Lock it down. Basic training came back to her. Hold your shit together, and get out.
The fire inflated. It boiled up the walls, engulfed the bar, and streaked along the floor. The smoke alarm tripped, a solid high-pitched shriek. Drew hung heavy in her shaking arms. She looked over her shoulder. The main door was one hundred twenty feet away. Beyond it, the stairs were jammed. A cry lodged in her throat. The stairs were packed so solid with people that none of them could move. They were yelling, writhing like worms.
The CO2 fire suppression system activated. But across the club, a man smashed a window with a chair. Oxygen gushed in. The flames welled and roared across the ceiling. The heat swelled appallingly.
A fleeing woman tripped into Drew. He blinked but didn’t move. Harper checked the other direction, the staff door at the back of the club. Black smoke nearly obscured it. Dozens of people were trying to shove through it. But gliding her way were three hooded figures. Amid the panic, they appeared impervious. The blaze seemed to burn from within their gas masks. Smoke enveloped them, then cleared around the one in the center. Under the light of the flames, the crawly black tattoo seemed to writhe. The silver pistol in his hand swept slowly across the room, gradually closing in on her and Drew.
Garrison tracked the shooters through rushing people and flashes of white flame and lowering black smoke. Hoods, masks, strutting across the dance floor. One raised his gun and aimed at the young brunette bartender. The pistol straight out, shoulder hunching, almost a parody of a gangsta pose, sweatshirt riding up, stalking across the floor, ignoring the fire he’d started.
Garrison barged toward him, coughing, trying to get a clear shot through the crowd and smoke. The shooters progressed in a straight line across the club, maybe sweeping the room for their original targets. They neared the wounded young man and the bartender, a slight woman who was straining to drag him to safety. Her hair was falling in front of her face. Her eyes were huge and desperate, but not craven—they glinted with firelight. She meant to save the young man even as the shooters and the fire bore down on her.
Garrison took aim. “Sheriff’s department. Drop your weapons,” he yelled.
The shooter didn’t respond. Garrison kept advancing. The gunman had a clear shot. He himself didn’t. The smoke billowed, obscuring all three shooters. Then, with a gust, it cleared. Garrison had an unobstructed field of fire. He squeezed the trigger. One of the gunmen went down. Garrison held his breath and swept his weapon right, and a second shooter was spinning in his direction, gun coming up. Garrison fired again.
Then, with a loud crack and a slithering shift in the floor, the world ended.
The wall of heat seemed to radiate through Harper. The fire bellowed, yellow, sliding around the room. Sparks and glass and the floor creaking. She turned frantically toward the staff exit. The smoke had lowered almost to the floor. Scurrying feet ran through the door, to the back hall, and it snapped shut.
She wrestled Drew toward the exit, groaning. The floor shifted beneath her. In front of the flaming bar, two shooters were down. From out of the smoke emerged the man with a gun and a badge.
She kept moving, even as the noise in the room turned to apocalypse, even as she knew the door was close, but too far. The cop was coming for her.
The floor opened up beneath him. With a flare of sparks and tearing wood, it collapsed. The wall came down with it. The club, the shooters, the night, her life, all disappeared into it. For a second, she caught the cop’s eye, until smoke and flame and the falling floor swallowed him. She felt Drew slipping and thought: I’m only a minute behind you into death.
3
A hawk drifted overhead, poised, dipping on flared wings. The sycamores rustled in the morning breeze. Down the hill, the Pacific sparkled with firework brilliance. Richard Westerman read from prepared notes.
“My son loved the outdoors. He loved this park.”
Though Westerman spoke up, his voice was buttoned down. “So today, in his honor, we dedicate the Drew Westerman Memorial Grove.”
Harper stood at the back of the gathering. Twelve months, almost. Three hundred sixty-two days Drew had been gone. Three hundred fifty-six since he’d been put in the ground. The hawk rose on a brush of air.
“We hope that everybody who comes here and walks in the shade of these trees will find . . .” Westerman looked up from his notes. “Find some . . .”
