Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

“The mother stood against you before the assembly, Amos. She said there was a second witness. I think we both know who that is. At the least, it’s my duty to inform the district overseer, maybe even Circuit. I know what they’ll say: There’s been enough bleeding; close the wound. I just wish you’d make it easy on us.”

  Raszer squatted down and rested his back against the stucco. The night was quiet and cool, almost sepulchral, but apparently, noise and heat surrounded Amos Leach. The boy’s mother? Which boy? A second witness? To what?

  “Make it easy on you,” Leach mocked. “Make it easy . . . You mean resign my position as an Elder. It’s not going to happen, Sam. I’ve been chosen to lead.”

  “Amos—”

  “You don’t get it, do you, Sam? I guess maybe you wouldn’t, growing up . . . disadvantaged. There’s rules for the flock and there’s rules for the shepherds. Men like you and me—spiritual leaders—we’re not gonna go out and rob a convenience store. They’re not gonna find us in the gutter with a needle in our arm, or catch us plotting against the government. We’re accountable. And in return, we get—”

  “Yes, Amos,” said Sam Brown gravely. “We are accountable. That’s why—”

  In the midst of the tomblike darkness, Raszer’s cell phone beeped. He’d forgotten to silence its ringer, forgotten that it was in his pocket. Idiot, he thought, as he fumbled for it, scampering back down the driveway toward his car: his sanctuary, if he could reach it before Leach apprehended him, before the doors of the Kingdom Hall flew open and his first paying job in a year hissed away with the curse on Leach’s lips. He dove into the front seat, scrunched down, and pressed the phone to his ear.

  “Hello?” he whispered harshly.

  No reply.

  “Hello? Who is this?” he repeated.

  The hall’s doors opened, spilling light on the stoop and the sidewalk. Sam Brown stepped out and surveyed the driveway, then the street. When he’d gone back inside, Raszer slid himself up against the worn-smooth leather of the seat back.

  In his rearview mirror, a dark, inchoate form materialized, barely in motion, but Raszer was too busy finding his breath, fumbling for his keys, to take it into his field of conscious vision. He turned the ignition key and let the engine warm.

  He waited a few moments and then eased away from the curb, making the first available left to get back to Azusa Avenue. He’d just lowered his window and lit a cigarette when the high beams blinded him. There was a Lincoln on his tail.

  His first conscious reaction was willful disbelief. No way. Men in black limos didn’t come after him; he went after them. And until now, the Lincoln had seemed almost chimerical, a thing imagined as much as seen. Get on the freeway and go home to a fire and a good rioja. Yes. But in his mind’s chronology, Raszer had already registered fear. Deep and primal, beyond rationalization, it had traveled up his brain stem from his gut, and he’d known decisively that home and hearth would never truly be safe zones again. What he felt was the certainty of prey that a predator had found his lair.

  Twice the big Lincoln rammed his rear bumper, and indignation as much as anything else made him drop the Avanti into second gear and floor the accelerator, blowing through the red light at Foothill Boulevard with his horn blaring.

  The westbound freeway entrance was a hundred yards up on the right, and Raszer hugged the shoulder and sped up as he entered the overpass, knowing that he could take the ramp at sixty while the Lincoln would almost certainly have to slow down. He heard the V-8 surge and saw the headlight fill his right side mirror as the bulky Lincoln rode up improbably on his right, its rear bumper throwing sparks off the inside wall of the viaduct. Its angle of attack was designed to force him away from the approach and onto a straightaway into the industrial south end of town, a far better place to do murder.

  Raszer again felt the Lincoln’s front bumper hard on his rear. “Goddamnit!” he howled, as he lost control of the back half of his car. He punched the accelerator and steered right, hoping to fishtail around the limo and come back at the ramp from the other side. All that accomplished was to put the limo’s bumper foursquare onto his right flank, bulldozing him down both lanes as effortlessly as if he were new-fallen snow. In another two seconds, he’d most likely roll; Raszer used up one of them to squint through the glare of the Lincoln’s headlights and the heavily tinted windshield.

