Gathering Dark

by Candice Fox

  ‘Wallert, are you there? Vizchen?’ she whispered into her radio.

  Nothing.

  ‘Wallert, Vizchen, respond!’ She squeezed the receiver so that the plastic squeaked and crackled in her hand. Static. ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’

  Jessica pulled her gun and headed for the garage. Stopped at the corner of the building to radio command.

  ‘Detective Jessica Sanchez, badge 260719. I’ve got a 10-54 and code three at 4699 Linscott Place, Baldwin Village. Repeat, code three.’

  There was a flash in her mind of Wallert and Vizchen laughing. Another officer might have wondered about the two of them, why they weren’t responding. If they were in danger. But not Jessica, not today. She’d heard Vizchen’s words, knew she would hear them again in the coming weeks, from her brethren at the station. You’re the hero cop. No one was coming to help her. She’d betrayed them all with the Brentwood inheritance. She’d marked herself as a traitor.

  She sank to the ground, flattened and rolled under the garage door, rose and held the gun on him. He was a big man, even crouching as he was, a heaving lump of flesh, bent back straining. At first she thought the old woman and the young man were kissing on the ground. Intimate. Mouth to throat. But then she saw the blood on his hands, all over his face, her neck. Jessica thought of vampires and zombies, of magical, impossible things, and had to steady herself against a pool table. Her mind split as the full force of terror hit, half of it wailing and screaming at her to flee, the other half assessing what this was: a vicious assault in progress. Assailant likely under the influence of drugs. Bath salts – they’d been hitting the streets hard in the past few weeks, making kids do crazy things: gouge their own eyes out, kill animals, ride their bikes off cliffs. She was watching a man eat a woman alive.

  ‘Drop her!’ she shouted. An absurd part of her brain noted she was talking as if to a dog. A wolf. A werewolf. ‘Drop her! Stand back!’

  The man raised his bloody face. The old woman in his hands bucked, tried to shift away. Too weak. Almost dead. Every vein in the man’s body was sticking out like a slick blue rope on his sweat-soaked skin. He wasn’t seeing Jessica. He was trapped in his fantasy.

  ‘Back up now or I’ll shoot!’

  The man lifted the woman to his lips. Jessica fired over his head, hit a dartboard hanging on the wall, sending it clanging to the ground. He got up, staggered away from the noise. She fired again and hit him in the left shoulder. The bullet flecked his shirt with blood, embedded itself in the muscle. He didn’t flinch. The man came for her, gathering speed in three long strides. She fired again, a double tap in the chest. A kill shot. He kept coming. A big hand seized her face and shoved her into the wall, then dragged her towards him with the strength of an inhuman thing. The gun fell from her fingers.

  She thought of Wallert as the man’s teeth bit down into the flesh of her bicep. Her partner out there, somewhere in the dark, laughing at her.

  Jessica grabbed at the man’s rock-hard shoulders and landed a knee in his crotch. They went to ground, rolled on the floor together. He pinned her on her front, his belt buckle jutting into her hip. Another bite on her left shoulderblade, the pop sound of the fabric as his teeth cut clean through her shirt. Jessica pushed off the ground the few inches she could manage and smacked her elbow into the man’s face. The crunch of his nasal bone. He bit her left shoulder. Clamping down, trying to tear the flesh away, a good mouthful. She looked into the eyes of the now-dead old woman only feet away from her and thought again about how no one was coming.

  He tried to get on top of her, accidentally nudging her dropped gun within reach. Jessica grabbed the weapon and twisted under him, put the gun to his forehead as the teeth came down again towards her.

  She fired.

  BLAIR

  I started missing kids the morning after I was arrested. Nine years as a surgeon, four of those as a paediatric specialist, had brought me into contact with thousands of children: mopey, sick teenagers and mewling newborns and wide-eyed, excited eight-year-olds whooping as they were wheeled down the hospital corridors on stretchers, their white-knuckled parents following. In an instant, my world was full of angry adults. For nine years the only kids I saw were behind scratched, faded glass in the prison visiting room or in the pictures fellow inmates stuck to the walls beside their bunks.

