Unseen #2: Door to Alternity

by Nancy Holder

  “But he didn’t do it,” Cordelia inserted. She was leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, listening carefully to everything everyone was saying. “That’s not fair.”

  “Fairness has very little to do with gang mentality,” Riley offered. “They think they’re all about fairness, but their version of it is pretty twisted.”

  “What’s the Mexican gangs’ beef with the Russians?” Angel asked, pondering. He was trying to pay attention, but part of his mind was wandering, thinking about the strangeness of the whole situation. Buffy, sitting so close by, didn’t even remember the last full day they’d spent together—while he’d never forget it. Feeling her, touching her, being with her . . . Now she was with Riley, who sat on the floor in front of her chair, his head resting against her knees, in a definite possessive-boyfriend way.

  There was no denying that it hurt.

  “As far as I can tell, it’s primarily economic,” Wesley replied with authority. The ex-Watcher had blossomed since moving here; Buffy and Willow had barely taken him seriously back in Sunnydale, but here they listened carefully to every word he said. “These gangs have run large portions of Los Angeles for years, even for generations in some cases. Other gangs have come along, such as the Crips and the Bloods, but the Mexican-Americans have always managed to hold onto their neighborhoods, their ‘turf,’ as it were.”

  The others nodded. That was the L.A. everyone knew and did not love.

  “But now the Russians have moved in with considerable amounts of money and muscle, and they don’t have any respect for the old rules or the neighborhood boundaries. The Mexicans take offense at this, and they’re striking back,” Wesley concluded.

  “But so far, no innocents caught in the crossfire?” Angel queried.

  “So far, no.” Wesley moved his shoulders as he regarded Angel. “Subject to change at any moment, I’m certain.”

  Willow raised her right hand as if she were back in school. “Umm, this is all sad and everything, but what does it have to do with finding Nicky and Salma?”

  “We don’t know yet, Willow,” Angel told her, glad to have something to contribute. “But Nicky is involved with one of the Mexican gangs. So there might be a connection there. At the same time, teenagers are disappearing all over town—Cordelia said she found two more reported cases online, and there might be more that either haven’t been reported to the police yet, or that they’re not releasing. There may not be any association between the gang war and the disappearances, but the links are there so we need to check it out.”

  Willow nodded. Then she brightened. “Maybe there’s some kind of spell I could do to enlighten us.”

  “If there is, Will,” Buffy said, “then you should do it as soon as you can. A little enlightening would do us all a lot of good.”

  “A little sleep would do us all a lot of good,” Cordelia added. “And can I just remind you all that you’re in my apartment, which makes sleep pretty much of a lost cause for me?”

  “We’ll be out of your hair soon, Cordy,” Angel assured her, as Willow nodded eagerly, covering a yawn. “We just thought it was important to get everybody on the same page as fast as possible.”

  “Because of the poof factor,” Buffy added helpfully.

  “I’m not even sure we’re on the same book,” Riley said. “I’m still not convinced that these cases are related at all. Except for Nicky’s tie to the Echo Park gang—”

  “The Echo Park Band?” Wesley asked, perking up. “That’s one of the gangs involved in the war. Apparently they have already made some sort of overtures to the Russians, in hopes of ending this conflict before more lives are lost.”

  “So that’s a pretty strong connection right there,” Angel said. The rest of the group looked more convinced. “You guys go back to Salma’s family’s house. See if you can find out any more about what might have happened to Salma. Willow, do your spell. I’ll be looking into the gang thing from the streets, while Wesley and Cordelia try to find out what they can about any historical disappearances of kids or teenagers.” He wanted everyone to get some rest, but part of him couldn’t help wanting Riley to get out of there—and Buffy too, if they were just going to hold hands and play with each other’s hair all night.

  “Kind of a Pied Piper thing, maybe?” Willow asked.

  “Maybe,” Angel agreed.

  “Sounds good,” Buffy said. “We’ll talk again in the morning—later in the morning, the part where the sun is up—and see what we’ve come up with. In the meantime, let’s hope no one gets hurt.”

