by Toni Andrews
“What do you want me to do?”
“You know that aerial view thing you showed me on the computer?”
“Google Earth?”
“Yeah, that. Do you think you could look at it and see if there’s a way past this wall without going down First Street?”
“I’ll have to load it onto Hilda’s computer. And it will help if you can give me an exact address.”
“How long will it take to download it?” I was beginning to wonder if it would save me any time, or if I should just keep exploring on my own.
“Not long. A few minutes, maybe.”
“Okay, call me back when you’re ready, and I’ll try to get a street number. Oh, wait—can you look up Part Heaven? That’s the name of one of the junkyards—there’s a big sign. Use that address on the Google thing and call me back.”
I hung up and walked back to the wall. The walkway leading to Second Street was strewn with trash but looked navigable. I stepped carefully around cardboard boxes and empty bottles, and came out on Second Street. I looked for police cars but didn’t see any. Normal traffic moved up and down the street uninterrupted. The wall that had blocked the alley made a right-angle turn and continued along the block.
My phone vibrated. “That was quick.”
“Yeah, Hilda’s computer is really fast. I think I found what you were talking about. I can see where an alley dead ends. There are two auto salvage places, side by side, and they both have big walls around them. And both junkyards are huge. Together, they cover the whole block.”
“Wow.”
“Of course, there’s no way to know how recent this picture is. It could be from two days or two years ago.”
I looked up at the wall and its crazy quilt of spray painted gang art. Grass sprouted between some of the cracks, and chunks of concrete were missing from a few spots along the top. “This wall wasn’t built any time recently. Hopefully they haven’t made any major renovations since the picture you’re looking at.”
“Let’s hope not.” I could hear the tension in her voice.
“What I need to know is, where are there openings in the walls?”
“On First Street,” she answered. “The walls are thick around the back, like they’re made of concrete blocks or something. But in the front, they’re thin, like wooden fences, maybe, or chain link. And there are driveways to get the cars in and out, of course, although there must be gates across them.”
“The police have First Street blocked off,” I told her. “I don’t want to go that way.”
“You could pr—er, sweet-talk them to let you in,” she said.
“Too many of them,” I said. “And they’ll be on radios, and someone would probably say something about a pedestrian, and—”
A volley of popping sounds interrupted me. Not too close, but within a couple of blocks.
“Was that gunfire?” asked Sukey, and I heard Hilda’s voice in the background.
“Gunfire?” she shrieked. “Sukey, what the hell is going on? Give me the phone.”
“Shush, Hilda, I can’t hear Mercy. Go pick up on the extension if you want to listen in, but for heaven’s sake, don’t interrupt us.”
Despite the involuntary tightening of my bowels that the noise of gunshots had instantly elicited, I may have grinned. Sukey’s tone had brooked no argument.
“Yeah, those were definitely gunshots,” I told her. I knew the sound from my foster care years—some of the homes where I’d been placed hadn’t been in the best of neighborhoods. “They came from farther down the block, I think.”
“Mercy, you need to stay where you are. You can’t stop stray bullets.”
“I know,” I told her. “But, like you saw, this is a pretty thick wall, and they weren’t that close.” I heard a click that must have been Hilda picking up an extension.
“What are you going to do?” Sukey asked.
I hesitated. I did not want to walk in the direction of the gunfire, but, if Tino and Gus were here, that was probably where I would find them.
I remembered Teresa’s voice in my head. If you have power, please, please, please, will you use it to help my sons?
I sighed. “Aren’t there any gaps in the back side of the wall?”
Sukey hesitated; then I heard her sigh, too. “Let me zoom in. There’s a shadow here…can you see any trees over the top of the wall?”
“Let me look.” I made sure no cars were coming, then crossed to the other side of the street, feeling naked as I stepped away from the thick wall. In Balboa, it was easy to forget that Southern California is a desert. No such problem here, far from the land of irrigation. I scanned the wall, looking for treetops. A wispy eucalyptus tree languished in a square gap of soil in the sidewalk, near the other end of the block. “No trees inside the wall that I can see,” I told her. “There’s a tree on this side of it, though.”
“Okay. With the shadows in the picture, I couldn’t tell which side of the wall it was on. It looks like…there’s something behind it. I can’t make it out.”
“Let me look.” Staying on the opposite side of the road, I moved cautiously down the sidewalk. The dusty lot behind me was mostly empty, with only a small building in the front. The For Lease sign inside the ubiquitous chain-link fence was faded, as if it had been there for a while.
As I drew even with the tree, it was easier to see what lay behind it. “There is a gap,” I told her. “There’s a wooden fence across it, or a gate or something. Just let me—” I was about to cross the street when a police cruiser pulled around the corner and up to the curb next to the tree. Two uniformed officers got out, and moved to the gate and pushed against it. It didn’t open, and one of the officers, a woman, spoke into her radio. The other glanced across the street and seemed to notice me. I turned away, continuing toward the corner. From the corner of my eye, I saw him return his attention to the other officer.
