by Daniel Pyne
2
HE HAD AWAKED, startled, naked, in a sweaty straitjacket of sheets. The redhead who called herself Riley was gone, and he took a moment thinking how the obvious thing would be to wonder, now, if the night before had been just some wild hallucination, but he knew it wasn’t, and had rolled out of bed happy—no, utterly delirious—to step down hard on something very sharp and painful.
“Ow ow ow!”
Hopping, holding his punctured foot, he had found embedded in his arch the bloodied engagement ring that must have dropped on the floor next to the bed sometime during the night.
“What do you mean nothing happened?” Joaquin said skeptically after Finn insisted that nothing had. This, during the impromptu parking lot triage behind the Long Beach police station following half an hour of Finn at his loft wasting Band-Aids on the puny puncture wound that nevertheless kept slowly bleeding through them.
“We talked, I drove her home.”
Joaquin had washed out of EMT training because the requisite intimacy with strangers gave him flop sweats, but he was a sure hand with minor emergencies. Finn had driven himself over and called to say he was in the parking lot, leaking all over the floor mat of his car.
“Talked.” Said skeptically, as Joaquin irrigated Finn’s wound with hydrogen peroxide, made a perfect staunch pad cushion, and began securing it with gauze.
“A lot. She’s smart, she’s . . .” Finn was a word person, but struggling suddenly for the right ones.
“Natural redhead?”
“No. I mean, how would I know?” Finn’s face flushed. “Just . . . amazing.” He didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
“Amazing.” Joaquin was mastering the skeptical spin.
“Yes. Pretty much. Stop just repeating the last thing I say.”
Joaquin stared at him. Finn’s face flushed again. “Dude.”
“And drove her home, I swear.”
It was pretty obvious Joaquin didn’t remotely believe him. “Okay. And now you want me to ask around. Because you didn’t get her last name.”
“I’m not convinced I even got her first name, but—”
“—Riley.”
“That’s what she said.”
Joaquin slapped a last piece of tape on the foot and started to repack the medical kit he’d brought out from the lab. “It’s not what you think,” Finn said, trying a different tack. “She left this thing in my car. I need to return it.”
“What thing?”
Finn couldn’t think of a good lie, and he wasn’t going to talk about the ring. He pulled a sock up over the bandage. “A thing.”
“Uh-huh.” Joaquin made a face and walked Finn through a hypothetical: “So how might this go, I wonder? I mean, me asking around the station. Wandering hallways and bullpens, tapping random cops on the shoulder and, going, ‘Hey, Mr. Homicide Bureau Colleague of Detective Terry Lennox’—also known, behind his back, as the Hammer, by the way, FYI,” Joaquin sidetracked, then resumed, “‘you know his girlfriend? Or fiancée? The hot, smart one, yeah, I think maybe her name is Riley, or not, and, welp, she and Hammer had this spat, and my friend, the sad-face forensic photographer you’ve seen around, he kinda swooped in and hooked up with her last night at the Palace of Justice and needs to return a thing—’”
“—I didn’t hook up with her.”
“Oh, right. You drove her home.” Joaquin took a stage pause, then observed, droll: “Dude, in which case you know where she lives. You can just return whatever she left in your car your own self. And ask her what her last name is, directly.”
Finn stared back expressionlessly, but he was busted.
“She’s a cop’s squeeze, Finn,” Joaquin insisted, sounding worried but hard-boiled. “Walk away.”
—
THE DESICCATED MEADOW held several huge monolithic sculptures of rusted steel, cold and stately among the dead scuffs of needle grass, and the small old man working on one of them—short-sleeved shirt and cargo shorts, arc welder throwing sparks—shoved up his face shield with one gloved hand and watched Riley park her car next to a brand-new Mercedes.
She didn’t acknowledge him. She was tired and confused by all that had happened last night, and hoped he’d just keep working so she could do what she came for and be on her way.
Drought had left the broken Portuguese Bend coastal bluffs hotter and dustier than anyone could remember, but the undeveloped south Palos Verdes Peninsula had always been bleak and burned dry, in Riley McCluggage’s long experience with it. Geologically unstable and therefore unbuildable, strangely beautiful, a small slice of perdition she’d escaped, and to which she always felt uneasy coming back.
