at me, affronted. “Knock that shit off. She’s not in God’s hands yet. Keep her awake. Slap her if you have to.” I stood up.
“Where are you going?” he demanded.
“I have to go. Don’t leave her! And don’t touch the knife, she’ll bleed out in seconds if you do.”
I was parked a block and a half away. I tucked my head down and broke into a sprint. They had David. It was my fault. I should have called him as soon as I had started getting a bad feeling. I didn’t know what they wanted from him, but I was pretty sure they hadn’t abducted him so they could have a fifth player for poker night.
I still had the blonde’s phone though. I dialed Ethan’s number from memory.
“Hello?” he said when he picked up. “Who is this?”
“Ethan!” I gasped. “I need your help!”
“Alex? What’s happening? What’s going on?”
“There’s no time for that! Listen, I need you to track my phone. Can you do that?”
“I don’t have a warrant for that,” he said dubiously. “What happened to your phone?”
“Damn your warrant!” I shouted. “Don’t tell me you don’t have a way of doing it!”
“Take it easy, Alex,” he muttered. “Are you running somewhere?”
“Yes, I’m running. My phone, Ethan!”
“Okay, okay. You have an iPhone, right?”
“Yeah.” I reached the parking garage where I was parked. The elevator was heading up already. I didn’t have time to wait for it. “I’m going into a parking garage. I might lose you.”
“Okay. That’s easy enough. I just need your password to your iCloud account.”
I could hear his fingers rattling against a keyboard. I started running up the ramp. My breath was starting to come hard. I gave him my password and had to repeat myself twice before he heard me clearly.
“All right. Just give me a second here… Got it. Your phone is on the freeway, on the 101 heading west. Now tell me what is going on.”
“David’s been abducted.” I reached my scooter and jammed the key in the ignition. “They stabbed the woman he was with, left her bleeding out on the sidewalk.”
I heard him cursing but lost the details of it as I jammed my helmet on and wedged the phone up next to my face. It hurt a little where it pressed into the bruises on my cheekbone, but I couldn’t very well ride my scooter one-handed.
“Sorry,” I said once I had the phone situated. “I missed that.”
“I’m coming,” Ethan said.
“Forget it,” I shook my head. “This is not your fight.”
“Bullshit, Alex. He’s my client, too, and I’m sure as hell not going to let you go alone. You can’t stop me. Either I’m coming, or I call the cops.”
I gritted my teeth. This wasn’t just some gang mugging. There was a marid involved, and who knew how many other djinn might be waiting for us? As bad as getting Ethan involved would be, having the cops mixed up in it would be even worse. The only way that would end was in bloodshed.
“Fine. I thought you were sick, though?” I gunned my scooter out of the parking garage and got onto Grand. As I passed by Temple, I saw an ambulance by the cathedral courtyard entrance. I hoped the blonde would survive her stab wound. I didn’t want to have to explain to the cops why I had possession of a dead woman’s phone.
“I’ll be fine.” I heard his car door thump and the audio quality changed as he transferred over to Bluetooth. “You want me to pick you up?”
“Are you at home?”
“I was.” Distantly, I heard his tires squeal as he took a turn too fast.
“Are they still on the 101?”
“Yes.”
I pictured a map of LA in my mind and trie
d to guess where they were going. If they stayed on the 101, they could be heading somewhere north. Burbank? Santa Clarita? Or even further north, like San Francisco? But then again, there was no reason they had to keep to that freeway. There was a half-dozen interchanges that could lead them anywhere.
“Wherever they’re going, I don’t think it’ll be far,” I said, thinking out loud. “If I was them, I wouldn’t want to keep David unsecured more than a few minutes.”
I finally made it onto the freeway and opened my scooter up. I wished I had sprung for a real motorcycle. I could hit sixty-five comfortably, but any faster than that and the scooter started feeling sketchy.
“So, if we’re following your phone,” Ethan asked, “whose phone are you using?”
“The blonde woman’s.”
“The one who was stabbed?”
“I didn’t have a ton of options, okay?”
