* * * *
Lilly Zoller had to pee.
While seated in Dulaney’s car, she cursed her tiny bladder for not being able to hold the gallons of water she consumed as part of her daily habit. Coupled with the diuretic nature of all that coffee she sucked back every dawn, she had become as used to holding her liquid as visiting the toilet. But the pressure in her abdomen was building. As much as she wanted to be present for the thrill of the takedown she worried that her moment might be ruined by ill-timed cramping. She wrestled with herself. Go now? Go later? Finally, she chose to risk missing the climax, leapt from the car, and scuffled practically pigeon-toed straight for the green awnings of that nearby Starbucks, praying like hell the cafe’s one bathroom wasn’t occupied by a coffee-addicted new mother with a baby to change.
She later recalled reaching for the bathroom door handle at the exact second the lever turned in her hand without assistance. An overstuffed barista in a black apron that barely tied around her middle popped out of the unisex toilet.
“Excuse me,” said the barista.
Lilly swallowed, concerned that in her step backward she might have leaked a cc or two of urine into her panties. She pulled the door closed behind her, twisted the lock, hiked up her skirt and sat without regard.
The concussion from the ANFO bomb nearly knocked her off the commode. Acoustic shavings shook from the ceiling. Lilly’s first inclination was that it was one of those local quakes that hit with little to no buildup, shaking the earth’s surface with a singular merciless jolt, leaving most Angelenos momentarily breathless.
But locals didn’t scream after such shocks. And that’s just what Lilly heard from both patrons and employees in the shop, their shouts muffled by the bathroom door.
Lilly couldn’t recall if she had even finished her business. She lowered her skirt and threw the door open. The Starbucks was fogged by concrete dust. Nearly all the glass from the windows was in piles of shards on the floor. Pedestrians with shirt fabric bunched over their faces scurried west while Lilly stepped onto the sidewalk, blinking to clear her contact lenses. Then her right heel sank into something soft. Fleshy even. As if stepping on a sleeping dog. She half-expected her own mutt, Dingo, to yelp and snap at her. Instead, she spun and looked down, discovering the face-down body of a muscled man, a piece of chrome sunk deep into the back of his skull, a barely eaten box of Panda Express kung pao chicken spilled next to him. The blood slick around him was ever-expanding like a deep red mu shu sauce.
“DULANEY!” Lilly shouted, twisting back toward the intersection.
That onshore sea breeze coastal residents had been waiting for began to show signs of life. As the airborne debris slowly dissolved, Lilly stood in slack-jawed wonder. Before her was a scene of urban destruction. Cars twisted and turned upside down. The sides of buildings looked sandblasted, most of them blown out and their veneers stripped of stucco and brick.
The intersection was flanked by stoplight standards, spun into industrial art. And ground zero, where there was once a shiny black Peterbilt tractor-trailer rig, was now a depression in the asphalt. Not quite a hole. More like a fifteen-by-ten-meter footprint littered with various vehicle parts none bigger than a toaster. The rest of the truck was gone or scattered amongst strips of skin and unidentifiable body parts.
“Jesus hell…” muttered Lilly.
* * * *
Rey hadn’t seen the explosion. While seeking a Sports Authority salesperson to loan him a pair of field specs, he had felt the shock wave hit him like a baseball bat across his shoulder blades, forcing him to his knees. This was followed by a hot wind and rain of tempered glass. Instantly, Rey felt a wasp-like sting on the back of his neck. He reached back and gently pinched a sliver of glass near his hairline, twisting it free then examining it on the tip of his index finger, the quick-drying blood acting like glue.
Damn. What just happened?
“Motherfucker!” cried Dulaney, his voice soaked in agony.
The call might as well have hooked Rey by the hypothalamus and reeled him forty feet across the floor to the injured FBI man. Dulaney was supine with his fingertips trembling near his bloody face. Tempered glass shards were nearly symmetrically embedded in his blue-black skin. Like raspberry rhinestones.
