Colorado Boulevard

by Phoef Sutton

  And as time passed, the loft got smaller and smaller, so to stand by the elevator seemed less like freedom and more like torment. So he passed his sentence locked behind the safety of his brother’s metal door and waited it out.

  Until now, when Zerbe was again thrust out into the whitewashed industrial hallway. The building looked deliberately unfinished, in order to appeal to the hipster urban dwellers who shunned the idea of living in an “apartment” for “rent” and craved the “loft” experience. Out here Zerbe felt vulnerable and exposed and he longed for the walls of the loft, like a tortoise ripped from its cozy shell.

  Bert pressed the button for the elevator while Ernie thrust his gun barrel into Zerbe’s ribs. “Don’t even think about yelling for help,” he said.

  “Why are you doing this?” Zerbe whispered. “Is someone paying you?”

  “Shut up,” Ernie said, and Zerbe got the feeling he was talking to both of them.

  “If it’s money you want,” Zerbe said, “you can have it. I have money. How much is he paying you?”

  “Enough,” Ernie hissed and gave Zerbe a shove.

  As he stumbled toward the elevator doors, the computerized voice spoke up from Zerbe’s ankle. “You are moving outside your home zone.”

  “What the hell is that?” Ernie asked.

  “I told you,” Zerbe said. “It’s my monitor.”

  “Well, shut it up.”

  “I can’t. Please, don’t make me go out there.”

  As he said this, Zerbe wasn’t sure if it was fear of what they were going to do to him, fear of breaking probation, or simply fear of going out into the world that scared him more.

  “You are moving outside your home zone,” the monitor repeated. It would not be denied.

  “Shut that thing the fuck up!” Bert said.

  “I tell you, I can’t,” Zerbe said.

  “Does it have a GPS monitor?” Ernie asked, sounding worried. “Can it tell where you are?”

  “Yes!” Zerbe seized at this way out. “So there’s no point in kidnapping me. They’ll find me in no time. They’ll catch you.”

  Ernie thought for a moment. “Take it off,” he said.

  “I can’t. It has fiber optics. It can tell if it gets cut off. It sends an alarm.”

  “How long have you had to wear that?”

  “Two years.”

  “You have to take it off. Do it. Now.”

  “Listen to me. On my mother’s grave, I swear, I can’t. I don’t know how to take it off.”

  Zerbe’s mother was alive and he knew how to take the device off.

  Crush, the man whom Zerbe called his brother, was taking the twelve flights of stairs up to the loft because if there was a hard way of doing something, Crush would do it.

  “Showing off for me?” Catherine Gail asked with a sly smile.

  “Nope,” Crush said as he bounded up the stairs. “But you can take the elevator if you’d like.”

  “No way,” she said, keeping right up with him. “The student will not outpace the teacher.”

  Taking this many stairs after a long day’s work might have been too much for most people, but Crush and Gail prided themselves on their stamina and physical conditioning. It wasn’t easy for them. They were both recovering from serious injuries, so they had a lot to prove, if not to each other, at least to themselves. She had been beaten nearly to death by Russian mobsters two years earlier; last February Crush had been shot in the stomach by an aging movie director. Trouble seemed to follow them like an old friend. Or maybe a stalker.

  Gail was a lithe and lovely forty. Her raven-black hair had a shock of white running through it, just like Lily Munster, as Zerbe used to say. She was Crush’s tae kwon do master. At the moment she was without a dojo to teach in or a home to rest her head. The landlord of her downtown storefront school had decided he could make a bigger profit from selling the building to a developer than renting it. This was the inevitable result of DTLA revitalization, Zerbe said. The residents were getting thrown out and the millennials were moving in.

  Crush said she could stay with him for the time being. Nobody was surprised. They not only worked out together in the dojo, they worked together in a nightclub, the Nocturne, where Gail was the bartender and Crush was the bouncer. This was that odd time between Christmas and New Year’s, that week of extended holiday that never seems real and that is best forgotten in the coming year. Christmas was five days ago, but the Nocturne was still open long hours, and the clientele still acted as though what happened this week, stayed in this week.

