Chuck saw with a glimpse that Stan, in underwear and tee shirt, was only a few feet away, his eyes wide.
“Let’s go!” Chuck grabbed Stan’s hand and turned him, and started running toward the stairway.
He heard the Serb’s voice shout, “Shoot the legs!”
Chapter 43
“I’m in my underwear Chuck!”
“Don’t think about it!”
They reached the bottom of the stairs, and were in the parking lot. There was a small retaining wall on the edge of the lot. On the other side of the wall was another parking lot behind some office space. All Chuck knew was they had to get out of sight, fast.
“Over the wall,” Chuck said, pulling Stan toward the barrier.
“I can’t, Chuck! I’m in my underwear!”
“Stick with me.”
“I’ll get scratched!”
But Chuck was already boosting his brother on top of the four-foot wall. Stan’s wiry body was as taut as an anchor rope.
“Jump over,” Chuck said.
“My knee hurts!”
Chuck heard the sound of scuffling feet echoing through the stairwell. Without a second thought he jumped onto the top of the wall and sprang off it like a cat. But he landed like a dog—with a heavy, splay-legged thud. He quickly recovered and pulled Stan off the wall, as a parent would a scared child.
They were now crouched in back of a cigar store and a Verizon cellular outlet. The small parking lot was empty. There was a breezeway between the two stores. Chuck took Stan by the wrist and pulled him toward the arch.
“My knee is bleeding, Chuck! I need a Band-Aid.”
“I’ll get you a bunch of them.”
“Why are those men after us?”
“Later.”
They got to the breezeway. Chuck pushed Stan’s back against the wall, peeked around.
He saw nothing, but heard muted voices talking animatedly, like angry blue jays. Then the sound of car doors slamming and tires burning rubber.
They would be coming, driving all around. How hard would it be to spot a couple of guys on foot, one of them in his briefs and the other in tee-shirt, jeans, and no shoes? And without cell phones. He had to get to a phone. Call the cops. Maybe Sandy Epperson.
If they kept to the back of the stores, hidden from the boulevard, maybe they could find a place that was open, get in and make a call. They couldn’t stay here. A side street was only a few yards away, and the Serbs could easily search the adjoining areas.
“Can you move?” Chuck said.
Stan said, “My knee hurts. It’s bleeding!”
“We have to duck into the alley.”
“What if we step on glass?”
“I don’t see any glass. Come on.”
“I’m scared, Chuck.”
“Come on.” Chuck again took Stan by the hand and pulled him toward the side street.
Just as a set of headlights careened around the corner, coming right at them.
There was no way out. Nowhere to run.
Stan yelped.
As a very nice silver Jag sped right on by. A youngish brunette in fully loaded makeup looked at them like they were splashes of graffiti.
“Hurry,” Chuck said, leading Stan across the street and into the alley.
They were behind a coin laundry now. Up ahead a few cars were parked. Chuck remembered. There was a sushi place that stayed open late. He’d been there before.
With Julia.
They’d have a phone there.
Chuck’s feet were starting to get raw. He could only imagine how Stan’s were. But Stan wasn’t crying about it. Maybe his little brother was getting a little tougher. Or maybe he was just too scared to think about anything, including sore feet. He hadn’t mentioned his knee in the last twelve seconds.
Chuck kept hold of Stan’s hand and ran on.
He couldn’t let this be the end of things. After everything he’d been through, this could not be the way he died, with his brother at his side, failing to take care of him like he’d always been able to do.
He couldn’t get gunned down in an alley. What would his kids think, his fifth graders, being told that their teacher was murdered and that’s the way it was and isn’t it such a sad day, kids?
He made for the door of the sushi place, bright red under a sconce.
Be unlocked.
It was.
Chuck practically threw Stan inside, followed, slammed it behind them.
There was a small, dark passageway, and two cloth sections hanging at the end. Chuck pressed through them and almost knocked over a Hispanic man with a load of dirty dishes.
“Phone,” Chuck said.
The man just looked at him.
“I want to use your phone,” Chuck said. “You have a phone?”
The man shrugged. Chuck wasn’t buying the can’t-speak-English act. The guy just didn’t like what he was seeing, and who could blame him? One shivering thin guy in his underwear, led by a guy with a scarred neck and no shoes.
“Owner?” Chuck said. “Owner, owner!”
The Hispanic turned his back and walked to the industrial sink and put the dishes in it. Like Chuck and Stan didn’t even exist.
“Maybe you better wait here,” Chuck said to Stan.
“Where you going?”
“To find the manager or the owner or––”
“Hand up!” The voice was high and screechy and trembling. Chuck turned and saw the business end of a double-barreled shotgun aimed right at his gut. Behind the gun was an old man with a weathered, Japanese face. He wore a bandana with a red sun between two Japanese characters. He was small, but his eyes were big.
“I need a phone,” Chuck said.
“Hand up!”
“We’re not here to—”
“Blow head off!”
Stan said, “He’s going to shoot us!”
“Hand up!”