  “I’m sleeping first,” Cordelia announced. “I can’t even keep my eyes open, much less sit at a computer keyboard and type, type, type, while Wesley leans over my shoulder and breathes all over me.”

  As if on cue, the front door opened.

  “Dennis, be polite,” she admonished.

  “I do not breathe all over you,” Wesley said, as everyone stood and began to drift tiredly to the door.

  “You do,” she shot back. “And by the way, the cinnamon-scented Altoids are definitely the way to go.”

  “Good night,” Buffy said.

  Riley put his hand on her shoulder, and they left.

  Angel stood at the doorway, and watched her go.

  Nicky turned to Che, who pulled his midnight black Porsche Boxter into a parking space on the street. “You sure about this, man?” he asked the leader of the Echo Park Band.

  “How many times you got to ask me that? The man wants to talk. We talk. We don’t get satisfaction or respect, we walk. Simple as that.”

  Nicky opened the passenger door of the little car, unfolding himself onto the sidewalk. Che had stopped in front of a café, closed at this hour and sealed tight with a metal grille. The café comprised the ground floor of an expensive downtown office building, though, and on the nineteenth floor, lights burned despite the hour.

  “Just seems like if the guy really wants to have a serious talk, he’d meet us in the daytime or something.”

  Che rolled his eyes and moved his shoulders. He stuffed his keys into the front pocket of his tight black leather pants. “You know what these Russian dudes are like, dog. He’s just jackin’ us around a little, make us come to him, make us operate on his schedule. We let him think he’s pullin’ the strings until we make our demands, then he’ll find out we’re serious people. Anyway, dude’s kid got killed, macho, he probably ain’t sleeping too good these days.”

  Next to the coffee shop, double glass doors led into the building’s lobby. They passed through unlocked doors, and a sleepy-looking guard appraised them from behind a deep counter as they entered.

  “Help you?” he asked.

  “We’re here to see Teodor Nokivov,” Che told him. “We’re expected.”

  The guard nodded. “Nineteen,” he said. “Elevator’s right there.”

  Nicky and Che crossed to it, their shoes resounding off the marble floor in the quiet of the predawn morning. As they approached, one of the cars opened up for them. They stepped into the elevator, and the 19 button glowed.

  “Guard’s operating the elevator from the desk,” Che said as the door slid shut. “Other buttons probably wouldn’t work even if we wanted ’em to.”

  “Let’s find out,” Nicky suggested. He pressed the button marked 17. Nothing happened.

  Che fixed Nicky with a dark stare. “You’re strapped, right?”

  Nicky touched the right outside pocket of his windbreaker to answer in the affirmative. He had a 9mm semiauto in there, and three clips on the other side.

  “That’s cool,” Che said. “You don’t ever want to meet these guys without some protection.” The elevator rose and rushed them past the seventeenth floor, stopping on the nineteenth.

  The elevator door gapped open. Three big men in dark suits waited outside it, hands held behind their backs.

  One of them met Che’s gaze, then Nicky’s. “My name is Karol Stokovich,” he told them in thickly accented English. He had long dark hair,
slicked down and pulled back into a ponytail. To Nicky, he looked like a parody of a Colombian gangster from the eighties, someone he’d seen on Miami Vice back in the day. But the flat expression in his eyes showed no trace of humor. “Mr. Nokivov asked me to meet you.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Che said. “To pay our respects and see what we can do to make a peace.”

  “You’ll have to talk to Mr. Nokivov about that,” Stokovich said. “These gentlemen are going to search you. Do you have anything you’d like to warn them about before they do?”

  “I got a piece which I don’t give up for nobody,” Che replied. “It’s in a belt holster at my back. That’s all I’m carrying.”

  Nicky tapped at his pocket again. “A nine,” he said. “I keep it.”

  “What if I told you that you can’t get in to see Mr. Nokivov with your weapons?”

  “Then, adios, ” Che responded. “No talk, no peace. I don’t think that’s what Mr. Nokivov wants. But we ain’t handing over our straps to nobody.”

  “That’s what he thought you would say. You keep those weapons. These men will make sure you don’t have any others that we don’t know about. Fair?”

