by Phoef Sutton
The light was blindingly intense at first, but as his pupils contracted he could see, outlined by white glare, the three objects on the table in front of him become clear. An iPhone on a tiny tripod, facing him. An iPad on a slightly larger tripod, also facing him. That’s good, he thought. No pliers. No scalpels. No hammers, no saw, no nail gun. This was turning out to be the best day ever.
Then he noticed movement in the background and the van rocked. A hooded figure was climbing in through the back doors. Zerbe could barely see him, the lights behind him were so bright. Clever of him to use the light to obscure his identity, Zerbe thought. The man (Zerbe felt almost sure it was a man) held a small device up to his mouth and spoke. Then a voice that sounded like a schoolgirl on Auto-Tune said, “Hello, Zerbe. If you do what I say I promise you won’t be hurt.”
It was the hooded man, talking to him through an electronic voice-modification device. This was even better news. This meant he didn’t want Zerbe to be able to identify his voice later. This meant there would be a later. There would be a time when Zerbe would be telling his story to the police and the man didn’t want him to be able to describe his voice. This meant the man didn’t mean to kill him after he got what he wanted.
Zerbe felt his heart flutter with hope. This was turning out to be the best New Year’s of the young century. “Okay,” Zerbe said. “But you know, you did hurt me before. With the punching.”
“I’m sorry about that. I had to do it.” The voice sounded like a teenager apologizing to her father for playing hooky. “I have to make her see I mean business.”
“Could you switch to another voice setting? It’s hard to take you seriously when you sound like Miley Cyrus.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass or I’ll cut off one of your fingers.” He still sounded like Miley Cyrus, but a Miley Cyrus who had taken a very wrong turn in life.
“Sorry,” Zerbe said.
“In two minutes you are going to get a phone call. You will see her. She will see you.”
“Who?”
“Shut up. Can you read what’s written on the iPad in front of you?”
Zerbe blinked a few times. There were words there but he couldn’t make them out. “I’m really sorry, but I can’t.”
“Just a minute.” The man stepped forward and plucked the iPad from its tripod. Zerbe shut his eye. He didn’t want to see any more of the man than the man wanted him to see. He didn’t want to give the man any excuse to kill him.
“Now?” the schoolgirl voice asked. Zerbe opened his eye. The man had made the font bigger and now Zerbe could read the words.
“That doesn’t make any sense to me,” Zerbe said.
“And they won’t make sense to her either. But your father, he’ll know what they mean.”
“My father?”
“Instruct her to tell your father this. Tell her not to call the police if she ever wants to see you again.”
“Is it my sister? Is that who’s going to call?”
“Yes.”
“You should have done a little more research. My sister wouldn’t mind not seeing me again. We’re not a close family.”
“Perhaps the tragedy will bring you closer together.”
“What tragedy?”
“The one that’s going to happen to each and every one of you.”
Zerbe swallowed. The New Year was looking a little bleaker. The phone beeped.
“Are you ready?” the girl’s voice asked.
Zerbe nodded.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Angela entered the number in her iPhone and pressed “call.” She put the phone down on the kitchen table and Crush and Gail and Frida gathered around to look.
The call was connected and they could see Zerbe on the screen.
“Oh shit,” said Angela.
Zerbe did not look good. His cheek was bruised, his lip was split open, and his left eye was swollen completely shut.
“Hey, guys,” Zerbe said. He sounded surprised.
“Are you okay?” Frida asked.
“Yeah, I just didn’t expect to see all of you there.” Zerbe looked “off camera.” “I didn’t know they’d all be there,” he said to someone. “Is it all right that they’re there?”
A young woman’s voice spoke up. It sounded artificial, like a distorted sample from a hip-hop tune. “Just read the words.”
“Are you in danger?” Crush asked.
“Yeah, I think so,” Zerbe said. He looked off camera again for confirmation. “I’m in danger, right?”
