by Alan Russell
The urgency welling up in me demanded immediate action. It was a war that couldn’t be put off.
The floor nurse entered my room. Before she could speak, I said, “I need my phone right now.”
“Detective Gid—”
“Now!” I said, interrupting her.
She read my voice and my expression and left the room. A minute later she returned with my phone, with security, and with what I assumed by his scrubs was my doctor. Everyone was looking at me warily. I had taken out my IVs and hadn’t done a very good job of it.
The young man in scrubs stepped forward and said in an overly calm voice, “Detective Gideon, I’m Dr. Padgett.”
“I understand I am greatly in your debt, Dr. Padgett,” I said, “but right now I have to attend to a matter of life and death and need to discharge myself.”
“You’re confused, Detective. You’re drugged, and not in your right mind. In this state, I can’t release you.”
“Phone,” I told the nurse, extending a bloody arm.
She looked to the doctor, and he gave a slight assent. I took the phone.
“And I’m going to need my wallet,” I said.
There was another exchange of glances between the nurse and the doctor, and then she left the room to get my wallet.
“You’re bleeding everywhere,” said Dr. Padgett. “Can I at least put some gauze on your wounds?”
“I would appreciate that.”
Dr. Padgett didn’t look much more than thirty. They keep making doctors younger and younger, or so it seems. With Sirius watching his work closely, the doctor did a quick patch job.
“You really are in no condition to leave this hospital,” he said.
“And I wouldn’t be leaving if it wasn’t a life-and-death situation.”
“Then why don’t you call emergency services? They would certainly be able to respond faster than you, wouldn’t they?”
“No,” I said, “they wouldn’t. Besides, it would be difficult for me to explain the situation to them.”
“You’re making my case for me that your cognitive abilities are compromised.”
“You’re making my case for me,” I said, “that what I need to do can’t easily be explained.”
The nurse reappeared with my wallet. I found the business card of Angie’s vet, along with Dr. Green’s emergency number. Four sets of eyes—the doctor, the nurse, the guard, and Sirius—watched me as I dialed the number.
Dr. Green didn’t use an answering service. When she picked up the phone at a quarter to midnight, she sounded tired, but not asleep.
“This is Detective Gideon, Dr. Green. I’m sorry that I didn’t pick Angie up earlier, but there was a good reason for that: I was in a car accident.”
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I’m fine. And I wouldn’t be disturbing you at this hour if it wasn’t an emergency. A situation has arisen that requires me to get Angie out of your clinic right now.”
“And it can’t wait?”
“I would explain, but every second counts.”
“I’ll take you at your word, Detective. I’ll call our evening vet tech and tell him that you’re coming to get Angie.”
The animal doctor was willing to believe in me, but the human doctor still had his doubts.
“You’re really in no condition to leave,” Dr. Padgett said, “and it would be unlawful for you to operate machinery.”
I pointed to my phone and then hit the Uber app. After my account came up, I punched in the destination of Dr. Green’s vet clinic. Uber electronically confirmed I would be paying with the credit-card information they had on file, and then gave me an amount and ETA of the driver.
“My ride is going to be here in ten minutes,” I announced. “I’d like my clothes and my handgun.”
“You are not getting your gun,” said Dr. Padgett.
I took it as a good sign that he was no longer saying he wouldn’t release me. The gun had been the bargaining chip I knew I would have to concede, but I pretended to be upset by his ultimatum, offering a long sigh and shaking my head.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll call in another cop with a gun to assist me. What about my clothes?”
“Your bloody clothing is being laundered,” said the nurse.
“I’ll need scrubs and my shoes, then,” I said.
The nurse once again looked for direction. Dr. Padgett’s sigh and headshaking were far more convincing than mine, but finally he said, “Go ahead.”
The nurse and the guard both left the room, and Dr. Padgett made a last attempt to be the voice of reason: “I strongly suggest that you stay, Detective. You’re leaving against medical advice.”
“I understand that. And I’ll sign whatever forms are needed that exonerate you and the hospital.”
“We’ll get them ready for you. And don’t even think about walking out. We’ll have an attendant wheel you downstairs.”
I stripped and put on doctors’ scrubs. The simple motions of undressing and dressing hurt like hell. I was already missing the drip, drip, drip of my pain medication. And I wasn’t the only one moving gingerly: my guard dog was also limping.
“You can play the fife,” I told him, “and I’ll play the drums.”
A pile of forms was dropped into my lap, and I signed my life away. Then my chariot showed up, and I was wheeled downstairs to the lobby. I felt guilty about my riding and Sirius having to walk. My attendant was a young, heavy-lidded Asian man. It looked as if he’d just been awakened. I knew for a fact that Sergeant Reyes had just been awakened, because I was the one who’d woken him up. I spent most of my wheelchair ride on the phone with him.
“You need to find a home address for me,” I told him. “I might have something on our abductor.”
“What’s stopping you from getting the address?”
“Long story short, I had an accident and am just now being released from the hospital. Besides, I thought you wanted to be in on this.”
“What’s the name?”
