by Alex Moss
Stelson watches him and stands alone in the darkness until Victor settles. He enjoyed the moment of rebellion with Anna and now it’s all over. Time to get serious. Time to step out of his depth and into the abyss.
TWENTY-FIVE
Benjamin Koit stands in the shadows on the middle floor of a multi-story parking garage in downtown. The car park is a quarter-full, vehicles dotted about, inserted and arranged throughout the level like Braille on a stone plaque at a historic national monument.
Koit wears an Adidas tracksuit and white cross-training shoes and his young face seems much older with the slivers of ambient light dissecting and accentuating the scars.
His cold dark eyes narrow when he hears the sound of a revving engine and gently squealing tires. A car ascends from street level via the oblong helter skelter driveway.
Moments later, the car is on this level of the parking garage and speeding in Benjamin’s direction. He steps back, so that he’s completely out of sight against the wall, side-on and head down, and as still as a chameleon in no man’s land.
The car–one of the modern unbranded golden brown sedans like the prosecutor’s–glides into a parking bay away from other vehicles. The engine switches off and the driver–a man in a grey suit–jumps out and softly closes the door.
It’s not the prosecutor or one of the team assessing the recent therapy but he has a similar look: stern, humorless, and anally professional. He immediately marches toward the exit stairwell, and once out the door and out of sight, Koit bolts from the shadows and heads directly for the brown sedan. The trunk of the car has been popped open for him and he flips up the lid.
He gazes down on the contents of the trunk.
A woman and a man are bound and gagged. The man is still, probably dead, his face all puffed up and bloody like a fruit salad that’s heavy on softened blackberries.
It’s Ellis, Stelson’s father; and sobbing into her blindfold next to him is Stelson’s mother, Mimi. She is trying to turn her head toward the light.
Koit pulls on some latex surgical gloves and checks Ellis for a pulse. He pushes down and moves his finger in circles. “Shit.” Ellis’s body is an emaciated bloody mess, right ear missing where Bobby had chewed and torn it off a long time ago. It seems that Ellis was just left to suffer and rot in the months that followed.
Koit cuts the ties on Mimi’s ankles and wrists and lifts the blindfold. She squints, her mascara bleeding down her cheeks and around her temples, a gag still constricting her speech. “Don’t make a sound,” Koit says. He flashes a grin, showing off his gold-filled incisors. He rips off the gag and she grimaces and breathes deeply, sucking air through her clenched jaw. He places his index finger over her lips and as soon as he’s sure that she’s too petrified to utter a vowel or consonant for fear of repercussion, he removes his finger, slowly. He deflects her gaze and pulls her out of the car’s trunk by her armpits.
He kicks the calves of her legs to make her walk. She stumbles at first and then finds her feet, and they walk arm in arm to the fire exit, his strong body acting as a splint to help keep her upright.
In the elevator up, there is an absence of piped background music. This troubles Koit to a degree, his expectations and wishes not met, so he makes his own by humming a tune while Mimi cowers at his feet in the corner of the grimy lift. She gazes up even though there this is no glass ceiling–just a weak diffused light that seems to get brighter as they get higher.
The doors slide open on the forty-seventh floor and Koit drags Mimi up the final flight of stairs to the roof of the downtown building. The door has already been busted open and outside the air is misty, a low early morning cloud over the city of Los Angeles.
He pulls her reluctantly to the edge and tells her to look down. She is not close enough to view anything more than her own blackened toes and chipped nails.
“Lean!”
She does. Her breath quickens and she is diminished to a puppet-like status. She looks down and squints, holding onto the rail that supports her just above the hip.
The mist breaks up to reveal a vast drop in altitude to the street below. Altered by a fearful perspective, the base of the building narrows to a stick thin dimension.
“What kind of a woman leaves her husband to die in his own home?” Koit asks, referring to the lifeless body left behind in the trunk of the golden brown sedan.
She has the gall to respond with, “He was alive when your guy took us. Musta been the journey that finally broke his pathetic ass.”
Koit grabs the back of her head and shoves her forward so that she is teetering further over the edge, negatively imbalanced if he let her go.
She squeals.
“Where is your son?”
“This is what it’s about?”
“What did you think it was?”
Mimi is racking her brains for a good answer. She has nothing.
“Where is he?” Koit demands.
“I don’t know. I really don’t.”
“Only he’s not really your son, is he?”
“I have two boys.”
“Oh?”
“Stelson and Bobby. They were a gift.”
“A gift you say?”
“I don’t know where either of them are. I promise you. Let me go. Please?”
Koit shoves her over the edge and then lets her slide by releasing his grip around her waist . She screams. The mist closed up for now, hiding the streets below, yet eerie in its illusion as a cushion between life and death.
He constricts his grip around her thighs and pulls her back so that her feet touch the ground.
“Tell me!”
She starts to talk but can’t finish her sentence; she has no idea. It’s written in her hopeless, foggy gaze and awe-shock expression.