“Can you see?” asked Rey.
“I don’t know…” Dulaney painfully blinked. “Yeah. Yeah I kinda think I can. Think the binoculars…”
“They’re right here. What about ’em?”
“Saved my eyes.”
“’Kay. But don’t move. Your face.”
“Wrong with my face?”
“Glass in it.”
“Right, right,” said Dulaney. “Did you see it?”
“Did I see what?”
“Bomb.”
“No. Felt it, though. Where’d it come from?”
“Truck.”
“What truck?”
“Our truck… Your bad guy…is a terrorist.”
Terrorist? Rey couldn’t process it. Instructions were traveling across his mental news ticker: get cellphone; dial 911. And Lord, what would Danny think of me now?
Rey stood, fumbled around his pocket for his cell phone and pressed the number nine. While his phone speed-dialed, he finally gave a look outside the evaporated window. The destruction was awe-inspiring in its efficiency. A single bomb had, in a matter of moments, rearranged the urban and seaside paradise into a scene usually reserved for Rey’s extra-wide TV screen. He could have been staring out over the streets of Baghdad or Kabul. And the sounds, too. A cacophony of car and fire alarms intermingled with the growing wail of fire and police sirens.
“Holy shit,” Rey said of the scene. “What have I done?”
* * * *
The way Dave Wireman figured it, the blast wave must have carried him twenty feet in the air. One moment he was adjusting his video camera from his perch atop the maritime statue, the next he was reeling backwards. And he remembered every millimeter of the ride, which ended with him landing squarely on his back in a soft patch of Bermuda grass. Dave felt the gas escape his lungs and the temporary paralysis as the proverbial wind was knocked out of him. He rolled to his side, wheezed for oxygen, and was on his feet with a rather speedy grace. He scooped up the video camera without checking to see if it had survived the impact and hauled tail back toward his parked Lexus.
It was all such a damned blur. A soundless scurry into the driver’s seat. Though his hands were vibrating, he didn’t hear the jangle of his keys or the sound of the eight-cylinder engine catching. It was half-feel for the private eye, half-instinct. Whatever had just happened… Whatever he had just borne witness to, was way bigger than the job he had signed up for. The last thing he cared to be was a public witness to an obvious terror attack on American real estate.
“Shit shit shit shit,” he kept saying over and over like a Hindu mantra. Only he couldn’t make out his own freaking words.
And Terrell? Dave Wireman didn’t even think to ask himself or any other horrified passerby where he might be. He merely jacked the luxury car into gear, swung the steering wheel into U-turn mode and threaded his way onto a side street.
Dave began laying on his horn to urge curious pedestrians, running either to or from ground zero, to get out of his way. That was when he first noticed something else that was wrong. He could hear nothing. Not the sound blasting from behind his grill or the screams coming from the anguished faces he was trying so hard not to run down.
With a quick adjustment of his rearview mirror, Dave saw blood trickling from both his ears. A sure-assed sign that his eardrums had ruptured.
“Shit shit shit!” he screamed, only registering the vibration of his curses inside his cranium.
I’m fucking deaf!
Dave needed a doctor. A hospital. And an emergency room to fix him. But not here, he thought. Hospitals would be overrun with victims. There would be cops and questions about who he was, what he was doing at the crime scene, and who he was working for.
Screw that. His ears could wait. He would drive back to L.A. In forty minutes he could be at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills. By then he would have a story to explain his bloody condition.
So Dave drove, wrestling with his brain in his own sad silence. And while he wondered if he would ever be able to listen to his Steely Dan records again, his cell phone rang and rang and rang and rang…
* * * *
After leaving three messages in three minutes on Dave Wireman’s voicemail, a frustrated Garvin Van Der Berk spun his cell phone across his desktop while unmuting the sound on his television. As was his habit while working alone in his two-room art deco West Hollywood office suite, he kept his TV on and tuned to one of the national finance channels. He would tell clients that the constant background chatter was just him keeping an eye on the markets. That he had investments to monitor. If that were only half true.
