by Fox, Candice
‘What if Ramirez’s wrong?’ Sneak said. ‘What if they break through early and you turn up and no one’s there?’
‘Fine. I know where everyone will be tomorrow. Lemon and Ramirez will be loading a plane they’ve booked to get to Mexico at an airfield near there. Maverick will be at her club. She’s not leaving. Not with her business interests in the area. And Harbour will be at her apartment. She’s got a kid. She’s not going anywhere. I’ve been in her apartment before, and I know she can fight, so this time I won’t be messing around.’
‘You,’ Sneak said. ‘It was you who broke in.’
‘I was trying to scare her off,’ Tasik said. ‘Scare both of you. It didn’t work. If you could put up less of a fight tonight than she did, I’d be really grateful. But this has to look authentic, so we’ll need to play around for a little while, at least.’
He pushed open his door, walked behind the car and opened the door beside her. Jessica heard Sneak yelp as the man grabbed her.
‘Enough talking,’ Tasik said. ‘Let’s start.’
BLAIR
I turned awkwardly and started moving down the ladder, and spied in the mess of items near the edge of the hole a long barbecue fork with a wooden handle. I pretended to trip, grabbed at the mess, swept the fork and some other items into the hole with me.
‘Watch it, Neighbour.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. In the darkness at the bottom of the ladder, Fred had a flashlight pressed into his palm, giving off a soft glow. I pretended to examine my ankle for scratches caused by the near-fall and slipped the handle of the barbecue fork into my shoe, pulled my jeans down over the top of it. Mike and Ada climbed down the ladder and stood quietly in the dark. Fetid air, heavy with a metallic taste, the unmistakeable reek of human waste and stagnant water. I could hear the breaths of the people around me. They were shallow, fast, measured: the breathing of people who had done this before, people who had sat in cars outside banks in balaclavas, waiting for the doors to open. People who had waited in the bushes near the guarded entries to stash houses. Thieves. Hunters. Some silent consensus was reached, and I was grabbed and guided along a gloomy dirt tunnel braced with untreated wood. Ada was beside me, Fred ahead and Mike behind us. The dirt tunnel ended in a smashed concrete curve of wall. I climbed through, was shoved to the right on a path. I could see nothing beyond the edge of the path, but some primal awareness told me we were walking in a narrow tube with one horizontal surface on the right meant for traversing the passage on foot. My arm brushed pipes and ridges in the wall in the dark, and I reached up experimentally at one point and touched the concrete ceiling, felt metal tubing, spokes, more pipes.
‘Keep moving,’ Ada whispered, poking me in the ribs with her gun.
We moved at a painful pace in the dark. Now and then Fred slid his palm slightly off the torchlight, illuminated the next few empty yards of sewer. I couldn’t bear the silence.
‘No one has been who they say they are in this,’ I said quietly.
‘What?’ Ada said.
‘You,’ I said. ‘I thought you were genuinely helping us find a missing girl. I thought you were paying your debt to me.’
‘Well, you’re an idiot. That’s not my fault.’
‘And Dayly,’ I said. ‘You saw that man up there. The old man. He’s been suffering. How long has he been there? Weeks? Dayly was a part of that. I thought she was different. But Dayly and Lemon and Ramirez did that to him so they could get down here.’
‘So Dayly’s a heartless piece of trash, like her mother,’ Ada said. ‘You’re a whole lot more surprised than you should be, Blair, if you want my opinion. I don’t know how you’ve maintained your faith in people all this time. You’ve been locked up longer than I ever was. You should have learned in the can that deep down inside, everybody’s just out to get their cut.’
Fred stopped suddenly ahead of us. Ada dragged me against the wall. There was a pause, and then a voice rippled down the tunnel towards us from up ahead.
‘Dayly?’ the voice called. I recognised it as Officer Lemon.
Fred dropped to one knee, let the torch fall by his side, and started firing in the direction of the voice.
