by Sean Black
He arranged the cut up empty boxes at the back door, and poured the gasoline over them, careful again not so get any on his clothes.
When the cardboard was good and soaked, he set the can down in the middle and looked around for anything that might burn.
His luck was in. Over by a dumpster, someone had dumped an old chair. He humped it over and set it down near enough to his little makeshift bonfire.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the taper, lit it, walked back and threw it into the pile. For a second nothing happened, and he thought it had gone out mid-throw.
He stayed where he was, giving it time. There was a sudden flash as the gas ignited.
He didn’t hang around to see what would happen or how it would spread. If anything, he hoped it would go out. His part of the mission complete, he ran back to the side, climbed the fence again, and this time lowered himself gently down.
Limped on his ankle, he half ran, and half hopped back across the street, got in his car and took off without a backward glance.
The scream of the smoke detector had Angie wide awake and bolt upright in bed. She grabbed a robe and stumbled out into the hallway. A couple of the other girls were out there already.
She smelled the acrid odor of the smoke before she saw it. It was pooling at the bottom of the stairs. Quickly, she ran over to one of the three recently installed panic buttons and pressed it.
When Lock had been here, as well as updating the cameras and alarms, he’d made everyone, Angie included work through what he’d called Actions on Attack. He’d explained that all it meant was having already decided what steps you’d take in any given situation where danger presented before it happened.
Fire had been one of them.
The route to the fire escape was at the end of the hallway. Angie shouted for any of the women in the hallway to wake the others. She ran back into her room, grabbed her phone and called 911, calming herself down as best she could and giving their details.
Back out in the corridor, she shooed her flock down the hallway, and through the door that led to the fire escape. As they shuffled past her, out onto the fire escape and down the metal steps, she counted heads.
They were one short. Missy. Where was Missy?
She was a recent arrival to the refuge, only nineteen but a girl who had spent the last six years on the streets. She also had a fairly major drug problem that she was working on, which might have explained her absence.
Worse, her room was down at the other end of the hallway.
Angie turned back, a couple of the other girls calling to her to follow them down the fire escape
“Go on,” she told them. “I’ll be real quick.”
Out in the hallway, smoke was in the air. She could still see fine, but it caught at the back of her throat and she started to cough. Lifting the edge of her robe, she placed it across her nose and mouth and hustled down the hallway.
Pushing open Missy’s bedroom door, Angie rushed inside. She closed the door behind her. Missy was in bed, lying on her side. She must have taken something. There was no way even the deepest sleeper would have slept through this otherwise. Even the alarm by itself was loud enough to wake the dead.
Angie knelt down and shook her awake. Slowly, Missy started to come round.
“Come on, we have to get you out of here?”
Missy’s eyes began to open. She had a glazed look.
Drugs weren’t allowed in the refuge, but that was a talk for another time. Not right now.
Angie hauled Missy out of bed by grabbing her arm.
“What is it?” said Missy.
“There’s a fire, we have to get out.”
The smell of smoke came again, intense and insistent.
Angie shepherded Missy to the door. She opened it. The hallway was filled with smoke now.
Pushing Missy back inside the room, Angie closed the door again. She grabbed some bedding and jammed it at the bottom. Then she ran to the window and yanked it up and open.
She leaned out and started shouting.
44
Lock stood behind the yellow and black crime scene tape that ran along the front of the building. He watched as Angie was loaded into the back of an ambulance, an oxygen mask covering her mouth and nose.
From what he’d already gathered from one of the cops, she’d gone to wake one of the young women who was slow to get out and collapsed from smoke inhalation as the firefighters were leading her to safety. Apart from shock, everyone else was fine.
The fire had been crudely set and quickly extinguished. There wouldn’t be any need for an in-depth investigation. This wasn’t a sophisticated insurance job that had been made to look like an accident. Nothing had been re-wired. As arsons went, it had been as simple as setting fire to a bunch of gasoline soaked boxes at the rear of the property.
As far as Lock was concerned, that could only mean one thing. It had been designed to send a message. The question was by who, and what was the precise nature of the message.
There were a number of possible answers. The most obvious in Lock’s mind was that it was somehow connected to the search for Kristin Miller, but that could easily be confirmation bias on his part.
It was just as likely that a former pimp or jealous boyfriend had stumbled upon the location of the refuge and decided to extract some form of retribution.
“Mr. Lock?”
Lock looked up to see an LAPD Sergeant heading his way.
“You told one of my officers that you’d just updated the security here.”
“Yes,” said Lock. “The cameras should have it all recorded. Everything goes to a remote server so I can send everything I have over to you.”
“That would be a big help.” The Sergeant looked back to the fire-damaged building. “Obviously we haven’t been able to speak with the lady who runs it. You know, if she had any specific concerns? Was that why she’d asked you to take a look at the security?”
Lock wanted to choose his words with care. They were on the same team, no question about that, but he wanted to get a better handle on who was behind this before he said too much about Kristin Miller.
