Gathering Dark

by Fox, Candice

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you just tell the truth, Sneak?’ I growled. ‘You almost got us killed.’

  ‘The truth is lame,’ she said.

  The gun she’d blasted at the men in the hangar lay on the dashboard. It was a long-nosed silver revolver with a handle so thick I wondered if I would be able to get my fist around it. I thought about Adrian Orlov’s gun bucking in my hands, the textured grip of the handle wet with my sweat.

  ‘Where did you get that gun?’

  ‘Where I get everything. The street.’

  ‘We need to talk about strategy,’ I said. ‘About your lies. About how much deeper I’m willing to get into this mess.’

  ‘You can give me the third degree later,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something here.’ She pointed to the screen. ‘Didn’t take me long to find it. The camera in the reception area where we were only comes on when it’s triggered by the door. See? There are separate video files for each visitor. Dayly visited three weeks ago. It’s not great quality, but it’s her. And some flat-top guy. He’s tall. Looks young and cute. They come in and they take two flyers away. I checked the video against the pamphlets I took from the counter. Looks like they took the parachuting one and this one.’

  She fished a leaflet out of her handbag and showed it to me. On the cover was a picture of a small white plane. Sneak opened the pamphlet and began to look through it.

  ‘The star of our extensive fleet of personal-hire aircraft, the Cessna 172 is a deluxe four-seater, single-engine, high-wing, fixed-wing aircraft made by the Cessna Aircraft Company,’ Sneak read. ‘The engine capacity—’

  ‘Four-seater?’ I said.

  Sneak checked the pamphlet. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Sneak shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I saw two-seater planes on the field. Plenty of them. One was even done up on the inside with all sorts of Valentine’s Day stuff. Red velvet seat covers and a little heart hanging off the roof. Couples must hire them for romantic weekends. So if that’s what Flat-top and Dayly were doing, why the four seats?’

  Sneak sat quietly, watching the video on the laptop. The mountains were rimmed in gold light beyond the old drive-in screen.

  ‘They don’t hold hands,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Flat-top and Dayly. They don’t touch each other. I’ve got footage of them parking her car, walking into the office, making the inquiry and taking the pamphlets and leaving. They don’t touch, not even once. So is he a boyfriend, like Dimitri said, or not? And if not, what are they doing hiring a plane together?’

  I leaned over and watched the footage of the young man and Dayly entering the office at the aerodrome, taking the pamphlets, wandering around and leaving.

  ‘How do we know they were going to hire the plane?’ I asked. ‘Maybe they took that pamphlet for cover, in case they were asked, and the real inquiry was about parachuting.’

  ‘The same is true in reverse,’ Sneak said.

  I sighed.

  ‘Did you look at the record book before you almost got us murdered and forced us to flee?’ I asked.

  She twisted in her seat and hefted the logbook off the back seat and onto her lap. I shook my head. In the back seat were two other logbooks, another laptop, a cash register and a silver model plane.

  ‘Did you steal all that stuff before you knew I was in trouble, or after?’

  ‘I was just making my second trip to the car when I heard you yelling.’ She rubbed her nose. I could see sweat beading at her temples. ‘I’m not seeing the name Lawlor anywhere. But if we find out who the guy is, maybe he’s in here, if they did end up booking something. Here, you keep looking. I’ve got to get back to the city.’

  She threw the book into my lap and started the car. There was sweat on her upper lip. Withdrawals. As she took us back to the highway, we fell silent. I realised as night grew that I had pushed aside my terror at the feel of the man who had attacked me in bed, his stubble against my cheek, his weight on my back, all day. Now I had new nightmare fuel, the men in the hangar and the sound of the pistol actioning, the car crunching through the wall across the room from me. I was disassociating, the way I had in prison. Riding the chaos from moment to moment. I didn’t want to be alone when all the fear of the past twenty-four hours caught up to me.

  ‘Are you staying in tonight?’ I asked Sneak.

  ‘I might have to run some errands.’

  ‘Don’t run any errands,’ I said. ‘Just do me a favour this one time. Stay in. I want someone there when I get back from the Pump’n’Jump.’