JESSICA
The pale moon was hanging low. Jessica glimpsed it through the windshield as she sat up, threw open the glovebox and searched for Tasik’s personal weapon. Nothing. Loose papers and the car’s service manual. Her bloody hands danced over the interior of the car, looking for her own weapon. She glimpsed Tasik outside the car, struggling with Sneak, his big fist raining down on her. One gun in his holster. The other nowhere to be found. Jessica didn’t risk opening her door. She slid across the car and onto the dirt road, but the sudden rush of blood to her head after the blow to the face made her stagger, roll her ankle on a rock. Tasik heard her and turned.
He left Sneak and launched himself at her, slammed her into the side of the car. Jessica hit the ground, his boots on either side of her, blows hammering downwards. She turned under him, struck upwards and kicked out, got his knee and sent him sideways. Sneak was there, bashing him in the head with her fists, clubbing downwards while he pot-shotted her in the ribs.
Jessica pulled herself into a half-crouch beside the car, prepared to straighten, to fight again. The gun had fallen from Tasik’s jeans but it was lost in the dark, and a shot would be impossible anyway. Sneak and Tasik had tangled together, Sneak an obvious prison fighter, gouging the man’s face, clawing with her nails. Jessica backed into the car again, started it up and slammed it into reverse. Then she waited, her hands gripping the wheel, until the inevitable happened. Tasik overpowered Sneak. Got her good in the temple with a long, straight blow. Sneak rolled away on her side, gripping desperately at the dirt while her world spun. Jessica slammed her foot down on the accelerator.
A wet crunch. That’s how she would think about it later. The kind of sound a bag of bones and water would make if someone dropped it from on high. The car ground to a halt in a cloud of dust only a couple of yards from where Tasik had stood. The man himself had been shunted backwards, thrown into the dirt maybe twenty feet away. She hadn’t hit him hard. But what she’d done had been effective. Jessica got out, went to Sneak and helped her to her feet. Sneak wandered forwards in a daze, stepping towards Tasik, hardly looking at Jessica. The officer went to the man on the ground.
‘Tasik’—Jessica’s teeth were locked, her voice a low growl— ‘you’re under arrest.’
Jessica bent over the groaning, coughing, writhing mess that was Detective Al Tasik on the dirt, the two of them illuminated by the car’s headlights. Jessica turned the cop on his side to let him recover. His ribs were surely broken, and he was drifting in and out of consciousness, but he would survive. Jessica was so relieved as she clipped the cuffs onto Tasik that she didn’t even hear the car door slam shut behind her. It was the beep of the horn that startled her, brought her back to reality. Sneak was sitting in the driver’s seat. She assumed Sneak must be about to bring the car closer to assist Jessica in hauling the man into the back seat. But Jessica stood and watched, dumbfounded, as Sneak reversed the car back a good ten yards and beeped again.
Jessica looked blindly into the headlights.
‘Sneak?’ she called.
Sneak revved the engine. Beeped again.
‘Sneak.’ Jessica put a hand out, begging, her fingers spread. ‘Don’t do it. Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!’
The cruiser burst to life. Jessica threw herself out of the way, and heard that hard, wet sound again as the car crunched over Tasik’s body. Jessica held her head and watched helplessly as Sneak reversed over the man and then ran forwards over him again. On the second reverse, she uncurled her rigid body and dragged herself to her feet. Trying not to look at the mess on the ground before the car, she staggered in shock towards the driver’s-side door.
Sneak rolled the window down slowly, watching Jessica from the corner of her eye. Her hand appeared with Jessica’s phone in it. She dropped the phone out of the sid
e of the vehicle and rolled the window up again.
‘Sneak,’ Jessica warned. ‘Don’t you dare. Don’t you leave me h—’
Jessica watched the car jerk into a hard three-quarter turn, the red brakelights burning dusty clouds as Sneak sped away.
She looked at Tasik. The man’s body lay in a twisted heap on the road nearby. Jessica picked up her phone and looked at the screen. The reception bar was empty.
‘Fuck my life,’ she said.
BLAIR
Ada shoved past me, her gun blasting, bullets from her and Fred hitting the walls of the tunnel ahead, making white sparks. I turned to run and Mike grabbed my arm. I made a swipe for the barbecue fork riding against my ankle but lost my balance and was dragged along with the big man towards the firefight.
