by Hal Ackerman
“The good news is that the intake valve has a diameter of twenty-two centimeters. I assume your daughter is wider than that.”
“Yes,” Stein said.
“The bad news is that they never removed the two-ton concrete slab pulverizing mechanism from the old days. I doubt they would have left it operational. Plus it’s off-season, and all their power may be shut down. But on the other hand, you never know. So I say we go in and take it down.”
Matthew sprinted back in from a brief reconnoitering run. The agents’ car was nowhere around, he reported, so either they left Angie here unguarded … He avoided looking at Stein, “Or she’s somewhere else,” he said.
“Special Ops in Panama would have knocked the place over already. Let’s move.”
Caravaggio lodged his frame in front of everybody. “I’m giving the orders here. After me.” He advanced to the main door and after shoving his shoulder against it to no avail, allowed Ruth Ann to gently pull it open.
It was dark as a bat’s balls inside. The misfit posse stayed tight together and tripped over each other’s legs. “Anyone think to bring a flashlight?” Wilson groused.
“This might be a light switch.” Ruth Ann began groping the walls with snow angel arms.
“Wait, Ruth Ann. I’m not sure you ought to do that.”
Stein grabbed her around the middle and whirled her away. The switch she had brushed blindly upward had not turned the lights on, but it had done something. In total darkness, the entire floor began to vibrate. An electro-mechanical hum rose in pitch from bass up through alto and up to a high scream. And then came the first thundering impact. The walls and floor resounded. Another earthshaking thud followed moments later.
“Turn the goddamn thing off,” Caravaggio roared. Stein had managed to shed Ruth Ann’s grasping arms. He found a lever against the wall and plunged it.
The house of horrors was instantly bathed in blinding light. Seven huge crushers were rooted into the concrete in a prayer circle—
a Stonehenge of polished chrome chambers and steel-bladed turbines. But they were not the source of the vibrations that seemed to shake to the very mantle of the earth. No, the switch had activated the medieval technology of the concrete crushers. These were long steel rods connected to a series of megaton concrete slabs that rose and fell in sequence like pistons, their rough undersides designed to pulverize anything on the floor below.
“Hey. Up here.” A plaintive voice came from the rafters. Angie was perched amid a system of sluices and chutes, which during harvest would feed tons of almonds from each of seven hoppers to be crushed into dust.
“Angie!” Stein and Matthew in unison called out her name.
“The bottom of this thing is opening!”
“Turn that goddamn switch off,” Caravaggio bellowed again. Stein went for the wall switch. So did Ruth Ann. All the lights went out. “Not that one!” The lights came back on. All necks swung up to the hopper where Angie had been stuck. But she was gone.
Without hesitation Matthew scaled the rope ladder to the top like a capuchin. The crow’s nest where Angie had been was empty. Its floor had opened up and dropped her down into the supply sluice, a winding spiral slide that in its mellower form delighted kids at playgrounds. He followed her through and slid down a twisting luge course. He accelerated through the curves and quickly caught up to Angie. She had gotten stuck, suspended upside down over the opening where all the shells would cascade.
The toe of her borrowed footwear had wedged itself into the gear wheel, catching an iron gear tooth that operated the piston of one of the crushers. The concrete slab was suspended above her while she hung inverted. Matthew was able to stop himself on the slide, rubbing the skin of his forearms raw.
Ten feet below her Angie saw her father and the fat cop and a black man and a strange woman looking hopefully, desperately up at her. With the gear mechanism stuck, an automatic cutoff switch had severed the electric current driving the mechanism. However, it had not shut down the forces of gravity that were straining to push the stuck gear over Angie’s boot, which would then allow the weight of the concrete slab to continue its downward plunge, obstructed only by Angie’s frame, dangling from the chute like a baby tooth.
Matthew inverted his body, wriggling himself close to Angie. He made his voice sound remarkably calm. “I’m with you,” he said. “I think we’re okay.”
“I don’t feel very okay.” She tried to squirm. The gear shuddered and loosened and moved an inch and caught again.
“You want to stay very still, Ange. Very still.”
“Okay, but don’t call me Ange.”
“I see a way out of this, but it means doing something you’re not going to like.” She braced herself to hear what it was. “I mean you’re really going to hate it.” He called down below for anyone to hand him up the sharpest cutting instrument they had. It was Spade Wilson who had with him a version of a Tanto knife, similar to the one the Russian had used to slice the seeded mandarin.
Caravaggio boosted Spade Wilson up onto his shoulders. Wilson reached to his full height and Matthew reached down. He felt the instrument being placed into his hand. He carefully rearranged his body, gaining purchase against the smooth, slippery sides of the chute by pressing his legs out against them, and supporting his full body weight. His face reddened with the effort.
