by Phoef Sutton
She thought of turning and running. She thought of yelling a warning to Amelia. She disregarded those thoughts immediately. When you’re on the run you can be caught. When you cry out a warning to someone, all you do is let the hunter know they’re close to their prey. No, the only thing to do when being attacked was to attack back. Harder.
She knew she could hold them off for few minutes at best, enough time for Amelia to hear them breaking up the place and slip out the back window to the street before they took Gail down. True, Gail was probably a better fighter than any of them, so if they attacked her one at a time, the way they did in the movies, she could whip them all and finish by standing victorious over their broken bodies. But as she dived into the tangled mass of Russian mobsters, she realized they probably had seen those same movies. They wouldn’t make the same mistake as Bruce Lee’s assailants or Chuck Norris’s assailants or Jet Li’s assailants or Jason Statham’s assailants. They wouldn’t stand and wait their turn. They’d take her all at once.
Fucking reality.
SEVENTEEN
My friends will meet you on the next floor.” The man with the skeleton tattoo (whose name was Sergei) listened to the man with the ring tattoos (whose name was Danzig) on his Bluetooth and rolled his eyes.
That was supposed to be Sergei’s cue to take action, he thought, facing the elevator doors with that hulking lunk Semyon by his side. But did Danzig have to deliver it with that Blofeldian smirk? Not for the first time, Sergei wondered what kind of bratva he had gotten himself into.
Sergei hadn’t even wanted to be a gangster. It was just the only way he could get from Tkibuli, that west Georgian shithole he was born in, to Los Angeles, where he could realize his dream. To be Phil Spector.
Phil Spector of the Wall of Sound. Music producer extraordinaire, yes. Also the Phil Spector who could pick up a blonde at the House of Blues, take her home to his castle in Alhambra, have sex with her, blow her brains out, and get off with a mistrial. That was the high life, no question.
Sergei loved music, mixing sounds and beats together and making them collide, almost as much as he loved killing people. Maybe more. And that was saying a lot. Because killing people, watching the life go out of their faces, hearing their last breath, that really got Sergei’s juices flowing. But to combine the two, music and death? That took balls of bronze.
True, Spector had been convicted on the second pass, but by then Sergei was already in L.A., indentured to Tarzan Ivankov. As a henchman. Sergei had been unfamiliar with the term till one of Tarzan’s whores called him that. He’d slapped her (open handed—he wasn’t that mad) when she used the word, because it didn’t sound complimentary. He asked her what it meant, and since she was an American whore from Canada, unlike most of Tarzan’s stable, she was able to explain: “It’s like one of those guys in an action movie that works for bad guy and gets shot and nobody minds.” So that was what a henchman was. Interesting. He hit her again, this time with his closed fist. Still, she had a point, and he felt a little bad about it afterward.
So he was a henchman, Sergei thought. Okay. For now. You had to start somewhere. He spent his spare time in clubs, listening to all the lousy bands and imagining fixing them, making them better, giving them the Wall of Sound.
“It’s here,” Semyon growled the obvious, as always.
The elevator doors slid open. They had to be quick about this. People were already gathering in the street around the body of that prick Danzig had dropped out of the other elevator a floor above them. Danzig, with his damn ring tattoos (a ring for every man he’d killed, as he’d explained far too often for it to be cool), had perhaps taken too literally Tarzan’s order to “put him down.” No matter. Danzig was running down the service stairs now, trying to get outside before the cops got here and the building was sealed. So the lowly henchman were given the next assignment: Kill this man they called Crush, the man who’d done so much damage to them in the parking lot of the Nocturne. Kill him in the elevator quickly and efficiently and get out.
But when the doors opened, the elevator was empty. Sergei stepped in, looking all around, and then turned back to look at Semyon, who looked as puzzled as Sergei was, when the elevator doors started to close. Sergei reached out to stop the doors when an angry two-hundred-twenty-pound bald man dropped down from the sky on top of him.
Crush.