“What are you doing now? Is it a gate or not?” Sukey’s voice in my ear startled me.
“The police got to it first,” I told her. “I need to find a place—I can’t just stand here staring at them.”
“Why not? The police always draw a crowd.”
She had a point, but I still didn’t feel comfortable. “Not in the middle of a block, in front of a vacant lot, with no cars parked nearby and no houses I could have come out of,” I said, but I stopped and turned my head to see what they were doing anyway.
The cruiser’s trunk was open, and the woman was removing something that looked like a short log with handles. I’d seen something similar on Cops and said to Sukey, “I think they’re going to break the gate open.”
Sure enough, the female cop handed the log to her partner, then slammed the trunk shut. The man held the mini battering ram—I couldn’t remember what it was called—parallel to the ground. The woman put her back to the wall and drew her weapon, then nodded. He gave the log a hearty swing, and the gate popped open with a bang. He dropped the battering ram and drew his own gun, then followed the woman through the gap in the wall.
“They went in,” I told Sukey. Trepidation had been replaced by frustration. “Are there any other openings in the wall?”
“Not on Second Street. But I think there’s something around the next corner.”
This is taking too long, I thought in frustration. I looked toward the end of the wall. “What corner? The block dead-ends at the railroad tracks.” Which was one reason there was so little traffic here.
“Yes, I see that, and there’s some kind of fence that runs along the tracks, right?”
“Yeah, chain link, with barbed wire on the top.” The railroad fence looked newer and in considerably better repair than the others in the neighborhood, though a fair amount of litter had blown up against its base.
“I can’t tell for sure, but I think there’s a gap between where the junkyard wall ends—the second junkyard, not the one the police just went into—and the railroad fence. I don’t know if it’s big enough for you to walk through,
though.”
“I’m headed that way.” I crossed the now-empty street and walked along the wall. “Are there any gates on that side? It doesn’t seem likely, with the fence right there.”
“The wall may have been built before the fence went up. It looks like there’s at least one gate—maybe two. It’s hard to tell—there are a lot of shadows in the picture.”
I reached the corner of the wall. “Shit, it’s blocked off. The gap’s big enough to walk through—barely—but there’s this little extension thing, running between the fence and the wall.” I grabbed the chain link and rattled it in frustration.
Then I noticed something. “Wait—it has hinges. It’s technically a gate, I guess, but it’s bolted to the wall.”
“Can you climb over it?” Sukey asked.
I looked up. The barbed wire that ran along the fence hadn’t been extended to the narrow gate, but the way it was bent forward, there was still no way for me to get past it. “I don’t think so.” I examined the bolts. They looked too substantial for me to pull out of the wall, but they were rusty. Maybe…“What I need is one of those things like the cops used to knock the gate down.”
“You mean a breaching tool?”
“I guess so. How did you know that’s what they call it?”
“It’s in my P.I. textbook.”
“Oh, right. In any case, the only way to get past this gate is to knock it down or cut through it.”
“And I don’t suppose you have a pair of wire cutters in your back pocket.”
“No, but—” I got an idea. “Sukey, I’m going to hang up. I’m going to try something, but I’ll need both hands. I’ll call you back if I need more information.”
“Okay.”
I switched the phone off and headed back toward the eucalyptus tree. At its base, I could just make out the item the policeman had dropped before heading though the gate. I sprinted, scanning the street, certain a second police cruiser would appear at any moment. None did and, with one final look around, I grabbed the breaching tool, spun and headed back the way I’d come.
It weighed a lot more than I’d expected, and there was no way to carry it casually. I held it in front of my body with both hands, moving as fast as I could with the added weight. I was panting by the time I got to the corner.
I tried to remember the policeman’s stance and the way he’d held the tool before swinging it at the gate. I looked at it more carefully. It looked more like a pipe than a log and was close to three feet long. Thunderbolt, said a label on the side. One end was narrower than the other, with a hard plastic shell, probably to prevent sparks. That had to be the business end, which told me which way to hold it. I planted my feet, got a good grip on the two handles, took aim at one of the rusty bolts and swung.
A shock wave ran through my body and rattled my teeth. The breaching tool bounced back, and I staggered, almost landing on my ass, and dropped it.
The gate sat stubbornly in place, and, as I rubbed my shoulder, I looked at the bolt. It looked as if I’d made an impression on it. Surely one more swing…
Who was I kidding? There were probably a couple of days’ worth of training on how to use this thing at the police academy.
Still, I’d done enough damage with my first attempt to warrant another. I looked around, but the street was still empty. I picked up the tool, which seemed to have increased in weight since I dropped it, planted my feet and swung a second time.
The bolt flew off and the top half of the gate was forced back, crashing against the fence with a noise loud enough to draw attention from the entire neighborhood. Luckily no one was around, at least on this side of the wall. If someone was anywhere near this corner on the other side, they would surely have heard it.
I’d managed not to drop the breaching tool this time, and as I turned my body sideways to ease into the narrow gap, it caught against the chain link of the railroad fence. It was longer than the space was wide, and way too heavy to carry comfortably with one hand.