“Read it,” the unknown woman said.
“Yeah, I’m in danger,” Zerbe said. “That’s why he beat me up, I guess. So you’d see that he means business.”
“He sounds kind of like a girl,” Angela said.
“Yeah, that’s a voice-modification app,” Zerbe said. “It’s very creepy.”
“What does he want?” Frida asked. “Does he want money?”
“He doesn’t want money,” Zerbe said. “He wants Angela to do something.”
“What does he want me to do?” asked Angela.
“He wants you to tell Dad something,” Zerbe said.
Angela swallowed. “Okay.”
“First of all, he says that you shouldn’t go to the police,” Zerbe went on. “At the first sign that you’ve gone to the police, he’ll kill me deader than dead. That’s what it says here. ‘Deader than dead.’ So that’s pretty serious. Do you hear that Frida?”
Frida nodded. She tried to keep her professional composure. “Where are you?” Frida asked.
“I’m in a van. Parked somewhere. But I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about that,” Zerbe said. “He just wants me to read this message. And for Angela to deliver it to Dad. Are you ready, Angela?”
“What do you mean?” Angela asked, worried.
“Write this down,” Zerbe said. “It’s important.”
Angela looked around for a pen. Crush handed her a pencil and a napkin. “All right.” She took a deep breath. “I’m ready.”
“Wait,” Crush said. “I want to talk to the other person in the room.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Zerbe said.
“Are you listening to me, whoever you are?” Crush said. “Answer this question. If Angela delivers this message, will you let Zerbe go free?”
There was an awkward pause.
“Just let me read the message,” Zerbe said.
“No. Not until we have an agreement,” Crush said.
“This isn’t a negotiation, Crush,” Zerbe said, plaintively.
“That’s exactly what this is,” Crush said, and reached down to the phone and ended the call.
The others in the room gasped.
“What did you just do?” Gail said.
“Are you crazy?” Angela asked.
Crush raised one of his big fingers, telling them to wait.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Crush,” Frida whispered.
“So do I,” Crush said.
“If he thinks he’s in control,” Frida explained to others, “then he is in control. Crush is giving him reason to doubt that.”
“Is that a good thing?” Angela asked.
“We’ll see,” Crush said.
The phone beeped. Crush reached down and connected the call.
Zerbe appeared on the screen. He looked like he’d taken a few more punches to the face. “Don’t make him mad, Crush. Really, don’t.”
“What did he say?” Crush asked. “Did he answer my question?”
“He said it all depends on what my father says,” Zerbe said, not even trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. “He says it’s all up to him.”
Crush nodded. That would have to do. “All right. Go ahead.”
“Here goes,” Zerbe said and proceeded to read with great deliberation. “‘The GV is dead. The SG is out of the HSR. Remember the seventy-six thousand. The debt is not paid.’” Zerbe looked quickly toward the camera. “Did you get that?”
<
br /> Angela wrote feverishly. “I don’t think so. Can I read it back to you?”
The line went dead. Angela panicked. “I don’t think I got it. I didn’t get it! Call him back.”
“We’d better not.” Crush took the napkin from Angela and read it over. “That’s almost right.” He crossed out a few letters and fixed some of the phrasing.
“You’re sure you’re right?” Angela asked him.
“I’m sure,” he said. Running numbers for the Russian mob at age fifteen, Crush had developed a good memory. He’d had to—his life had depended on it. He folded the napkin and put it in his pocket.
“I’m supposed to deliver that,” Angela objected.
“And you will,” Crush said. “But I’m going with you.” He turned to Frida. “What are you going to do, Frida?”
Frida sat at the kitchen table, her face set in concentration. “My next scheduled visit is on January 2nd. I haven’t been here this morning. You have three days.” She finished the rest of her cold coffee and got up. “Zerbe better be here when I get back, Crush.” Her voice cracked a little as she spoke, which made it sound less like a warning and more like a plea.