  ‘You got it,’ she said. I knew she was lying again.

  I unlocked the door to my apartment and pushed it open, and Sneak followed me through it only to bump into my back as I stopped suddenly in front of her. On the coffee table, sitting on the remote control as if it was determined to turn on the TV and engage in an evening of viewing, sat a small, round gopher. I pointed at Hugh Jackman, and for a long moment Sneak and I could do nothing but stare at the creature perched on its hind legs, its front paws fiddling with a button on the remote. My friend and I broke into laughter and fell into each other’s arms.

  Sneak said she wasn’t going out, but there was another four hundred dollars missing from the cash pile, which I’d hidden between papers in a box of personal files in my bedroom. She twitched and paced and pretended to watch the television while I dressed for work, then caved and said she was going to take a walk around the block to clear her thoughts. She didn’t come back. It seemed somehow important to keep the gopher near me, my relief at his reappearance forbidding me to leave him alone. So that night I stood behind the register at the Pump’n’Jump and tried to ignore Hugh Jackman’s scuffling and scratching about in the ice cream container under the counter while I served customers. Business fell away near midnight, as it always did, and I pulled a stool towards the register and filled in some of the day’s crossword in the newspaper.

  My phone rang as I was watching the headlines scroll across the bottom of the television above the Coke fridge. Jittery footage of stairs in a beautiful house, a hallway, a red room, some sort of table flipped on its side. A naked woman crouching, her hair covering her face. LAPD officer caught in the act!

  I answered the call distractedly.

  ‘They haven’t found your car,’ Jessica said down the phone.

  ‘Damn it.’

  ‘There are a few cars on the list, however, which haven’t been examined,’ she said. ‘Burned-out shells in the mountains, in the desert, one in Malibu. I’ll go check those out. Some of them I can rule out right away. They’ve been sitting there for months waiting for the municipal council to come get them. But this one in the mountains was only reported three days ago. I’ll start there.’

  ‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘Well, not for me. Not for Dayly, either, if it is the car. But a good lead.’

  ‘There’s no activity on Dayly’s phone, bank accounts or social media accounts,’ she said. ‘She’s completely blacked out. Tasik is pursuing the angle that she might have some Crips after her to take a bullshit charge on a bag of guns.’

  ‘What?’ I watched a cat skitter across the empty parking lot, pursuing a cockroach. Jessica told me the story she had heard from Tasik. ‘But what about the guy? Flat-top? Sneak and I have him with Dayly at the San Chinto aerodrome looking at hiring a plane.’

  ‘Not everything means something in an investigation like this. Sometimes things are just parts of the puzzle. All I’ve got on Flat-top is a vague lead about an officer out there,’ Jessica said. I heard papers shuffling. ‘I searched the internal database, the personnel files for the San Chinto police department. Marcus Lemon is your guy, I think. Weird name. Badge number 994901. Officer Lemon is a newbie straight out of the academy, just posted into San Chinto in January. He’s pretty clean. Young and square. Has that stupid haircut.’

  ‘Sneak and I can check him out,’ I said. ‘Did
you ask Tasik why he went for me like he did?’

  ‘I didn’t need to, Blair. You’re a criminal. You should be used to being treated like shit.’ The silence hung for a beat. ‘He wanted you to back off, that’s all. That doesn’t matter. If Dayly has pissed off some Crips then she’s either dead or she should be hiding under a rock on Mars, because they’ll come after her. Killing Dayly to get two of their lieutenants and one of their footmen off a guns charge would be no problem for them.’

  ‘Great,’ I said.

  ‘It would make sense for one of them to bust into your apartment and try to grab you. It probably means they don’t have her yet, and they’re looking for anyone who might know where she is, and you stuck your hand up when you went into the police station, or maybe when you turned up at her apartment.’

  ‘So where do we go from here?’ I asked.

  ‘Tasik will probably be working on confirming the Crips angle. We should work on something else. Three weeks ago we have a weird payment into Dayly’s bank account. I can’t figure it out,’ Jessica said. ‘Eight hundred bucks. The money came in from one of those crypto websites that keep the payer anonymous. It’ll take some tracking down. Tasik doesn’t seem to be onto it.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘Dayly also flew to San Francisco two months ago,’ she said. ‘Landed at five am on a Saturday and hired a car from the airport. Dropped the car back six hours later and flew home.’