  When I found my apartment in Crenshaw, there was plenty I didn’t like about it. Dangerous-looking men in long white T-shirts rode bicycles up and down the street, monitoring activity closely. The bathroom ceiling inside the apartment was black with mould. The whole place was exposed red brick on the inside, even the shower cubicle; the walls, close and impenetrable. On the day I inspected the property, a cockroach was swimming weakly in the dripping kitchen sink, and when I tried to flush the pathetic creature down the drain the real estate agent assured me he’d be back – he was a permanent housemate. I was about to shake hands with the agent and leave when a troupe of children came out of the apartment next door, each carrying a guitar case the length of their body, letting the screen door slap shut behind them, to the grumblings of the old man inside. From the lawn, after the real estate agent left, I watched the children waiting for their rides, saw a teenager arriving for her guitar lesson, a bright-red electric guitar slung over her shoulder. I called the agent and took the apartment right there.

  The day after the robbery at the Pump’n’Jump, I was standing at the kitchen counter drinking a coffee and watching the morning news on the TV when a small, familiar knock came at my door. I crossed the apartment in five strides and found my usual Saturday morning visitor: a small Asian boy named Quincy, clutching his ukulele.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he asked, as he always did. I leaned in the doorway, still half-listening to the news. Something about an elderly couple and a cop attacked and bitten by a crazed drug addict. Typical Los Angeles stuff.

  ‘I’m always ready for you, Quince,’ I said.

  Quincy hefted his ukulele against his small chest and played ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ haltingly, skipping the part about bluebirds completely. Upon finishing, he flashed me a set of big white teeth and bowed. I put my coffee on a shelf beside the door and clapped.

  ‘Boy, when you’re a super-cool solo performer doing gigs downtown, I’ll buy you a martini,’ I said as I retrieved the box I kept on the shelf. ‘But right now all I’ve got is chocolate.’

  ‘What’s a martini?’

  ‘It’s a special drink for grown-ups.’

  ‘My dad drinks beer and my mom drinks wine. Lots of wine.’ He rolled his eyes.

  ‘She’s my kind of woman.’

  ‘I’ll just have chocolate, please.’

  ‘You got it, buddy,’ I said. He dug around for a while in my collection of goodies, trying to decide on a reward, making the wrappers crinkle. ‘What’s for homework this week?’

  ‘“What a Wonderful World”,’ he said, selecting a Twix.

  ‘Good song,’ I said. ‘Can’t wait.’

  Quincy waved and ran to the corner to wait for his ride. I stood in the sunshine for a while, still watching the news. I knew that bribing kids to give me mini-concerts on my doorstep after their guitar lesson was weird, and potentially dangerous. It would only take one parent who heard I was a violent ex-con paying for child interactions with candy, and a world of trouble would erupt. Paul, the old guy next door who taught the classes, would face a downturn in business. My parole officer would get a call. But being around children reminded me that I had been a good person once, and that one day I might be a good mother to my own child, who I saw once a week for a couple of hours. It reminded me that somewhere deep inside me, the head surgeon who had sweated and laboured over the bodies of tiny infants in the operating theatre, who had stayed up all night reading stories to cancer-riddled toddlers, who had cried with parents for hours in waiting rooms, was still there. She was still alive, just buried. Even though I had taken a life, ‘shockingly and viciously’, as the newspapers had claimed, I was not com
pletely irredeemable, because children still liked me.

  The news stole back my attention.

  ‘Outrage this morning following an announcement regarding the three million dollars that was found by construction workers developing a property in Pasadena last September,’ the newsreader said. I retrieved my coffee and looked up to see an image of dirty suitcases on the screen, lying at the feet of police officers in a crowded conference room, footage from the find a few months earlier.

  ‘A spokesperson for City Hall told reporters that investigators have found no physical evidence to support claims the buried hoard of cash once belonged to famed bank robber and murderer John James Fishwick. Fishwick is a current inmate of San Quentin State Prison and has not commented publicly on whether the exhumed money was indeed his.’

  A photograph of a long-jawed man in his sixties flashed on the screen. The deadened, stale look of all mugshots. Denim prison shirt.

  ‘Lawyers representing the families of some of Fishwick’s victims have expressed dismay at the government’s decision to withhold the money under penal code 485 rather than use the funds to compensate those who lost loved ones during Fishwick’s criminal reign.’