“He will be,” Crush said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ll bring him back.” Crush didn’t say dead or alive. He didn’t think Frida could handle that.
They decided to leave Noel in the loft with the ankle monitor on. He said it made him feel safer to know that “they” thought he was someone else. Gail stayed with him, to keep an eye on him and make sure that, if he went totally crazy (always a possibility according to Angela), at least he wouldn’t be alone. Crush and Angela went to see her father and deliver the message.
Now Crush was piloting the Camaro through busy downtown traffic. It would still be the morning rush hour for the next three hours, so he knew enough to stay off the 110 and the narrow tunnels that led to the San Gabriel Valley. Instead, he traveled to Pasadena through the surface streets of what was nowadays called DTLA. Through the canyons of old buildings that were used by film crews to double for New York and Boston. Past the gleaming new skyscrapers that were sprouting up like immense, glass Lego kits, changing the face of Los Angeles from the sprawling western burg he knew into a Dubai-like city of the future. For all the years Crush had known it, LA had always been an evolving city. But now it was evolving in ways Crush didn’t really understand.
“The skyline’s really changing,” Angela said, echoing his thoughts.
Crush grunted noncommittally. Then he said. “I guess that’s your father’s work.”
“Not all of it.”
“But enough?”
“Enough.”
After that, they drove in silence up Broadway until it crossed the concrete ditch that was the LA River and turned into York. In no time at all, Crush felt like he was in another land. A part of the Gilded Age Midwest. Magnificent Ambersons-land, Zerbe called it. The fabled land of Pasadena.
Turning left, Crush maneuvered through tree-lined streets and made his way onto San Rafael Avenue, the legendary lane of Tudor mansions that bordered the steep bluff of the dry riverbed called the Arroyo Seco. Hidden from the road by hedges, fences, and long driveways were great imposing houses. Houses that looked like Wayne Manor from the TV show Batman. In fact, one of them was Wayne Manor, or at least the house they used for the establishing shots back in the sixties. The illusion of great wealth met the reality of great wealth on the Arroyo Seco.
The shadows of tree branches swept over the Camaro’s hood and Crush stuck his head out the window and took in a deep breath of cool December air. What was that smell? Crush wondered. Oh that’s right. It’s the smell of power.
Fifteen minutes away from downtown LA and it seemed to Crush like another country and another time. A time of western culture and money and white people’s rule. A time a lot like right now, Crush corrected himself.
As he drove, he thought back to another time. Near the end of the last century, when he first drove down these streets with his mother. On the day they moved in.
Toni Rush had married Emil Zerbe in Las Vegas just a few days before. Toni had left the one-room apartment she shared with Crush in Koreatown (and this was before Koreatown got all hipster-cool) one day in late June and didn’t come back till July. She was gone for two weeks, but Crush didn’t worry. She did that from time to time. Went off with men for a week or two. Sometimes she even came back with them. Sometimes she came back with a few trophies. Sometimes she came back with a black eye or a busted lip.
This time she came back with a husband.
Crush hadn’t thought that Emil Zerbe would be a keeper. To be honest, he thought Emil Zerbe was out of Toni’s league. Crush knew that was kind of a rotten thing for a son to think about his mother, but Emil was one of the richest men in Southern California and Crush’s mother was…Crush’s mother. Good for a rich man’s fling but not much more. To be honest, Crush was surprised when she was gone with him for more than a weekend. When the weekend stretched to two weeks, he was half afraid that Emil was a rich maniac and that he had buried her somewhere in the desert.
For that reason, Crush was ecstatic to see Toni leaning over his bed one morning, alive and well and looking exceedingly well fed.
“I’m back, Cabe,” she said. “Pack your things. We’re moving.”
He sat up and shook his head to clear it. All right, he thought, we’re moving again. What’s Toni done this time. Robbery? Blackmail? Something worse? Best not to ask. Just get on the move.
