by Alex Moss
“We don’t know. Nobody really knows. We coulda met them but they didn’t reveal themselves. It’s a closely guarded secret.”
Stelson half-smiles.
Victor looks at him with suspicion.
The van reverses south down Figueroa for about twenty meters and then left into a multi-story parking lot so that they’re out of sight. Tilman slides it into a tight space between two columns and shuts the engine off.
“Now listen up,” Victor is up close and looking deep into Stelson’s molten eyes, “in five minutes time, you are going to walk past the LAPD and into the City National Bank, unarmed, and you will talk your brother into walking right out of there with the money and whatever help he needs to carry it.”
“You’re crazy. Why would he not do that already? He’s probably got hostages.”
“Too unpredictable. He knows a sniper will just take him and his crew out.”
“A sniper will do the same with me. Probably take me down too once they find out who I am.”
“Why do you think I’m dressed like this? Bobby is waiting for us to get him out of there. He knows I’ve got to pull some strings to do it, but for him, it’s worth the risk. When push comes to shove, can he really walk out of there when it’s time? I just don’t know how much he trusts me and he sure as hell doesn’t look like the trusting type, this clown-faced fool brother of yours.”
“He ain’t mine.”
“He’s your flesh and blood. And that’s why you can make sure it happens. You can bait him. Appeal to his sibling need for rivalry. Be allies for a brief moment in time before all hell breaks loose and you rip each other apart.”
“That some kinda incentive?”
“We’ll make sure you come out of it in good shape.”
“And what about the money?”
“I’ll be there to collect as a fine upstanding member of the Los Angeles Police Department. And after that, we all disappear. Got it?”
Stelson nods and fidgets as though he’d just been granted the final three wishes that could determine the rest of his life.
Kenny holds up the fingers on his right hand and counts down. “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco. Outta time. Are you game?”
Stelson nods. “Yeah, I’m game, whatever that means.”
Head down, shades on, Cinco steps through the parking lot for a short cut onto Sixth Street, his hands in the pockets of his colorful long-sleeved bike courier jersey. Moving quickly, he ducks under the police tape that’s stretched loosely across the street, bound at each end to the wing mirrors of black and white police cars. Other members of the public have cleared the area and he cuts a lone figure wandering off course into this newly created no man’s land.
About thirty meters up ahead, he can see some of the damage caused by the bomb blast. The blown out glass of the main corporate office building belonging to the City National Bank on the corner of Flower Street is shattered over the street, parked cars, and sidewalk.
Paramedics tend to the bloody victims that must have been caught in the rain of shards on their way into work.
One bagel cart has been cut in half, no sign of its human vendor, and new meaning is given to the term ‘tree surgery’ when scanning the once pristine maple trees that were planted to pretty up the building’s unsightly down ramp.
All of this is seen from the corner of Stelson’s eye as he tries to maintain a forward view. He’s focused on taking a left onto Flower and the main public entrance to the bank retail floor with its line of tellers. But then he’s swarmed upon by tightly coiled cops.
“Where do ya think you’re going, buddy?”
Stelson keeps moving.
“Stop. Hands in the air.” There is a gun pointing at him now. He can sense it.
This time he stops in his tracks but stares at the cut glass near his feet. He can see part of his reflection. Just his mouth and nose, and from here, they look crooked like his brother’s.
“I said put your bony little hands in the air.”
Stelson obeys and does it slowly.
“Look at me.”
Stelson looks up. He looks stony-faced. The sunglasses add to the nonchalant effect.
The cop facing him doesn’t know what to say now. Another cop approaches and briskly pads him down and steps back. “He’s clear.”
“Are you blind?” The cop facing him motions a circle around his own eyes as he says this to Stelson with some degree of concern and sympathy.
“I think we’re all a little blind here and there, Officer whatever-your-name-is.”
“Don’t be a smartass, kid. Who are you and why are you here? You’d have to be blind not to see what’s going on around you. Either blind or you got something else going on that we need to know about.”
“I’m here to help out.”
“How’s that?”
“My brother is in the City National Bank.”
“I’m sorry to hear that but we are doing our best to contain the situation and we hope to get a status of all those affected by this event in due course. We think there are hostages, but we don’t know for sure. We’re assessing the scene. We also know there are casualties, inside and out. In the meantime, you need to clear the area. There is a police helpline you can call for updates.”
They are already pushing him back toward the cordon.
“No, you don’t understand. My brother is robbing that fucking bank. He set the bomb. He made the bomb.”
Five minutes later, the police captain is in Stelson’s face–pumped and nearly popping out of his shirt as he flexes out the anxious muscles in his chest and neck.
“You know your bro was a fuckin’ CI?”
Stelson shakes his head.
“The fact that his handler, Detective Suck-Ass Lesko, has also gone AWOL means we’re good ‘n willing to take your claims seriously. If you weren’t so goddamn ballsy about this, we’d read you your rights for being complicit.”
Stelson just shrugs. He wants to get on with this. He seems to be surrounded by a gaggle of uniformed LAPD cops and SWAT team Sergeants. The captain turns to one of the SWAT leaders. “Put a vest on him and point him at the target.”