‘Come on, bitch! Let’s go.’
A sound like a harsh whisper against my ear. I realised with horrifying clarity that a bullet had just whizzed mere inches past my head. Lemon was firing back. The tunnel kinked slightly, a gentle corner, the only thing that had stopped Lemon from seeing our weak little light before he heard us. I listened to the firing ahead as it slowed to a stop.
We waited, grouped together. My ears were ringing. Fred let his hand slide from the torch for just a second, illuminating the tunnel ahead. There was no one there. Lemon had been alone, heading back towards the ladder we had come down. I caught a glimpse of him flopped on his side on the ground a few yards away. I ran to him and crouched down, put my hands on his chest. Though I couldn’t see well enough, I felt blood running so fast and wet and hot it had to be fatal. My hands were soaked with it immediately, my shoes squelching in it on the muddy floor. Lemon coughed blood. I remembered the kind young man who had helped me after my faked car accident and forgot the cruelty the same man had apparently displayed against the old fellow in the hoarder house.
‘It’s all right,’ I lied to the dying man. ‘It’s all right.’
‘Dayly?’ Lemon gasped. He scanned the faces above me. ‘Is she—’
‘She’s not with us,’ I said. ‘We thought she was with you.’ I knew he was dying fast. His breaths were becoming shallower. ‘Do you know where she is? Is she safe?’
He died under my hands. It was a sound I recognised, even in the dark.
A humming, uneven and distant, pushed gently through the chaos in my mind.
‘What is that?’ I asked. No one answered. I was pulled away from Lemon. We walked. In time the humming became a grinding sound. A jackhammer. In a hundred yards, a glow began to form. I realised it was coming from another smashed hole in the side of the sewer tunnel. Fred stopped by the edge of the hole and pocketed his torch, gently leaned forwards to see what was ahead.
The grinding sound was deafening now. He held up a finger in the dim light. One guy.
He waved us forwards. We go now.
Mike gripped my arm. I followed Ada and Fred into the second dirt tunnel. Ahead of us, the wide body of Ramirez stood with his legs braced, grinding downwards at the end of the tunnel into a piece of rock the size of a basketball. He was wearing ear muffs, trying to split the rock with the machine. As we approached, Ramirez set down the jackhammer and bent to pick up the broken stone. The sound of the device was still echoing around us as Fred and Ada raised their weapons.
‘Watch out!’ I screamed. Ramirez turned at the last second, a bullet slamming into the dirt wall ahead of him, tagging the hem of his jeans harmlessly. In a single movement he twisted, grabbed a gun from his waistband and fired at us. There was no cover. Mike and I fell together against the dirt wall. He shoved against me, fired over my head. I rolled away and grabbed the barbecue fork from my ankle, rolled back and stabbed Mike’s chest as hard as I could.
I hit paydirt. The fork popped through the fabric, sank hard into the flesh of his right pectoral, only an inch or so deep. I thought it was enough, the shock of it, the sudden pain that made him drop his gun. I turned and scrambled to my feet, tripped, gained traction and ran the way we had come.
I fell against the side of the tunnel when bullets started shunting into the concrete wall of the sewer pipe ahead of me. They weren’t firing at Ramirez anymore. They were firing at me.
I froze, the barbecue fork still in my hand, and turned to look at them.
Ramirez was on the ground, clutching his belly. Fred dragged the man to the side of the tunnel and dumped him in a heap. Ada beckoned me, the black eye of her gun locked on my face. Panting with exhaustion and terror, I walked back towards my enemies. I couldn’t meet Mike’s eyes. He rubbed the double holes under the wet fabric of his shirt as though he was soothing a bruise.
Ada took a shovel from a collection on the ground and threw it at my feet.
‘Dig,’ she said.
JESSICA
Her knees hurt. Policing was a killer for bad knees, hips, shoulders – all those pieces of equipment that needed to be strapped on. Heavy belts and flak jackets. Jessica thought she must have scraped her knee on a rock on the road when she rolled away as the car rocketed towards Tasik. There was blood on her shins, her elbows, her hands, dirt on her clothes. Jessica knew that if she stopped a car coming up the mountain before she got within range of a cell tower, she would have some explaining to do.