  ‘Six hours?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why the hell would she do that? What can you do in San Francisco for six hours?’

  ‘No idea,’ Jessica said. ‘You can ask your friend Sneak. See if she knows what her daughter was up to.’

  ‘Look,’ I said as I sensed her tone easing towards the end of the call. ‘I want to say thanks fo—’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘It was a big ask. I don’t know what’s going on with you right now, but—’

  ‘Why would what’s going on with me be any of your fucking business?’

  ‘—but things seem to be a little hectic in your life, and you were good to listen to me, to us, when we came knocking.’

  There was silence on the line. The tautness of it made me restless. I looked out the window and saw a huge black Escalade pulling in to the lot, parking without stopping near the gas pumps. I recognised the numberplate and a bolt of fear sizzled through me.

  ‘Blair,’ Jessica said. ‘That night. In Brentwood. Why didn’t you—’

  ‘Oh, Jesus, I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta go.’ I ended the call and hurled the phone into the messy space beneath the counter where Hugh Jackman’s container lay. I tossed the newspaper in after it.

  I had never met the cartel men who owned the Kangaroo Gas Pump’n’Jump, but I had seen them talking to my boss out in the parking lot once. I’d seen the sheer menace in their eyes and the nervous, rigid gait of my boss as he walked towards them, and had stood at the counter with my hand on the receiver of the phone, ready to dial 9-1-1 and stop him from being beaten or mugged. He’d explained who they were when he returned, but I’d still written down the numberplate. The men had poured out of the Escalade that day dressed uniformly in black, finely cut clothes with thick gold chains hanging from their wrists and necks, tattoos winding like blue and black vines up their necks and into their hairlines, dappled across knuckles and fingers. They’d looked like a collection of bit actors waiting to audition for the role of violent goons in an upcoming HBO narco drama.

  Now as they headed towards the automatic doors, I glanced anxiously out into the darkness beyond the lot, imagining Jasmine the parole officer there in her car, ready to photograph the men and me standing under the fluorescent lights.

  They were here about the robbery, I knew. The bullet hole in the Marlboro dispenser, my abject failure to do anything to counteract the shame such an incident would bring upon their gang. I felt my body shrink as I tried to calculate the odds of surviving hostile encounters with two gangs of criminals in one day. The two biggest men ducked their heads instinctively as they came through the door, easily exceeding the limits of the coloured height strips inside the entrance. The four men came right for the counter. One of the two human-height guys came and leaned on the surface before me under the light, so I could see down the hollow made by his shirt, which was unbuttoned to the navel. A pierced nipple winked at me in the shadows.

  ‘Blair Harbour,’ the man said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I managed.

  ‘I’m Santiago Cruz. You’ve probably heard of me.’

  ‘Of course,’ I lied.

  ‘I’m here to talk to you about—’

  ‘The robbery,’ I blurted, wincing as I interrupted him. ‘I know. I’m sorry. It was . . . I didn’t . . . I wasn’t sure what to do, and I’m sorry about the . . . the dispenser. I can replace it. It’s my fault. The robber didn’t take any money, so that’s something.’

  ‘That’s the weird thing. She did take some money,’ Santiago said. He straightened up. ‘For some reason, you replaced it with your own.’

  I froze. I had always believed there were no cameras inside the Pump’n’Jump or the office behind it. My boss had let slip once that the cartel sometimes held meetings at the gas station on the rare evenings in winter when it wasn’t worth opening the store. I assumed they didn’t want the hassle of proving to their associates that the cameras weren’t on when they came together. Santiago could read my thoughts. He smiled, flashing gold teeth.

  ‘You think I don’t have cameras in my own store? I see everything that goes on here. I see you doing those puzzles all night long.’

  ‘Shit. Sorry.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ He sniffed. ‘I just want to know why you would give up your money to cover a chick who just stuck a gun in your face.’ He made a gun with his thumb and index fingers and popped an imaginary bullet at my nose. ‘I can’t figure it out.’

