The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

  “My God, I thought they were an urban myth. You know.”

  “Oh, no, sister. Well, you see them.”

  “I heard they live by the river.”

  “They do,” he said. “They often take cover in the riverbed. From here they range to that rail yard”—he gestured easterly with a hand I saw to be mangled somehow—“then they find their way through the vacant lots and alleys to the river.” He dropped his voice. “Nobody knows how much time they spend on this property, though. Such a good hideout for them.”

  I said, “I heard rumors that when a homeless person dies out there, unless somebody notices, the pack drags off the body.”

  The Reverend cleared his throat. “There is truth to that rumor.”

  “Oh, God,” Gina and I said simultaneously.

  He saw me checking out his hand.

  “Have you always been a preacher?” I asked.

  He held it up: instead of a thumb there was just a fused-looking stub. “Oh, me, I used to be a longshoreman, back in the day. This here got roped off just like a cowboy’s—you toss a loop, and if the slack disappears and your thumb’s in the way, goodbye thumb.”

  He watched the dogs. “If we could clear those athletic fields and restore them to the community, that might expose the pack and help the city capture them. Looks like they’re headed east now, to the river.”

  I observed, “That five million dollars coming from Mr. Khani Emberton sure will help.”

  He peered at me carefully, kindly, through the smudged lenses of his glasses. “Amen, sister. And you have a blessed day.”

  Chapter 10 – Feral Interest

  I took a slow, yogic breath of the clean Sunday morning air, then squatted and dead-lifted the Sunday L.A. Times from the mat. A photo caught my eye right away. For some reason it caught my breath too. Caught it tight.

  You know how you see something quickly, almost subliminally, and your mind blots it out until you pull yourself together to deal with it?

  I carried the paper to the breakfast counter. Gina started some eggs and gave me a mug of coffee. I drank some.

  Then I looked again.

  OFFICER KILLED IN GUN BATTLE

  An LAPD sergeant was shot to death while on patrol on Mateo Street yesterday afternoon, then her fleeing killer was shot and killed by her partner, authorities said last night. According to LAPD sources, Sgt. Annette Soames, 32, and her partner, Officer Leroy Dent, were ambushed by a single gunman, who stepped from a doorway as they sat in their patrol car, having stopped at the curb to talk to a neighborhood shopkeeper.

  Wielding a semiautomatic handgun, the suspect shot Soames, who was at the wheel, twice in the chest at point-blank range, then fired at Dent as well but missed, police said. Dent returned fire and fatally shot the gunman, according to a high-ranking department source.

  Soames and the gunman, identified as Jerrol Bays, 28, of Los Angeles, were pronounced dead at the scene.

  Dent said, “It looked like his goal was to kill Sgt. Soames and that was it. He fired at me without looking. I had a clear shot as he turned to run away, and I took it.”

  I closed my eyes for a long moment. Then I was ready to digest the photograph.

  The department portrait showed Sgt. Annette Soames in uniform, hat off, eyes full of purpose and promise.

  “No,” I said. “Oh, no.”

  “What?” Spatula in hand, Gina came to look over my shoulder. “Hmp. There’s your doppelganger.”

  The slain officer was a narrow-shouldered white woman who wore a chin-length blond bob, whose face was wholesome and spritely, with a straight nose and a pixie chin. Arched eyebrows, no glasses.

  Just like me.

  And she’d been shot on north Mateo Street, possibly on the same block as the little grocery store.

  Just like me.

  “Oh,” said Gina. “Oh.”

  “It could have been me,” I murmured. “My God.”

  “No,” said my sister, her voice hardening. “Whoever did it thought it was you.”

  We stared at each other. Her face was as bloodless as plaster.

  _____

  “Ump! Ump! Ump!”

  George Rowe tried to block out the sound.

  “Ump! Ump!” grunted the man running beside him. “Ump! Ump! Ump!”

  The fellow was a pleasant sort, but he found it necessary to grunt like a pig with each footstep. This got on Rowe’s nerves, plus the guy couldn’t run faster than an eight-minute pace. They were headed south on Alvarado, approaching Olympic.