“Mr. Stein, you’ve got to be ready to catch her the second I cut her loose. That stone thing is going to fall as soon as her foot is out of the gear tooth and you’ve got to grab her out before it does.”
Angie looked down at her anxious father. “Daddy, I have to tell you something. Promise you won’t be mad.”
Stein could barely speak. “I promise, baby.”
“I still have another key to your car.”
“Angie. I need you to look only at me now,” Matthew said.
All the blood had descended to her inverted head and she was getting woozy.
“On the count of three I want you to scream as loud as you can, okay?” He gripped the knife tight in his right hand. He jackknifed his body. His legs were quivering to hold fast. He held the knife to her booted shin. “One … two …”
Stein couldn’t bear it. “What are you going to do to her?”
“Now.”
Angie screamed as Matt inserted the knife blade and slit Alyssa’s borrowed boot down the side. He yanked her foot out. The boot had been the last thing holding Angie in place, and now she plummeted headfirst into her father’s chest. Freed of its impediment, the gear holding the concrete slab instantly rolled over the defooted boot, loosing the mechanism to gravity. The two-ton slab of concrete plunged downward.
Directly under the crushing piston Stein staggered with the weight of impact of his daughter hitting his chest. He was snatched out of the path of the pulverizing slab by the strong, fat arm of Caravaggio, who himself staggered under his momentum toward the smashing site right alongside them, where the next slab was now heading down. The three of them would have been powder—
indistinguishable as any chain link of predator, prey, and scavenger in the tar pits—had not the strong ebony hand of Spade Wilson grabbed Caravaggio by the scruff of the neck, anchored by his splayed legs and other hand, and kept them all afloat.
Ruth Ann steadied herself and lent a hand to Angie, pulling her to complete safety, then Stein. Matthew vaulted down from the top of the chute and struck the landing in front of her with that grin. “Hi,” he said.
Stein grasped his daughter’s shoulders, and Matthew’s. He knew what would happen if he tried to speak. His eyes fluttered like a butterfly drying its wings.
Chapter Twenty
The work on Lila’s Jacuzzi was completed to perfection. The heater motor hummed. The whirlpool mechanism purred. The last chunk of sod was replaced in the backyard. It glistened green as Ireland. The turquoise tiles at the bottom of the pool shone through clear water. Everything was back to the way it had been before Stein arrived.
He ca
rried the last armload of his things down from Lila’s bedroom. He had loaded Angie’s stuff on the first trip back to his apartment. Her brush with mortality had not altered her resolve never to set foot in Lila’s again. She hadn’t told him why. Only that she was content to live with her mother full time if it came to that.
Lila followed Stein outside through the front gate to his car. Old hurts live in healthy tissue and every new loss unscars every old one. Her husband’s death from cancer had been unpreventable, but this loss was her fault. Not just doing it but telling Stein about what happened with Richard. She had been sure Angie had told him. She had been trying to apologize, or explain, and in fact had gotten angry with Stein for pretending not to know and making her spell it out to him. It was that part she still felt horrible about. Which put them pretty close to even.
She needed some closure, a set of rules to live by. That would do for now in lieu of hope. “We can still be friends, can’t we?” she asked.
“We should probably give it a rest for a while,” Stein said, not unkindly.
“I liked Angie a lot, you know.”
“She’s not dead.”
“No,” Lila said. “I am.”
Mercedes came out of the house and asked Lila what she wanted for lunch.
“I’ll make it,” Lila said.
“Is okay. I do it.”
“No, I need to do more things myself.”
“I wish you’d have let Mercedes do Richard for you.” Stein managed a little ironic humor.
He turned to go to his car. There was a ticket plastered on his windshield for not having a Beverly Hills permit displayed. The irony of it was perfect.
“Do you think we could have made it?” Lila asked. “I mean, erasing that one thing?”
He didn’t want to tell her about the decision he’d made to close up the old duplex and make his future with her.
“Never mind,” she said. “Either way I don’t want to know.”
He blew her a sad little kiss before getting into the car. She watched it go by without reaching for it.
***
Stein could have flown to Sacramento and rented a car, but driving the whole way cleared his head. The Peerings’ Range Rover was parked on the driveway of their two-story suburban home, set amid other suburban two-story homes on a suburban two-story street.
Stein nodded a greeting through the front screen door to Ned, who was propped up on his elbows on the floor in the family room, working with Skip to build a birdhouse out of bottle caps. It was Barbara Peering Stein beckoned to join him outside. “Your roses look beautiful,” Stein said for all to hear, as he guided her out of family earshot.
“I saw on TV about your daughter and her friend discovering and solving that old murder, Barbara Peering said. “You must be proud of her.”
He smiled and nodded that he was.
“If only we could keep them babies. It all goes by so fast.”
“I think time is going to slow down for you for a long while, Mrs. Peering.”