A younger man, who looked like a larger rendition of the shotgun guy, complete with matching headband, came in from the restaurant side. He was holding a revolver. He said, “You better put your hands up. My dad’s fingers aren’t as steady as they used to be.”
Chapter 44
Chuck said, “It’s not what you think.”
“No move!” the old man said. The double barrels of the shotgun trembled, fixed on Chuck.
“Okay, Dad,” the young one said.
“Talk to them, Chuck!” Stan said.
“This is a mistake,” Chuck said.
“Call cop,” the old man ordered.
The son said, “Would you two sit on the floor, please?”
Chuck felt Stan shaking, put his arm around his shoulder. “Would you tell your father to put the firepower away? We were being chased, we want the cops to come.”
The son frowned.
“Call cop,” the father said.
“We’ve been having break ins,” the son said. “So just sit down on the floor and we’ll make the call.” He motioned with his revolver.
Chuck sat, pulling Stan down with him. They parked on the hard floor and leaned against the wall.
“Watch 'em, Dad,” the son said.
The old man nodded once, hard.
“Would you mind having him point that thing at the floor?” Chuck said.
“No floor!” Dad said.
“Might be a good idea, Dad,” the son said. “Just lower it a little.”
“Only little!”
The son disappeared through twin curtains.
And now, waiting, Chuck felt something he hadn’t in a long time. It traced a sharp line back to Afghanistan, and the security patrol that was attacked. In that whole fight, which he could barely remember, one thing did stay with him—an inner tearing. It felt like the sharp talons of a predatory bird, clawing out from inside his ribs.
There was a myth like that, Prometheus. The guy who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to man. So Zeus chained him to a rock and a bird pecked out his liver. Only Zeus made the liver grow bac
k, so it could be pecked out again the next day, and forever.
Only this bird was inside Chuck. In everything that had happened so far, the bird hadn’t come back.
Now it had.
At least the dad wasn’t pointing the weapon at Chuck anymore. It was more toward the Hispanic dish washer now, who hadn’t moved at all during the last few minutes.
“Go on, back work,” the dad said to him. Then to Chuck: “You two big trouble.”
“Are we going to be all right, Chuck?” Stan said.
“Sure. When the cops get here, we’ll straighten it all out.”
“I hate being in my underwear, Chuck.”
“Be glad you don’t sleep buck naked.”
“That’s gross, Chuck.”
Gunfire.
The sound of glass exploding.
The old man spun around. The shotgun went off.
More shots from the front, a scream.
Then silence.
The old man took a step toward the curtains.
Another shot exploded.
The old man went down, flat on his back, his head hitting the floor with concussive force.
For a second the only sound was the hot water shooting out of the sink where the dish washer once stood.
The curtains rustled, as if a soft wind were blowing them. And it stopped everything cold in Chuck’s mind, because the soft movement of them looked exactly like the curtains that danced in the hotel room on his honeymoon night. They got a beach view room, he and Julia, and she went outside to the balcony, and when Chuck came out of the bathroom he turned off the lights and there was a single candle in the room. Julia had lit the candle and Chuck could see the curtains—same color as these in the sushi joint—could see them swaying gently, gently, and Julia came back into the room, through the curtains, like a ghost passing through a wall.
But through these curtains in the sushi place came a man. He wore a black workout suit and a ski mask. His right hand held a slate-gray submachine gun.
Chapter 45
Forget about sleep, girlfriend. Sandy almost said it out loud.
She was sometimes kept up by hard cases, but it wasn’t just that. The whole Elias thing flooding back to her memory was a big part. Six months after making detective, and going to Central, Elias was transferred over. And began his systematic campaign to break her down.
Sexual innuendo, racial slurs, all in private. And the one time she tried to record him he’d caught her. And then her complaint to Internal Affairs, and her Protective League lawyer advising her to take the deal—transfer to the Valley, and no liability anywhere.
“Anywhere,” Sandy said out loud now. Oh boy, when you start talking to yourself, it’s time to work.
She opened the Mac laptop on the dining room table and sat down for some research.
She accessed a newspaper database that was not open to the public. A joint project of the Los Angeles County Library and the LAPD, this was the most complete collection of local newspapers in existence, anywhere. From as far away as Barstow, and as near as downtown, the database covered every kind of newspaper, print and digital, from paid subscriber to free handout. It was an amazing thing that even Sandy Epperson was in awe of.
She typed in a search request on the name “Edward Hillary.” All she knew about Hillary was what she’d read in the report on the Beaman hit-and-run. He was a retired cop. She’d never met him, but that wasn’t odd in a department as large as the LAPD.
She got a ton of hits, some alluding to Edmund Hillary, the first man to reach the summit of Mount Everest. She limited her search criteria by date, going back only ten years.
Scrolling through the squibs revealed an Edward Hillary who played a doctor on One Life to Live for several years. It was easy to ignore those items.
An Edward Hillary was valedictorian of La Crescenta High School in 2006.
No help at all. There were probably still some people who flew below the Internet radar, who didn’t have a database presence. Maybe a barfly named Hillary was one of these.
