by Alex Moss
The first of the three henchmen pushes the manhole all the way open and, in turn, they crawl into a corridor of the Morning Star Jewelry Emporium. They sit in line with their backs to the wall and each jack a round into the chamber of their M4 Carbine assault rifles. Bobby follows suit. They check their mag belts. Each have six, thirty rounds per mag.
Stelson seems naively impressed by the potential firepower.
Bobby shoves a rubber mask into his lap. Stelson puts it on and Bobby checks him out. The contrast is surreal. The mask is a white blank mannequin’s face, symmetrical left to right, the lips straight and thin and expressionless. It’s only Stelson’s molten green eyes that match up with Bobby’s.
Bobby’s eyes drop, somewhat saddened, as though the face he is now looking at is the one he would rather have.
The pale innocence, blank, cold, and empty.
Saint-like.
THIRTY-FOUR
Stelson is searching between Bobby’s broken glances. Bobby notices and feels exposed, weakened, and breaks it off. Just as he does, a man in a balaclava turns the corner into their stretch of corridor holding a Glock 19 handgun. He can’t get a shot off. A single trigger pump from the first henchman puts the guy down with a marker to the head.
Each of them places their mannequin masks over their faces–four of them in SWAT uniforms and Stelson in Cinco courier garb. He’s the only one that appears differentiated.
Bobby signals them forward.
They rush the corridor.
Bobby retrieves the Glock and passes it back to Stelson and continues, turning left into the next corridor.
Stelson is uneasy with the Glock. There’s not enough time to get a feel for it. To work out how to pump a couple of rounds into his brother’s back, because that’s what he’d like to do right now. It’s the best opportunity he’s ever had. He checks the safety is on and keeps it pointed to the floor, for now. His attention and thought turns to Anna. Where is she? He’s expecting to see her body lying somewhere in one of these dark corridors. A sight he’s never wanted to witness.
All the steps that Anna took are being retraced here. They pass through the containment room where the hatch to the floor below has been replaced, the light in here still flickering from the opaque surface above.
They then push out onto the shop floor of the emporium in one continuous flow of movement that maintains their surprise assault on the Client crew that got stood up at Olympic and Bixel. There are seven clear targets working the floor, checking bodies, display cases, and moving toward doorways that lead to the backrooms and tunnels. A couple of them are armed with AR-15 assault rifles.
One, aiming a Sig-Sauer pistol, is balling right at them and he gets a double-tap to the chest from one of the mannequin-faced crew members, hurling the target backwards onto the floor. He’s alive. Bullet slugs punch halfway through a Kevlar vest, and he’s rolling around on the floor in agony but completely silent as though someone had pressed his mute button.
The other six clients drop behind the display cases that fan out across the expansive emporium floor space. There’s distance between them, Bobby’s crew on one edge, the client six on the other.
It’s deathly quiet for a moment. Stelson is crouching low behind a steel column and nervously flicks off the Glock’s safety. Bobby and his three henchmen are propped up against the nearest display cases covering the floor, waiting for a head to pop up.
There are bodies everywhere. The store customers that were held hostage earlier are now dead. Where visible, they’ve been shot in the head at close range.
What hope can there be for Anna? Stelson is toying with the Glock, even thinking about using it on himself. The forlorn mannequin appearance he now has matches his mood.
“Stay where you are!”
It’s Victor’s voice from the other side of the emporium near the entrance. “You are surrounded.” The clack-clack sound of three shotguns being primed–Victor uno, Kenny tres, Tilman cuatro.
Could they be here to help Anna? Stelson’s hope returns. He’s looking at some of the bodies now, searching for signs of life.
One of the mannequin faces hurls an empty gun casing at Stelson to get his attention. It catches him on the chin. Stelson turns his head and observes that he’s being signaled to move out and work his way across the floor. He hesitates. The mannequin face points the M4 rifle at him and signals again–whipping two fingers and a thumb toward the entrance.