  What he saw informed him of how to use the remaining second.

  The face of the driver was utterly impassive. Not so much as a clenched jaw marred its fearsome serenity. In fact, the lips were just slightly parted in anticipation of the kill. From what scant information Raszer could gather in the blink of an eye, the face had no marked characteristics, no obvious ethnic stamp—but then, of course, Raszer was constructing a physiognomy from little more than an eye socket and the line of a mouth.

  It was enough to tell him that his death would mean little to this man and would never be recognized as murder. He would be just one of two or three dozen accidental calamities visited upon L.A. that night.

  He accelerated forward—the only way he could go—and hurtled over the curb, shaving steel from the Avanti’s oil pan and spinning up mud from the saturated earth. As soon as he’d cleared the Lincoln’s bumper, he spun the wheels hard left and shimmied back onto the pavement ten feet behind the limo. Its brake lights glowed an unnatural red, and its rear tires were obscured in small clouds of vaporized rubber.

  Just to the left was the eastbound ramp to the 210 freeway, bound for San Bernardino and the desert beyond, headed anywhere but to the solace of home. Raszer shot onto it, narrowly avoiding a broadside with a hearse bearing the stencil of the Malthus Mortuary. For nearly five minutes, he purred along at ninety-seven in the carpool lane with nothing in his mirror, crossing the double yellow to make for the I-15 South, from which he could connect to Interstate 10 going back into L.A.

  He’d just reached for his phone to page Lieutenant Borges when he spotted the Lincoln again, bearing down from the right, making at least 103. Raszer made up his mind to cobble the best from a very bad situation. The local news didn’t cover L.A.’s notorious high-speed chases at night, but the highway patrol might; failing that, he would lead the Lincoln back onto Borges’s turf, if its driver would be led. He nudged the speedometer to 105, and with a less than steady thumb punched in the rest of Borges’s number.

  In spite of its horsepower and the recklessness of its driver, the Lincoln could do no better than keep up with the Avanti’s rebuilt engine. At 5,000 rpms, it made a sound that limousines rarely make, and each time it crept up on Raszer’s bumper, he shot forward by four car lengths. In fact, he could have lostit, but then he would also have lost the opportunity for apprehension. He scanned the freeway. L.A.’s deserted downtown glimmered ahead like a mirage. There wasn’t a squad car in sight. He might as well have been on the Autobahn, for all the undermanned LAPD cared about speed limits. He wondered why he hadn’t yet seen the snout of a gun protrude from the limo,then realized that his pursuers might have a greater purpose in mind: to follow him home. He reconsidered his gambit.

  The junction of the I-10 and the Hollywood Freeway offered a last chance for evasion. The 101 ramp came up quick and could be overshot, especially by something as unwieldy as a Lincoln. If Raszer made as if he were continuing west on the 10 and then veered onto the 101 at the last instant, he might shake his tail. They’d been within six car lengths of his bumper for nearly thirty minutes, and he was enjoying neither the steady trickle of sweat running down the bridge of his nose nor the knifing pains at the base of his skull. Borges hadn’t returned his page, the highway patrol hadn’t appeared like the cavalry on his flanks, his gas gauge was on E, and he couldn’t reach his cigarettes. Time to make a choice.

  Raszer surprised even himself by politely putting on his turn signal and ramping onto the 101 North at an even speed. The municipal district was in sight, offering some measure of sanctuary. The arteries were thickening with traffic, and not even jaded Angelenos co
uld fail to note that a yellow Avanti with its entire right side cratered was being chased by a Lincoln with a badly dented grill. He went back to plan one.

  If the police would not come to Raszer, he would come to the police. Borges was bound to have a man or two stationed at the crime scene in Silver Lake. The place where the killers had last struck might be the one sure place to elude or entrap them.

  If they let him get that far.