“You pack,” he said, jumping out of bed. “I’ll get a car. An inconspicuous one. Maybe a Corolla. I saw one parked around the corner last night. I’ll be back in five minutes.”
Toni laughed. “Slow down, Cabe. We’re not on the run. We’re just moving.”
He sat back down. “Where?”
“To Pasadena.”
He blinked and thought. “Where’s that?”
She laughed again. “It’s just to the east of here. I spent last week out there. It’s like another world.”
“Okay.” Crush tried to adjust to this new change in his always-changing life. “Is this on account of Emil? Is he getting you an apartment?”
“No,” Toni said smiling. “A house! A huge fucking house!”
Crush had to ask. “What for?”
She showed Crush her left hand. There was the most spectacular diamond Crush had ever seen, with a gold band nestled beneath it, sitting there on her third finger. Still, Crush couldn’t quite put it together. “Why did he give you those?”
“Why do you think? We got married, Cabe.”
Crush just stared. Was she kidding? “Why?”
“What kind of question is that? Because he loves me.”
Crush nodded. Then he nodded again. Then he thought to ask, “Do you love him?”
Toni looked at him like he’d asked her something that had never occurred to her. Then she answered, “Sure. Of course, I do. Now come on.”
So, she wasn’t kidding, Crush thought as he drove the Mustang that he’d stolen from somewhere in Bell Gardens last month down San Rafael Avenue. She had really done it. She had landed a big one.
“Here. On the right,” Toni said.
“Where?” There was nothing but a large hedge on the right.
“It’s there. That’s the entrance. You passed it.”
He turned the car around, pulled up to the massive greenery, and on closer inspection saw a small metal box inset in the bushes. Toni rolled down the window, stuck out her hand, and pressed a button on the box like she’d been doing it her whole life.
A bored, officious voice came through the little box. “Who’s there?”
“Samantha! It’s me, Toni.”
“And?”
“And let me in.”
There was a passive-aggressive pause. “Just a minute.”
Toni turned to Crush with a happy smile. “Samantha hates me.”
After another pause, the hedge st
arted to open, revealing a long curving driveway. Crush steered the car down the lane and they listened to almost all of “My Favorite Mistake” on the radio before they came upon what Crush thought must have been a four-star hotel. Or perhaps they’d gone through a wormhole and ended up in England in front of a damned castle.
It sure looked like a castle. Massive stone walls overgrown with ivy. What Crush thought were called battlements along the top of the façade. The little windows to shoot arrows out of and the big windows to let light in. A huge front door with enormous iron studs set into it. True, there was no drawbridge, but the large pond in front of the house could serve as a moat in a pinch.
“Is that his house?” Crush asked as he circled the pond and pulled up in front of the stone steps that led to the entryway.
“I told you it was fucking huge,” Toni said gleefully as she got out of the Mustang.
“How many people live here?”
“I don’t really know. I think four. At least part of the time. When his kids are staying with him.”
“And the rest of the time?”
“Emil lives here alone.”
Crush got out of the car. One man alone in that gigantic mansion could get pretty lonely. But lonely enough to marry Toni Rush? Crush felt the hairs on his back stand up straight, the way they always did when he sensed danger. Something wasn’t right.
Toni raced up the steps, taking them two at a time, and rang the doorbell, which chimed with appropriate solemnity. Crush climbed the stairs with more caution, eyeing the ivy with suspicion. Rats lived in ivy, he’d heard. This damn house could contain hidden dangers.
The huge door swung open and a young woman who had dirty-blond hair swept up on the top of her head with a pencil pushed into it to keep it there greeted them with a stony expression. The woman wore wire-rimmed glasses and a trim little business suit that somehow managed to look disheveled even though it was actually quite tidy. She looked all business. “I didn’t expect you,” she said to Toni.
“Why not?”
“Because I thought you’d come to your senses. You had a good week. You got a nice ring. Why don’t you quit while you’re ahead?”