by Sylvie Fox
“Jean?” He lowered his voice to let her know he was serious. She may have been at his wedding. But this was a no-go zone.
Her eyes held his for a long moment. He tried to telegraph that she didn’t need to worry. Her eyes were unreadable. Rivera picked up her purse from where she’d rested it on the table. “See you in three.”
They’d worked the four-day, ten-hour compressed schedule this week. Unless there was a riot or natural disaster, they’d be back at work after a much needed three-day break.
A flash of red from the TV pulled him back to thoughts of Jessie. It was a commercial for the nightly news. A camera panned up his wife’s stocking-clad leg. The voice over urged viewers to tune in again. Noticias my ass. There was nothing newsworthy—
“Shit!” Rivera dropped her purse and braced her arms against the door frame.
He heard the rattle of metal and glass before he felt the floor move under his feet. One part of his brain registered that Rivera was safe. For the moment. His training took over. He pulled her under the table, waiting out the shaking.
Ten seconds. Cam ticked off each one in his mind. As quickly as it had begun, it ended. Everything stopped moving as if nothing had happened. The way his heart had accelerated when seeing Jessie minutes ago had nothing on the pounding in his chest, ears, and throat. Blood had expanded too much for his vessels, they were so tight with pressure.
“Let’s go!” He moved to his designated command post.
Sergeant Sikes barked out orders.
“Rivera, Becker. You have Fountain, Highland, Beverly, Crescent Heights.”
Cam committed those perimeter blocks to memory. The minute the Sergeant was done, he booked it to the supply room, grabbed the first pool keys he could find, and ushered Rivera out the door.
Everything shook. Yesenia’s brand new sneakers slid around like she was on ice. She could barely keep her footing in the tiny elevator. The building rolled back and forth like a marble on a boat, and she went with it. Like Mexico City, the building was going to come apart. Was that the sound of cracking, stucco hitting pavement? Were windows shattering all around her? Minimal sound pierced the sealed box, got past her thundering heart and harsh breath.
Vowing to keep her head, Yesenia spread her legs hip distance apart, brought her head to her knees, wrapped her arms around her legs, and tried to stop the compulsive swallowing of the saliva pooling in her mouth. Uttanasana, the forward fold was to calm the nausea, ease the panic that had bubbled up in her throat for the second time tonight.
Another roll.
A jerk.
Silence.
The carpeted floor welcomed her like a mother’s arms. To hell with coping mechanisms. This was life or death. And death was looking more likely with each passing moment.
She was going to die.
In an earthquake.
Like her father.
God was vengeful.
When there was no further movement for seconds, or minutes, or years, she pawed through her bag for her phone. Pressing the home button cast dim light in the elevator. Weren’t there emergency lights in these things? How was she in the only elevator in the world where the emergency mechanism failed? She had been right to never trust these contraptions. Especially in Los Angeles, the least disaster-prepared city in the world. After New Orleans.
If she could tell herself that small joke, maybe she wasn’t going to die. Not yet.
Taking another deep breath of synthetic carpet, she pushed herself up to sitting and gripped her phone hard. The cool glass of her phone against her palm eased the panic a tiny bit more.
She pressed the small circle lighting up the digital display that had always signified connection with her family, friends, work. A tiny circle spun near the top of the phone, mesmerizing her with its perfection. Lazily, dizzily, the phone sought connection with a cell tower.
It stopped.
No service.
Her mother and sister would be in a panic if she didn’t reach them soon. What if they were hurt, their little house crumbled down around them? She couldn’t get to them, help them.
The memory of her father’s death busted out of the carefully placed closet she’d locked it into. She chanced a look at the ceiling. No pillar bisected it in the way it had separated her from her father in Mexico.
Fear stole her breath. No way was she going to die like her father. With no connection showing on the phone, she dialed anyway. That worked sometimes when she was way out in the field. Some kind of magic would make the phone connect to a tower. If it could work in Sun Valley, a Hollywood elevator shouldn’t be a problem.
She punched in the number.
The phone dialed.
Nothing.
Damn.
She couldn’t help her family if she couldn’t help herself. One deep breath later, she clawed her way up the wood and brass. She pressed her phone on again. A flashlight didn’t require a signal. Words had been long rubbed off the emergency button.
That single red plastic protrusion had been her one line of defense against panic. Her very rational therapist had told her that if she were ever overcome, press the button and someone would come to Yesenia’s rescue.
She pressed.
Dial tone.
Dialing.
Ringing.
No answer.
Like so much else in L.A., the buttons were for show. Her therapists had said her fear was irrational. But she’d known. She knew.
Defeat pulled her back down to the carpeted floor. She shifted from one side to another, trying to keep her stockings from sticking to her thighs. With the movement, a prickle started on her scalp. A bead of water dripped from her nose. She wasn’t crying…yet.
The air conditioning must have been off. It would be one of the first non essential systems to go. Suddenly, she couldn’t take it a moment longer. The side zip fitted gabardine top was the first to go. Then the skirt. Not giving a crap about runs, she skimmed the stockings from her legs.