  Crush and Gail spent so much time together that many people assumed that they were a couple and that living together was the natural next step. The fact that they weren’t lovers, despite being two reasonably attractive people of the opposite sex, was something most people just couldn’t accept. For them it was natural. It wasn’t that Gail didn’t find Crush appealing. It wasn’t that Crush didn’t think Gail was beautiful. It wasn’t even that their roles as student and master made it inappropriate. Gail, the more spiritual of the two, said it was because they had been brother and sister in an earlier life. Crush, the earthier of the two, said it was because they knew each other too well to allow sex to complicate things.

  Crush wasn’t his real name, of course. It was just his street name. He was born Caleb Rush, and the fact that he had a different last name than Zerbe was just one reason Crush objected to being called his brother.

  Crush and Zerbe were roughly the same age, both of them in their early thirties, but there the resemblance ended. Zerbe was a doughy computer nerd of average height; Crush topped out at six-foot-five and was 230 pounds of pure muscle. His head was shaved bald, and an old scar ran from his left eye across his face, like an angry exclamation mark. Zerbe’s head was covered with a wild mop of curly hair that always made him look like he had just gotten out of bed.

  Gail was, to her surprise, having trouble keeping up with Crush. “In a hurry, Grasshopper?” she asked him. She hadn’t actually ever seen the TV show Kung Fu, but Zerbe had told her about it. Zerbe was their curator of popular culture.

  “Not really,” Crush said. “I just don’t like leaving Zerbe alone any more than necessary these days. He’s getting weird.”

  “Weirder than usual?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  The whole relationship between Crush and Zerbe was hard to explain. Zerbe came from an old-money Pasadena family. Crush came from Brooklyn, by way of the Russian mob. Their families had intersected briefly when Zerbe’s father married Crush’s mother. It had been a short, eventful, and horrendous relationship that had occurred when Zerbe and Crush were both in their teens. It hadn’t made them friends exactly, but it had made them allies.

  If there had been an informal poll among their acquaintances at Pasadena Prep as to which one of them would be sent to prison, Crush would have won hands down. Instead it was Zerbe who was locked up and Crush who got a Purple Heart in Iraq. When Zerbe got the opportunity to finish his prison sentence under house arrest, he agreed to it on the condition that he live with his “brother,” the decorated war hero Caleb Rush, rather than with his mother or father. The state, in a hurry to make room for more dangerous criminals than Zerbe, agreed.

  So they lived together. Crush liked having Zerbe there. It was nice to know someone was always looking after the place during his frequent absences. Zerbe liked living vicariously through Crush’s unorthodox life. It was nice for both of them to have company. It was a win-win situation.

  But lately Zerbe had been moody and depressed. He hadn’t showered or changed his clothes for days now and, what was more alarming, Zerbe’s frequent masturbation rate had dipped drastically.

  “Are you losing interesting in yourself?” Crush asked him last night.

  Zerbe shrugged. “It just doesn’t seem worth the trouble.”

  This made Crush really concerned. Zerbe had only eight months to go on his sentence, and Crush prayed he could do the time and sta
y relatively sane. Sane for Zerbe, anyway.

  Crush passed the eleventh floor and put on a burst of speed. Gail kept up right beside him. Competition was part of their relationship. Crush smiled as he reached the twelfth floor and pushed open the door to the hallway.

  To his surprise, he saw Zerbe stepping into the elevator with a man standing close to him and another, taller man behind them, as if standing guard.

  Most people would have been puzzled. Most people would have paused to react. Most people would have taken the time to figure out what was going on. But not Crush. By the time the doors had started to close Crush had stepped forward, grabbed the tall guard by the shoulder and yanked him from the elevator, throwing him back against the wall. Sensing the movement, the doors slid open again and Zerbe almost broke loose. The shorter man seized Zerbe by the throat and pulled him back.

  Crush blocked the door with his foot. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked.