  Once in a while Rowe joined a Sunday-morning running club for a good long workout. They met in MacArthur Park and ran into the city from there, covering eight to ten miles. The runners began in a group, but strung out as everyone asserted their own pace. They always picked some coffee shop as an end rendezvous point.

  Rowe ran along, enjoying the city morning. He liked to be surprised by clumps of flowers growing in ugly places. He loved how hardy the California Golden Poppy was. The sight of one pushing its tough little stem through a crack in a curbstone delighted him. The orange of the petals hit his retinas with a special vibe he felt all the way through him. Growth is stronger than pavement. He liked the color orange.

  Colonel Markovich had called last night, again, asking for a progress report.

  “Nothing yet,” Rowe had said bluntly.

  “Well, I’m afraid I’ve been singing your praises to a few key people, so the expectations are mounting!” Markovich’s voice was happy.

  “I beg your pardon, Colonel?”

  “Ernest’s disappearance is big news in the canine community. The AKC has been in touch with me. They know you’re on the case, as do several of the top beagle people. Odd—I sensed a little nervousness in them.”

  “You spoke of me by name to these people?”

  “Yes—just a few.”

  Rowe’s toes had dug into the decks of his cherry-red flip-flops. “I wish you hadn’t done that.”

  “Ump! Ump! Ump!”

  Rowe told his running companion, “Hey, I’ll meet up with you at the doughnut place, OK? Is it the one on Sixth?”

  “Ump-kay!”

  Rowe peeled off and went his own way, heading east on Olympic, feeling his heart pumping harder as he accelerated. His legs felt good. He sped up until he hit a good equilibrium between heart and legs. He thought he’d go all the way to the river, then north to Elysian Park, then down again to inhale some carbs at the doughnut shop on Sixth. This shop was new-agey in that it served whole-wheat fried cakes.

  He sucked in the Sunday morning air, smelling a cedar hedge as he ran past it, then an old man’s cigar smoke, then hot ham grease from a diner. He thought about what to pack for a trip he was planning to make to Nicholas Polen’s house and kennel in Canada.

  Usually he carried toys on trips, because he liked them, and because they’re useful for breaking tension with anyone, not just children.

  He liked to fling a kite up while doing informal surveillance, because people saw the kite but not you. He liked wind-up toys that walked or rolled. He liked yo-yos and superballs. When he was a boy, his uncle had given him a rock-hard black sphere from his garage and said it was an original Super Ball. After playing with it for a few minutes, he figured out how to spin it into a wall to make it rebound to the floor and then accelerate back into the wall by itself. That ball was as close to a magic object as anything.

  He hated batteries.

  He liked toys made of metal—gyroscopes and jumping discs and wire puzzles. The older he got, the more he understood toys.

  This trip was going to be a bit different, and he would need to do some shopping.

  He reached the railroad tracks at the river and turned north, leaving what little traffic there was behind him. He slipped through a break in an Amtrak fence and pounded along on the gravel, watching two gulls fighting over a broken green melon on the opposite embankment.

  Even this sluggish urban stream smelled—well, good. River water had an or
ganic, fresh odor that reminded him of growing things. He skipped over the tracks and ran just above the channel’s sloping concrete wall. No rain had fallen in weeks; the river still flowed, less than a foot deep, around the usual junk—tires and chicken buckets and shopping carts.

  Oddly, he heard a vehicle gunning its engine directly behind him. He had left the roadway five minutes ago. The vehicle must have gotten into the rail yard from a level crossing somewhere behind. The engine came on quick and hard, tires bit into the gravel, and his ears told him he had time either to turn and see the vehicle before it struck him, or jump for it.

  He flung himself into space.

  Peripherally, he saw a clunker of a beige sedan flash past, motor screaming.

  Knowing how to fall, he tucked his body, shut his eyes, and tumbled, trying for an angled descent. The vehicle’s roar faded sharply as he rolled down the sloping concrete embankment. He felt the serial jolts of the fall as well as the ugly sensation of his bare arms and legs rolling over warm grit. His body came to a stop at the water’s edge. One arm splashed into it.