Stelson tucks the Glock under his waistband behind his back and crawls off. He circumvents the reeling target on the floor who’s now transitioning his focus from recovery to revenge, the eyes in his balaclava hat searching for his Sig-Sauer. He makes the spot and starts reaching for it.
Stelson has his eyes keenly focused on a body splayed on its front. It’s a woman. Her clothing so badly soiled with blood and dirt, it’s hard to tell whether she’s part of their crew. He knows it’s Anna but he’s unsure whether he wants it to be. Her stillness is foreboding. He moves faster now. He can hear Victor calling the shots: “Nobody move. We get out of here clean.”
Stelson is by her left side. Her face is buried in the elbow of her right arm, her left arm trapped under her pelvis, left hand concealed below her groin. He assesses her right hand that is blistered and bloody and brushes the hair away from the side of her grubby face. His brooding bright eyes skim the length of her slim body–and her back does not rise and fall and that troubles him, but he refuses to believe that she is gone. He touches the side of the neck and keeps moving around in circles to find a pulse.
“Do you have the items?” Victor shouts.
Stelson knows full well that’s aimed at him. These bastards aren’t here for Anna. They just want what she covets. He keeps searching for a pulse, pressing harder against her neck, his stubbornness not allowing him to consider her possible death.
The guy worming his way along the floor is about two feet away from retrieving his Sig. He’s moving so slow that the other Mannequin crew members don’t notice, they’re so intently trained on the far side of the emporium where the greater threat is apparent–the client six.
Victor, Kenny, and Tilman are somewhere on either side of the entrance. Nobody has a clear shot on anyone else, but the guy on the floor is about to retrieve the gun. When he does, Stelson will be exposed.
In the dream world of The Deep.
Anna relaxes and lets her body and limbs flail and it’s not long before a dark shadow passes over the deep end of the pool and then something enters the water and swims toward her as she hits the bottom, face down now, feigning and also defying death. Her eyes remain closed until someone in the water starts turning her over to face the surface and then once she’s looking toward the light she is shaken until her eyes open wide. And the surface becomes the destination.
She drifts away from The Deep…
Stelson finds a weak pulse near Anna’s collarbone. His stomach floods with the feeling of a multitude of butterflies. He turns her over so that he can see her face, but in doing so, he reveals the red shoulder bag that’s been concealed beneath her–it’s still in her left hand grip. Stelson hears a click and looks back across the floor.
The guy on the floor in a balaclava has the Sig aimed at Stelson and he’s clicking away as he squeezes the trigger. It’s not firing. The Sig’s clip was loose and it drops out.
Stelson knows he has to move. He shouts out, “Cover me.” He rips off his mannequin mask and gets up and starts dragging Anna backwards across the floor until he reaches broken glass.
The guy on the floor jacks the clip back into the butt of the Sig-Sauer and primes it and aims at Stelson, but before he can get a round off, he’s rained down on by shots from an M4 Carbine. Four shot bursts.
Stelson lifts Anna, cradling her by the shoulders and knees, the red shoulder bag dangling precariously from the fingers of her left arm.
Heads pop up from behind display cases and shots are fired back and forth. Bursts of lethal battlefield firepower shred the space. Glass shattering all around, the ambient lighting catching it and making the shards seem deadly and beautiful all at the same time.
Stelson is heading fast toward the exit, praying as he goes. Praying that he’s not caught out and cut down. Victor, Kenny, and Tilman are on either side of the exit and they are pumping shot into the display cases where the Client crew holds position.
Victor is shouting something at Stelson as he passes through. He has to almost lip-read Victor to catch his drift: “Throw the bag.”
But Stelson has no intention of letting Anna go to pass the bag to Victor. He carries her onwards. Victor takes a hit–a bullet ricochets and catches him on the left shoulder and he drops his shotgun. Kenny ceases fire and pulls Victor aside into cover.
Only Tilman is holding back the other crew.