“Dr. Alec Barron,” I said, “with two r’s in the last name. He’s a therapist, and has offices in Los Feliz.”
“You think he’s our guy?”
I had remarkably little in the way of evidence, but enough had added up. In my fire vision I had heard my instructor exhorting me, “You got to listen to your dog, Gideon.”
The fire dream hadn’t stipulated which dog. It was Angie I hadn’t been listening to. I never took into account how alert she’d become when we neared Alec Barron’s workplace. And when I came back from my meeting with Barron, Angie had all but patted me down with her nose. It wasn’t a friendly sniff either. She was all business; she knew the scent of her enemy.
Emilio Cruz had finally admitted that Barron had authored his note. The therapist had to have been the one who suggested they meet. Barron must have been watching for me from the parking lot, and while I was preoccupied, had planted a tracking device on my car. It was the only way I could figure how he’d known where Angie was being kept. Barron had recognized what I’d failed to—Angie was a witness to his crime, or her nose was. He’d understood that she was a potential threat to him, and because of that he’d attempted to murder her.
Still, the evidence was sketchy. I had little more than a lost dog, a dream, and a gut feeling to go on, but for me that was enough.
“I do. He’s certainly a person of interest.”
“You’re not exactly reassuring me, Gideon.”
“I got to run,” I said. “I’m making a stop along the way before calling on Barron. Call me when you get his home address.”
“If it’s going down, I want to be there,” he said.
“Then you’d better find out where there is.”
The Uber driver pulled up to the hospital’s entrance. He was driving a Ford Focus. In a short while it was going to be a tight fit.
I got out of my wheelchair and told the attendant, “Thanks for the ride.”
As Sirius and I approach
ed the Focus, the driver rolled down the passenger window. He was a white kid who looked to be in his midtwenties. “I wasn’t told about the dog,” he said.
“It’s not a dog,” I said, “but a decorated police officer. And I’m his handler. We’re on police business.”
I flashed my wallet badge, groaned as I helped Sirius up into the back, and groaned some more as I took a seat in the front. The kid acted uneasy. That might have had something to do with my appearance in the wake of playing bumper cars. Or maybe it was my wearing doctors’ scrubs while claiming to be on police business.
Uber driver Steven said, “Where are you going, sir?”
Judging from his appearance, Steven looked and sounded like a nerd. “We’re going to a veterinary hospital,” I told him.
“Is your dog all right?”
I reached back to my partner, gasped from the pain the movement caused, and then ruffled Sirius’s fur.
“We were in a car accident tonight,” I said. “But we’re not going to the vet’s office for my partner. We’ll actually be picking up another dog.”
Steven thought about that. “I’m not sure about transporting a second dog.”
“A second police dog,” I said. I decided to elaborate on my fabrication before Steven learned firsthand what a drooling machine Angie was. “And as you probably know, police dogs are afforded the same status as police officers and cannot be discriminated against. As you’ll see, Angie is a trained bloodhound.”
My Uber driver was looking that much more uncertain.
“Say, Steven,” I said, “when you were a kid, did you like playing cops and robbers?”
Without asking Steven’s permission, after we picked up Angie, I seated her in the front next to him. My neck was hurting too much for me to easily turn around, and I wanted to be able to monitor Angie’s reactions.
My phone rang while I was getting into the backseat. The readout told me Reyes was calling.
“Good timing,” I said. “What’s his address?”
“I’m still working on it,” he said. “His DMV address isn’t where he lives. It looks like that’s where he rents out a room in a house and collects his mail. His landlord says he uses it as a sometime office, but it’s definitely not his residence.”
“What about property records?”
“Nothing has popped out yet. And you know how some properties are in trust names or business names. Unraveling those takes time.”
I cursed under my breath, and Steven’s eyes widened. He’d told me he enjoyed playing cops and robbers as a kid, but I wasn’t convinced. My menagerie was certainly out of his comfort zone; Steven was a grad student studying engineering at UCLA. His orderly world had been invaded by a cop in doctors’ scrubs, my toothy partner, and a slobbering dog who was already drooling on him, not to mention his car’s upholstery. Given his position, I might not be enjoying this particular game of cops and robbers either.
“Keep trying,” I told Reyes. “And while you work on locking down his address, we’ll be doing the same thing. We’re going to be heading to Sherman Oaks.”
“Why Sherman Oaks?”
“That’s where I found Angie. She traveled a roundabout route from Burbank. I’m thinking she was following Heather Moreland’s scent. I’m hoping by the time she collapsed in Sherman Oaks, she was getting close to her mistress.”
“That sounds like a long shot.”
“Until you get me Barron’s home address, you got any better ideas?”
“Not a one,” said Reyes. “Vaya con Dios,” he added, and then clicked off.
Go with God, I thought. That’s what I hoped we were doing.
“Let’s hit the road,” I said to Steven.
“We can’t proceed without a specific location,” he said.
“We’re going to my house in Sherman Oaks,” I said.