  ‘Well, I . . .’ I looked around at the men. Santiago’s sideman was watching me closely, leaning on a stand full of cheap phones. He had the relaxed, predatory gaze of a lion in the sun watching cubs play, above the drama. I felt a stirring in my stomach at the sight of him. Big, hard hands. I shook my head to focus myself. ‘Look, it’s hard to explain. I guess I just saw someone who was in a bad place, and um . . . I didn’t want you guys to, uh . . .’

  ‘To hunt her down and kill her?’ Santiago raised his eyebrows. ‘Maybe kill her family, just to send a message?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Because we’re those kind of people, right?’ he continued. ‘Sicarios. Pandilleros. Monsters. We’d find her, bust into her house, tie her family to lawn chairs and toss them in the swimming pool one by one. That’s what you see when you look at us.’

  I opened my mouth to reply, but nothing came out. The air was like fire all around me, flickering with danger. My hands were wet with sweat, white-knuckled, gripping the counter. When a big smile broke over Santiago’s face, my throat tightened almost to closing.

  ‘You’re right!’ he laughed. It was a hard, deep hacking. ‘We are those kinds of people!’

  The San Marino 13s gang leader leaned over and thumped my shoulder, grabbed my arm and shook my whole body with it. The men around him smirked. The sweat on the back of my neck had turned cold.

  ‘That’s exactly what we would have done.’ Santiago grinned.

  ‘Okay.’ I swallowed, looked at his sideman or lieutenant, the one who wasn’t a towering beast. He seemed frighteningly calm.

  ‘So who was the chica with the gun? Do you know her?’ Santiago asked.

  ‘No,’ I lied again. ‘Seemed like some street girl, maybe. A nobody. I’d never seen her before. Haven’t seen her since.’

  ‘You wouldn’t tell me if you had,’ Santiago reasoned, shrugging. ‘If you’re going to cover her ass with your own money, you’re not going to then give us her name. Not unless we tie you to a lawn chair. Put you on the edge of the pool.’

  I
stared at his grinning teeth.

  ‘Anyway, I can let it slide this time,’ Santiago said. ‘You covering for her was a nice thing to do. You’re a nice person, Blair Harbour. Nobody on the street has been talking about the hit. I try to let one go every now and then. It’s like a tribute to Santa Maria.’ He thumped his chest.

  ‘Thank you.’ I exhaled. ‘I really appreciate—’

  Hugh Jackman shuffled loudly in his box. A stab of pain hit my ribs, seizing my breath. Santiago leaned on the counter again, curious this time.

  ‘What the fuck was that? Don’t tell me we got rats in this place.’

  My hands were numb as I brought the ice cream container up onto the counter. The men all crowded in.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s just my pet. I, uh . . . See, I’ve been having some trouble at my apartment. My friend . . . My friend’s daughter . . . It doesn’t matter. Look, it was just for the one night and he hasn’t been out of his box at all. I would never let him out. None of the customers have noticed. He’s not a rat. He’s a gopher. Some people have them as pets. I’m sure they do.’

  ‘Open that thing up.’ Santiago pointed at the box. My throat felt ragged now. Torn. I was about to feed my gopher to a pack of wolves. I took Hugh Jackman out of the box and held him in the light. The gopher stretched, its rump in the air, then put its head up and yawned, baring two long front teeth. The cartel members watched as he did a circle on my palm and headed for my wrist.

  Santiago snatched the animal.

  ‘Please don’t hurt him.’ I made a grab for the gopher. ‘Please. Please just—’

  ‘Look at this thing.’ Santiago held the gopher in his fist like a microphone, Hugh Jackman’s round, furry head poking out from the choke chain of the man’s thick thumb and forefinger. The men all leaned in to look. I couldn’t bear to watch the gang leader crush the life out of Dayly’s pet, so I stared at my own terrified reflection in the windows.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for a pained animal squeal, the crunch of broken bones. Nothing came. When I looked back, Santiago was stroking Hugh Jackman’s head with the index finger of his free hand.