The Samaritan

by Cross, Mason

  She slowed and took the exit. Mazzucco could handle himself for a little longer. Kimberley Frank had just become the priority.

  74

  The taxi had almost reached Kimberley Frank’s address by the time I ended my conversation with Allen. I assumed she was arranging for a black-and-white to head straight here, so I knew I would have to move fast. I raised my voice and asked the cabbie to slow down, so we were coasting at fifteen miles an hour as we passed the house. I wanted to give the place the once-over before getting closer.

  No cars parked directly outside, no one in the front yard. I told the driver to let me out three doors up and handed over the fare, telling him to keep the change. He was a young, Middle Eastern guy in his early twenties who smiled and then looked more closely at me as he took the bills.

  “Are you famous or something? You look kind of familiar.”

  I pushed the sunglasses higher up on the bridge of my nose. “You got me. American Idol, a couple of years back.”

  He looked doubtful at first but then smiled again. “That must be it. Hey, is Simon Cowell really—”

  “Worse,” I said and made a hasty retreat out of the backseat. I slapped the side of the cab and waited for it to vanish around the next corner before I headed back along the street to Kimberley Frank’s house.

  As soon as I got within twenty feet of the front door, I felt a dull ache in the pit of my stomach. It was ajar. People didn’t deliberately leave their doors ajar in Los Angeles, even in a relatively safe neighborhood like this one. I got close, my senses attuned for noises and flashes of motion, and nudged the door open with my shoulder, being careful not to touch anything. It swung open with a creak and unveiled what looked like the aftermath of a violent struggle: furniture upended, a broken vase, a phone lying on the ground, its cable ripped out of the wall, a shattered cell phone on the ground not far from it. There was no sound from within.

  I was about to step over the threshold to make sure when I heard the sound of a police siren approaching fast. I backed away from the door and glanced around me. There was a path around the side of the house bordered by a low fence separating this lot from the next. I ducked down the side, vaulted the fence, and made my way into the neighboring backyard. Thankfully, it was empty. There was an old six-foot-high corrugated iron fence at the back. I scrambled up and over, into a narrow access road that ran between this street and the next one over. My feet landed on the opposite side just as I heard the police car come to rest outside the Frank house.

  I ran down the access road to where it came out on the street. I needed a car, fast. My eyes scanned the street for a good prospect. It was a reasonably affluent area, so there was no shortage of new and nearly new vehicles parked curbside. But that was the problem: newer cars had newer security features. They were a little more difficult to break into—a lot more difficult to hotwire. I needed something old. And then I saw it. A couple hundred yards from me, diagonally across the street. Not old—vintage. A 1973 Chevrolet Camaro Z28. Red with twin vertical black stripes down the hood. Under normal circumstances, way too nice a car for me to consider stealing. But I was in a hurry, and these were not normal circumstances.

  The Samaritan had taken his last victim, and there was only one place on earth he could be going.

  75

  The location of the abandoned town set wasn’t on any GPS, of course, because it wasn’t a real place. Nevertheless, by using Darrick Bromley’s directions together with Google’s satellite imaging, as well as a good old-fashioned map, Mazzucco had been able to plan out the route with a fair degree of accuracy. He’d even found pictures of the abandoned set on one of those Hidden LA websites, so he knew what it would look like on the ground. He had an LA road map in the car, the book open to the page he needed on the passenger seat.

  The first part of the journey was straightforward: along the entire length of Mulholland, past the last clutch of houses, and on to where the road entered the San Vicente Mountain Park. Mazzucco took a left turn onto the West Mandeville Fire Road, which took him past the LA-96 Nike Missile site. He followed the curving road for about a mile, looking for the next turn on the left. When he found it, it took him onto a narrow road that led upward. He slowed down and hit the trip meter under the odometer as he took the turn. There would be no signposts for the next part of the journey: all he had to go on were Bromley’s directions and the photographs from the website. By cross-referencing with the satellite images, he had worked out that the dirt track leading to his destination was situated at approximately two and a half miles along the length of this road.