There had indeed been a time when the high profile private eye was a player with a sturdy financial portfolio built from profits and insider stock tips from grateful clients. But one of those customers was invested heavily with Bernard Madoff, the famed New York master of the Ponzi scheme. Garvin was kissed into the deal and, within three years, had moved all his liquid assets into the doomed fund. Adding to his further bad luck, he had signed his final divorce agreement only months before the Ponzi scheme’s bubble had burst so publicly. His wife got the hard assets—house, cars, and the condo in Palm Desert—while Garvin had hung on to the investment portfolio. Oops.
Nearly all that Garvin had left was his name, the private detective shingle, and his image as Lala Land’s super successful private detective to the stars.
Thus the television served more as something to keep him company during the long hours slogging through the piles of unglamorous reading that his job required.
In the twenty-four hour news cycle, reports of violent events usually begin with a trickle from one source which expands to a slow stream and eventually unplugs into an avalanche of coverage with very little detail. The bomb blast in Long Beach seemed to blitzkrieg on to local and national stations in a matter of seconds. News anchors scrambled for information while traffic helicopters were rerouted from freeway tie-ups to cover the expanding smoke cloud just off the harbor.
Garvin had left his desk and was retrieving a reduced-calorie grape Gatorade from his mini-fridge-disguised-as-a-retro-wall-safe when he heard the breathless news voice talking about some kind of large explosion in Long Beach. Why Garvin checked his watch, he didn’t know. It was eleven minutes after noon.
Coincidence?
Most certainly, Garvin decided. There were a thousand logical reasons why there could be some kind of fiery conflagration in Long Beach. First of all, it was possible the report of the location was erroneous. There was a large petroleum refinery south of the city and just to the north were acres and acres of natural gas wells. The most likely explanation was that there had been some sort of industrial accident. And if that wasn’t it, there were the millions of tons in cars and trucks that maneuvered through the vicinity daily. The harbor itself served as the busiest port in the entire United States. Even before 9/11, authorities had warned that it was only a matter of time before terrorists used a shipping container to deliver a bomb to American shores.
Terrorists? Jesus. Not again.
With that, Garvin gazed across his corridor-like office to the television screen. Without his glasses, he had trouble focusing more than five feet away. On top of that, the late morning sun had hit its peak, blasting off the solar panels mounted like sentries on the roof of the design gallery next door. Garvin reset the vertical blinds until the glare was redirected to his wall of fame—a space dedicated and chockablock with framed five-by-seven photos of grinning Garvin arm-in-arm with every celebrity he had ever worked for.
Garvin broke the safety cap on the Gatorade, coated his throat with grape goodness, then returned his specs to his face. There was a live helicopter image of downtown Long Beach bordered in an array of up-to-the-minute market figures. The camera, optically zoomed from three thousand feet above, scoured the post-explosion geography—the overturned cars and gashed hunks of steel surrounding a smoking gouge in the earth.
“Son of a bitch…” said Garvin to nobody but himself before rushing to his computer and Googling the address he had received from Conrad Ellis. In a matter of seconds, a satellite map appeared. As the image crystallized and zeroed in on the intersection, all doubt was vanquished. Whatever event had shaken the attention of the cable news world was somehow connected to the murder of young Nickelodeon actress Pepper Ellis.
“Damn damn damn.”
Garvin picked up his cell phone and, once again, dialed Dave Wireman.
27
Victims of the blast were split between Long Beach Memorial and St. Mary’s Medical Center, which was a mere three city blocks from ground zero. Triage teams of nurses and doctors, designated by post 9/11 preparedness, leapt into the messy job of separating the medically savable from those most likely to succumb to their injuries.
St. Mary’s, the smaller of the two hospitals, was overrun. While the emergency room was choked with bleeding victims surrounded by a growing corps of medical personnel, the lobby was repurposed for triage. Those without life threatening issues were shunted into the first and second floor corridors where they were left unattended, waiting on gurneys and rollaway beds parked flush against the walls.