The SWAT Sergeant gestures for Stelson to follow. Stelson moves off.
“What makes you think he won’t just waste your ass or use you as collateral?” The sergeant asks with cynicism.
“He might. He hates my guts but I’m the only one who can talk him out of this crazy shit.”
“So you wanna be a hero?” He leads Stelson to a van, places a ballistics vest over his head, and secures the Velcro straps.
“I got blood on my hands.” Stelson looks pensive and thoughtful. “Need to wipe ‘em clean.”
The sergeant is intrigued. The proverbial bloody hands are enough of a trigger to get all fired up over this young man. He reaches and pulls off Stelson’s sunglasses. “Whoa!”
He looks Stelson in the eyes, frowns, and backs off a little and tries to subdue a cold shiver running down the length of his spine. “Don’t think me and my boys won’t take you down if you are seen to be aiding and abetting. Catch my drift?”
Stelson starts up Flower Street and as soon as he does, a stony silence descends on the close vicinity. He briefly walks backwards to get a view of the captain and the cops on the ground eyeing his departure with all the comparable hope of sending a message in a bottle across stormy seas.
He glances at the rooftops and terraces–SWAT units aiming their assault rifles toward the City National, scoping the building from top to bottom. At ground level, there is a revolving door that’s been jolted from its axis, warped metal sitting lop-sided. The next level up is devoted to lofty cathedral height spaces where tall glass windows used to be. The window spaces are a complete story above the ground floor, which makes it impossible to get a clear view of the main floor layout and tellers.
As Stelson steps past the two empty black Lexuses belonging to Bobby’s crew, and across the piazza space in front of the bank, he notices the cracks in the tiles–some so wide a quick skip and a jump is required to avoid turning an ankle.
The contemporary orange sculpture at the center of the fountain has collapsed in on itself, causing the still flowing water to cascade over the edges–a shallow lake diffusing over the piazza and consuming the overturned tables and chairs that have been shaken out into random patterns of dispersion.
He weaves between the tables, crouching low, eyeing the entrance to the City National, but at the same time watching his footing closely–shattered glass everywhere–blended with the diffusing water from the fountain, a half-frozen lake thawing at the end of winter.
There is movement inside the bank. A lone figure darts from the blown out window next to the door into the recesses of the bank. Stelson sprints up to the revolving door and climbs, cat-like, through its twisted frame.
He stays low and edges a quick initial glance at the floor. Bodies laid out, dust and debris that’s probably fallen from above. Another lingering look and he can see the long row of tellers to the right, a large expansive floor space between him and them.
It all seems far too quiet.
Bobby’s crew could be holding court and making their presence felt. Not letting him access the stronghold they have taken from themselves. This is the type of bank where there’s nowhere to hide. Open plan design–tellers, desks, and the entrance to the vault in plain view. Its openness makes it a hard score to take down, so why would you even try? Stelson stands up and steps out onto the floor. He’s going to test the scenario in a foolhardy way that’ll reveal the truth.
“Bobby?” His voice echoes. “It’s me. Your brother, Stelson. We need to talk.” He waits for a response.
Eerily silent.
A flash of movement from behind the teller. BANG!
A thud to Stelson’s chest and he gets knocked backwards and lands hard on his back.
He’s gasping for air, eyes rolling around in his sockets. The adrenaline in his veins boosts him into a hyper-alert state where he tries to ignore the pain by absorbing more of his surroundings.
Some more clarity: not all the bodies on the ground close to him are still. Some are still alive, barely, but alive nevertheless. Fading from life, painfully and slowly. One woman on her back is coughing blood, trails of it run down the side of her cheeks. She has a glass shard protruding from her gut and a granite block crushing her right leg. She could be saved. He can see it in her eyes. She’s a fighter.
Stelson rolls toward her, recovering his breath, grimacing with the pain to the chest, the slug lodged deeply into the center of his ballistics vest, a blackened hole to highlight the intent of its velocity.
His face is close to hers now. He can see the life in her eyes that’s slowly fading and she can see him. She coughs some more blood and then pushes out a broken whisper that takes all the energy she can summon from her depleted reserves.
“It’s just one man.”
“He have a warped, crooked face? All messed up?”
“No. He was just a man in the line.”
“Stay alive. I’ll help you.”
She actually smiles, but only for the briefest of moments.
But in that moment, Stelson sees Anna.
The creases and kinks of her lips and the stray stands of hair caught up in them. “Please, Anna. Stay alive.” And it’s then that he realizes how foolish he was to leave the Morning Star Emporium without her.
She is there and he must get back to her.
The light in the woman’s eyes fades to nothing and she is dead, but at the same time, Stelson lights the hope in his soul for Anna.
There is a chance.
THIRTY-TWO
As she lays next to one of the dead Saints inside the darkened chamber of the Morning Star Jewelry Emporium, Anna Fayne pulls out a scrunched up bright red shoulder bag from her messenger bag and flattens it with the zipper enclosure facing her.