Koit resigns himself and abates. He pulls her back onto her feet so that she is evenly balanced, out of harm’s way.
“So what am I going to do with you now?”
“Let me go home.”
“I have a better idea.” Koit pushes her against the rail, so that she leans backwards over the edge, his face close to hers. Mimi seems more defiant now, prepared for anything. “Good. I knew you had some balls.”
“You are a lot like Bobby, whoever you are. I won’t say anything about this. Just let me see him again?”
“What about your other son? You should treat them equally, no?”
Mimi doesn’t understand or agree with his point of view. Somewhere along the line, her reasoning and compassion were corrupted, possibly not long after her birth. “Let me?”
“My idea is better. You’ll like it.”
“What?” she asks, tentatively.
“I’m going to show you how to live forever.”
Mimi looks deeply confused.
“I bet you’re wondering why.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I want to give you a second chance. Reflect on mistakes and do better next time.”
“Anything. I’ll be nice to my son. I’ll show you.” She’s desperate, but also a non-believer - futility whimpering from her vocal cords.
“Are you ready?”
She nods.
“Here’s the rub, as they say. I’m going to throw you over the edge of the building.”
“No!”
“But don’t worry yourself, because there is a little secret I will show you and it will add that ten, twenty years onto your life.”
“I’ll die, you crazy bastard.” She struggles as Koit grips her by the wrists.
“How old are you? Maybe forty, forty-five?”
She nods.
“What if I told you that when you land you will not die, but merely wake-up somewhere else? Another island, as they say.”
“You are definitely crazy.” She tries to bite his right hand. He slaps her
face and grabs her wrist again.
“Think of age as a spectrum and you can move from one end of the spectrum to the other if you please. The direction, backwards or forwards, depends on how old you are when you bounce. Most people discover this little secret by accident, if you get what I am saying.”
Mimi seems stunned and confused.
“But you will need this.” He pulls out an item from his pocket: a pearly orb. He shoves it into the palm of her hand and closes her fingers around it.
The ghastly grimace on her face suggests that it’s starting to burn the surface of her skin as she grips it.
“Don’t let it go. This is what you need to hold onto to survive. At all costs, keep hold of the item,” Koit pleads with sincerity.
Pained, she nods.
Koit has nothing more to say or waste his breath on, so he uses all his strength and power to lift her over the edge in one swift move so that she has no time to react.
Her body plummets through the mist.
Benjamin Koit exits the fire escape at the base of the building. There is nothing out of the ordinary at street level and nothing to suggest that someone had just been thrown off the top, apart from a couple of vagrants who appear to be looking up at the sky and then at the sidewalk, and then at each other in a highly bemused fashion.
A commuter bus pulls up the stop nearby and Koit climbs aboard.
TWENTY-SIX
Stelson is drinking coffee and watching the view of his brother’s small industrial unit in Van Nuys via the monitor. Victor sits down next to him.
“Does Anna know about Bobby?” asks Victor.
Stelson shakes his head.
“I would hate for her to find out the hard way.”
Stelson brushes off the remark. He doesn’t want to drop this bombshell on Anna and ruin the bond between them.
“Did you know that your brother robs banks?”
“I kinda figured. He’s got a talent for terrorizing everyday people.”
“He has a good crew. He’s never been caught.”
“Well, there’s always a first time.”
“Yeah, there is.”
“We’re kinda reliant on him?”
“To a degree. He’s a diversion. The attention needs to be on him and not on us.”
“He sure likes attention.”
“He’s probably not going to come out of this alive. You comfortable with that?”
“Well, it’s either him or me. Always been that way. Never any room for both of us.”
Victor nods. “I’ll go get Anna.”
Anna stands in a small, dark, compact shower unit. The water is partially relieving her hangover. She doesn’t want to move, her arms crossed and clasping each shoulder, head bowed.
A knock on the door.
She ignores it and carries on staring at the troubled waters in the foot-well that get deeper, rising toward an overflow. The waters agitate and dark shadows appear in between the ripples and eddies and they gradually morph into the clown-faced boy’s head. It seems to rise up toward her with greater dimension. She starts to whimper and then cry out.
More vigorous knocks on the door.
“Anna. You okay in there?”
She’s not okay. Her face is straining with a fear-induced spasm. She starts kicking holes in the water to shatter the illusion of the clown-faced boy. This just seems to feed it further and her knees start to buckle as she drops, her butt now resting on the backs of each heel, toes bent. The water is now overflowing the foot well, covering the small floor area and under the door.
The door crashes open. Kicked in by Victor. He and Stelson are dark shadows standing there, eclipsed by the bright artificial lights of the warehouse unit.
The vision of the clown-faced boy has evaporated under this new ambiance and Anna diverts her attention to the two voyeurs. “Go the fuck away. Leave me alone,” she cries out.
Victor and Stelson hesitate.
“Go.”
They move away from the door.