At first light she’d stolen from the photographer’s loft like some fallen woman, and summoned a Lyft to get to her own car, where she’d peeled off her little black dress and pulled on the jeans and a T-shirt she kept in the trunk, just in case. She wanted a shower. Her tangled hair felt like a hat.
An orchard of dead pear trees and the weed-pocked tennis court flanked the small manufactured home where Riley had grown up. Her father’s big cinder-block workshop had, since she moved out, engendered a litter of smaller aluminum prefab sheds filled with the scrap steel and rebar of an angry old man’s Great Art. On the ridge above the compound, foundations buckled by the shifting bentonite clay, windows boarded up, the tile roof cracked and caving, condemned remains of the old Vanderlip land-grant hacienda still glared angrily down at the world, long ruined by the massive ground failure caused by careless construction of Palos Verdes Drive back in the fifties.
She glanced briefly and indifferently at her father, the sculptor, as she disappeared into the house. The structure was strictly utilitarian, cheapest materials, aggressively low-rent. But inside was different, what little decor there was was exquisite, probably priceless, and Riley made no note of it because she’d never not known of it, had at one time been so embarrassed by it she’d made excuses why her friends couldn’t come over. She went down a short, narrow hallway to the tiny back bedroom, which still faintly favored the tastes of a stubbornly conventional ten-year-old girl. Half storage, half museum, there were, taped to the pale pink wall, faded Polaroids and snapshots of a flinty, pencil-legged creature the boys had teased: Stick your tongue out and turn sideways, you’d be a zipper!
Track and field trophies. A withered corsage. Lots of books. A dog-eared Stanford diploma tacked to the wall like an afterthought.
She caught a glimpse of herself in the narrow mirror and thought of Finn Miller. The way he looked at her; the way he saw her. Shit.
What was that all about?
She shoved it away. Hers would never be a love story unless love was made a crime.
Riley pushed a moving box aside and cleared space to get at a recently installed safe. She punched the electronic keypad code and opened the door. She tugged up her T-shirt and removed a thick envelope from where she’d wedged it in the waistband of her jeans. It held cash, a thick cushion of old bills, and she put the envelope with a dozen other fat envelopes neatly aligned on the safe’s top shelf, then made note of the date, time, and amount—fifteen thousand dollars—in a compact black ledger.
In the back of the safe, on the bottom, was a small black Ruger LC9 with the serial number filed off. Hitting anything farther than ten feet away with it was an iffy proposition, but the gun had kick and was reliable and slipped easily into the pocket of her jeans.
Riley returned the ledger and removed from a soft Cartier bag a lovely silver-and-gold wristwatch that she was still sliding over her wrist when a voice behind her cracked: “That’s a helluva timepiece.”
She straightened, startled, and then got annoyed that she’d been startled, because who else could it have been? The old man blocked the doorway, bandy-legged, regal, covered with the grit and grime from his welding. His hair was an explosion of stubby gray dreadlocks sprayed upw
ard from a shoelace tie. Mason McCluggage, once almost a l’enfant terrible of the South Coast art scene, had never quite come to terms with the concept of aging out. Her father. Convinced that the only reason fame had eluded him was because the world was too ignorant and undeserving.
“Anytime you want to get your things out of this room, I could use the space.”
Riley closed the safe and stood, stretching. “Why? Your new girlfriend have a kid?”
“Maybe it’s two girlfriends, and I want to park the spare one I’m not using in here.”
Her phone chirped with a text message she’d been expecting. She glanced at the display and told him, “I gotta go.” She squeezed past him before he could react, moving down the hallway, long strides that her father didn’t bother to keep up with.
“I thought you might make me some lunch.”
“Can’t. Sorry.”
“That cop finally ask you to marry him?”
This slowed her. “How did you know?”
Mason’s laugh was dry kindling. “He called for advice. I said good luck with that shit. But maybe you should jump on it. Seeing as how you’re all teeth and claw. Like your mother.”