The laugh that bubbled from her throat could have been hysteria. She chose to believe it was humor. If she was ever rescued, she’d be in a see-through camisole, bra, and thong. Great. Another laugh escaped her lips. She could only hope the paramedic wasn’t a fan with a cell phone. The last thing she needed was to see her sweaty, panicked, half-naked self on TMZ. Not that she was that big of a celebrity. But after that other television news reporter started dating the mayor, Spanish language anchors had bigger profiles.
If she was thinking about tabloids and not her imminent death, maybe things were looking up. The elevator jerked, and her phone dropped to the floor, plunging her into darkness.
Rivera glanced his way, communicating without words. He nodded in agreement. L.A. was never like this, especially on a Friday night. The streets were eerily quiet.
“Staying put for the moment,” he said.
“We can only hope.” Rivera glanced at the laptop, the map of their sector zoomed in on the screen.
They started on Beverly. There were quite a few valets standing quietly. The busy upscale Friday night crowd had either left before the quake, or were waiting out aftershocks.
He pulled over where a tight knot of citizens stood. “Can you check this out?”
Rivera gave him a strange look. Protocol dictated they step out of the vehicle together.
He held up his phone. “Wanna check on Jessie.”
While Rivera, hands on hips, her jacket spread so that her shoulder holster was visible, interrogated the crowd, he dialed his wife.
One ring.
Two.
Voicemail.
He didn’t leave a message. What could he say to a women deathly afraid of seismic activity? For a moment, he was tempted to call Reina and Dolores, his mother- and sister-in-law, but their neighborhood would be covered by another pair of LAPD officers.
He joined Rivera.
A short man in a blue vest approached him cautiously.
“Can I help you?”
T
he man shrank back for a minute then continued his approach.
“Piece of brick fell on a customer’s car.” The man’s accent was thick. New arrival.
“Anyone hurt?”
“No. But the rich man’s car…”
Cameron looked over to where the man’s gaze had drifted. There squatted a Tesla, half a cinderblock lodged in its windshield. The fence from the adjoining property had buckled. Closely planted ficus trees had caught most of the pieces. But this one, not reinforced by rebar, had shattered the glass.
“Who do you work for?”
The man’s eyes shifted in his dark, weathered skin. “I won’t arrest you if you don’t have papers,” he assured him.
“Temp service.” In halting English, the valet explained the usual morass of hiring undocumented workers. Felipe, as his name tag read, had signed up with a service, who had hired him out to the valet service, which contracted with the restaurant. It was a common arrangement that kept a lot of hands clean of the sordid world of cheap labor.
Cam gave the standard answer. “It’s a civil matter.” No doubt the car’s owner would file a claim with the valet company who would extract money from the worker. Jessie and her sister Dolores had told him these tales hundreds of times. But as he’d been then, he was powerless to fix what was a federal issue.
Back in the car, he drove through increasingly crowded streets and unusually empty restaurants. Looked like bar patrons had called it an early night and hightailed it home, no doubt to be with loved ones.
Lights blazed at a large liquor store. He pulled into the parking lot. Glass and earthquakes didn’t mix.
He joined Rivera inside the front door as the small late night staff worked on cleanup efforts. He left her to do a quick tally of the damage and loss.
They hadn’t encountered any injuries. Only property damage. So the fact that his heart beat a little fast and his palms were sweating shouldn’t have bothered him. The fact that tonight of all nights he couldn’t pin down Jessie’s whereabouts really shouldn’t bother him. But it did.
Cell towers appeared to be overloaded with calls. Considering and dismissing the idea of using an emergency band, he pulled out his cell again. He was on thin ice with the department as it was. Cam didn’t want to give them a reason to slap him on the wrist and make another note in his file. It took him a minute to get a signal.
Still nothing from Jessie except voicemail. He fiddled through the contacts on his phone, found and dialed her land line number. She only lived a few minutes from work. He’d seen her on TV at eleven. She could have gotten home before the earthquake.
Rivera joined him. “Maybe ten, twenty thousand in lost wine and liquor,” she reported.
“Let’s do residential,” he said. Cam drove straight to Ogden, grateful Jessie’s house was in their sector and he didn’t have to make a choice between his wife and following the rules.
“Who lives here?” Rivera asked when they pulled outside the fourplex.
“Jessie isn’t answering my calls.”
Rivera made herself scarce, talking to the few people outside. He watched her knock on a couple of doors. Probably shut-ins identified by the neighbors.
He pounded on the front door the units shared. Watching the second hand on his watch pulse in time with his heart, he resisted banging on the door again. A man about five foot ten with salt and pepper hair finally answered. Wrapped in a green terry robe, he looked at Cameron warily.
“Can I help you…Officer?”
Lots of people were wary of the LAPD, blacks, gays, the undocumented. There were reasons for that he wasn’t proud of as a fellow officer. But he didn’t have time to figure out this man’s issues or put him at ease.
“You seen Yesenia Morales tonight?”
“The girl who lives in number four?”
“That’s her.”
“She works nights,” the man said. Cam could see that the man thought he’d revealed too much, but didn’t have anywhere to backtrack.