  Zerbe croaked an unintelligible reply. The short man used Zerbe as a shield and pointed a gun at Crush. “Don’t,” he said.

  Meanwhile, the tall guard had pushed away from the wall and tried to run past Crush into the elevator. Crush blocked his way and shoved him off, but the man was clutching at Crush’s arm, pulling him off balance.

  Zerbe broke free, stumbled out of the elevator, and fell against the wall. By then, Gail was in the hallway, throwing herself at the shorter man, who brandished a gun. He didn’t fire it, rather, he swung it at her jaw. She arched her back and the pistol sailed past it. She brought her knee up to her chest and kicked out, the ball of her foot colliding with his chin.

  The short man fell backward and Crush was on him, driving his fist toward the man’s face, knuckles crunching his cheekbone and propelling him to the ground, like a hammer pounding in a nail.

  The tall man grabbed Zerbe and dragged him into the elevator. The doors were closing. Crush dove for them but they slid shut before he could reach them. Gail hit the button but the elevator had already started its descent.

  Crush ran for the stairs. Could he outrun the elevator? Maybe, if it stopped on one of the other floors. But at four o’clock in the morning? Not likely.

  “Shit!” he said, slamming his fist into the door.

  “What’s going on?” Gail asked.

  Crush tromped toward the short man who lay crumpled on the floor. “Let’s find out,” he said, reaching down and dragging the man by his arm into the loft. Crush flung him against the sofa.

  The short man bounded up and ran. Crush’s big body was blocking the exit, so the only place he could run was into the bedroom. A dead end with no way out. He slammed the door, but that wouldn’t do him any good. The short man was trapped in there.

  Something on the sofa caught Crush’s eye. He reached for it and picked it up.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Gail asked.

  “Zerbe’s ankle monitor.”

  “Why’s it so shiny?”

  “It’s covered with this,” he said, pointing to an open bottle on the coffee table. One hundred percent virgin olive oil.

  “He slid it off?”

  “I guess.”

  “Is it still working?” Gail asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Crush said, observing the steady blue light on the monitor. “And it doesn’t know he’s gone.”

  “We better call the police,” she said.

  “Wait.” He crossed to the bedroom door. “Let’s get some answers first.” Crush flung open the door. The short man was cowering in the corner, breathing heavily through his ski mask. Crush grabbed him and threw him to the floor. Grabbing a Christmas garland that was hanging over his bed, Crush wrapped it around the man’s throat, choking him. “Where is he going?” Crush asked. “Where’s your friend taking him?”

  The man’s answer was muffled by the ski mask. Crush yanked it off his head. He was just a kid. Asian, hair dyed blond with blue highlights. He couldn’t have been more that twenty-two.

  “Who sent you here?” Crush asked. “Who hired you to do this?”

  “Him!”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “The guy we kidnapped. He hired us! He hired us to kidnap him!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Crush was kneeling on the gunman’s chest, putting his full 230 pounds on him. “What are you talking about?”

  “He did! I swear!”

  Gail entered the bedroom, tossing the ankle monitor on the bed. “Did he?” she asked.

  “What are you asking?”

  “Maybe he did this,” Gail said. “Maybe he got bored. Maybe he thought he could get outside this way and the court wouldn’t blame him.”

  Crush was silent for moment. “You know, that’s not a bad idea. I never thought of that.”

  “He has a lot of time to think of things.”

  Crush shook his head. “Even if he had, he wouldn’t have done this. He’d have to be crazy.”

  “He’s done some pretty crazy things.”

  “Like what?”

  “How ’bout the time he ordered the one-legged stripper to come and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to you. And it wasn’t even your birthday.”

  Crush looked down at the frightened kidnapper. “What’s your name?”

  “I can’t breathe,” he said.

  Crush put more weight onto his chest. “Your name!”

  “Donny,” the man cried.

  “Okay, Donny,” Crush lifted his knee from Donny’s sternum and unwrapped the garland from around his throat. “Tell me more.”