She rounded a bend and the canyon opened up before her. Los Angeles dazzled far below, a scattering of gold lights.
She was higher up the mountain than she’d realised. Below her, the road snaked between the canyons, empty. She sighed and marched on.
BLAIR
The earth was hard. Pale, crumbling rock, the occasional pocket of blessed sand that slid to the ground at our feet. I worked shoulder to shoulder with Fred, Mike jamming his shovel in low to clear the dirt from around our feet while preserving the injury I had given him. Fred and I cleared the split basketball-sized rock together, our hands touching as we shifted it upwards, the absurd intimacy of foes forced together.
Now and then I turned to look at Ada, who had the gun trained on Ramirez. The man lay panting and clutching his stomach, drenched in sweat, his body slumped awkwardly against the curved side of the tunnel.
‘Just through here,’ Ada was saying to him, pointing at the wall where Fred and I were digging. ‘A couple of feet at most. That’s what you’re saying? You better not be fucking with me, Ramirez.’
‘It can’t be far,’ the man heaved. His eyes wandered to me. It was clear he recognised me from the driveway outside the house. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t me who had brought this on him. That I hadn’t been responsible for whatever happened to Dayly, that I was as much a slave to the people around us as he was. But there didn’t seem to be time.
‘You can let him go,’ I told Ada. She looked at me. ‘He’ll survive if he gets medical attention soon.’
Ada raised her gun and shot Ramirez in the head without taking her eyes off me. I turned to the wall before me, dug madly, relishing in the simple act of throwing, lifting, twisting, dumping the soil, trying to escape this moment. An hour passed. Maybe more. The final moments of my life. There was no phone to distract myself with this time. No Alejandro. I was going to die down here in the earth, directly below a police station, exactly how deep I didn’t know. Sasha was going to have to explain all of this to Jamie. She could barely account for what I had done to Adrian Orlov a decade earlier. I had no idea how she would deal with this. A strange thought occurred to me in the blackness, that my best hopes of Jamie ever knowing that I hadn’t meant to get myself involved in the horror in which my body would be found was Jessica Sanchez. Jessica, the woman who had arrested me all those years ago – she knew that all I’d wanted was to help my friend, to find and save Dayly. Jamie would never know that I’d tried to save Lemon, to save Ramirez, and that I’d wanted to help the man in the house at the beginning of the tunnel, who would surely die as Ada, Mike and Fred made their retreat. I could only hope Jessica would tell my son I was a good person. I almost laughed. Hours earlier I had been standing on Mulholland Drive with Alejandro, flirti
ng with the idea of leaving my life behind again, and now all I wanted in the world was to be able to go back to it.
My shovel hit what I thought was a rock, but Fred snapped to, grabbed my shovel off me and pushed me away. He hit the spot I’d hit again, made sand fall, and I heard what he had heard: a hollowness.
I stood back with Mike and Ada while Fred dug. The dirt around the suitcases was loose, disturbed decades earlier by John Fishwick’s hand. Mike dragged down an enormous suitcase wrapped in a plasticky film not unlike what Sasha covered Jamie’s school books in. The first case was covered in a once-white film that was now filthy, patterned with toucans that were aged and pale. The second case was wrapped in plastic wrap covered in pictures of yellow tigers. The third suitcase, from the bottom of the stack, was undiscernible.
There were no words exchanged. Mike stepped forwards, took a knife from his belt and flicked it open. I stood watching as he slashed open the wrapping around the toucan case and unlocked it, shoving it open.
Stacks of hundreds. Messy, faded, used bills bound with elastic bands and stacked neatly. The suitcase was jammed so full of cash that stacks got caught in the lid when it opened and flopped out onto the floor.
We all stood and stared at the money.
‘What do you think?’ Ada asked.
Mike cocked his head. He counted the stacks on the top briefly, reached out and pressed down on the piles, tried to gauge the way they sprang back against his hand.
‘Seven at least,’ he said. ‘Three cases. Twenty-one million all up. Probably more.’