Then she stopped cold.
Two names, together. Two she’d never expected to see.
In a pdf document was a page from the Los Angeles Daily News nine years ago.
She opened the doc, and confirmed that an Edward Hillary was being honored with several others for a gift donated to a prestigious private school.
One with that other name attached to it.
The Raymond Hunt Academy.
The place Chuck Samson, whose wife died at Hillary’s hand, taught fifth graders.
Oh yes, girlfriend. Forget completely about sleep.
Chapter 46
Chuck came to, face down, smelling oil. He was aware that his hands were taped in front of him, and that he was in a semi-fetal position. The right side of his head throbbed. He remembered the blow then, a gun butt, and knew it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been.
Vibration told him he was in the back of a moving vehicle. From the layout, apparent by instinct and feel, it was probably an SUV of some type. And the shifting of his weight meant they were on a curving road. Winding their way somewhere, at a slight incline. Maybe a canyon road. If that was so, maybe they were heading toward the ocean. This could be Topanga or Las Virgenes. Or they could be heading up into a mountain range, like the San Gabriels. Or––
Where was Stan?
Chuck rolled onto his back.
“Don’t move,” a deep, accented voice said.
Chuck wondered why he wasn’t dead yet.
“Where’s my brother?” Chuck said, his voice thick and dull.
A jab to the ribs sent fire to his bones. Had to be the barrel of a gun. “Shut up,” the voice said.
.
This is the worst, Stan thought. This is the worst it’s ever going to be. They’re going to kill Chuck and they’re going to do the same thing to me. That’s why they have me tied up and they put another thing in my mouth and they won’t let me talk. They won’t let me find out where my brother is. They won’t let me wiggle around. They hit me. I’m in the back of some truck. They’re taking me somewhere. I hope they take me where Chuck is. If they do anything to Chuck I will bite them. I will do anything I can to hurt them. Maybe I’m going to die but I will not die until I hurt them because of what they’re going to do to Chuck.
Dear God, save me and Chuck.
I hope I don’t pee. I don’t want them to see me pee. I want to get them. I have to. I can’t be scared anymore. Chuck needs me. I hate mean people. I hate them. I don’t like these things in my mouth, I don’t like to be tied up, I don’t like what they’re doing to me, but if I cry or pee they’re going to hurt me more. I have to be smart. I have to. I can’t be scared, Chuck told me not to be scared. I have to try, I have to.
I have to plan.
Dear God, help me have a plan.
.
A team of the worst people he’d never met. That’s what Thompson––Boffo—had told him. No doubt, that’s who had him.
But what did Chuck have to do with heroin trafficking?
And what was his next move? Do something nuts, like try to kick out a window? Jump into the back seat and roll around with the gunman?
As kids, he and Stan had a game with dandelions. One of them would blow the spores into the air and the other would try to grab as many as he could before they floated away or hit the ground. Chuck got to be pretty good at it. In fact, back in his fighting days, Chuck unleashed a one-two combination he fantasized was as fast as Muhammad Ali in his prime. It wasn’t, but it was pretty fast.
Maybe he should make a play for the guy’s gun and do some shooting.
Sure, I am Jean-Claude Van Damme. I am Chuck Norris. And this is a movie.
You jerk.
He thought of Stan again. Stan, who was no doubt going crazy. Stan, who would be out of his skin with worry. Stan, who would be wondering if the wolf man had caught up with his big brother.
If Stan was even still alive.
Once, they’d gone to a summer camp in the Angeles National Forest. In cabins and everything. Their mom was committed to giving them some semblance of a normal childhood, once the old man had taken off.
This camp had a big meadow in the middle, and the second day they got a big game of Capture the Flag going. Stan played defense, keeping up a constant chatter and asking Chuck please not to leave him.
Until Chuck told him he was going to go for it.
It was almost the most beautiful play in Capture the Flag history. Chuck was Barry Sanders, his favorite running back, going this way and that, avoiding the destructive tag. He was twenty yards from home when he got flanked.
Changing directions yet again, Chuck slipped and went down and got multiple slaps from the enemy.
And heard Stan screaming, really screaming, not far away.
Later, Stan would admit he thought the opposition was really and truly capturing Chuck, and going to put him in a real jail.
He longed for those days again because this was no game.
But longing wasn’t going to bring it back.
But the hot hate was cooking his blood, maybe that would help. Maybe that would keep him sharp.
.
Stan screamed hard against the thing in his mouth. And kicked his legs. Somebody pulled out the cloth, and said in a scary voice, “What?”
“I have to pee!” Stan said.
“Hold it in.”
“I have to!”
Another voice, the one Stan thought was driving, said, “I don’t want him messing the car.”
“Where you think we can stop?” the first voice said.
“There’s a turn out coming.”
“Keep driving. The others will wonder where we are.”
“I don’t want that stink in my car, understand?”
“Some cop drives by, sees it, he ask questions.”
Stan said, “I can’t hold it in! I can’t hold it anymore! My sphincter!”
“What’d he say?” the driving voice said.
“I don’t know.”
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