The point of weakness allows them to start pushing out toward the exit and pursue the holder of the items. They cover all angles as best they can.
Bobby’s Mannequin crew are down from four to three, each taking turns to pop out from behind cover to take three shot bursts.
Stelson is out into the mall and is heading up the escalator with Anna as the firefight is pushed outside, each crew member taking new positions and Victor is back in charge of his shotgun, using one arm to cock and fire.
The Client crew makes a foolhardy attempt to storm onto the escalator and go after Stelson, Anna, and the items, but Tilman and Kenny have it covered and take down a couple more targets.
The mannequin faces are now outside and closing the noose around the Client crew, who are suffocating as more bodies fall in the crossfire. They were always surrounded and the maintained formation of Victor and Bobby’s collaboration is reaping dividends, but not without collateral damage.
Stelson turns and looks down at the emporium to see a mannequin-faced shooter hit the deck, landing on his back with a double-tap to the head. A diffusing red dot on the forehead of his pale white mannequin mask, which is still firmly set in place.
Stelson wonders if it was Bobby. He can’t tell from here. He’s hopeful. He looks ahead and up at the hazy LA sky.
At ground level, the area is still deserted apart from one lone figure running along Figueroa toward the mall. Soon this place will be mobbed. The below-ground firefight is only barely muffled and the shots still echo and the sound ricochets and rises up and between buildings.
Stelson carries her out of the mall to the sidewalk to meet the lone figure approaching–it’s the mall cop. He’s holding onto his hat and his face is etched with panic and confusion. He looks at Stelson and then at Anna and then toward the mall. His right palm is on the butt of his holstered gun.
“Help us,” Stelson says to the cop.
“Is she okay?”
“Does she look okay? We need to get her outta here. You have a car?”
“Yeah, in the lot across the street.” The shots are more infrequent now. “Are you part of this? Whatever this is?” He glances at the red shoulder bag, dismissing it as though he’d rather not know what’s inside.
“Yeah, we are part of it,” Stelson says, betting that honesty will win trust.
The cop looks surprised.
“But what the fuck are going to do? There are guys with automatic rifles down there, and then there’s you.”
The cop looks at Stelson with disdain and then at Anna. “She needs a hospital.”
“Then be a hero and help me save this girl.”
The cop nods and starts across Figueroa toward the car lot. Stelson follows, Anna becoming heavier by the second.
“Has she been shot?” the cop asks.
“No.”
“What then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is she breathing?”
“Sorta.”
“There’s hope then.”
“Yeah, there is.”
They’re in the car lot and the cop finds his cruiser and opens the rear doors. Stelson hoists Anna onto the back seat, the red bag resting on the floor, but still hanging from her fingertips. He climbs in beside her while propping up her legs so that they overlap and rest on his knees. The cop flicks the ignition key and pumps a few revs into the engine block to get the old beast warmed up. He checks his rearview. “Shit.”
Stelson leans sideways and cranes his neck to see what’s spooked the cop.
Four mannequin-masked gunmen are striding onto Figueroa, looking up and down its length. Stelson’s already detached himself from these guys. To him, in this moment, they are just anonymous gunmen intent on causing havoc. He is away with their big score and his awareness of their now impending wrath fires him into an uber-alert state. He pulls out the Glock from his waist-band and buries a round into the chamber.
“What do I do?” the cop asks Stelson.
“Go. We have to go.”
The cop has melted into a chicken-shit fearful state of patheticness. Stelson just adds to it by pointing the Glock at his head. “Go!”
It has the desired effect. As the cop swings the vehicle out of the parking space, the gunmen spot it accelerating toward the exit. One of them has an M4 Carbine and he immediately takes shots between neighboring cars in the lot, his white face strobing between the parked vehicles, ghost-like.
One triple burst blows the rear and side windows of the car out, passing right through the vehicle, perhaps within an inch or two of Stelson’s face. He ducks down closer to Anna, but maintaining a hawk eye on the shooter.