  “We were just doing what he told us! He said to break in at four in the morning. He asked us to deliver him to a warehouse in Irwindale. He told us not to be afraid to threaten him and rough him up. We figured it was some kind of sex game.”

  “A sex game?” Crush asked.

  Donny shrugged. “It takes all kinds. I don’t judge.”

  “How did he contact you? Through the internet?”

  “No. We met at a bar.”

  “A bar? What bar?”

  “The Abbey, okay?”

  Crush knew The Abbey, on Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood. It was one of the most famous gay bars in the country. A nice place. Crush subbed for the bouncer sometimes. “When was this?” he asked.

  “Last night,” Donny said. “He was sitting at the bar. He said he’d give us a thousand dollars to kidnap him. Said it was a game. He even gave us the key and a pass card to get in the building.”

  Crush and Gail exchanged a look. Zerbe hadn’t been out in public for four years.

  “Fuck me,” Gail said.

  “Noel,” Crush said.

  Donny took advantage of their momentary distraction to crawl in the direction of the door. Crush put his big hand on Donny’s shoulder. “Stay,” Crush said. “Hand over the key. And the pass card.”

  Donny searched frantically through his pockets and dropped the key and the pass card into Crush’s palm.

  “He gave us the gun, too,” Donny said. “It isn’t loaded. He just told us to make it seem really real. To scare the hell out of him. I should have figured it was a trap. That he’d get off on seeing you beat the crap out of us.”

  “I didn’t beat the crap out of you,” Crush said. “When I beat the crap out of you, you’ll know it.”

  Donny’s eyes grew wider. “Okay.”

  “Did he pay you in advance?”

  “Half. The other half when we delivered him.”

  “Let that be a lesson to you. Always get the money up front.” Crush stood up. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?” Donny asked, trembling.

  “Irwindale.” Crush grasped Donny by the arm and started pulling him to the door. He stopped to pluck the ankle monitor off the bed. “Take this,” he said, handing it to Gail. “Walk it around.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Make it look like he’s still here.”

  “You don’t want me to call the cops?”

  Crush shook his head. “I’ll bring him back. D
onny had Zerbe’s keys. What if he was in on this? What if he’s violated his probation? He’ll go back to prison.”

  “Noel’s the crazy one.”

  “Noel may be crazy, but he’s still Zerbe’s brother. What if they cooked this up together?”

  “I don’t like this.”

  “Look, if you don’t hear from me by eight o’clock, you can call the police.”

  “And tell them what?” Gail asked.

  “That’s up to you.”

  Crush floored his 1967 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 down Rampart to the 101. He figured it should take about a half-hour to get to Irwindale at this time of night. Zerbe and his abductor had about a fifteen-minute head start on him. But then, they were probably stopping at red lights. Crush wasn’t doing that. He would catch up with them.

  While he sped through the darkened city streets, he thought about Noel Zerbe. Noel was K.C. Zerbe’s twin brother. Born five minutes before Zerbe, he always looked to the future. Though the twins were identical in appearance, they took very different paths in life. Zerbe was the practical one, the one who went to Harvard Business School, the one who made a fortune on Wall Street before he was thirty. The one who went to prison.

  Noel was the artistic one. He went to Rhode Island School of Design, majoring in scenography. He graduated and went on to design Las Vegas shows for the likes of Céline Dion and Cirque du Soleil. He did the sets for numerous Broadway productions, including the wildly successful revival of A Little Night Music, for which he became the youngest winner of a Tony for Scenic Design.

  The only prison Noel went to was a metaphorical one.

  Noel was described by those who liked him as bipolar. He was described by those who didn’t like him as bat-shit crazy. The bat-shit crazy ones far outnumbered the bipolar ones.

  K.C. and Noel made quite a pair in their high school days. Identical twins, one who dressed like Jerry Maguire and the other who dressed like Neo in The Matrix. They had different friends and different goals. And they had a very different relationship with their new stepbrother, Caleb Rush. To Zerbe, he was an ally. To Noel, he was a rival.