She caught from his tone that this was not a friendly visit.
“Pretend I’m selling you aluminum siding and let’s walk around to the side of the house.”
“If you were selling aluminum siding I’d tell you to take a hike.”
“Pretend something else then.”
While he pointed up at random places on the house and jotted down make-believe numbers, he told her what he knew: that it wasn’t the lover of a Monahan widow who loosened the ties on Frank’s load. That she did not see anybody in the parking lot running away from the back of his truck.
Her breathing became heavy.
“On the way back to Los Angeles I stopped with my daughter at that roadhouse where your family had the encounter. We sat at the booth where you sat. She went around back to the ladies room. She called me in and showed me something I was not surprised to see. It has a door that opens to the back where they keep the trash bins. From there it’s a clear walk to the parking lot. You went out to the truck and loosened the ties. It wasn’t the bees that killed him, Mrs. Peering. It was you.”
She didn’t blink. Stein read the flickers of thoughts that passed behind her eyes.
“It’s all true,” she said. “And I’m quite certain you understand why, or you’d never have known. He took my children’s respect for their father away. That I could not abide.” She stopped as they reached the back of the house.
“Monahan had kids. They don’t have a father now. And your guy is building a birdhouse out of bottle caps.”
“I guess. If you look at it that way.”
“How would you look at it?”
She tried to think of another way but resigned herself that he was right. “May I have a few minutes to say goodbye to my family?”
“I’m not taking you in, Mrs. Peering.”
“Please, call me Barbara.”
“I mean, somebody will. I would think. But not me.”
“I see.”
He returned, not happily, to his car.
Sabrina Peering appeared at the side of the house, hands cocked sullenly on her hips. “Mommm. Are you going to be out here forever? I have cheerleading.”
Stein read Barbara Peering’s thoughts. Prison might be a pleasant respite.
Epilogue
When word got out that a private corporation had pulled a backroom deal to expropriate the ownership of a vital public resource, one-third of California’s fresh water supply, there were howls of protest. About three howls and a whimper. The investigative reporters, all two of them who had not bartered their writing souls for column space and whose papers had not traded courage for access, wrote the story. They drummed for details. They pricked the points of their pens into the veins of public outrage. They drew no blood.
The massive PR wheels rolled into the ruts already rent into the public’s mind. They spun their sweet cotton candy yarns of why corporate stewardship of valuable resources was better for us. Their spin song lulled the somnambulistic into contented dreams where everything comes out just right, where plunder is progress, where gargantuan profit is an unintended by-product of altruism. While just out of sight, lawyers and lobbyists crushed out and bought out the flaccid opposition.
There was a good rain that winter and late spring. Wildflowers grew in abundance. There were bounteous crops of almonds that fall and bumper crops of honey. And so the inevitable day was forestalled when the well will run dry at the Havelock orchard at nine in the morning. When Ian Peters’ pump coughs out sand and gravel. When Garvey Reed’s machinery blows out air and no water, and he takes his shotgun to the adjacent farm, thinking his erstwhile friendly neighbor has usurped his portion, but finds that orchard dry as a dustbowl too. When the summer heat beats down, leaving a top layer of clay that bakes hard and impermeable, so developing fruits shrivel on the vine. When parched roots turn unnaturally upward in search of water and crack through the surface, therein falling prey to legions of marauding insects, to the excretions of stray dogs, and to the surprising mortal enemies of roots; sunlight and air. When the distant music of dogs and children disappear and the last remaining sound is the hot dry wind scraping through branches of dangling carcasses and the fading faraway buzz of dying bees.
About the Author
Hal Ackerman has been on the faculty of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television since 1985 and is currently co–area head of the screenwriting program. His book, Write Screenplays That Sell … the Ackerman Way, is in its third printing, and is the text of choice in a growing number of screenwriting programs around the country.
He has had numerous short stories published in literary journals over the past two years, including North Dakota Review, New Millennium Writings, Southeast Review, The Pinch, and The Yalobusha Review.
His short story “Roof Garden” won the Warren Adler 2008 award for fiction and his “Alfalfa” was included in the anthology I Wanna Be Sedated … 30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers. Among the twenty-nine “other writ
ers” were Louise Erdrich, Dave Barry, Anna Quindlen, Roz Chast, and Barbara Kingsolver. “Walk Through” is among Southeast Review’s World’s Best Short Shorts of 2010.
His nonfiction baseball memoir, “Talk to the Stars,” appears in the fifteenth anniversary issue of Sports Literate.
His play, Testosterone: How Prostate Cancer Made a Man of Me, won the William Saroyan Centennial Prize for drama, enjoyed a successful run in Los Angeles, and is currently touring as a one-man play called Prick.
Copyright © 2012 by Hal Ackerman
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
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