  I closed the door and drained my coffee. Then another knock came, harder this time, definitely not Quincy. When I opened the door and saw who it was I dropped the coffee mug on the carpet and slammed the door in her face.

  ‘Oh, fuck!’

  ‘I hate to break it to you, but that’s not going to work,’ Sneak said. ‘Open up, Neighbour girl.’

  I winced at the name. I hadn’t been called ‘Neighbour’ in a year, not since I left the gates of Happy Valley, the California Institution for Women. Prison is full of unclever nicknames like that. I was Blair Harbour, the Neighbour Killer, aka Neighbour. I had met car thieves called Wheels and jewellery thieves called Jewels and gunrunners called Bullets in my time inside. I looked down at my straining knuckles gripping the doorhandle.

  ‘You can’t be here,’ I called through the door.

  ‘Well, I am, so deal with it.’ She barged into the door, causing it to smack me in the forehead. Sneak’s steps jiggled her huge breasts as she shoved her way past me into the apartment.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ I scanned the road outside. ‘What the hell do you want?’

  Sneak smelled the same as she had back in prison, of candy and fried food. Her leather miniskirt was squeaking, trying to contain her big rump as she headed for my kitchen.

  ‘I need your help. But before that, I need something to drink, all right? I’ve been out all night. What time is it? You got any ice?’ She began fishing in my fridge. Sneak talked fast, even when she wasn’t high. She was like a storm blowing into my world, knocking things over, filling the air with noise and chaos.

  ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’ I slammed the fridge door shut, almost on her fingers. ‘We’re not doing this. You’ve got to get out of here. I’m on probation. You’re on probation. It’s real nice to see you but you’ve got to go. Known association with convicted criminals or fellow parolees will get us both thrown back inside. It’s one of the main conditions.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’ She shoved me away. Her words were slurred, running together. ‘Unless you’ve got a parole officer hiding in your freezer, we’ll have to risk it. I need help here.’ She poured herself a vodka from the big bottle in my freezer and pocketed two mini Jack Daniel’s bottles from my cupboard. The movement was quick, but not quick enough to escape my eye, because I expected the theft. ‘You were robbed last night at the Pump’n’Jump gas station, am I right? You lost your car and some cash?’

  I stood back. ‘Yes. How—’

  ‘That was my kid, Dayly.’ Sneak gulped her vodka shot. ‘She called me up and told me she hit the Pump’n’Jump. I’ve known you worked there for a while. Now she’s gone. The last person who saw her was you. So I need your help getting her back.’

  I worked my temples, looked at the front windows, dreaming of escape from this. The day outside was just beginning, full of potential. I longed for it. Jamie was on my mind again. Something stupid like this could break us apart.

  I went and drew the curtains. Someone was playing ‘Hotel California’ almost perfectly next door. Sneak sloshed herself another vodka, probably pocketing items from my kitchen drawers with the hand I couldn’t see below the counter. I grabbed a picture of Jamie in a nice silver frame from the shelf near the door and stuffed it under a couch cushion. I stood uncomfortably in the centre of my mostly bare apartment.

  ‘She was in trouble.’ Sneak turned to me. ‘Big trouble.’

  ‘She told me someone was after her,’ I confirmed. ‘She was injured. Looked scared. But that’s all I know, okay? Whatever this is, I can’t get involved, Sneak. I’ll lose everything. If I go back to prison I’m facing another five years.’ Sneak wasn’t listening. I took my wallet from the counter. Throwing money at problems was still a reflex, even after so many years away from my life as a Brentwood medical celebrity. I had been very wealthy before I was locked up. I treated the kids of the stars, drove a Mercedes-Benz, vacationed in La Jolla. Once, I went to Oprah Winfrey’s house in the middle of the night to treat the child of a friend who was staying over, suffering a fever. All that was before I shot my neighbour in cold blood and stood watching him bleed out on his dining room floor, doing nothing, while his girlfriend screamed at me.

  ‘I don’t even have any money to offer you to—’

  I stared into my empty wallet. I’d had a twenty-dollar bill, all that was left to my name after I’d paid for Sneak’s daughter’s theft. Now it was gone. Sneak had probably snagged it when I went to close the curtains. I tossed the wallet on the counter.