As the door slid shut, Sergei noted that although he had looked all around for someone, he hadn’t looked up. Rookie henchman mistake, he thought, as Crush rained his fists down on him.
As Rush was beating this Russian mobster to a pulp, taking the gun from his hand and beating him some more, he noticed something. The man wasn’t fighting back. Rush paused as he recognized him. Skeleton Tat. From the club.
“You all right?” he asked, in Russian.
“You win,” the man answered in a thick Georgian accent. Eastern Europe Georgia, not southern U.S. Georgia. Though both had their coal mines. And from the look of this man’s hands, he knew them well.
“That’s it?” Rush asked.
“Yeah…don’t kill me.”
“You were going to kill me.”
“Just doing my job.”
“It’s a lousy job.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Well, I’m not going to kill you.”
“Thanks.”
“You’d still kill me if you had the chance, though, right?”
“Well, orders. You know.”
The elevator doors slid open. “Tenth floor. You get off here.” Rush half rolled, half pushed Skeleton Tat out of the elevator. “I’ll tell Tarzan you put up more of a fight.”
“I don’t fight when I know I’m going to lose. Waste of energy.”
“Wise man,” Rush said as the doors closed.
It took an eternity to get down to the garage level, where the police were just arriving. They were just starting to shut the building down but hadn’t yet gotten to the service entrance. Rush ran through it, his heart pounding in his chest. He had to contact Gail. He had to know if she was all right.
As he ran to the car on Flower Street, he dialed her number furiously on his cell phone. It rang and rang, until her voicemail answered. He called again and again. Always with the same result.
He started the car and sped down Flower, turning onto 4th as he called the police and told them there was an assault taking place at Gail’s dojo. The officers would probably get there before him, so if he was wrong, if Gail and Amelia were working out and she was just letting the machine take the calls, Gail would make Rush do Palgwe forms till the sun came up. But if he was right.…
It took him six and a half minutes to get there, dodging traffic, tearing through red lights. Pulling up in front of the dojo, he saw that the front window was busted in and the cops were nowhere in sight. LAPD, to serve and protect—in their own good time.
Rush ran through the broken plate-glass window, calling out, “Gail! Amelia!” No answer.
The dojo had been wrecked. Benches overturned, mirrors shattered, punching bag slashed. Rush didn’t pause to assess the damage. He just ran up the stairs, flipping the light switches as he passed. They didn’t come on. The bulbs had all been shattered.
The kitchen was untouched and empty. He heard faint music coming from the bedroom down the hall. Walking toward it, he checked the closet. Empty. He checked the bathroom. Empty, but the sink was filled with bloody water, and bloodstained towels were strewn around the room. Gail hadn’t gone down without a fight.
The bedroom door was closed. He swung it open with a lump in his throat. The room was in shambles. The bed was turned on its side, the card table was tossed into the corner, the Clue game board and pieces scattered around it—a rope, a knife, a lead pipe, a revolver—like so much evidence in a tiny crime scene.
Gail’s iPod was plugged into its speakers. Belle & Sebastian were playing. “It’s been a bloody stupid day.…”
There was a card on the windowsill, where he couldn
’t miss it. It was Miss Scarlet. Gail’s favorite. Across it was scrawled a phone number.
“Don’t leave the light on, baby,” the iPod sang. Anger flaring in his gut, Rush snatched the iPod from its cradle and made to throw it across the room. He stopped himself just in time. For the sake of Gail’s playlists.
He took a deep breath, then pulled out his cell phone and dialed the number that was written on the card. Slowly and deliberately. He didn’t want to enter the wrong numbers.
The phone rang. And rang.
Then he heard it. The faint sound of a cell phone ringing somewhere nearby. In the apartment.
He followed the sound. Followed it downstairs. Followed it across the darkened dojo to the equipment closet in the corner. Dear God, Rush thought, don’t let this be what I think it’s going to be.
