When she came to she was lying face down on the ground. The man rolled her over on her back as if she were roadkill. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. No matter how hard she tried-even with all her might-she couldn’t scream. She couldn’t even remember where she was.
She looked up and thought that she saw a jet lowering its landing gear in the black sky. When she turned back, the fish hooks were still clinging to her sweater, the wires tangled up with her iPhone. She saw the man holding the gun, staring down at her with those dead eyes of his. He said something she couldn’t hear through her earbuds, but guessed from the look on his face that the news wasn’t very good. Then he pulled the trigger again and she felt the electricity making a second jagged pass through her wrecked body and charred nerves.
When her mind finally bobbed back to the surface, she could see the man throwing her purse into the Dumpster. When he picked her up and tossed her into the backseat of his SUV, she couldn’t feel anything. Not even the dread swimming through her stomach into her chest.
And then the SUV started chewing up gravel again. He was taking her away now. She looked through the window at the parking lot, but not much registered. After a moment she thought she saw someone hiding in the shadows between cars. If they were calling for help, she guessed that they were ten to fifteen minutes too late. But maybe it wasn’t anyone at all. Maybe it was just a hope or a dream or a phantom born from the electricity inside her body that deadened everything.
The man turned from the front seat and smiled at her, but didn’t say anything as he pulled out of the lot. Sensing that the truck was picking up speed, her eyes drifted back to the window. She could see that neon rooster on the roof. The Cock-a-doodle-do vanishing into the night. Another jet lowering its landing gear.
When the window went blank, she tried to turn off what was happening and concentrate on her iPhone. She tried to use the music to gather strength. If she could just pull herself together and get moving again, she’d dial 911 and call for help. Maybe even push the door open and jump the hell out.
She listened to the music and tried to focus. She knew that the singer’s legal name was Derek Williams, but he went by the number 187. His brother Bobby had changed his name to XYZ. She liked their voices. She liked them a lot. But about a mile or two down the road, 187 stopped singing, and so did XYZ. The track finally ended and the music ran out. .
2
Lena Gamble poured herself a fresh cup of coffee and walked it around the counter to the table in the living room. As she sat down, she took a first sip through the steam and gazed out the window at the city. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The piping hot brew tasted rich and strong, with just enough kick to revive her. She had taken the day off and had done nothing but read the newspaper and listen to music. It was the first day she had worked at doing nothing in a long time and she was reveling in the vibe.
The repairs to her house were finally complete, and she was celebrating. The roof that had blown away in the Santa Ana winds eight months ago had been replaced-the work guaranteed for fifteen years. The ground cover around the house had been pushed back twenty yards in case of another wildfire. And her brother’s furniture-and all of the evidence that went with it-had been removed and replaced. Yesterday the painters finally cleared out. All that remained was the smell of fresh paint and polyurethane. Nothing was left but silence. Emptiness. That feeling that she wished David was still with her. Still here to live and play his music in the small home they once shared on top of a hill overlooking Hollywood and the city of Los Angeles.
She turned and looked into the bedroom. Through the far window she could see the two-story garage on the other side of the drive. Just after moving in her brother had converted the space into a state-of-the-art recording studio, attributing the success of his band’s third CD to the acoustics. But that was all over now. The studio had been dark for nearly six years. As her eyes fell away from the building, she wondered about the word closure-who invented it and why. It was one of the few words that had no meaning for her. No definition or purpose.
Lena realized that the reason she was probably thinking about all this was because last night had been the first night she hadn’t slept in the upstairs guestroom since she closed the Romeo murder case and solved her brother’s homicide. It had taken an entire bottle of wine to block out the memories and knock her down. But she’d slept through the night in her new bed without dreams, or nightmares, or any of the ingredients that taunted her and seemed to go with the word closure.
She had been dealt the low card. She knew that. Her brother’s murder had been senseless. Something she would walk with for the rest of her days. But now it was time to turn the next card over. Time for a new table and another game. Time to fight the urge to cash out.
She pushed aside the newspaper, opened the slider, and stepped onto the porch. The winds had picked up, drying out the city after ten straight days of heavy rain. In spite of the sun raking the basin from downtown to the ocean, the temperature probably wouldn’t climb out of the forties. Still, the view from the top of the hill this afternoon was stunning. The entire city appeared clean and polished, glistening in a wet light. Although she didn’t heat the pool, vapor was rising out of the water and drifting toward the sun in a flush of color. She couldn’t keep her eyes off it. The peace. The illusion of peace in the city so many people wanted to call their home.
She wondered how long the illusion would last. There had already been 478 homicides in Los Angeles this year. With only eighteen days left on the calendar, she wondered if they’d beat five hundred and expected that they probably would. Over the past eleven months, the prison population had reached 173,000 and become the twenty-fourth largest city in the state. Bigger than Pasadena, even though it was a city without a name, a football game, or even its own parade.
She wondered if the illusion of peace had the power to last.
The heat clicked on, the newspaper sailing off the table from the outdoor breeze. Lena stepped inside and shut the slider. As she picked up the paper, she noticed a photograph she’d missed on page three of the California section. A mansion in Beverly Hills was under a foot of snow. After thinking about what happened in Malibu last week, she started reading the article and realized that the photograph wasn’t a result of the storm and hadn’t been doctored by a special-effects house in Burbank. The snow was part of the city’s grand illusion, manufactured and blown over the house and yard because the owner was rich and he wanted to give his kids a white Christmas. Instead of spending the holiday in the mountains, the house and yard would be sprayed with new snow every day at a cost of ten thousand dollars a pop. Lena did the math. The price tag for a white Christmas in Beverly Hills topped out at a cool $120,000. By all appearances, the illusion everyone knew as L.A., and the insanity that went with it, remained intact.
Her cell phone began ringing from its charger on the counter. Turning over the newspaper, she got up and checked the display before picking up. It was her supervisor, Lt. Frank Barrera from the Robbery-Homicide Division, calling on her day off.
“Good news, bad news,” he said. “You cool, Lena?”
“I’m good. What’s up? I can barely hear you.”
“Hold it a second. Let me close the door.”
Barrera was whispering. Lena spotted her coffee on the table and took another sip as she thought it over. Her supervisor’s desk sat out in the open at the head of the bureau floor. If he needed to close a door, that meant he was in the captain’s office and didn’t want to be overheard.