The Samaritan

by Cross, Mason

  Then I became aware of a low rumble building in the west, and it took a moment before I realized what it was. The noise grew closer and louder until I looked up to see another passenger jet pass a couple hundred feet above my head. The morning rush beginning to get underway. It continued climbing, and the noise of the engines faded and the silence flooded back into the void.

  I looked around me. There was another anonymous low and wide building across the street behind a six-foot fence. There was an intersection a hundred yards away, and beyond that the street turned residential: bungalows and apartment buildings. I started to walk toward the intersection, looking from side to side. A man approached from the opposite direction, his eyes darting away from me in discomfort as I openly stared at him. He gave me a wide berth as he passed by, probably thinking about how the crazies come out this time of night.

  And then something made me turn around. I looked back down the street, the way I’d come, and saw another man standing beneath a streetlight, his face in shadow. A man who wasn’t moving. A man who appeared to be staring straight at me.

  I started walking toward him, picking up speed with every step. He straightened and took a step back. I quickened my pace again. He bolted.

  I broke into a run, gradually closing the gap. I thought about yelling after him and then asked myself what good it would do. The street was empty and silent, the sounds of our footsteps cracking off the sidewalk the only noise. He ducked to the left, and I saw him disappear into a building. As I got closer, I saw it was a parking structure, like the one I’d met Allen and Mazzucco inside a couple of days before.

  I heard footsteps on stairs, climbing not descending. I made the pedestrian entrance to the structure and saw a flight of concrete steps to an upper floor. I took them two at a time and came out on the second level. The ceiling was low, supported by thick concrete pillars. The space was square, a couple of hundred yards on a side, bordered by solid walls on the east and west sides and half-height walls on the north and south that left a large, open gap beneath the ceiling for air to circulate. It was around half full with cars, which meant plenty of places to hide.

  The parking spaces were arranged in double rows, with aisles between wide enough to allow vehicles to pass one another. I picked the middle aisle and started walking down it. I kept my eyes open and my ears alert. I moved my head from side to side, checking the spaces between cars, making sure not to spend too long looking in one direction.

  I got to the halfway point between the entrance stairwell and the north wall and then stopped and listened. I stood still for a full minute, not moving. I heard nothing, but I knew he was in here with me. There hadn’t been enough footsteps for him to have ascended to the next level. I waited another minute. I could wait all night if that was what it took.

  But then the air was filled with noise again. Louder than the jet had been, in the close confines. A car alarm: the horn blaring and echoing and amplifying off the concrete walls and the low ceiling. A black SUV in the last row before the solid east wall was angrily flashing its headlights. It was a demand for attention, a beacon to home in on. Which was exactly why I ignored it.

  Instead of running toward the black SUV, I dropped to the floor and looked under the parked cars in the direction of the east wall. He was there, a shadow against the fluorescent-lit concrete, low crawling toward the half wall on the north side of the building. He realized he’d been spotted and rolled to his feet, still with two double rows of cars between him and me.

  I edged between two cars in the first row and crossed the aisle as he made for the north wall. In the light, I could see him better, though his back was to me. He wore jeans, a dark coat and a green ball cap. He looked to be the right height and build. I dived through the final two rows of cars and out onto the space along the east wall as he reached the north wall and swung a leg over it. He hauled himself over and dropped off the edge, my hands just missing his as he let go. I looked over the edge and saw him hit the ground and roll fifteen feet below. The parking structure backed onto a narrow maintenance road, about ten feet wide, and then there was a chain-link fence beyond. He kept his head down, and all I could see was the top of the ball cap. He took a run at the fence and caught it halfway up, scrambling up it with agility. The top of the fence stopped a couple of feet below and ten feet across from my position.

  I took a step back and judged the gap between the wall of the parking structure and its ceiling, and the distance to the fence. I jogged backward a few steps and took a run at the wall, crouching low to avoid the ceiling and kicking off the top of it, trying to hurl myself horizontally across the gap.

  I had judged it just right. I hit him just as he was cresting the fence, and my momentum knocked us both over on the opposite side. The impact knocked out my angle and all of a sudden I realized I was dropping toward hard asphalt facefirst. I got my arms up in front of my head and tried to angle my body, twisting my legs toward the ground and doing just enough to save myself.

  I felt a blunt pain as I touched down and immediately started calculating the damage. Broken ankle, or perhaps broken leg. Six weeks in plaster. If there were another six weeks in my future, that was.

  My quarry had had better luck than me, managing to grab hold of the fence on the way down and hang on. He dropped off and landed on three points as I tried to roll over and onto my feet. A stabbing pain in my left ankle dropped me back to the ground again.

  He circled me cautiously, like someone moving past a wild dog. He was looking right at my face, but the streetlight directly above us cast a long shadow from his ball cap over his face and halfway down his chest. He lingered for a second, as though coming to a decision, or thinking of something to say. And then he took off again across the lot.

  I rolled onto my side and started to get up again, putting all my weight on my right foot. The fenced area enclosed a patch of land and a weather-beaten two-story warehouse. There was a battered sign on the front that was obscured by an almost equally battered sign that read FOR RENT, providing a phone number.