This stopped her. He had to have known that it would. In the front doorway, she turned on him, eyes on fire: “And not surprisingly, Terry shares many of your finer qualities, Mason. He’s even made the same keen observation about my lack of, well, a gentle disposition.”
“Cops meet a lot of hard women, I guess.”
Riley let the cut slide. They’d been skirmishing since she was eleven years old. “Last night I met this new guy, and he was interested in finding out who I was rather than telling me who I wasn’t. Or should be. Cute and humble and warm—”
“Disney called,” Mason cracked, “they want Bambi back.”
“—And everything he does is, like—it’s filled with life and feeling—”
“Does?”
She knew she’d said too much.
“He’s an artist?” Mason scoffed. “Fuck me. Jesus H. Christ.”
Riley maintained, undaunted, “And now I’m confused, Daddy. Because I thought, growing up with you, I had men and art all figured out.”
Mason flinched as this hit home. “Sounds like a poofter. What’s his medium?”
“The dead,” Riley said, and walked out.
—
ONLY THE REPEATED and insistent buzzer roused Finn from fitful sleep and got him up, confused in darkness, and the loft door unlocked and yanked opened to reveal a pale and panicked Arden—“Hello, I’m still breathing”—the underfed hand model who lived downstairs. “Do you have any Benadryl?”
“Do I look like a pharmacy?”
Finn had come back to his loft from Joaquin’s parking lot urgent care and tried to do some work, but couldn’t concentrate and finally crashed and tossed, dreamless, on the unmade bed until dusk. It felt like somebody had plugged Finn into a wall outlet, his thoughts were caught in a Cuisinart, pulped and chaotic. His heart wanted to leap out of his chest.
Arden showed him her fingers, covered with angry red welts. “I ate shellfish. Who puts shellfish in ceviche?”
“Um . . . everybody?”
Finn stepped back and Arden swirled in, flouncy sundress and tangerine flip-flops, turning on lights, unable to stop moving until she lasered in, possessive, on the Murphy bed and made some mental calculations while her mouth motored on. “And I have a shoot tomorrow. This whole Taco Truck twitter thing is a joke. And yes, you look like a pharmacy.”
Finn ducked into the bathroom and came out with a bottle of pink pills. “There are only three left.”
“I saw that woman,” she said, staring at the tangle of sheets and blankets that Finn worried would confess to Arden a perfume not hers.
He stayed impassive. “What woman?” His muted cell phone started to hum.
“The Clairol redhead. Slinking away at dawn, doing the walk of shame, in her little clingy black silk number.” Arden looked sad suddenly, and Finn felt a tug of guilt.
“News to me.” Finn even shrugged to sell it. “Maybe she was visiting the IT guy who lives upstairs.”
“I’m pretty sure Jeff’s into solo play,” Arden said, eyes never leaving him, throwing back all three pills, dry. Finn answered his phone to avoid her probing eyes.
It was the Long Beach crime lab. Officer down, he scrawled the address on the back of a DWP bill envelope, another shooting, another job.
—
IT WAS A SACRED PLACE locals called Sunken City because a whole San Pedro neighborhood had, back in the twenties, fallen off the edge of the continent. Twilight, gloom, and shadows, marine layer pressing down silver spectral, and windy as hell, Riley had slid down the sandy embankment from the gap in the high chain-link fence, and scanned the well-worn paths and broken slabs that tumbled down toward the ocean like some kind of postapocalyptic dream.
“Hello?”
Every flat surface was tagged with a spectacular rambling tapestry of graffiti, most of which in turn had been recently disrupted with feral black gang markings. No moon breached the low clouds, only ambient leak from streetlights up on the bluff challenged the darkness, and it got darker as she went down. She sensed company, but saw only hardscape.
“I’m here.”
A woman’s shape had separated itself from the darker shadows of the headland’s upheaval, she was almost turned silhouette by the last of the dying day. “It’s Mallory.”
Riley held the Ruger low against her thigh, gripping and regripping it. She crossed the broken flats of what once was sidewalk, sneakers light on the concrete, not exactly scared, but a little healthy paranoia never hurt.