She has already extracted six pairs of oversized pearls from the eye-sockets of the dead. They’re too much of a hand-full so she deposits them in the bag, each one encrusted with mucus and membrane, much like their natural ocean born derivatives.
She knows her time is nearly up, but she has another twenty-nine pairs to retrieve. She crawls over to another body, flips it over, and locates the pale face branded with a bloody cross.
She spits on the eyes, her saliva moistening the glue that holds the eyelids together, adding some elasticity.
With her nails, she scrapes away at the gunk and pries the eyelids apart to reveal the opaque orb.
Anna then digs it out with her fingers, and all her strength is required to separate the item from the socket. But once she has it in her hands, she is quick to release it into the red shoulder bag. And it’s obvious why–there are burns on her finger-tips as though she had scolded herself on a smoking hot skillet.
By the time all seventy items are deposited in the bag, Anna’s fingers and hands are deeply blistered. Some are blackened. She is shaking with pain and her breathing has quickened to short sharp intakes of breath. She zips up the bag with her teeth, curls her right arm through the handle grips, and crawls on her elbows and the insides of her knees to the narrow gap in the metal door of the box chamber.
Bodies are strewn about her relatively thin and fragile frame, and she is forced to crawl over them in some kind of sick, pseudo-sexual way. Her mental togetherness is barely together at all, and if she tried to stand in here, with the stench as it is, she would surely lose consciousness and fall.
She feels feral.
Blood and dirt are smeared over her face in the places where she’s tried to wipe away the irritating yet necessary trickle lines of salt-grimed sweat, but once she’s wriggled her way out of the chamber and into the corridor, her outlook improves momentarily.
The lighting is brighter and the odor softer.
Anna pulls herself up onto her feet. For some reason, her disoriented state leads her back down the zig-zag corridors to the location of the safe and where she last saw Victor and Kenny, but the six minutes were up five minutes ago. Victor and Kenny have exited and seemingly left her to fend for herself.
She stops at the manhole cover at the end of the zig of the zag. It seems to be turning slowly against its airtight seals that are flush with the floor. The geometric keyholes also turn in an opposite direction. Something or someone is about to rise up from underneath. She doesn’t hang around to find out what or who, and turns back to the way she came in.
Anna passes through the metallic containment room, its opaque white glass ceiling still flickering intermittently. She steps across the track and onto the moveable floor panel. She pauses and considers it. At the same time, wisps of white smoke begin to fill the room.
She kneels down and levers the floor panel up with her blackened fingers. She grimaces and starts to cough and a scrawny man’s arm reaches through the gap as though it were a desperate light-starved shrub.
Anna shifts back and then climbs up and stamps on the man’s hand.
A cry of pain and the arm immediately withdraws at speed. The man has clearly toppled from whatever he was standing on. Anna kicks the panel aside to get a clear view down the hatch.
A horrifically skinny white man is laying on his back at the foot of an aluminum ladder, naked, his left leg bent across his right for the sake of modesty, his arms spanned out to their full width. His chest heaves and he blinks rapidly.
All around him are the bodies of other painfully thin naked men and women. He’s the only one still alive, most of the others too frail to stand up to the gas attack from the canister Kenny lobbed down earlier.
Nearby, there are overturned tables, shelving units, and lab paraphernalia smashed and scattered over a on
ce pristine, clinically sterile floor.
Anna looks at the man with pity. “What did you mean, sir, when you said, have I come here for revenge?”
The man is too delirious to talk, but he eyes Anna as though she were the devil incarnate intent on a reaping.
“Are you scared of me?” She coughs as the smoke becomes thicker. She watches him blink, which makes her blink, and then she remembers her false retinas. “These aren’t real. They were only meant to scare you. I’m not the demon you think I am.”
She wants the man to compose himself. Start breathing at a normal rate. Anna bows her head and thumbs the false lenses from her eyes. “Look!”
But the man’s head has flopped to the side, not even a thimble of warm breath remaining in the capillaries of his lungs.
Anna covers her mouth and her eyes widen with shock. She’s coughing in fits now and stumbles backwards, leaving the containment room into the corridor. She double checks the contents of her messenger bag, even though she knows full well that she dropped her respirator somewhere.
She exhales and suspends her diaphragm from drawing further breaths, but the irritation of the gas causes her throat and chest to spasm. She pulls in more gas via her nostrils.
The door to the shop floor of the emporium is propped open by another body and Anna tramples over it and into the chaos of the siege.
Scattered, crawling, sluggish bodies surround the display cases; broken glass and puddles of vomit litter the emporium floor space.
Her vision of it all seems to be fading in and out as the little oxygen left in her lungs is gradually overcome by the gas. She’s doing better than most. At least she’s on her feet, stumbling forward.
She can see Stelson through the fog but it’s evident she can’t get to him. His green eyes glisten but he’s looking right through her and the space is becoming hazy, a watery blue beginning to obscure everything else that would help identify her vulnerable location.
She’s aware of the fact that she’s passing from this place to another, losing consciousness. So she pulls the red shoulder down to her chest and hugs it as she falls, her chest convulsing, the blue enveloping her…