Once more I had to lock and load the coordinates before we set out. For the first few minutes, we drove in silence. From the backseat I watched Angie’s every movement. Her passenger window was halfway open, and she was sampling the breezes, but nothing seemed to have captured her interest.
Steven cleared his throat and then said, “I didn’t mean to snoop, but I couldn’t help but overhear some of your conversation.”
“And?”
“So we’re driving to Sherman Oaks with the hope of this dog picking up a particular scent?”
“That’s right,” I said. “A woman—Angie’s owner—is missing under suspicious circumstances. We’re looking for her. And we’re looking for the man who might have taken her. So I guess we’re potentially looking for two scents.”
“Do you want me to put in my own two cents?”
He laughed at his own pun. It was a reminder to me of how I annoyed certain people.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“When we get to Sherman Oaks, we should take into account the direction of the wind, and try to position ourselves accordingly to maximize our chances of the scent coming our way.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
Angie apparently could. She violently shook her head, and froth and drool went everywhere, but Steven was the main target. He looked down to the splatter zone that was his shirt and pants and said, “Gross.”
“Sorry about that.”
He found a napkin and began dabbing at the mess. While working on the slobber, he took notice of Angie’s bandages. “What happened to her ear?” he asked.
“I’m pretty sure the bastard we’re looking for cut half her ear off.”
“That’s sick.”
I liked the anger I heard in his voice. “Tell me again,” I said, “your thoughts on matching up the wind to Angie’s olfactory senses.”
We had driven to one location in Sherman Oaks, and then a second. If I understood what Steven was telling me, he was establishing vectors on a wind map in the hopes of formulating a directional grid. That he was trying was enough for me. I kept paying for every ride with my credit card.
“If we’re going with God,” I muttered, “we’re taking a circuitous route.”
“Excuse me?” said Steven.
“Nothing,” I said, but then added, “We need Angie to be Balaam’s donkey.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“I guess they don’t teach religion in your graduate engineering courses.”
“Of course not,” he said, almost sounding offended.
“In the Bible there’s the story of Balaam’s donkey,” I said. “I don’t remember where Balaam was going or what he was doing, but whatever it was, somehow he displeased God. To intercede with Balaam, God sent down an angel. This angel stood in the middle of the road with a drawn sword, but Balaam couldn’t see that. The donkey sure did, though, and being a smart creature, every time it saw the angel, it turned away from the road.
“Because of the animal’s swerving, Balaam hurt his foot. Being a jerk, he took it out on the donkey and only stopped his beating when the donkey opened its mouth and spoke with the voice of the Lord, chastising Balaam. And then God opened Balaam’s eyes so that he could see the angel that had been there all along.”
I stopped talking. I hadn’t beaten Angie, but I wondered if there were more similarities than not between me and Balaam. An animal had known what was going on. It had taken me too long to divine what was there.
“So Angie needs to see what we cannot?” said Steven.
“Or smell what we can’t,” I said. “The human species is so proud of the fact that we’re at the top of the food chain that we forget the abilities that other species have.”
Angie’s head suddenly jerked and her body stiffened. She looked as if a jolt of electricity was coursing through her. Then she began breathing hard, almost like a wheezing asthmatic, desperate to take in some rare air.
“What do I do?” said Steven.
“Follow the wind.”
CHAPTER 41
THE TRUMPETING OF A HAIRY ANGEL
As Kurios made his approach to
her cage, he tried to hide the sounds of his footsteps. He was sure she was dead, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. As he had fast-forwarded the footage, he was able to see that for hours she had remained curled up and inert in a pool of blood. That couldn’t be faked.
Neither could the smell. He raised his hand up to his nose and tried to ward off the odor. The foul creature had soiled herself when she died.
It appeared rigor mortis had set in, but because she remained in the shadows, it was difficult to get a good look at her. She had been remarkably uncooperative in death. She’d kept her back to the camera. When she’d cut her wrists, he had observed the flow of blood, but hadn’t seen her rend her own flesh. Kurios had felt cheated by that. Next time he’d set up multiple cameras so as to be able to see everything.
He felt the electricity running through him. He had hoped it would be like this. It was what he expected, and more. For so long he’d listened to their lurid stories, to men talking about how they put their women in their place. His clients had never known how much Kurios enjoyed hearing how they beat and bloodied the oppressive women in their lives. Growing up, he had watched his father beat his mother. She had always deserved it. And then his mother had abandoned both of them when he was only eight. His father was right: women should have a bounty on them.
Kurios looked into the cage. It was too dark to see the purpling of livor mortis, but he wouldn’t be surprised if there was purge fluid along with her feces and urine. She had been disgusting in life, and was even more disgusting in death.
Now all that remained was for the trash to be put out.
He unlocked her cage, holding his breath. The stench was revolting. He had bought a huge roll of polyethylene, what the worker in the hardware store had called painters’ plastic sheeting. After coating the body in lime, he’d wrap her up in the sheeting. Then he’d find a spot in the desert to bury her so that she would cook in her own foul juices.
He stepped closer and bent down to see her face. Her mouth was set in a gargoyle’s rictus.