Anna looks up toward her hooked towel and then the dial on the shower unit. She pushes herself up and turns the dial to shut off the water, probably wondering why she hadn’t figured it to be the obvious antidote to her terror.
Anna, now dressed in another silky black hooded track top and leggings, steps over to the large fold-out table where Stelson and Victor are side-by-side studying the map of LA. The armored van has gone, so there is a greater sense of space.
“I’m going to need that two-hundred and fiddy grand,” Anna says in a gangster moll purr. She’s back in the game and focused. Her eyes say: don’t even dare mention what just happened. No need to talk about it. She flips one of the chairs around and sits opposite them both, resting her arms on the backrest.
Stelson and Victor both look at each other.
“You still drunk?” Victor asks.
Stelson seems more concerned, still stunned by her breakdown in the shower.
“The only way we are going to collect fifty-five million bucks worth of product is to get someone to open the safe for us. They’re not going to lay it out in a display cabinet like normal. Not that quantity.”
“I know the mess we’re in, Anna. We would have to front two point five million on a fifty-five deal size. We ain’t got two point five million. We got a tenth of that which was earmarked for other resources.”
“I’m just sayin’.”
“We’re going to blow the safe,” Victor says.
“Why bother when someone can open it for us?”
“You got someone in mind?”
“Yeah, I do. Same guy who told me how much was inside.”
“Why the hell would he tell you?”
“He’s baiting me, of course. But he’s motivated to make more, perhaps do the dirty on his employer.”
“Interesting. What else does he want?”
Anna looks at Victor. “I really wouldn’t lower myself. Flirting is my limit.”
“Really?” Victor glances at Stelson and then Anna, suggestively. “You lowered yourself for this piece of work. Put the devil inside you. Am I right or am I wrong?”
Stelson looks at Anna who seems troubled by her father’s veiled concern. “I’m not sure that is any of your business, Victor,” he says, knowing that he’s pushing the needle a bit with this tact and tone.
Victor sits in silence for a moment, simmering. He scopes Stelson’s pale green, animalistic eyes.
Anna responds. “Put the devil inside me? What kinda shit is that? You sound like a bigot when you say things like that.”
Victor cools. He realizes that none of this will help their cause. “Forget I said it. It was wrong of me. He’s a good guy. And he’s worth a dime or three.” He pats Stelson on the back but this all seems phony and part of an act to appease Anna and keep the ship from blowing off course again. He looks at Anna again and smiles. “So how do we play this out, beautiful?”
“I go and meet the contact while Stelson watches out for me. The contact is going to provide proof of product.”
“Good. We don’t want to fall for a yarn.”
“We give him fifty percent upfront and the remainder on the day. He also wants an exit. Like us, he believes he can escape the city.”
“He’ll receive the balance of the funds on the day. Don’t promise him anything, but we’ll get him out of there.”
“Are you sure? Cause the guy will be fed to the wolves once they find out what he’s done for us.”
“It’s fine. As long as he’s not a ball and chain on the way out, it’s not a problem. We can take him.”
Anna nods. “Thank you.”
Victor grips her hand.
“Here’s a hundred grand for your contact.” Victor lays it on the table. “There’s a white Chrysler Town & Country on Brighton with some key
s and a cell phone under the passenger seat. Get this done.”
“Why only a hundred?”
“Because I’m in charge, that’s why. He gets the rest in 48 hours. Not long to wait but long enough to plan, I hope.” He places the ten by ten bundles of cash in a large brown grocery bag. “Are you okay with that?”
Anna nods. Stelson shrugs. She takes the bag and heads toward the exit with Stelson in tow. Victor checks the monitor from the booth. “It’s all clear. See you when I see you.”
“It won’t take that long. The guy is a pushover.”
“Shoulda made it fifty,” Victor replies.
“What about Hackett and Greenburg? Where are they?”
“Just collectin’ resources. Nothing too challenging.”
Anna smiles, slips on a pair of sunglasses that were stashed in a pocket of her track top, and opens the side door as they step outside into the sunlight.
Anna reaches under the passenger seat and retrieves a cell phone. She switches it on and waits for it to boot up while Stelson starts the engine and pulls out of the parking bay. He flips a three-point turn, aims the MPV toward the Verdugo Hills, and hits a T-junction. He takes a right and follows the signs for the interstate.
Anna is calling her contact. “Can I speak to Andrey?”
There is a pause. She pats and strokes the Ralphs bag on her lap, nervously, as though it were a docile pet.
“Andrey. It’s Anna. Anna F.” She waits for him to process the who and the why of the call before continuing. “Just gimme yes or no answers. We need to meet today. Is that okay?” There is some hesitation until she gets an answer. She looks tense. Everything rides on this guy cooperating.
Still no answer. Stelson points to the brown bag on her lap and mouths something obvious.
Anna nods. “Can you take our deposit immediately, Andrey?” Anna seems relieved. It was a yes. “Can you confirm the product? I need some proof for the stakeholders.” The answer to this question is more than a yes or a no. Anna frowns.