  Nicky watched for Che’s response. Che nodded, removed his Sig Sauer automatic from its holster and held it in the air, with both hands raised. One of the Russians moved in to pat him down. Nicky followed Che’s example, raising his own gun high. The other Russian thug frisked him.

  After a moment, both Russians stopped, nodded to Stokovich.

  “Replace your weapons,” Stokovich instructed Che and Nicky. “We’ll be in the room with you. If you reach for the guns, you’re dead.”

  “Cool,” Che said, sounding casual about the whole thing. Nicky was impressed by the way he kept his head at times like these. He aspired to the same kind of composure. His Night of the Long Knives had certainly helped—even though the invincibility of the one-night spell had worn off now, he felt a confidence that he had never possessed before, a certainty of purpose and of his own abilities. He would always remember the way he’d felt, strolling through the oil field fire he had ignited, feeling the heat rush around him, smelling the hair singe off his body, and knowing that he could feel no pain from it, that it couldn’t kill him no matter what.

  Stokovich led the way out of the hall and into a lushly furnished office suite. The blue carpet was thick and welcoming, the wooden fixtures gleamed with polish. Nicky mentally compared this place to the barrio houses the Echo Park Band, and his own Latin Cobras, used for their headquarters, and decided that the Russians were doing something right. This looked like his own father’s corporate offices, not like a headquarters for a bunch of gangsters. He was used to wealth and comfortable in such surroundings, but he doubted that Che shared his background.

  They kept following Stokovich through the office suite. He paused before double doors of a rich dark wood. Then, with a glance back at Che and Nicky, he pushed the doors open and stepped back to let the guests enter first.

  They went into a plush conference room. A vast table, the size of some of the entire rooms Nicky’s fellow Cobras slept in, dominated the room. Leather chairs were arrayed around it, the buttery softness of them apparent even from the doorway. At the far end of the table sat the man that Nicky knew was Teodor Nokivov, head of L.A.’s Russian Mafiya. A legal pad and an assortment of manila file folders littered the tabletop in front of him.

  As they entered, Nokivov set down the Mont Blanc pen with which he’d been writing something on the legal pad, and rose. “Welcome,” he said with a broad smile. A powerful-looking man, his chest was deep and his shoulders wide, straining his expensive suit. His kept his thick, steel-gray hair neatly trimmed and combed back from a ruddy, heavy-jowled face. His prominent, bulbous nose reminded Nicky of nothing so much as a new potato. “Be it ever so humble,” he said, spreading his hands as if to indicate the conference room surrounding them.

  Behind him, Nicky was aware that the other three Russians had entered the room and closed the doors. But he focused on Nokivov, who came around the table, hand extended in friendship. Che took the hand and gave it a quick, nervous squeeze, then released. The Russian continued on to Nicky. Nicky offered his hand, and Nokivov took it in a firm grip, touching Nicky’s forearm with his other hand as he shook.

  “Nice place,” Nicky said casually.

  “Thank you. The beauty of America,” Nokivov said. “Back home, when I lived there, only the most influential party members had offices like this.”

  “Were you an influential party member?” Nicky asked him.

  “Me?” Nokivov shook with silent laughter. “No, not me. Not then. And after, of course, the Soviet Union fell apart. Under the rulers we’ve had since then, Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Yeltsin, and now Putin, all the rules are changed. Who knows where I would be if I were back there? Prison? Siberia? Head of the KGB?”

  Che didn’t seem to know what to make of Nokivov’s monologue, so he just launched into the speech he’d already prepared. Nicky had heard it twice in the Boxter on the way over, although it had been spoken more forcefully then.

  “Mr. Nokivov, we’re here to express our sorrow for the death of your son, and our sadness that members of your organization, and ours, are now dying in the streets. We want to work out a way that we can both operate and share the wealth that Los Angeles has to offer.”