  As the trip meter clocked up toward 2.5 in tenth-of-a-mile increments, Mazzucco began to slow down, watching the right-hand side of the road for evidence of pathways. At 2.6, he saw it. A tight dirt track, unsurfaced and almost obscured by bushes. If Mazzucco hadn’t been going so slowly and hadn’t been on the lookout for exactly this, he’d have passed right by and been none the wiser.

  He stopped the car and got out, examining the concealed entrance. There were multiple tire tracks, crisscrossing one another and traveling in both directions. The tracks looked reasonably fresh. Fresh enough to tell him somebody had used this road since the rain on Saturday night, anyway.

  He took his phone out and sent a text message to Allen. If she was coming straight from her apartment, she’d be here within another twenty minutes. The problem he had with waiting here for her was the same as the problem he’d had with waiting for the warrant: there could be somebody up there who needed his help now, not in twenty minutes’ time.

  His phone buzzed in his hand, and he tapped to open the message, expecting it to be Allen. Instead it was his wife, asking, ETA for dinner? X

  Mazzucco felt a twinge of guilt. He’d barely thought about Julia or Daisy all day. Quickly, he tapped out a reply, telling her not to wait for him. If Allen was right about the old set, they might be able to shut the Samaritan down today. Maybe then things would cool off a little and he could start getting home on time for a change. Maybe.

  He considered getting back in the car and driving onward along the track but decided against it after a moment’s thought. If he’d calculated right, the set was less than half a mile along the track. He could cover that on foot in a few minutes. That way, he wouldn’t risk alerting anyone who happened to be up there with the noise of the engine.

  He’d give the place a quick once-over and wait for Allen if it looked like he’d need the backup. Mazzucco took a second to check his gun, locked the car, and started walking up the rutted dirt road into the wilderness.

  76

  Allen was on Santa Monica Boulevard, about a mile from Kimberley Frank’s house, when her phone rang again. There was evidently some kind of holdup up ahead, because traffic had come to a dead stop instead of its usual jerking progress. As she checked the display and saw it was Blake again, she heard faint ambulance sirens behind her. Probably some kind of accident up ahead, then. She hoped it hadn’t prevented the black-and-white from getting to Kimberley Frank’s place. And then Blake’s first words to her made that academic.

  “He’s got her already.”

  “What?”

  “I was just at Kimberley Frank’s place. She’s gone, and it looks like she didn’t go quietly. We need to get out to the mountains. I’m on my way there right now.”

  “In whose car?” Allen asked, then quickly interrupted his answer. “I don’t want to know. Okay, Mazzucco’s out there now. We can catch up with him. I was on my way down to Frank’s house . . .”

  As Allen spoke, the ambulance passed by her in the other lane. When the blare of the siren dropped away again, she thought she could hear others approaching, too.

  “Where will I meet you?” she said when she could hear the sound of her own voice again.

  “Remember the old missile site we saw on the map?” Blake said after a second.

  “Sure. Make it twenty minutes.”

  She hit the button on the dash to activate the light and
siren and pulled out of the line of traffic, making a U-turn and putting her foot down.

  77

  Captain Don McCall was parked in the Universal City Overlook. He knew Allen was headed for the address in Santa Monica, but he was playing the odds by staying around Mulholland. He wasn’t really interested in Allen anyway, only Blake. Channing’s suspicion that Allen was still in contact with the fugitive had been dead-on, and his instinct that McCall was the best person to find out more had been similarly well founded. It was just a pity from Channing’s point of view that he’d never see the benefit. McCall’s cell rang again, displaying Rooker’s personal number. Both of the men he’d trusted enough to let in on this surveillance had been warned to keep things strictly off the grid. He picked it up and held it to his ear, not saying anything.

  “Captain? We got another call on the subject’s phone. She’s not headed to the address in Santa Monica anymore. It looks like she’s setting up a meet this time.”