Harper steepled her fingers against her lips.
Drew’s mother, Sandra, stepped up and took her husband’s hand. “Our family hopes that everyone who comes here will take heart from this beautiful view, the sky, the ocean my son loved so much. Thank you.”
Applause pattered. The trees seemed to join in, leaves trembling. Richard and Sandra Westerman leaned against each other. Nearby, Drew’s sister, Piper, blinked against the sunlight.
The crowd shuffled toward them, a ragtag receiving line of neighbors, family, Drew’s friends from the software firm, and his father’s colleagues from the bank. Harper recognized a few people who had been at Xenon that night—fellow survivors. A photographer skirted the gathering, camera to his eye, shooting. Down the hill, the Malibu coastline shimmered in the salt air.
Yeah, this was the spot. Drew had relished sunny days and a good surf report. And the trees, with their roots digging into the ground, gnarling and strengthening, viscerally reinforced the truth that Drew had gone down and was buried.
He had gone down with the collapse of the floor and left Harper hanging on the edge of nails and splintered wood, screaming. That night, she was ten inches on the right side of living. Drew was on the wrong side.
Harper had recovered from the smoke inhalation and lacerations and the burns caused by flaming debris. She had largely stopped hurting. She was still trying to stop asking why. That question was a trigger. It sucked her into a recurrent loop, where memory became a kind of recidivism.
Worse, asking why seemed to get her nowhere.
The hawk rode the air above her, wings tipping back and forth, hovering as if tethered with a kite string.
Across the lawn, people huddled around the Westermans. Richard and Sandra stood hip to hip, hands locked. Piper stood apart, awkwardly greeting people. She looked like she needed a teammate. Harper walked over.
A woman in a salmon-tinted suit was smiling painfully at the teenager. “A lovely memorial. Your brother’s certainly smiling down on you today.”
Piper brushed her hair behind an ear. “Glad it’s sunny. Better view for him.”
The woman’s smile weakened. She glanced at Harper, maybe seeking assurance that Piper wasn’t toying with her.
She did a double take. “You’re . . .”
“Harper Flynn.”
The woman had crow’s eyes, flat and searching. “You’re the girlfriend.”
She touched her pearls and glanced at Piper. Volumes in that glance. Poor kid.
Piper’s eyes flashed. Often the girl hid her gaze behind a downturned chin and sandy hair that formed a parenthesis in front of her face. But when she stared, it was frank, a paint-stripping glare.
She grabbed Harper’s hand. “We’re going to get the Ouija board and find out if my brother has a view of traffic on the freeway home. Excuse us.”
She turned toward the grove of sycamores, but the woman stepped in front of Harper.
“You’re the one he saved,” she said.
Piper’s mouth tightened. “She’ll spell out thank you on the Ouija board.”
“I’d hope so. My God. To have somebody give his life for you.” The woman tilted her head as though examining a specimen, trying to see Harper slantwise. “I hope you live in a way that’s worthy of what Drew did for you.”
The sun felt jaundiced and overbright. Harper said, “I’m working on it.”
Piper pulled Harper into the trees. Under her breath she said, “What a special brand of bullsh
it people shovel at a gig like this.”
“I’m used to it,” Harper said.
“I can’t take it. Before you walked up, she told me, ‘God needed an angel, so he called Drew home.’”
As if a fourteen-billion-year-old god needed to call Drew home that night, via blood loss and blunt force trauma, instead of letting him live out his life. “God didn’t do this.”
“No shit.”
Piper stopped beneath a tree and slumped back against the trunk. “I’m the girl whose brother died. That’s plenty to wear every day. You’re the one he died for. How’s that feel?”
Feel? Grief wasn’t a feeling. It was a thing that visited. It was a weight, a lead wall, and it pressed on her lungs and settled a shadow across her mind, until the only way she could inhale was through a gasp of anger. Fleetingly, she saw a barricade of fire, smelled the phantom reek of smoke.