  ‘Okay, I’m good now.’ Sneak swallowed her third vodka, gasped and exhaled hard. ‘Let’s get rolling.’

  ‘We’re not—’

  ‘We can talk on the way.’

  In the cab I leaned against the window and wondered how on earth I’d let myself be abducted into a fellow ex-con’s personal troubles, and how I could best extract myself. Sneak rambled beside me and wrung her hands. The confidence and determination I’d seen in my apartment was draining away from her. She had me now, and was gearing up for the next challenge. Prison does that to you: gives you the ability to put up a tough front to get what you want, but then it burns out and moves on, like a grass fire. I was looking now at the face of a terrified mother, something I’d seen plenty of times in hospital hallways, and in the mirror. Sneak was drunk and high, but she was wavering on the edge of screaming panic.

  ‘You never even told me you had a kid,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not lying. Not this time.’

  ‘All that time in Happy Valley together. All those hours you listened to me talking about Jamie, you never once mentioned it.’

  ‘We only just got back in touch.’ Sneak shifted in her chair. ‘I gave her up as a teenager. It was kind of embarrassing, okay?’

  Sneak had been a good friend of mine on the inside. Good enough that I’d overlooked her constantly stealing my things, coming up with grandiose lies to entertain herself, waking me up in the winter with her ice-cold hands on my face. I could feel those hands now, slapping at my cheeks and brow. Her big blue eyes peering at me over the edge of the bunk. Hey. Hey. Neighbour. Wake up. I’m bored. That cute guard on seven just got here. Come be my wingman.

  ‘She called me from a payphone,’ Sneak said. ‘This morning, maybe one am. She said she fired a gun at the woman behind the counter. I figured it had to be you. There couldn’t be too many women stupid enough to work a night shift in a place like that.’

  ‘Desperate enough, I think you mean,’ I said. ‘It was the only place that would—’

  ‘She would hardly let me speak.’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ I sighed.

  ‘She said I should watch my back, that someone was coming, something real bad was going down.’ Sneak chewed her nails. ‘Then we got disconnected. Like, fast. She went quiet suddenly and the line went dead.
’

  ‘Why did you wait so long to come get me?’

  ‘I had to see what the street was saying first. Get a feel for what Dayly was telling me about someone being after her. But nobody’s heard anything. Usually if there’s some kind of hit out, people will know.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To Dayly’s apartment.’ Sneak blocked a nostril, inhaled, made a snorting sound. Irritated sinuses from bad coke. ‘I’ve been there a couple of times. Like I said, we’ve been trying to make good with each other. She looked me up. She’s angry, I guess, but it wasn’t my fault, her childhood. My parents made me give her up.’

  I knew some things about who Sneak had been before she turned to a life of drugs and prostitution. Walking by her bunk one day at Happy Valley, I’d spotted a newspaper cut-out on the floor. A yellowed picture of a lean young girl in a gymnast’s outfit. The resemblance to Sneak was minimal – the girl was fresh-faced, grinning broadly, blonde ringlet curls held up in an elaborate scrunchie, and a sculpted, muscular frame shining in lycra. The headline read Dreams shattered. Sixteen-year-old Emily Lawlor had been warming up for her performance at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney when she landed wrongly after back-flipping off a floor beam. She suffered a traumatic fracture in one of her cervical vertebrae. I’d stuffed the newspaper article back under Sneak’s pillow, where I assumed it had come from. Another inmate told me Sneak had got hooked on oral Vicodin after the accident, then moved to heroin when her insurance ran out.

  ‘I don’t know who the father is,’ Sneak said. ‘I was knocking boots with a lot of bad guys. Some of them are in jail now. Like, forever.’

  I watched my former cellmate from across the cab. She looked older than her years, her mouth downturned with worry. I realised she and I had both given up our babies unwillingly; her as a teen being pushed by disappointed parents, me in the Happy Valley infirmary only an hour after giving birth to him. Though Sneak and I hadn’t been able to be there for our kids, the idea that they might fall into peril still throbbed, in the back of my mind, at least, like a burn that never really healed. From the moment our children had left our hands they’d fallen into the big, bad world, and it looked as though Dayly was in the grasp of some of that badness.