“Nothing specific, no, but obviously there are plenty of bad guys out there who’d have a problem with a place like this.”
“No particular threats you were aware of?”
The Sergeant’s tone of voice suggested that he didn’t fully believe Lock, but that he wasn’t about to call him on it either.
“None, but if I think of anything, I’ll let you know.”
“Appreciate it,” said the Sergeant, fishing out a business card.
They traded cards. “I’ll email you a link to all the security camera footage as soon as I get home.”
Apparently satisfied, the Sergeant wandered back to speak to some of his patrol officers as Ty pulled up in his car and headed over to speak with Lock.
“What happened?”
Lock brought him up to speed.
“You looked at the cameras yet?” asked Ty.
“Just got here,” said Lock.
“What you think? said Ty.
Lock shook his head. “I don’t know. Could be Hanger, and could be a coincidence.”
“I don’t like coincidences,” said Ty.
“Me either.”
They drove back to Lock and Carmen’s place to take a look at what the cameras had captured. Lock had already scoped them out and apart from one at the rear that appeared to have been damaged as the fire took hold, they all appeared to be intact and untampered with.
Dawn hadn’t yet broken as they hunkered down in the living room and Lock began to download the footage to his laptop. Carmen appeared, still sleepy, and started to make coffee.
“You guys cool?” Ty asked Lock.
“Yeah, I mean, I think she’d rather this hadn’t spun out of control like this, but she wants whoever this asshole was caught as much as we do.”
“Just don’t go letting this bullshit get in between you.”
>
“I hear you,” said Lock, as he opened up the video player to review what the camera at the rear property had filmed before the fire was set.
The fire crew had estimated the blaze had been set close to when the first call came in to dispatch. Maybe a half hour prior and possibly less. Surprisingly for such an amateur attempt at arson it had taken hold quickly, burning through the wooden door and quickly finding a bag of recycling that had been left on the other side.
It didn’t take Lock long to find the arsonist. As he watched it unfold at five times regular speed, a shape appeared in the otherwise static frame. He pulled it back to just before the person appeared and played it at regular speed.
The quality from the camera was good, but the positioning was a little too high. One of Angie’s criteria had been discretion. She didn’t want the women who lived there to feel they were being watched. Most of them had experience years of that, years in a life where they had no autonomy and where every aspect of what they had was controlled.
“He knows it’s there,” said Ty.
“Or he’s guessing that it is,” said Lock.
A common but rookie error was criminals who stared straight into the lens. This person had their head covered, and they’d kept their face angled down.
Lock studied the footage at slow speed. As the arsonist arranged the boxes, he froze the frame and zoomed in.
“What do you think?” he asked Ty.
“Those hands belong to a guy. He moves like one too. What is he, maybe six, six one? Slim. White. That narrows it down to a few million people in the greater Los Angeles area.”
“Okay, well, let’s check the camera at the front,” said Lock, going into the folder and opening up a new file.
He moved to the time code stamp a few minutes before the person appeared at the back of the property. All it threw up was the same shadowy figure in the same hoodie as he moved quickly down the side of the property.
Ty threw up his hands. “Goddamn it.”
Carmen appeared with two mugs of coffee.
“Thanks,” said Lock, kissing her cheek.
“Anything?”
“Nothing,” said Ty, exasperated.
“We still got one more to check,” said Lock.
“We do?” asked Ty.
“Yeah, I placed a covert camera outside to cover the street.”
“Sneaky. I like it,” said Ty.
“Wasn’t part of the brief, but I figured, what the hell, for a few more bucks and a few more gig of storage,” said Lock.
“Okay, let’s see,” said Carmen, perching on the edge of the couch as Lock clicked on the folder.
He pulled up the video from this camera. He’d had it placed in some shrubs on the street side of the building. The camera had a relatively wide angle and was about three feet above ground level, ensuring that it captured everything on the street.
He moved the time stamp to around fifteen minutes before the arsonist had made his appearance and placed it on five times play speed.
“What you think?” asked Ty. “Get the car?”
“Not unless the guy’s a complete moron. You park a block away,” said Lock.
“Carrying a can of gas? Kinda suspicious.”
Lock shrugged. “Just looks like you broke down.”
“Remind me to never commit arson with you,” said Ty.
“Noted. Hey, hold up,” said Lock, reaching down and pausing the footage as car headlights cut down the street.
He pulled it back and watched the car drive down the street. It didn’t stop, no one got out. Just someone driving home. He restarted the video footage.
It played through the time frame for the fire being set. Lock let it continue to spool out. The camera had caught the arsonist fleeing the scene. He was on the edge of the frame, with his back to the camera and moving fast.
Lock played it back in slow motion. They couldn’t see his face, or anything else they hadn’t already seen from the camera at the rear of the property.
The footage moved on.