  As I watched, my target reached a fire door in the side of the building. A couple of seconds later, he had it open and was inside.

  Gingerly, I tested my left foot, putting a little weight on it. My ankle hurt like hell, but it wasn’t broken; just a bad sprain. I started to limp toward the warehouse.

  56

  The man in the hat had closed the door behind him, and when I tried the handle, it was locked. I wondered about that for a second: had he had time to pick the lock in the moment I’d seen him fumbling with the door? I didn’t think so. That meant somebody had accidentally left the door unlocked—which seemed a little convenient—or somebody had deliberately left the door unlocked. Perhaps even the same somebody I was chasing.

  The entire half hour from the end of the Samaritan’s phone call until now had been one long period of frantic activity. I’d barely had time to think, only to act on instinct. One action after another, following the trail, narrowing down the options. It was only now that my options had been reduced to one clear pathway that I took a second to wonder if I’d been meant to follow this trail all along. It was almost too simple: one action after another, leading to an inevitable conclusion. And, as I’d been so quick to brag a little earlier in the night, the Samaritan knew what I could do.

  Either the Samaritan had been a little careless and a little sloppy, or he had been very careful and very well organized. I thought about how I would engineer this situation if I were him. I decided that it wouldn’t be so difficult—the trick would be to make sure it didn’t seem too good to be true. If I was right about this, then it meant I was about to walk straight into a killer’s trap.

  I put a little more weight on my sprained ankle. It still hurt, but it was solid enough. I considered my options. I could call Allen and have her come out here herself—or better yet, with backup. But that would take time. There was probably more than one exit from the building, and I could be in only one place. There was
still a chance that this wasn’t a trap, that the warehouse was a dead end. Perhaps the Samaritan hadn’t watched for the five forty a.m. to Newark taking off before he dialed the number of my hotel. Perhaps he hadn’t called in a fire in this neighborhood to 911 a moment before.

  I reached into my pocket for my wallet and located the appropriate size pick. Ten seconds later, the lock had been sprung. I held my breath, turned the handle, and gently pulled the door toward me. The rusted hinges screeched, but only a little.

  I got the door open all the way and stood on the threshold, listening. My eyes could just barely make out shapes and hard edges within, so it wasn’t all the way dark. The air that escaped from the doorway smelled musty, abandoned. From somewhere inside, I heard a brief flapping of wings. And something else. I had to move my head closer to the doorway to confirm I was really hearing it. Music. Something old-time, from the thirties or forties. A crooner tune. I took one step and then another into the darkness.

  It took a second for my eyes to adjust further, but I soon realized there was just enough light to make out my immediate surroundings. I glanced up and saw the reason why: a big hole in the corrugated roofing thirty feet above me was letting in moonlight and a reflected glow from the streetlights. Ahead of me was a corridor lined with plywood walls. I guessed that the open-plan warehouse floor had been partitioned into separate rooms—offices or workshops or something. About twenty yards ahead of me down the corridor was a metal stairway that led up to a second level spanning only half of the interior space. I couldn’t be certain, but I thought that was where the sound of the music was emanating from.

  I blinked a couple of times to hasten my eyes’ adjustment to the dark and scanned the concrete floor ahead. It was pitted with holes, weeds were sprouting up in some of the corners, and there were piles of scrap metal and machine parts lying abandoned here and there. I started walking toward the stairway, making sure to avoid the pitfalls and keeping my tread as light as I could with a sprained ankle. As I walked, I passed doors that led off into the partitioning. I tried a couple of them and found them locked. I reached the foot of the stairs and looked upward.

  The music was louder here. It sounded like Bing Crosby, or someone of that vintage. I hadn’t figured Crozier for a fan of old-time pop music. The stairs looked rickety, the guardrail missing on one side. I put a cautious foot on the first step and settled my weight onto it. It held without complaint, so I proceeded upward. I’d made it almost to the top when a flash of movement burst in front of my face. I rocked backward on my heels, grabbing the guardrail, before I realized I’d been startled by a pigeon. Or rather, we’d startled each other. The bird flapped upward before gliding through the torn opening in the ceiling.

  I let a slow breath out and paused to listen. Nothing but my heartbeat and the music. I climbed another step and saw a thin line of light in my sight line, which was just above the level of the upper floor. The light was shining through the gap at the bottom of a stack of wooden pallets. I made the top step and moved onto the upper level. The platform was floored with rigid boards suspended from the roof beams, rather than supported from below. The stacks of pallets created a high wall directly in front of me. The light and the music were coming from farther back. I saw a narrow gap in the pallets thirty feet to my left. It required sidestepping along an empty strip of floor no more than eight inches wide, with no fence or guardrail to separate me from a twenty-foot drop. I put my free hand on the pallets and started to move carefully toward the gap. I glanced down and realized that the partitions had no ceilings of their own. It was like looking down into a wine box divided into squares by crisscrossed cardboard. In the dim light, I noticed that some of the boxes were empty, and some were filled with unidentifiable shapes.