“It’s okay,” the shape called. “I’m Mallory. Charlie’s friend?”
Riley recognized the voice and the dark figure resolved into a tiny woman with a helmet of black hair that framed a chalky white complexion. Mallory was strikingly attractive, Riley noticed, not for the first time. Upscale boho: linens, pricey flats, and dangly earrings. Twitchy and scared. “I think I was followed,” Mallory said.
“I didn’t see anyone.”
Mallory glanced up toward the road.
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know.” Her expression strange, she watched Riley approach. “I thought you did.”
“No. That’s why I’m here.”
“Charlie trusted you.”
“Did he say that?”
“He said you could help us. That if anything happened to him, I should go to you. And tell you what I know.”
“Tell me.”
Mallory hesitated, then shook her head. “It’s too late for that.”
Riley felt a jolt of disquiet, then heard the footsteps coming, rapid, from behind her; Mallory’s eyes went wide, but not, on later reflection, in a what-is-happening way, but more an oh-shit-here-we-go way, and Riley was already raising the Ruger as she sidestepped, crouched, and turned into the ambush. She sensed before she saw the gunman moving across the slope above her, among the rocks, low, arm outstretched. A muzzle flashed, once, twice. Riley didn’t hear the gunshots, she was scrambling backward and downslope to grab Mallory with one arm and shield her, while with the other Riley fired back, off balance, nearly underhand, a random pattern of six shots placed just ahead of where she guessed the shooter would go.
He jerked awkwardly and fell into shadows.
But another muzzle fired at three o’clock, a second gunman who, Riley realized, disappointed in herself—time slowing, everything unfurling with hyper-clarity—must have been lying in wait for her approach and she’d failed to anticipate the possibility of it.
Snap. She was hit. It felt like an electric current drilling into her. She twisted with the pain, falling, breath lost, Mallory still in her grasp. She pulled the trigger of her gun by reflex, shooting almost upside d
own at the second assailant, emptying her clip, incoming bullets still sparking off the concrete slabs and rock faces, and on the ground around her from two directions.
Snap. She was hit again. This one didn’t hurt. But she felt a quick tug under her rib cage and the force of it jacked her sideways into a rock wall.
Down, tumbling, falling, mad at herself.
And in frustration, she cried out.
—
FINN SKATED THE TREACHEROUS DECLINE from Paseo Del Mar, twisting between fantastical earthworks from which the ruins of road, pipes, and foundations, all lathered with street art, jutted crazily. A medevac helicopter lifted out of the darkness, rotors churning a sand blizzard, and Finn turned his back, shielding his eyes and his camera until the chopper arced away over the water, hurrying toward Long Beach. His lanyard flapped around wildly as finally he ducked under the yellow tape to join the confusion in Sunken City.
A kaleidoscope of emergency lights, headlights, flashlights laced the Point Fermin cliffs. Cops milled, restless, more of them than usual, multiple jurisdictions, a show of force. Flares dotted the beach and the hillocks with their smoldering red fire. Soft rollers foamed up the glistening sand and fell back, ghostly, hissing. The rig lights of Terminal Island shimmered on the high tide.
Finn took his camera from his backpack and went to work.
In the backwash of the forest of portable forensic spotlights, a pale woman wringing the last out of her thirties, blunt chopped black hair a mess, blanket over her shoulders, bandage on her bloody neck and shoulder, sobbed and spoke in jagged bursts to a bald, bearded black man in civilian clothes, who Finn didn’t recognize. Officer-involved shootings brought everybody out of the woodwork. A few more plainclothes cops with a full array of facial hair and Technicolor tattoos hung back like the detective’s Greek chorus.
“. . . we were meeting . . . I was early . . . they came out of nowhere, I couldn’t see . . . the guns, my ears, I couldn’t hear . . . she saved my life . . .”
Flashclick.
The chalked outline of a contorted body that had already been removed. Blood soaked the ground where it had come to rest. The geometry of broken foundations around it fresh chipped by gunfire.