The cop in the driver’s seat has pissed himself but he stays well focused on the exit. He screeches and slides the car onto Figueroa. By this time, a conflict of shouts and bravado body language has broken out between the shooter with the M4 and another mannequin-faced gunman that has to be Victor–the limp, crooked, and bloody shoulder is a give-away and he wears the mask of a dead-man, with a large red blood stain on the forehead, strangely similar in shape to Stelson’s Lake Superior birth mark.
Victor is berating the shooter for opening up on Stelson and Anna. The shooter has to be his brother, Bobby. The cocky, willful mannerisms are all there. If he could see those eyes, he could confirm it. As they pass by the crew and head north up Figueroa, the shooter takes aim at Victor and that’s when Stelson makes a snap decision to grab this opportunity. Now or never. He points the Glock through the shattered rear window of the cop car and glares down the barrel and fires at the gunman gesticulating wildly with the M4 Carbine rifle.
Two shots.
One of them gets lucky and catches the shooter somewhere around the collarbone. Blood and bone fragments spray out in a vague mist. The target drops his M4 and falls to the floor like a sack of wet sand in zero gravity. Is he dead? Hard to tell. But he’s moving on the ground.
Victor and the other two gunmen watch Stelson fade into the distance. One of them lifts a free hand and points at Stelson until they are out of sight. That finger point sends an obvious message to Stelson. They will come after him and Anna–but he doesn’t care. His aim was to get Anna out alive and that’s what he did, no matter what the consequences.
“Hit the 110,” commands Stelson. “We need to disappear first and foremost, partner.”
“I ain’t your partner, freak. I’m just helping the lady.” The cop glances down at the wet patch around his groin, embarrassed. He knows his career is over. Such a fool. He gulps and his eyes droop with self-pity as they scan the highway ahead.
More normal sounds of the city return, sirens filling the void that was created in the last hour of madness.
They turn a corner toward the freeway on-ramp, and in the rearview, there is a stream of police cars and trucks heading down Figueroa toward the shopping mall.
“Don’t even think about turning back to your buddies in blue,” says Stelson.<
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Anna’s eyes begin to flicker but Stelson hasn’t noticed. He’s only looking at the red shoulder bag. He flicks the safety on the Glock and he shifts her slender legs forward so that his range of movement is such that he can lean over her body and reach for the bag. He does this while tucking the Glock behind him.
He gives the bag a gentle tug. An action he hopes will relax her clasp. It doesn’t. He uses a degree of force to pry it from her fingers and then lift it slowly onto his lap and he seems guilt ridden for doing so.
The cop is glancing at him in his rearview, accusingly, or at least, that’s what Stelson thinks in his state of exhaustion.
The red canvas of the bag puckers the texture of the dappled blood spatter covering it. He scratches some of it off with his fingernail and glances at the zipper. He’s reluctant to open it up. He can subconsciously feel Anna telling him not to, so he pauses for thought and looks out of the window to check their location.
They’re on the 110 and he sees the exit for the 101 and tells the cop to take it and head north, and it’s not until the exit at Silver Lake Boulevard that Stelson realizes where he is taking her.
“I’m taking you home, Anna.”
The cop looks it him in the rearview. “Are you crazy? She needs a hospital. That was the deal.”
Stelson returns the bag back to the foot-well beside Anna and grips her left hand. He closes his eyes and he waits.
“If she dies, it’s on you.”
Anna’s fingers twitch. He grips her hand a little tighter and she responds with a soft caress of his grazed knuckles. Stelson opens his eyes and looks at her face, the eyes flickering, half-open. “She’s going to be okay.”
His eyes twitch with panic. The red shoulder bag is gone from the foot-well. He sits back up and the cop is pointing his gun at Anna by wrapping his right arm around his own waist, his left arm steering the vehicle. The bag is on the passenger seat next to him.
“Hands in the air where I can see ‘em,” the cop says.
Stelson complies and touches the roof with his fingers.