“What happened to your phone, anyway? Did David have it?”
“I stuck it on the back of the van.”
Ethan whistled. “I’ll need to hear that story in more detail someday.” I heard the growl of his car accelerating up the onramp. “Want to meet up? How about the Jons grocery off the Santa Monica exit?”
“I know it,” I sighed.
“I’ll be there in ten,” Ethan said, and hung up.
Ethan was waiting for me when I pulled into the grocery parking lot. I grabbed a spot near the back to park my scooter and jogged over to his car, still unbuckling my helmet. Traffic on the 101 was never ideal, and the daily rush-hour congestion was just beginning to start.
He popped the door for me and I slid in, picking up his laptop from the seat where he had the GPS tracking on my phone open. Without a word, Ethan pulled out of the parking lot and turned onto Santa Monica going west.
I pulled off my helmet and caught the blonde’s phone as it fell out. I sighed and shook my hair out, and only then did I get a good look at Ethan’s face. He was pale and grim, with deep circles around his eyes. An unhealthy flush mottled his cheeks.
“Wow, Ethan, you don’t look so good.”
Ethan smiled tightly. “I don’t feel so good either, but this is an emergency.”
“You should be in a bed, not chasing after—”
“It’s either me or the cops, Alex.”
“Shit.”
I felt bad. Not only had I let David get abducted, but now I was leading Ethan into danger as well. I turned my attention to the laptop. The van had taken a freeway exit and was moving slowly through an area I vaguely pegged as belonging to the movie-making complex only a mile or two away from us.
“You knew,” I accused Ethan. “They got off on Santa Monica too.”
He flashed me a smile. “I told you, we’re in this together.”
Rush hour traffic was getting worse and slowed our speed down to a crawl. We were still fifteen minutes away from my phone when it finally stopped moving.
“Bingo,” I said and tapped the screen. “Looks like a sound stage. Romaine and Citrus, right after Highland.”
“What’re they up to? Are they filming a hostage video?”
“Or maybe they just want some place soundproof,” I said darkly. “They knifed that blonde woman in broad daylight. These guys aren’t messing around, Ethan.”
Ethan leaned over my lap and popped the glove compartment. A weathered 1911 gleamed in its holster, the harness webbing wrapped around it. I kneed the glove compartment shut again hastily.
“Are you insane? We are not going in shooting.”
“They left a woman for dead, Alex. I’m not going to just ask them nicely to let David go. Think of it as insurance. I have a license to carry the gun, even in LA.”
“Do you have a license to kill, too? If you shoot the place up, the cops will get involved.”
“Only if necessary. But I won’t go in unprepared. He’s my client, remember.”
I wanted to argue more, but then Ethan was pulling over to the side of the road and parking. According to the GPS, my phone was in the lot behind the sound stage.
The stage itself was unlabeled except for a street address. The only design considerations that went into the stage was a blunt requirement for space. The walls were poured concrete, the windows tiny and high. The fresco detail trimming the building seemed more of an afterthought than an integral design component. The slightly off-beige of the building was a patchwork of slightly mismatched colors where graffiti had been painted over.
“Looks like it’s out of business,” Ethan observed. He opened the glove compartment again and grabbed his gun.
“Fuck,” I muttered.
Ethan ignored me and ejected the magazine, checked the action and holstered the gun again. His movements were sure and quick. “You should start carrying.”
I coughed a laugh. “Yeah. How about no.” Most of the things I dealt with in the usual course of my job wouldn’t give a damn about a gun, present circumstances being the exception. Despite what Ethan seemed to think, ninety-nine percent of my business was pretty tame.
“It’s a tool like any other,” Ethan said patiently. “With proper training and practice, guns aren’t dangerous.”
“Except for the people getting shot,” I grimaced. “No thanks. We can’t all be ex-military.”
He shrugged and got the holster webbing around his shoulders, then pulled his jacket on over it. “Ready?”
“Not really.” I opened my door and got out of the car.
“First things first,” Ethan said, “we get back your phone. I don’t want them tracking you down later if they find out who you are.”