  Nokivov chuckled once, but without any humor in his laugh. “Sharing the wealth is a concept close to my heart,” he said. “I am, after all, a Communist. One who has taken an interest in many aspects of capitalism, but a Communist nonetheless.” The smile vanished from his face. “However,” he continued, sounding suddenly angry, “you are not here to negotiate a deal. I am a Communist, but I am also a father, and my son has been taken from me. I have reason to believe that he was killed by a Mexican—maybe the one who was arrested and then, inexplicably, set free, or maybe another one. But his murder is a crime that must be avenged, and if the killer doesn’t come forward it will be avenged with the spilling of as much Mexican blood as possible.”

  “I don’t care for the sound of that,” Che said. He sounded all attitude, and Nicky felt a thrill of fear. “We have apologized, and—”

  Now Nokivov threw in some attitude, holding up a hand to silence Che and saying, “If there is anything you’d like to tell me—”

  “We don’t got nothing more to say,” Che said angrily.

  “Very well,” Nokivov said.

  Behind them, Nicky heard the unmistakable sound of weapons being cocked.

  “Nicky, go!” Che shouted. He had heard it, too. He dove to the right side of the room, rolling underneath the thick conference table as he did. Slugs tore into the heavy wood and the room was suddenly aroar with the thunderous boom of weapons fire. Nicky hurled himself the other way, tearing the 9mm from his jacket as he did. A burst of pain flared from his arm as he hit the ground. Without even aiming, he rolled himself into a ball and fired his gun toward the door.

  Acrid smoke filled the air, and Nicky knew he would die here in this close quarters gunfight. He couldn’t see or hear anymore, smoke stinging his eyes and his ears ringing from the echoing gunfire. But, blinking away the smoke, he thought he saw Che on his feet, motioning wildly toward the doorway. Che had his Sig Sauer in his fist and he fired it several times at a mound of bodies on the floor.

  “Run, man!” he thought Che was saying. Then Che threw the double doors open and disappeared through them. Nicky followed. At the last moment, he hazarded a glance behind him and saw Nokivov raising a shotgun from beneath the conference table. Stokovich, on the floor, shoved the corpses of his two thugs off himself and scrabbled for his own dropped weapon. Before the man could locate it, Nicky darted through the big doorway.

  His left arm burned. A bullet had torn through his upper arm and blood soaked his jacket. He couldn’t stop to worry about it, though, and he couldn’t take any time to deal with it. Che was already out of sight up ahead.

  Fo
r a moment, Nicky feared he wouldn’t remember the way out of the office suite. But rounding a corner, he saw the main doors just ahead, and he knew the elevator waited on the other side of those doors. If there had been anyone outside, then Che would be dealing with them now, and he’d hear the signs of a fight. So he banged the door open with his left shoulder—his nine was still clutched in that fist. Che stood on the other side, breathing hard, panic in his eyes.

  “We got to go, man,” Che implored. “I was just about to give up on you. We got to hurry.”

  “You push the elevator button?” Nicky asked.

  “Stairs, fool,” Che said. “Last thing you want to do is get on that elevator. Dude downstairs controls it, right?”

  Nicky had forgotten. Without Che, he’d have been one stupid dead cholo.

  Che led the way to a staircase with a green EXIT sign over it and they ran downstairs, leaping from the fourth or fifth step each time. Every hard landing sent a new jolt of pain up Nicky’s arm and shoulder and he thought once that he would faint. But above them, they heard the stairwell door open, and he forced himself onward. A couple of random shots were fired from above, bullets pinging around on the cement stairs, but the shooters fired blindly. In another moment, the ground floor door loomed before them.

  Che paused for only a second. “We don’t know what’s out there, mano, ” he said.

  Nicky glanced up. “Orale, we know what’s up there.”

  Che grinned. He looked manic, but sincere—like there was some part of him, maybe a big part, that genuinely enjoyed this. “Vaya con dios, baby,” he said. “Let’s boogie.”

  He and Nicky, weapons in hand, burst through the door into the lobby like Butch and Sundance at the end of the movie, Nicky half expecting to be cut down by rifle fire from a hundred Bolivian soldiers. But no one waited for them—even the front desk guard was gone from his post. They dashed through the empty lobby and to the waiting Porsche. A moment later they were laying rubber through the streets of Los Angeles, screaming and whooping like maniacs.