I hated to put it down—I might need it for whatever gate I found—but it was impeding my progress. I rested it carefully against the concrete wall and moved toward First Street as quickly as I could, considering I had to turn both my shoulders and hips sideways.
There was a rumble, and the ground seemed to vibrate. Oh, crap, not an earthquake. Not now! I’d barely had time to form the thought when a thunderous noise overtook me, along with a rush of warm, dry wind that first pushed me toward the wall and then sucked me back against the chain-link fence.
Not an earthquake. A train. I’d been so focused on finding an opening in the concrete wall that I hadn’t seen or heard it coming. It had passed within less than ten feet of me. The train—it couldn’t have been more than four cars long—was gone in seconds, but the sound of blood rushing in my ears went on even after the deafening noise subsided. I slumped against the concrete and forced myself to take shallow breaths. I tasted grit from the trail of dust the train had left swirling in its wake.
Focus, Mercy, I told myself. You have to find the gap in the wall. I straightened and kept going.
The door Sukey had seen on the camera was about forty feet from the corner, and recessed. At least I assumed it was a door. It was wooden, but any hinges were invisible, and there was no handle. I pushed against it and thought I could feel some give, but it was pretty solid. I would need the tool, but even with the door being recessed, I wasn’t sure there would be enough space to swing it. I kept going toward First Street. I came to a place where the concrete blocks were newer and less discolored—there had been another opening here in the past, but someone had bricked it up.
Resigned, I made my way back to where I’d left the battering tool. As I’d thought, it was a bitch getting it back to the doorway, and I alternately snagged the blazer I’d worn to the office that morning on the chain link to my left and scraped it on the concrete wall to my right. Oh, well, Sukey had been nagging me to get rid of the shapeless jacket for months. She’d given me crap about my shoes, too, but I was glad I had on sensible footwear instead of the heeled pumps she was always trying to get me to wear.
The recess did give me enough room to swing the breaching tool, but just barely. Also, I couldn’t be sure whether the hinges were to the left or the right, and I assumed it would be more effective to aim the tool at the opposite side of the door.
What the fuck, I thought. I have a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right.
I aimed at the left side of the door and swung as hard as I could in the limited space. It didn’t have much effect, other than making a few splinters, but the door made a reassuringly hollow sound, and the recoil from the wood was much less than it had been from the metal bolt.
My second swing had a better result, with more splintering wood and a gap about an inch wide appearing between the wall and the door. Apparently I’d guessed correctly about the position of the hinges. I set the battering tool down and leaned my face against the door, trying to peek through the gap. I could make out some kind of metal band, which was probably part of the latch, or maybe a dead bolt.
I picked up the tool again—I would have sworn it got heavier with every swing—and braced myself for a third try. Concentrating all my effort on a spot a few inches to the right of the gap, I swung as hard as I could.
Wood splintered, and there was the sound of metal rasping against metal. The door flew back, but something big kept it from swinging all the way open. The gap was substantially bigger, though, and when I again pressed my face against the door, I saw another wall, this one composed of twisted metal. It looked as if flattened cars, stacked one on top of the other, had been piled in front of the door.
There was just enough room for me to squeeze through, although I knew I’d have to write off my jacket as a total loss. I eased along parallel to the concrete wall, looking for a gap in the stacks of cars. I found one almost immediately and passed quickly through it, only to find myself looking down a long pathway flanked by walls composed of the
remains of hundreds, if not thousands, of cars. The stacks were surprisingly symmetrical, the corridors they formed obviously meant to be wide enough to walk through.
My scalp prickled and my skin crawled. It was a maze. I was in a fucking maze.
15
I never cried much as a kid. My response to fear or anger had been, instead, to freeze and go silent, like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.
It was this very response that had led to one of my earliest memories, back from when Tom and Bobbie Hollings were still Mommy and Daddy, and our suburban life had been almost happy.
The fair was on—the state fair, big enough to be the primary topic of conversation at the elementary school for weeks prior to its opening—and the three of us joined the throngs of families walking along the midway and through exhibits. I remember being somewhere between dizzy and ecstatic, enthralled by the flashing lights, raucous music and too-pungent aromas of animals, fried food and, near some of the more adventurous rides, vomit.
Tom, bored with the kiddie rides and rubber duckie games, had quickly abandoned Bobbie and me in favor of the shooting range and stock exhibits, and as the evening wore on toward closing time, Bobbie, too, had tired of the merry-go-round, the pony ride and the other amusements considered suitable for a six-year-old.
I remember thinking the entrance to the fun house, in the shape of an openmouthed clown, looked more frightening than fun, but Bobbie had said, “You go ahead with the other kids. There’s nothing scary in there. That’s why they call it the fun house.” She then sank gratefully onto a bench next to a couple of other tired-looking parents, and I followed the line of children through the garish red lips and around a turn into a revolving barrel.
A group of other kids were having a great time playing on the moving floor, falling theatrically and pretending to be unable to get up, or seeing how high they could cling to the moving walls before sliding back down toward the floor.