“Woah. Hold up,” said Ty as a fresh set of car headlights light up the street.
Lock hit pause one more time, then rewound a few frames.
“Damn,” said Ty. “Can’t see the license tag.”
Lock fiddled a bit more with the video player until he had the car in the middle of the frame side on.
“Don’t have to,” said Lock. “I know whose car that is.”
45
“You’re sure?” said Carmen, peering at the screen as she leaned over the couch.
“Hundred percent,” said Lock.
“Or it’s the mother of all coincidences,” Ty chipped in.
“And Ryan doesn’t believe in coincidences,” said Carmen, straightening up and walking around the couch so she was facing them.
Lock could feel an address to the court about to go down. That was the vibe Carmen was giving off. He had a fair idea what the gist of it would be too.
“No going vigilante again,” she said.
He smiled. He’d been right.
“Getting charges in Bakersfield dropped is one thing, and even that was a stretch, but here’s different.”
“So, what we do?” asked Ty. He was looking more to Lock than Carmen.
“We can take this straight to the cops, but the first thing he’s going to do is lawyer up. He goes down for the arson, but that doesn’t help us find Kristin.”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Ty.
“I’d vote we beat the shit out of him, then hand it to the cops, but Carmen, you’re right, we can’t find this kid if we’re cooling our jets in county jail.”
Carmen stalked over to the window and back. She snapped her fingers.
“Maybe there’s a way you can have your cake and eat it too,” she said.
“Oh, yeah?” said Ty.
“Yeah,” she said, tapping the back of the laptop with her nails.
46
There was no such thing as time in Las Vegas. Not inside the casinos anyway. No clocks. No windows in the gaming rooms. No way of knowing whether it was night or day. Then even went as far as pumping oxygen in to keep the gamblers alert and awake. If you didn’t know the time, how could you know you’d spent ten or twelve or even twenty-four hours at the tables or pumping money into the slot machines?
The game was to keep people gambling, which, Soothe had explained to Kristin, was why casino security and women like them were enemies.
They tolerated selling sex because that was part of the city’s appeal. For instance, said Soothe, they would never embarrass a John if he was with them. But if you stepped on to the casino floor and they caught you soliciting for business, then watch out.
That was where they were now. On the casino floor. Kristin with her fake id that gave her age as a wildly improbable twenty one, and Soothe watching everyone around them, explaining to Kristin who a likely customer was and who wasn’t.
“See that guy over there,” said Soothe, pointing out a balding, middle aged white guy in a sport coat.
“Yes,” said Kristin.
“He keeps looking over. Next time he does, you look back. Don’t break eye contact. He’ll come over.”
“Okay,” said Kristin, watching him as she stirred her straw around her orange juice.
That was the other rule of being a carpet ho, Soothe had told her. No drinking on the job, and definitely a hundred percent, no getting high. That would get you kicked out faster than anything.
He looked again. Kristin stared back at him.
This was way tougher than being out on the track, she thought to herself. The track was straightforward. If a guy was in his car on the track and he had his window down, then he was either a John or a cop. Here, on the carpet, there were other men, a lot of them not looking to buy sex.
On the other hand, Soothe had explained, the rewards were higher. A girl could charge a lot more for a guy she met here. Soothe wasn’t exactly sure why that was. Maybe it was something to do w
ith the fact that the carpet hoes looked better, they were on point. A girl with meth-rotten teeth who was stumbling all over the place wouldn’t last two seconds on a casino floor.
Kristin was just glad that Soothe was here and what had happened back in LA had been forgotten. By now Soothe was like a big sister to her. She could be tough on Kristin, but she told Kristin it was for her own good and Kristin was starting to believe that.
The guy looked back over at them. Kristin looked back.
“Okay, that’s good, plenty of eye contact, don’t look away,” Soothe coached.
The guy was starting to come over.
“Okay, you’re on your own now, girl,” said Soothe, stepping off to a nearby craps table and leaving Kristin standing by herself.
“Hey, how are you?” the guy said to Kristin.
“I’m good,” said Kristin. “You looking for a date?”
The guy smiled. He moved the bottom of his sport coat to one side, revealing a laminated plastic casino ID badge.
“Okay, let’s see some identification. Let me guess, you’re twenty one, right?”
Kristin froze, a rabbit in the headlights.
“I didn’t do anything,” she stuttered.
“Sure, you didn’t. What are you like, sixteen?”
From nowhere, she felt a hand on her arm. She jumped, expecting it to be attached to a security guard, or worse, a cop.
“We were just leaving,” said Soothe, guiding Kristin gently away from the guy.
He stepped in front of them.
“I haven’t finished speaking to her yet,” said the casino security guy.
“You ain’t a cop, and we’re leaving, okay?” said Soothe, her face set like granite.
It was the same look she gave Kristin when Kristin had messed up or she needed her to do something.
“I don’t want to see either of you in here again. Understand me?” said the security guy as he stepped out of their way.