How did it feel? Impossible to live up to. Because it was a myth.
In her statement to the sheriff’s department, which she wrote from the hospital, Harper had drawn a diagram and explained where she and Drew were standing. He grabbed my hand across the bar and said, “Come on.” Then the round hit him in the back.
To his parents, those terse words became the testament of Drew’s heroism. Drew had tried to lead Harper to safety. Shielding her, he had blocked the gunfire with his own body and sacrificed himself.
“I take it as a mark of respect for Drew,” she said.
“You’re trying to earn it, aren’t you?” Piper said.
“Maybe.”
Piper’s hair fell in front of her face. Her razor stare was beneath. “You’re going to graduate and get a job with Homeland Security or Protect-Your-Shit Incorporated, and keep watch over everybody in the country, aren’t you?”
“To start.”
Definitely. Pointlessly. She could scrub her life so clean that it gleamed like the alabaster statue of a saint. To Drew’s parents, nothing she did could outshine their son’s martyrdom.
With Xenon out of business, she had scrabbled a job as a barista to make ends meet while she finished her degree at UCLA. But she could do nothing about the rest of it—the why and what the hell? She’d learned way back: You can’t control what other people do or how they see you. You can only control your own reactions. Life owed you nothing. Life came upon you. You built what you could.
But she was struggling to do that, because the investigation by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, and the L.A. Fire Department, and the BATF had concluded that Xenon was attacked by two gunmen: hired enforcers, settling a score between criminals over a deal gone bad. The dead men were local lowlifes, convenience store robbers, assholes in crime. Both were killed at Xenon. One was shot dead. The other died when the floor caved in.
Two shooters, not three.
The report noted unverified reports from several survivors who claimed to have seen more than two gunmen. It noted that a civilian witness asserted she had counted three hooded men in gas masks, one of whom brandished a silver pistol. But it found insufficient corroboration to validate her claim. In other words: The authorities thought that in the mayhem, overcome by terror, Harper had imagined a bogeyman.
All dead. So said the police. Harper heard that as a taunt.
She had spent four years in the Navy doing a job that boiled down to threat analysis. Before that, she had survived her teens by knowing how to recognize and avoid danger. Yet nobody believed what she’d seen the night when danger became immediate and personal. Her eyewitness testimony had been relegated to a footnote. That was what nearly made her bleed bile. Her experience had been reduced to an asterisk.
“Don’t worry about me. Your snark’s at championship level. Doing okay?”
For a second, Harper thought Piper might, finally, cry. But she forced a smile. “Ready for this day to be done.”
Harper put an arm around her shoulder. Overhead, the hawk took a last lazy turn over the trees. With a burst of wings, it swooped down the hill toward the water.
Harper missed the sixteen-year-old that Piper had been before Drew’s death: impish, precocious, sunny; smart-alecky with the older brother she had idolized. The slicing stare, the sarcasm, were new, her emotional Kevlar.
“Ready to face the crowd again?” Harper said.
“If you’ll block for me,” Piper said.
Arm around Piper’s shoulder, Harper headed back toward the gathering. Across the park, moms were pushing kids on the swings. On the lawn, two young men tossed a Frisbee. A brindled dog watched them, panting. In the grove, the leaves trilled in the breeze. Light and shade scurried across the ground.
Then a deeper shadow seemed to move.
A man stood in the shadows among the trees. Harper saw him in silhouette, backlit by the morning sun. He was thin, in a loose jacket and baseball cap. Shoulders ratcheted up, hands in his pockets. He slid from behind one tree and along the ground, his stride seeming to snap as he kicked up leaves. His head was turned in the direction of the Westermans and the people gathered around them.
Piper said, “What?”
Harper stopped. So did the man, shadow across his face, dappled sunlight falling on his shoulders.
“Harper?” Piper said.
Though she couldn’t see his eyes, Harper could feel him staring at her. She tightened her grip on Piper’s shoulder. The man held still, watching.
“What’s the matter?” Piper raised a hand to point. “Who’s that?”