EIGHTEEN
Rush hadn’t screamed since he was a child. That was during the bad times, when his mother had to turn tricks in their one-bedroom apartment off Cherokee and she’d lock him in the closet with a blanket and pillow and tell him to keep quiet till it was over. One time he’d heard her panting and struggling and gasping for breath, as if someone was strangling her and pounding the hell out of her at the same time—which, he later reflected, was basically what was going on. He knew he had to help her. So he’d screamed at the top of his lungs and pounded on the door. How his mother had whipped him for that!
Of course, it wasn’t nearly the whipping she’d given her john when he suggested little Caleb join them for a three-way. A mother bear protects her cubs even if the mother bear is selling her ass on Hollywood Boulevard.
So that was the last time Rush screamed, and he didn’t scream now as he looked in the closet. He just gave out a low, blood-chilling moan.
Gail was in there.
Her body was crammed into the corner of the closet. Twisted and bloody, like a piece of boxing equipment used and then tossed away. The ringing cell phone was duct-taped to her naked chest. A piece of butcher’s paper was taped across her face—another phone number was scrawled on it. The paper moved, sucked in by her breath.
Ripping the paper from her face, Rush bent down to her. Her breath was shallow and fast but it was there.
“Gail,” he said. “It’s going to be all right.”
She mumbled something. Rush couldn’t quite make it out, but the sound of her voice made his heart leap.
She tried again. “There were too many of them, Crush.”
“Must have been a hundred,” Rush said, holding her gently.
Gail snorted a laugh. An actual laugh. “Five or six. They took her. I’m so sorry.” She started to cry, and Rush held her to his chest, shaking with relief.
Sirens approached. In a minute, red flashing lights would wash through the room, and he’d be stuck there for hours, answering the same questions over and over, while they were out there laughing about what they’d done to Gail and what they were going to do to Amelia.
Gail looked up at him. “Go,” she said. “Go get her.”
Rush stood in the shadows across the street long enough to see the paramedics load Gail into an ambulance. Then he pulled the wadded-up paper from his pocket and called the number scrawled on it.
A harsh, accented voice answered. “Took you long enough.”
Rush kept his voice even. “My friend needed a doctor.”
“You mean she isn’t dead? Chyort!”
“Where’s Amelia?” Rush asked.
“Where’s Guzman?”
“I don’t know.”
“I call this phone in two hours. That’s ten o’clock. If Guzman doesn’t answer, we kill her.”
“I—”
“And don’t involve anyone else.”
“If you hurt her—”
“Oh, we’ve already been hurting her.”
The line went dead. Rush ran toward the car.
Philippe’s was busy. The legendary sandwich shop was always busy. Had been since 1908. How many places in L.A. could say that?
Rush tromped across the sawdust-covered floor, past the long wooden tables filled with old-timers and new-timers, pushing through the line at the counter to where Bill Ingol was working, carving roast beef and pork for the multitudes. As Bill used to say at AA meetings, carving meat wasn’t that different from screenwriting.
“We need to talk,” Rush said.
“Take a number like everybody else,” Bill replied.
Rush snatched a number from the hipster standing next him. The hipster almost objected, but one glance from the big, angry man made him retreat under his porkpie hat. Discretion, after all, was the better part of cool.
Bill took a cigarette break in the alley out back by the dumpster. Rush didn’t have time for preliminaries. He told him that he needed to reach Guzman.
“I’m his sponsor, not his goddamn message service.”
“This is life and death.”
“What isn’t?”
Rush grabbed him by the collar and shoved him against a brick wall. Bill didn’t flinch. He’d dealt with worse trouble before.
Feeling guilty, Rush relaxed his grip. “I’ll start going to meetings again.”
Bill smiled. “Now you’re talking, Caleb.”
“So where is he?”
Stubbing out his cigarette, Bill said, “He’s at home, genius. That’s where he’s been all along.”
Rush skidded to a double-parked stop in front of Guzman’s Manhattan Beach house, ran up the steep stairs, and hammered on the door.
“Guzman!” he yelled.