Oh. Shit. I hadn’t thought of that. “Uh, Ethan. There’s something I forgot to tell you.”
“What?”
“The people that abducted David… your girlfriend is part of the crew.”
“What?” Ethan’s eyes widened. “You waited until now to tell me?!”
“Sorry, it slipped my mind.”
“It slipped—God damn it, Alex!”
“What do you want from me?” I threw my hands up. “I just saw a woman get stabbed in the chest and I’ve been racing to catch up with the people who did it ever since! I’m sorry, I’m not used to this sort of thing, okay?”
Ethan pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re right. Okay. It’s my fault. I should have asked what you knew. So. What else do I need to know?”
“There are four of them,” I said. “I think.”
“You think?”
“I only saw four, all right? Elaida, a man in a suit, a driver named Eric, and a big guy who looks like a weight lifter.”
“You know the name of the driver?”
I shrugged. “He was my Uber driver. Twice.”
Ethan’s eyebrow quirked upward, then he frowned as the implications hit him. “This wasn’t an attack of opportunity. This was planned.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
“Well, this changes things.”
“Not to say I told you so, but you have shit taste in women, Ethan.” I felt a cold puff of breath against the back of my neck. Soft laughter tickled my ear and I shivered.
“Really? You’re going to bust my balls now?”
I shrugged, ignoring my mother’s amusement. “I’m just saying. It would probably be a bad idea to let them know who we are. That means we need my phone, and you need to cover your face.”
“What about you?”
I opened the car door and retrieved my helmet. “I’m good. They… ah… they already have seen my helmet. So, no big deal, right?”
Ethan stared at me for a long moment. “When this is over, we’re going to have a long chat, you and I.”
“Oh, come on, dad, save the lecture, okay?”
He scowled at me, then went and popped the trunk of his car. He dug inside and came up with an oily button-up shirt. “It’s not a motorcycle helmet, but this will work.”
Ethan started wrapping it around his head and I touched his arm to stop him. “Might want to save it until we�
��re off the street. You cover up like that now and someone will call the cops for sure.”
“Right. Okay. Here we go, then.”
I followed Ethan across the street and we walked down Citrus toward the lot entrance. The lot was empty of cars, but giant shipping crates were stacked on ranked scaffolding around the lot, with a few semitrailers parked in a row in the back. The panel van was parked next to a loading dock, and I pointed it out to Ethan.
“There, that’s the van.”
The fence around the lot was a ten-foot, welded-steel job, with outward curving spikes on the tops of the vertical bars. A man-door was next to the closed vehicle gate, locked with a keypad.
“I don’t suppose you have the code?” Ethan asked.
I shook my head.
“Never mind. Look, down here.” He walked to the end of the lot and gestured at the neighboring parking lot’s fence. It was two-thirds the height of the other lot fence, made of horizontal rails, and about as easy to climb as a ladder. It butted up against the unclimbable fence around the lot, offering a platform for anyone marginally athletic to leap the fence.
I shared a grin with Ethan. “Neighbors, huh?”
“Ladies first.”
I flicked him off and scrambled up the short fence and balanced on top. The taller fence came up to my chest. I grabbed an outward-curving bar and threw a leg up, getting my foot on the point of a bar. Then, with a grunt, I levered myself up and over the curved spikes. I landed hard and felt the sting through the soles of my feet.
“Okay, your turn.”
Ethan climbed the parking lot fence and simply vaulted the curved spikes, coming down next to me with considerably more grace than I had managed. He quickly wrapped his shirt over his face and used the sleeves to tie it off behind his head.
“How do I look?”
“Like an idiot.”
“Jealously, Alex. You gotta watch that.”
We hurried across the lot to the parked van and I recovered my phone from the ladder. It was a huge relief to have it back in my possession again. Not only did it have what was left of my business on it, but it had my driver’s license and credit cards in the case. Without it, I was a bum on the streets. I snapped a quick picture of the van’s license plates, then I tucked my phone into an inside pocket on my jacket and zipped the pocket up. I wasn’t going to lose it again.