“Screw this,” said Gonzo. “I’m good to go home.”
But in looking at her, Lucky didn’t think so. She had been lying flat on her back for an hour, neck in a foam cervical immobilizer. Lucky hadn’t left her side, pulling a medical waste bin from a bathroom to serve as a short stool next to the gurney on which the EMTs had carefully placed her. A triage nurse had assigned her to the survivor column and gladly accepted Lucky’s offer to act as a medical assistant. So he wheeled his temporary partner into an open slot between a unisex restroom and an elevator bank.
“Neck compressions,” said Lucky. “Let’s not forget the concussion.”
“So what? I have a sore neck. And you don’t know I have a concussion.”
“You were out for a good five minutes. Call it a qualified guess.”
Somewhere underneath her skin Gonzo knew she needed an MRI of her neck—that her gray matter had received a serious shake when the top of her head had connected with Lucky’s sternum.
“How’s your chest?”
“Sore. But I can breathe.”
“You should get an x-ray.”
“Think I’m at the back of the line.”
Lucky couldn’t have been more understated. A cracked breastbone wasn’t anywhere near the same zip code as the ailments suffered by the casualties surrounding him. In any case, the treatment would be little more than rest and a two-week course of anti-inflammatories.
Still, his skull felt like it was going to split open without a strong dose of caffeine and Excedrin. As an excuse, he offered to find Gonzo a bag of ice for the lump on her scalp.
“Gonna find the cafeteria,” said Lucky. “Be back in a minute.”
“Hey,” said Gonzo once Lucky’s back was to her. She waited for him to turn around and face her. The question was nagging her. “All along. Were we chasing a terrorist?”
“Dunno. I was just lookin’ for the guy that popped my little brother.”
“But the terrorist thing. That would explain the FBI, right?”
“Got a few questions too,” said Lucky. “Lemme go get you that ice first.”
Questions demanding answers that would surely come about as quickly as sucking cement through a straw. Or so decided Lucky. That’s because the feds were in charge. And they shared information like a wolf shares his kill.
The hospital cafeteria shared the basement with the radiology and imaging department. Windowless and painted saffron and pale gray in an effort to lighten up its submarine-like atmosphere, it was strangely occupied by a growing contingent of news and media
personnel forbidden by the hospital from interviewing patients until they’d been cleared.
Lucky asked the cashier for a pair of plastic bags and placed one inside the other as he cut the line to the soda dispenser. But when Lucky depressed the lever to release an expected torrent of cubed ice, the motor whined and produced nothing but an annoying noise.
He wanted to complain.
And not just about the empty ice maker. His mind flooded with grievances. Free-associating from Filipino nurses to unrelenting gasoline prices to physicians who think because they graduated from med school they have a right to talk to you like you’re a moron.
“Is this broken or—”
“Comin’ with more buckets,” said one of the undocumented cafeteria Oompa Loompas. “Ice very soon.”
“How soon?”
“Coming soon.”
“Might’ve exhausted his command of the language,” said the man at Lucky’s three o’clock.
Lucky agreed with a nod, then grumbled out of the side of his mouth.
“Lowered expectations,” said Lucky. “The key to us all getting along.”
“Doncha know it, brother.”
Lucky glimpsed at the man, expecting some blue-collar video jockey who worked for one of the local news stations. Instead, he was nearly alarmed to see a haggard fellow with bloody gauze glued to half his face, an arm hanging limp from a denim jacket, and a bloody right knee showing through a pair of dirty dungarees.
“Shouldn’t you be in line to see a doctor?”
“Hell yeah,” said Beemer, clueless as to whom he was addressing. “But looks like my injuries are the survivable type so they stuck me in a wheelchair and left me this.”
Beemer held up his own bag for ice, only most of it had melted into a dirty soup.
“I gotcha,” said Lucky. “But aren’t you afraid you’re gonna lose your spot in the patient queue?”
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