  Raszer had begun to maneuver right for the Echo Park exit when the air around his ears was buffeted by the full-bore pulse of the Lincoln’s engine. It came up on his left without warning, and a pea would not have fallen through the gap between its door handle and his. The rear window slipped down about six inches in what seemed altered time, and Raszer felt his insides retract. From the window emerged a man’s hand: a large hand with five long, fine digits, one adorned with a silver ring set with a single ruby. Held between the thumb and forefinger was a sixth digit, equally long and fine but feminine in provenance, severed at the knuckle from its owner and still tipped with the dusky purple nail that identified it as Layla Faj-Ta’wil’s.

  Aiming the finger like a dart, the assailant shot it through Raszer’s open window and onto his lap.

  Raszer swerved and went metal to metal with the Lincoln for an instant, sending it into a skid across one lane of traffic. He wrenched the steering wheel right and shot down the Echo Park exit ramp while the Lincoln flew ahead, remaining visible just long enough for Raszer to see its brake lights glow. You didn’t back up on the Hollywood Freeway. He began to wonder if going home wasn’t the more prudent course, and then realized with a pang that home might not be any safer.

  After ten minutes of threading his wounded vehicle through the side streets of L.A.’s most unnavigable district, he arrived at Sunset and Hyperion, two blocks east of Layla’s apartment. All evidence suggested he’d lost the Lincoln, and it seemed unlikely that it would show up here on its own. Since that had been the whole point of the detour, he was no longer sure why he’d come. The cell phone beeped: Borges, answering his page.

  “Raszer,” he said. “¿Que pasa?”

  “Jesus, Luis,” said Raszer. “I paged you twenty minutes ago.”

  “Lo siento,” Borges replied, “but you’re not my only guy. I was with the chief. The feds are moving Scotty to a secure facility in Arizona. Some Air Force base. If you want a last word on this, get down to the Federal Building at 9:00 am. Room 626.”

  “Moving Scotty . . . as a detainee or as a material witness?”

  “Both, I think,” Borges answered. “I’ll tell you what Djapper told me. They think Al Qaeda—or some offshoot of an offshoot of it—has gotten inside this crazy game your kid was into. They think there’s some big human-trafficking operation going on, so now they’ve got DOJ and even State Department people questioning him.”

  “I think they’re onto something,” said Raszer. “But it isn’t about Al Qaeda. That’s the standard bullshit. This is something new—or maybe something very old. And moreover, it’s Shia, not Sunni. Haven’t these idiots figured out the difference yet? I’m gonna take a different route, though. I need to get my stray back.”

  Raszer pulled up to the curb in front of the Tantra. The club was closed, but the police tape stretched across the front of Layla’s building hadn’t otherwise affected pedestrian traffic on the busy strip. “Meanwhile, the killers just rode my bumper all the way down from Azusa . . . which means they followed me there, too. I lost them at the Silver Lake exit from the northbound 101 and came straight to the crime scene. Don’t ask me why, but I had the notion I could draw them here.”

  Borges cleared his throat. “Are you sure it was them?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m sure. They turned my car into scrap metal and tossed the Syrian girl’s ring finger through my window. I’m assuming you took her prints, so getting a match shouldn’t present a problem.”

  “Can you ID any of the men?”

  “The windows were tinted like Ray-Bans, but I did make the driver. It’s a face I won’t forget, Luis.”

  “Good. We’ll do a sketch. When you were up in Azusa, did you leave your car for any length of time?”

  “Yeah,” said Raszer. “I had dinner. You think they stuck a tracer on me?”

  “Check the underside of your gas tank,” said Borges. “And feel around inside the rear bumper and wheel wells. The state-of-the-art transmitter’s about the size of a quarter and not much thicker. If you find it, hand it over to the officer just inside the building. Give me a description of the car, and we’ll go after it. I’m sending men over there, but I doubt your friends are going to show up in that part of town.”

  “No,” said Raszer, “I don’t suppose they will. Do you want me to stay put until your guys get here?”