  McCall smiled. “Same voice on the phone?”

  “Same unidentified male. They’re both headed out to the mountains.”

  “Where’s the rendezvous?”

  “Unconfirmed. They said something about a missile site, which I think could be . . .”

  “I know where they’re going.”

  “Do you want me to . . . ?”

  “Negative on that,” McCall said quickly. “I’m going to observe the meet personally. I want to tail them and see where they’re headed after this. If I need backup, I’ll call you.”

  There was a pause. “Captain . . .”

  “Did I ask you for an opinion?”

  “Understood, sir.”

  McCall hung up and switched his phone off. In the time he’d been sitting here, the sun had begun to set, so he removed his dark glasses and started the engine. He had a head start on both Blake and Allen, but he wanted to be prepared.

  78

  The light was ebbing out of the sky as Mazzucco approached the crest of the hill, keeping low. Beyond the crest, the ground fell away into a flat hollow that extended half an acre to the north. The set was built on this plain.

  Once upon a time, it must have been quite something to look at. There were three main clusters of buildings. The nearest, and largest, was a mock-up of a main street. Most of the storefronts were just facades, and some of them had collapsed over the decades. A couple of them, however, had been built all the way back and had roofs. Mazzucco guessed those had doubled as interior sets, too. At the far end of the street was the bar from the photograph Allen had found: Stewarton’s. It was one of the facades, nothing behind the surface. Mazzucco heard a low creaking sound and took a couple of seconds to find the source: a wooden sign hanging by a single chain from one of the fake buildings, swaying slowly back and forth in the breeze.

  Despite the sad state of the forgotten make-believe town, Mazzucco found himself strangely impressed by the craftsmanship, the attention to detail. He realized it was because they didn’t do this sort of thing anymore. These days, the filmmakers would pick a real-life town that was close enough to what they wanted, and some computer nerd would CGI the rest.

  A little way off to the side of the main street was a barn. The paint on the sides had probably once been a vivid red but had long since flaked and peeled and faded to a brown the color of dried blood. The corrugated sheet metal on the roof had buckled and fallen in on itself, never designed to last. The other building was on the opposite side from the barn, out past the end of the main street.

  It was a house. Mazzucco had never seen the movie Allen had spoken of, but based on the size of the house, he assumed it must have played a central role. It was one of the finished buildings. From a distance, it looked just like a real dwelling. It seemed to have weathered the years better than the rest of the town. It was a wide structure topped out by a gently sloping roof with a dormer window in the center. Along the front was a long porch. Once Mazzucco’s eyes had been drawn to the house, he held his position for a minute or two, watching it for signs of . . . what, exactly? There was no movement around the building, but straining his eyes to look at the patch of dirt track along the front, Mazzucco thought he could make out depressions in the soft ground. A vehicle had been parked there recently.

  He’d switched his phone to silent on the way up the track. If the Samaritan was here, the last thing he wanted was a ringing phone giving him away. He examined it now and found a text message from Allen. She’d been delayed but was on her way again. The last sentence of the message read: Bringing a friend along.

  Mazzucco knew exactly what that meant, but standing on the edge of the abandoned set, he couldn’t honestly say that he was sorry Blake would be joining them: when it came to a situation like this, three was definitely better than two. Or one. But it didn’t change the fact that he needed to confirm whether there was someone being held in the barn or the house.

  He rose to his feet and started to descend the road that led down into the set. After a moment’s consideration, he opted not to walk down the main street. Too many windows, even if what lay behind most of them was an inch of plywood. Instead, he walked along the strip of ground between the back of one side of the street and the barn. As he drew level with the barn door, he noticed more tracks on the dirt outside. He stopped and glanced around him. The air was still. From this side, the row of stores manifested as a blank wall buttressed by long beams of wood. He turned his attention back to the barn. Though the wood siding was rotted and holed in places, the double doors were firmly closed.