  Another couple of birds took flight as I disturbed their sanctuary. I could be as quiet as I liked, but if there was anybody waiting for me behind the wall of pallets, the birds would be giving him all the warning he needed. I took comfort in the fact that neither the music nor the light had been switched off.

  I made the gap in the pallets and stepped gratefully in off the ledge. There was a narrow corridor twenty feet long and a foot wide between the stacks. The light spilled out from the far end. It was a small, dull light, probably from a low-wattage table lamp. I saw something else, too. A dark red stain pooling out from the source of the light. The music stopped and there was a moment of utter silence. I was almost relieved when another tune kicked in.

  I recognized the song from somewhere, though I couldn’t identify the voice of the crooner, who’d probably died of old age thirty years ago. It was all about the girl of the singer’s dreams. I walked toward it, my eyes flicking from side to side for any ambush point that might be concealed in the wall of pallets. I glanced above me and saw nothing but a corrugated ceiling, pendant lights with shattered bulbs hanging every few yards. As I got closer to the blood pool, I could see that it was starting to coagulate, but only just. That meant it had been spilled relatively recently.

  I made the corner, paused, and stepped out into the light.

  Shit.

  There was a woman’s body on the wood floor. She was nude and was lying on one side, her wrists bound with rope. I could see deep incisions on her back and on the backs of her legs. A blood-soaked mop of blond hair covered her face like a shroud, but it didn’t obscure the ragged gash across her throat. I cursed out loud and fought the urge to break something. A voice in the back of my head spoke in a measured, matter-of-fact tone: This one is on you. The Samaritan, far from backing down at the challenge, was escalating his activities. This particular victim, whoever she was, had died because of me. To send me a message.

  I took my attention from the body for the time being and surveyed the rest of the scene. Someone had created a hidden grotto within the stacks of pallets. The space was about ten feet by fifteen. The light came from a battery-powered lantern that had been placed on one of the horizontal beams supporting the ceiling. There was a small office desk in the far corner. There were three items on the desk: a cheap stereo, from which the music was coming; a heavily bloodstained chamois cloth; and something that looked a little like a small black leather briefcase that was open on its hinges but facing away from me. Attached to one of the ceiling support beams near me was a stub of rope, severed just below the knot. I didn’t need to look back at the corpse’s bound wrists to know that the two lengths of rope would match. The bastard had hung her up while he had his fun.

  I looked back at the body. The victim was tall and blond, different body type from the first three victims. Another deliberate choice, I thought. It fit perfectly with my working theory on what the Samaritan was trying to do.

  I maneuvered around the body, being careful to avoid the pool of red, and approached the desk. I reached into an inside pocket of my jacket and took out a pair of surgical gloves. I put the gloves on before I reached out and hit the off button on the CD player, cutting off the singer in the middle of another declaration of undying devotion. I turned my attention to the briefcase, only it wasn’t really a briefcase. It was more like a box with a leather cover. I’d seen boxes like that before, and I had a pretty good idea what it would contain. I reached out and took hold of the open lid, using it to swivel the box around so I could see the contents. The interior was lined in red velvet and there were shaped depressions that snugly held a collection of knives. Scalpels, paring knives, boning knives. Like a hunter’s blade set mocked up to look like a surgeon’s kit. But no surgeon would have had a use for the largest blade in the case.

  It was an ornate dagger called a Kris, a ceremonial blade of Javanese origin. It had a gilded handle with swirling patterns on it. The blade was eight inches long and curved back and forward in a jagged pattern. The razor-sharp edges glinted in the lamplight. The weapon held an odd attraction. I wanted to pick it up and feel its weight, test the sharpness of its blade. I ignored the impulse, just on the unlikely chance that the Samaritan had left his prints. Even if he h
ad, I reminded myself that they wouldn’t do any good.

  I was so absorbed by looking at the blade that I didn’t notice the sound of approaching rotor blades until they were practically overhead.

  I heard a smash of glass from one of the windows downstairs, followed by a thud of something heavy hitting the concrete floor. It was followed by a second sequence of the same. I moved quickly back to the narrow corridor that looked back toward the warehouse floor and saw two fat clouds of smoke rising to the rafters. The Samaritan had trapped me, all right, just not in the way I was expecting. I batted the battery lamp off its perch and it crunched on the ground, plunging the death room into blackness. From outside, I heard a screech of feedback from a megaphone and then a gruff, commanding voice.

  “This is the LAPD. You are surrounded. Lay down your weapons and come out of the building.”

  57

  “Hello?” Allen was still only semi-awake when she hit the button to receive the call from Mazzucco—she had been worried it might be Denny again—but his next words shook her out of the sleep haze immediately.

  “I just spoke to McCall—he says they got a heads-up on the Samaritan. They’re surrounding an old warehouse down in Inglewood. They’re making the incursion right now.” Mazzucco’s voice was strained, and she could sense his controlled anger.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Ow. You don’t need to yell, Jess. I know. He says they tried to get ahold of us earlier, but—”

  “Bullshit. I’ve had my cell beside me all night.”

  “Me too. Jess, we can talk about it—”

  “Got it. Just give me the address and I’ll meet you there. Gimme a sec.” She hunted around for a pen and something to write on. “That fucker.”