  He was OK except for feeling like somebody’d taken a sledgehammer to each of his joints.

  “Ohh.”

  He heard a low snarl.

  He opened his eyes.

  There were twelve or fifteen of them, a few facing him in a line, the rest mixing behind. One near him was three-legged and looked to be mostly spaniel, a larger one was mottled, like an ash-bin Dalmatian, but its head was a shepherd’s. The dog that had snarled was a sizable burnt-shit-colored Rottweiler with a faceful of scars. It snarled again.

  Slowly, he sat up. His arms and legs were shining with sweat and stuck over with dirt and ants, but they worked all right. Both of his elbows and one knee were bloody, but that was just the skin. His head was OK.

  He looked up to the top of the embankment. The car was gone. He would’ve needed only a glimpse of the license plate to remember it, but he hadn’t gotten it. Well, well. A long time had passed since someone had tried to run him over, and in that case it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, involving a kicked-in motel room door, a Polaroid, and a guy who was having sex with a stripper instead of working late.

  But this was certainly different, quite different.

  The Rottweiler advanced, braced his front legs, and growled, baring its teeth. The other dogs in the lineup began to growl in their throats. Those that were moving wove in smooth unison through the brush that had sprouted in the dirt bars along the river bottom.

  Rowe had to get up. The leader would challenge him, but there was nothing else to do.

  He moved into a crouch.

  The blood dripped from his elbows and knee, and he knew they could smell it. He could not outrun the pack through the brush along the riverbed. He had to climb the concrete embankment, but they’d attack him as soon as he turned his back. The leader was showing aggression, and Rowe had heard of this feral pack.

  The dogs looked as if they’d been whelped in eat-or-be-eaten Mexican junkyards. Their eyes were intent, their bodies lean, except for the heavy-bellied Rottweiler.

  The breeze shifted, and then he smelled them, rank with musk and sharp with stink.

  He swallowed.

  If they attacked, he might be able to vanquish the leader and escape at the cost of a few chunks out of him. Or they might take him down. How hungry were they? How bored this morning? How unified as a pack?

  He knew they’d defeated the efforts of the city to live-trap them. Wary of people and people-smell, they hid away except when they thought they could score something. And he had invaded their morning’s lair.

  He looked up again to the channel of blue sky. No one was around; the tracks stretched empty. Cars swooshed over the Main Street bridge in the distance.

  Here in the middle of a city of four million people, he had plunged into the wildest, loneliest, most savage place he’d ever entered, including the exercise yard at Folsom.

  He knew the pack did not force battles they couldn’t win. Why hadn’t some vigilante with a rifle come along and wiped them out? Well, what’s the point, he thought, as soon as you dropped the leader, the rest would vanish, only to regroup later.

  The Rottweiler snarled and inched closer, forelegs low, foam dripping from its jaws, its bulging black eyes locked on Rowe.

  Rowe took a full breath and let it out. Then he did the only reasonable thing.

  He attacked.

  He let out a piercing scream and lunged, fists up. The dog sprang.

  Rowe met it with his fists, and he concentrated only on the dog’s jaws. He pounded its snout as fast and hard as he could, left-right-left-right, punching from his shoulders, driving with his legs. He could not allow the dog one shred of purchase on him, because once a Rottweiler latches on to you, you’re toast. Once he had seen what a Rottweiler had done to a human leg. The inmate at Folsom who had sustained the injury, years back, took pride in his calf muscle that looked like a shark had eaten most of it.

  Rowe did not try to protect his belly and groin from the dog’s thrashing legs, he did not think about the other dogs who could circle behind him and snap through his hamstrings, because he knew he had to attack the lethal part of the emperor dog, and devil take the rest.

  His knuckles tore open on the creature’s teeth; the dog’s lips showed blood too, and still it attacked. He knocked it off balance, and as it gathered itself to strike again, the Dalmatian-shepherd darted behind him. He screamed at it, and it cowered back, uncertain.

  The lead dog leaped again, and this time Rowe took a bigger risk. He flexed his knees, raised his elbow, and aimed it to meet the dog’s throat. If he miscalculated, the dog’s fangs would be right in his face.