  Mazzucco approached them quickly and looked closer. They weren’t shut tight. One of the doors was warped, as though it had once been locked or barred but had been prized open. There was a gap between the two more than big enough to get his hand into. He did, and pulled the door. It swung open, the bottom edge scraping off the dirt floor. Mazzucco raised his gun, covering the opening.

  It was dark inside. There were no windows, and what light there was came from the section where the ceiling had collapsed. The space was about fifty feet square and was mostly empty but for some rotted hay bales stacked at one end. Mazzucco assumed they’d been just for show and had been abandoned at the end of the shoot like everything else. Likewise, he thought the lack of natural lighting was a deliberate choice by those long-ago set designers. As Mazzucco’s eyes gradually adjusted to the dimness, he saw that there were two vehicles inside, parked over on the opposite side from where the remains of the daylight came in via the hole in the ceiling. They looked alien in their surroundings, because they were both relatively clean and relatively new. The nearest vehicle was familiar: the green Dodge they’d seen a few hours before.

  The other one was a pickup truck, also green in color, though a darker shade. A California license plate. As Mazzucco approached it, he saw that there was a towing rig with a rolled cable at the rear. Perfect for offering a helping hand to a stranded driver. This had to be it: the Samaritan’s truck.

  Mazzucco kept his gun trained on the windows of the pickup as he got within a couple feet of it. He couldn’t see any sign of anyone inside, but that didn’t mean there was no one there. As his hand reached out for the handle, he froze as he saw what was on the front seat. A digital SLR camera and a canvas shoulder bag. He stood there for a second, wondering what it was that struck him about the equipment, and then it came to him along with a dull, sick feeling in his gut.

  He reached his left hand into his jacket and pulled out the sketch he’d taken from Blake the other day. The two versions of a face he’d penciled on the back of a menu. Something about the face had seemed familiar. It was why he’d held on to it. He straightened out the piece of paper with one hand, and all of a sudden, the haze cleared and he realized who it was in the picture. It wasn’t an exact likeness. In fact, it looked like the halfway point between the kid in the photograph and someone else. Someone close to home. It seemed glaringly obvious now.

  He was about to reach for his phone to call Allen when he heard the n
oise.

  He stopped and listened. There it was again: a muffled banging sound, as though somebody was kicking something. Somebody trying to attract attention. The sound wasn’t coming from inside the barn, but from outside. He couldn’t be sure, but it didn’t sound close enough to be emanating from anywhere on the main street.

  Mazzucco turned around and ran back toward the door. The last of the evening sun outside made the dark space on either side of the door even darker. He was two steps away from the threshold when a piece of the darkness on the left side came to life and slammed into him, right across the bridge of the nose.

  Mazzucco rocked back on his heels and another blow slammed down on the back of his neck while powerful fingers like steel cable twisted the gun from his grasp. He was twisted around and he felt his knees give way. He dropped to the ground and saw his own shadow and that of someone else cast in the rectangle of light from the door. He started to turn around, and an arm clamped around his upper body. He reached up with both hands to wrestle himself out of the grip when he realized there was a more pressing problem. Specifically, the touch of sharp steel against his bared throat. Mazzucco froze and relaxed his arms.

  “I’m a cop,” he said quietly.

  “I know,” a voice whispered, as though there were anyone to overhear.

  And then there was a jerking motion and a sound like a hose being cut. Mazzucco flashed on Julia back at home, eating dinner alone. Daisy. The last thing he heard was the whisper.

  “You shouldn’t have come here.”

  79

  Allen had just glanced at the speedometer as she came out of another curve on Mulholland Drive, so she knew she was doing at least fifty when the back tire blew out. As the car lurched toward the side of the road, her eyes widened and her hands whitened around the wheel as she tried desperately to persuade the two-ton hunk of steel to remain on what now seemed a hopelessly narrow strip of asphalt. She tried to yank the wheel left, succeeded only in sending the car into a skid. An oncoming vehicle swerved as she swung out into the opposite lane, missing her by inches. The car pulled out of the skid but now she was lurching toward the edge again.