“I’m her husband. Just came to check on her.”
The man looked even more wary. Rather than push past him and get to Jessie’s, he gave more information than he wanted. “We’re separated. My partner and I—” He gestured to Rivera who was talking to a few people across the street. “—are doing our sector check.”
“I didn’t hear her come in,” the man said. “But I’ve been on the phone checking on my parents. They’re elderly in North Hills.”
“You reach them?”
“Can’t get through,” he said, pulling his phone from his bathrobe pocket.
“She lost her father in an earthquake. Can’t reach her. I’m worried that this may have triggered…something.”
The man’s eyes went from wary to waver. “Gary,” the guy volunteered his first name.
Cameron pulled out his badge. “Can you knock on her door? I’ll call Devonshire and see if I can get a report on your parents.”
“I have a key. Let me get it and check.” He took down Gary’s parents’ names and address. Gary shut the door, but Cam didn’t mind. He went to the car and got the other division on the horn.
“She’s not in there,” Gary said, coming out the door, onto the slate steps.
“Your parents are fine,” Cam said. “Some stuff from the China cabinet broke, but they have water, gas, and electricity if not phone service.”
“Thanks,” Gary said. “Hope Yesenia’s okay.”
“Me too,” Cameron said.
Cameron put his phone away for the rest of the drive through the sector.
“We’ll drop off the car and head home, Rivera. The next shift’s got this covered.”
“Thank goodness,” Rivera said through her yawn. “I’ve got three days with my little hellions. Gonna need all the energy I can muster.”
On their way back to the station, Rivera looked at him. “What are you going to do once you find her?”
Cam didn’t have to ask who they were talking about. “Make sure she’s okay.”
“That’s it?” Rivera’s voice was full of doubt.
“That’s it. Her father died in an earthquake. I’m not sure all that therapy she had prepared her for this.”
“You’re not thinking of getting back together, right?”
“No,” he said. But he wasn’t sure.
“You’re just getting back on your feet.”
“I know.”
“We’re putting the finishing touches on the sting. Even with the quake, it’ll probably go forward. I think we have all the preliminary evidence we need to do a stake out and make busts.”
The red light on the corner of Melrose and La Brea seared his retinas. He didn’t need Rivera to remind him of the mess he’d made of his career. How he’d fucked it all up by blabbing department business to Jessie. She’d done what any reporter would do, taken the story and run with it.
Of course, once the cockfighting ring had been exposed on KESP, their evidence had disappeared, and their suspects had blown in the wind. Eight months of late nights and undercover work had come to nothing and so had the possibility of promotion.
“Just because we aren’t together doesn’t mean I stopped loving her, okay?”
“Got it.”
“Natural disasters have a way of bringing up what’s important.”
“So…?”
Cameron pulled into the lot and tossed the keys to Rivera. “So I’ll see you Tuesday night.”
The panting she heard was her own breath. How long would the air last? How much air did a human need to survive? Heaviness weighed on her chest like a boulder. Standing would take too much energy, use too much oxygen. Bending, she laid her head against her knees and sipped at the air.
Regret filled the space fear left behind. She should have worked harder to make her family legal. They had come to America to get the kind of medical help she’d needed. Doctors in L.A. had changed her from an agoraphobic girl into a functioning woman. Her mother was right. Once she’d been granted p
ermanent residency, there had been little pressure to help her mother and sister. Her career had gone sideways too.
In the beginning, Yesenia had thought she’d be a Mexican Christiane Amanpour. The cockfighting ring bust had put her on the map, or so she’d thought. Instead she’d traded her marriage for gotcha journalism. Her greatest aspiration had ratcheted down to Debra Norville.
Her breath calmed. Sitting up again, she felt around until the cool metal and glass of her phone was back in her palm. She pressed the button again and again. One by one, minutes ticked by. Two long hours later, the elevator jerked again. Fluorescent lights flickered on. She shielded her eyes against the glare, looking for an escape.
She was getting out.
Pulling on her skirt as best she could, Yesenia waiting for the box to move. Moving on cables and pulleys didn’t scare her any longer. Staying still without air—did. Another jerk. The elevator went up, not down.
It stopped.
Lights out.
It took longer to stop the panting this time. She pressed the phone’s home button. The same circle that had been spinning for hours stopped. 4G winked into place.
A signal.
She dialed on autopilot.
One ring.
Connection.
“Cameron Becker.”
Sagging in relief, she said what she’d never been able to before. “I need you.”
It was near two in the morning when Cam finally got into his Dodge Charger on the station parking lot. He’d been texting with his mom and Ryan off and on while they’d driven their quadrants. His family by blood was safe.
Before he pulled into traffic, he checked his phone one last time. He was surprised to have it ring in his hand. Adrenaline flooded his veins again. Yesenia. His Jessie. His hands shook.
Grabbing the wrist of his phone hand to steady it, he placed the rectangular lifeline to his ear.
He spoke his name into the phone, not sure what in the hell was going to come next. Alive and uninjured was all he wanted.
“I need you,” was the last thing he’d expected to hear.