He tried the door. It was unlocked. Flinging it open, he rushed inside.
“Guzman!”
He heard a sound coming from upstairs. A woman crying. Rush took the stairs three at a time and burst into the guest bedroom.
Tianna was sitting on the floor by the unmade bed, sobbing.
“Where is he?” Rush asked from the doorway.
She looked up at him, bereft. “He said he didn’t love me anymore.”
Rush didn’t have time for this. “Where did he go?”
“I don’t know,” she wailed.
He went into the master bedroom. Tianna followed him in as he flung open the door of the huge walk-in closet. “What did he take with him?” Ripping through the closet, Rush searched for he didn’t know what.
Tianna sniffled. “He’s in some kind of trouble, Crush.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he loves me. He wouldn’t lie unless.…”
There it was. An open lockbox on the floor of the closet, with a few loose papers inside. He picked it up.
“What was in this?” he asked Tianna.
She wiped her eyes. “Papers. Birth certificates, our passports.”
He took out the only passport from the box. “Your passport.”
He threw the lockbox on the bed and headed out. She scuffled after him, whimpering. “Where are you going?” she moaned. “What do you know?”
Rush stopped on the landing. The view of the ocean from the picture window was stunning.
“What do you know?” he asked. “How the hell can you afford this place? Did you go back on the job?”
“No! I’m clean! Tony paid me off! I’m free and clear.”
“How? How did he get the money?”
Tianna grew silent.
Rush pressed. “Did he do a favor for Ivankov?”
“I don’t know. All know is, Ivankov said I was free.”
“Do you think a man like Ivankov would ever let you be free?”
“You don’t know him. He’s a man of honor.”
“I don’t have to know him. I know his kind.”
“Ivankov gave me his word. In the Thieves’ World, honor is everything.”
Rush turned on her, intensely. “Don’t talk to me about the Thieves’ World. I know it better than you. If you think you’re safe, you’re wrong. Run. Go someplace no one has ever heard of you. Lock your door. Never leave.”
“But Tony—”
“You’ve lost Tony. We all have.”
Tianna watched him go.
NINETEEN
Rush sped around the traffic circle to Shell Avenue. He thought he could make it to the L.A. airport in fifteen minutes. He had twenty-five left. Twenty-five minutes till the Russians called back. Twenty-five minutes till Amelia died.
As he tore onto Venice Boulevard, he reflected on the idea that the world probably wouldn’t be a worse place without Amelia Trask. She was a spoiled-rotten and naturally perverse creature who would no doubt make many men very unhappy in her adult life. Still, when he thought of what the Russians had done to Gail, it made his blood boil, and he wanted to do the same to them, only worse. And if he saved Amelia, he might be able to get his hands on them.
He called Zerbe as he turned right onto Lincoln. His roommate was no help.
“You want to know what flight Guzman’s on, but you don’t know the airline or where he’s going?” Zerbe was irritated. “What, do you think I’m one of those guys in 24 with a magic computer that can tell you everything? In 3-D?”
“The Dominican Republic. He’s going back home.”
“All right. That gives me something. I’ll call you back.”
He was on 96th Street before Zerbe called him back.
“You can’t get there from here.”
“What?” Rush was in no mood for jokes.
“You have to fly to Miami and catch a shuttle to Punta Cana or Santa Domingo.”
“Fine. Who flies to Miami?”
“Delta has the only red-eye.”
“When does it leave?”
“Ten thirty-five.”
“Thanks.” He ripped the Bluetooth out of his ear as he turned into LAX. Traffic slowed—he watched the time ticking away. Twelve minutes to ten.
He pulled up to the curb and quickly divested himself of the things airport security would frown on. A Glock pistol. Two knives. A Beretta. A pair of brass knuckles. These he deposited under the passenger seat. From a false back in the glove compartment, he withdrew an envelope he kept for emergencies. Then he jumped out and ran. Delta was in terminal three, and he was at terminal one, but he could get there faster on foot.