  But he didn’t miss. Against the full force of his body, the dog’s neck felt as hard as a fencepost, but at the last millisecond it seemed to yield just a little.

  The dog fell back with a yelp of pain.

  “Yeah,” grunted Rowe.

  It stared at him as if trying to remember something. The other dogs watched in stunned silence.

  Rowe stood, hands on hips, panting.

  The dog turned, and the sight of its stinking bob-tailed butt running away from him was the prettiest thing Rowe had seen all morning.

  _____

  I no longer wanted breakfast.

  It was time to consult Gramma Gladys.

  I drove my Honda down to Santa Monica and headed west, the morning sun at my back, gold-washing every building and tree. Half-empty streets all the way to Beverly Hills. If you want a clear path to anywhere in L.A., pick early Sunday morning. Everybody’s at church. Haha.

  I pulled into the empty parking lot on the west side of Rodeo at Santa Monica. All the boutiques still slept. I parked overlooking the intersection.

  I rolled down my window.

  “Gramma?”

  I waited.

  After a minute a bus honked, and I began to feel the spirit of my dead but still wonderful grandmother, who’d clawed her way out of poverty, loved fancy clothes, and would have gone mad for Rodeo Drive had she ever seen it, which she hadn’t, as her whole life long she never left central Wisconsin.

  I loved her the more knowing she would have loved the spectacle of Rodeo as much as the shopping itself: the hordes of tourists dressed like toddlers in their shorts and sneakers taking pictures, so openly fascinated by the stores and the customers actually buying Dior and Hermes and Baccarat. You can see them trying with heartbreaking frankness to understand, to grasp, a fellow creature with the means to buy a pair of yellow leather pants with mauve insets at the hips and crotch for fourteen hundred dollars, and the will to do it.

  Gramma Gladys, dead eleven years now, would have gone for Chanel and Halston if she’d had the dough, for sure.

  It was inexplicable, this certainty of mine that she was there and had picked this place to commune with me. I’d first sensed it when I was facing the fact that I had to leave Jeff. I’d been so upset, so needing of advice and comfort, and I
’d felt so alone, trying to hide a black eye with makeup and carrying on with it because I hadn’t wanted to admit I’d made a terrible mistake.

  The only good thing that came out of that marriage was Petey. Gramma Gladys had listened and given me good advice then and ever since.

  Now, this distressing Sunday morning, I began. “Gramma, there’s this woman and her grandson. Someone’s after them. This woman, Amaryllis, she helps poor people, and everybody loves her, except something’s going on, something bad, and I don’t understand what it is.”

  I sighed. The traffic fumes wafting from the intersection weren’t overpowering at this hour. Faint car exhaust is baseline air in these parts. Eau de L.A.

  Get to the point! I felt Gramma Gladys say. She’d never been the most patient person in the world.

  The growl of an approaching airliner gathered in the soundscape, a jet coming in to LAX from Austin or Paris or Louisville.

  “I think that now—they’re after me too. So what do I do? Fight? Run? If I stay, who do I fight? Gramma, I’m just a little white girl from Wisconsin, and these tribes in South Central—I’m not as tough as them.”

  They’re just people, goddamn it! They’re no tougher than you!

  “Amaryllis gives so much to others that I wonder if she bothers to look out for herself. You know. Which can be dangerous, and which I certainly know something about.” I realized I was on to something. “Everybody says they love her, Gramma. They love her like God—with plenty of fear mixed in! But I don’t know if anybody really knows her.”

  The jet plane’s roar pulsed in the atmosphere.

  Go back! I felt Gramma Gladys say. If you care so much, go there. Stand and fight. Never run!

  “But what do I do?”

  Just go there. You’ll see what to do.

  “Just be myself, then?”

  No! Don’t be yourself!

  “Gramma, what do you mean, don’t be myself?” But it never did any good asking her to clarify.

  I felt her spirit recede.

  “‘Bye, Gramma. Thanks.”

  Chapter 11 – Heroes in Tight Places