Harper pushed the girl’s hand down. “Go to your mom and dad.”
Hesitantly, Piper headed for her parents. Harper turned to the grove of trees.
The man was gone.
Her palms were sweating. A pinging seemed to emanate from the center of her head, sonar, seeking a return. The shadows gave nothing back.
Clenching her fists, she walked back into the grove. Leaves crunched beneath her feet. Checking her peripheral vision for motion, she headed deep into the trees, to the spot where the man had been standing. On the ground, in trampled grass, were three discarded cigarette butts.
Her mouth felt dry. She scanned the grove and the park beyond, but the man had vanished. Skin prickling, she crouched and examined the cigarette butts. One was still smoldering.
He’d been standing there long enough to smoke three Marlboros. Watching the memorial service. Feeling half crazed, half foolish, she got an Altoids tin from her purse. She dumped out the mints. Crushing the hot end of the smoldering butt with her heel, she scooped all three into a tissue, dropped them into the tin, and almost furtively stuck it in her purse. It was evidence.
She hurried back to the Westermans. Richard, speaking to a well-wisher, lifted his chin. Sandra’s face was sanded smooth, maybe walled up behind the mortar of Xanax.
Piper said, “Scare away the ghosts?”
Her mother looked at her sharply. “Inappropriate.”
Harper seemed to see the day through a scrim of yellow light. For a second, she held her tongue.
Then she looked at Piper. She turned to Sandra. “I think it would be a good time to go.”
“Really?” Sandra said.
“Somebody was in the grove, spying on the ceremony.”
“Spying,” Sandra said.
“Yes. I think—”
“Of course you do.” Sandra’s face paled. Red patches glowed on her cheeks. “And you’re right. It’s a good time for you to go.”
“Mom,” Piper said.
Sandra raised a hand to silence her daughter. To Harper she said, “Really. We don’t need this foolishness.”
“Mom. Some guy was watching from the trees. I saw him.”
Sandra stared at Harper. “‘Some guy.’ No, you think it was him. Again.”
“Mom, chill,” Piper said.
But Sandra was winding up. “You think it was this elusiv
e third shooter. The nonexistent killer. For Christ’s sake.”
Harper said, “I’m concerned that a man surreptitiously observed the dedication, then took off when he was spotted.”
“This is not the time to indulge your sad fantasy. For the love of God, this is supposed to be about Drew. Don’t make it about you.”
“Sandra, please, believe me—”
“Believe you? That’s what you’re asking?” Sandra spread her hands. “How? You insist that you see somebody who doesn’t exist. Who can trust you?”
Taking Piper’s hand, Sandra strode away across the lawn, leaving Harper to bear the glares of the crowd. The scrim of yellow light brightened painfully. Harper clenched her jaw and walked to her MINI Cooper. She climbed in and slammed the door.
Ghosts. Piper might be right. She started the engine and pulled out. In the rearview mirror, she watched the trees.
4
Harper drove down the hill out of the park, trying to quiet the pounding in her head.
Little forensic evidence had survived the fire. The flames destroyed fingerprints, blood evidence, and the building’s CCTV cameras. Cartridge casings were recovered, sifted by crime scene techs with shaker trays, like archaeologists winnowing a dig for artifacts. The brass was largely melted. Nine millimeter ammunition, .40 caliber ammo, and magnum loads—at least four weapons were fired during the mayhem. Some witnesses insisted they saw one of the gunmen firing two-fisted. Others reported return fire from the target’s bodyguards. Everybody agreed that the shooters had been firing at Arliss Bale, high roller, meth mogul, the guy who escaped without a scratch.
That was another reason the Westermans held Harper accountable for their son’s death. Xenon had let a drug dealer through the door and served him champagne. That kind of place. Who would work there? That kind of woman.
The round that hit Drew went through and through. Forensics couldn’t determine which of the deformed bullets they collected from the rubble had hit him. The fire had melted all ballistic markings.
Phantom Instinct (9780698157132) Page 2