  There was a pause. “No,” said Borges. “I want you to go home.”

  “Home? My fondest hope is that these guys don’t know where I live yet.”

  “They know where you live, Raszer. And they’ve got business with you. I’m going to put three of my best men on your house. You can sleep tight.”

  “Sure, Lieutenant,” said Raszer. “Like a baby, right?”

  “Right. And give that finger to the officer on-site, too. If you can find something to wrap it up in, uh, it might be appreciated.”

  “Right,” said Raszer. “I’ll see what I’ve got. Until recently, I had a little velvet jewelry bag that would have been just perfect.”

  FIFTEEN

  Raszer stood numbly in the driveway and mourned his battered car. It was worse than he’d imagined. On one level, the cratered metal was a map of grace. Had they hit him on the driver’s side, he might have looked worse than the Avanti. But at the moment, this gave him no consolation. He loved the car, and it had been cruelly violated. As much as it pained him, he couldn’t stop examining and reexamining each and every gash, like a jilted lover obsessing over the details of his betrayal.

  Finally, the descending chill of night—a chill that no one who lives in L.A. is ever really dressed for—drove him inside, but even then, he stood silently at the front window and continued to stare at the torpedoed hulk of his car. After a short while, the emptiness of the dark house at his back made him realize that part of the reason he’d lingered outside was an unreadiness to be inside and alone. There was nowhere to run if his assailants did come to finish their “business” with him.

  He thought about Harry Wolfe, and about the bloody stump the killers had left in his mouth. Raszer didn’t want to die in bed, much less pinned to the mattress. He hadn’t found a transmitter on his car, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t find him. He wondered how long it would take for Borges’s men to assume stakeout positions. These were the times when he wished he owned a gun. At all other times, he was glad he didn’t. It would offer temptations he did not want to court.

  He found his way to the bar in the dark. He hadn’t turned on the recessed lighting, or the floor lamps whose familiar spill patterns made him feel welcome. In the darkness, he felt like an intruder in his own home, but he didn’t want to swim about in front of lightedwindows like a big fish in an aquarium. It was only the third or fourth time in ten years that such caution seemed warranted. Raszer didn’t use letterhead stationery or hand out business cards, and he billed from a P.O. box. He wasn’t listed in the Yellow Pages. He and Monica had kept everything except their command of cyberspace deliberately old school, and for the most part, it had meant that he could take his meals in peace, invite a woman to spend the night, and let his daugh-ter play in the garden. He wondered now if his home would ever be safe for Brigit again.

  The thought of losing his house hit him with the same kind of animal panic as the thought of giving up cigarettes, and he knew that, sooner or later, both fig leaves would have to fall. You finally had to face the world the way Adam and Eve had faced the wrathful god whose footfalls had shaken Eden: naked. It wasn’t a pleasant prospect, and as he straddled his stool at the slate-topped bar, he took re
fuge in a glass of port and a Cuban cigar. It was too late in the evening for red wine.

  Raszer’s bar was a study in anachronism and a key to his psyche. At his right was a rotary phone whose number was known to only two dozen people in the world. It was a safe line that he used mainly for outgoing calls, but when it rang, he answered. To the left of that was a tricked-out MacBook Pro that was networked to his front office, the security system, and a matrix of international police and nongovernmental agencies, some of which tracked missing persons, others the emergence of new religious and pseudoreligious movements worldwide. It was when the two phenomena conjoined that Raszer received a bulletin.

  Directly in front of him was a bookstand on which his current reading was opened: an 1826 edition of the Koran he’d purchased from an antiquarian bookshop in Hampstead, with the Arabic on the left and an English exegesis on the facing page. Overhead was a lensed halogen track lamp whose beam encompassed the dimensions of the bookstand, and no more. On Raszer’s left was a cedar inbox in which Monica placed the day’s research and any important messages, and farther to the left were his ashtray, his wine glass, and a candle.