Blood Flag: A Paul Madriani Novel (5 page)

The thought that she could get fired flashed through her brain for an instant, then was quickly extinguished. She knew they wouldn’t can her, not for this. Nonetheless, she didn’t like it.

Along with native good looks, Sofia was armed with a well-tuned antenna for assessing people. It wasn’t reserved for men, though they were often quicker to gauge and more susceptible, the same way you can sink a ship faster when its radar is blinded. Harry would give her a star for jerking the cop around on the phone. Paul might tell her to call him next time. But that would be the end of it.

They had reputations as tigers in the courtroom, but outside the railing, their claws were generally retracted. You could post placards on their desks, one reading “easygoing” and the other “forgiving.” It came with the turf. It’s tough to be an unremitting boss when you spend your days like a priest dispensing absolution to people accused of committing crimes. Sofia was a quick study. She already knew the secret pass phrase to the defense bar—“who among us has not committed sin?” The difficulty was in converting others to the cult: the jurors and the occasional judge. She knew that before she could open her mouth to say she was sorry, Paul and Harry would be churning excuses in their brains to forgive her. And it would have nothing to do with her gender or her looks. They would have done the same for the bearded lady in the circus.

At the moment, Sofia was the one kicking her own ass. She had volunteered to do something and had failed. If the dog was lost, she was the one who would have to tell Emma. She let them all down, the two partners, the people who gave her a chance and the client, a woman behind bars whose dog was now missing. She would have to make it up. Find the dog or burn every spare moment of her time looking for it.

With visions of her weekends spent stapling signs with Dingus’s picture over half of San Diego, she headed out of the bedroom and checked the bathroom across the hall. He wasn’t there. She stormed back down the hall toward the rear of the house. She flipped on the outside light once more, unlocked the door, and stepped out.

As soon as she did she heard the sound: barking, somewhere off in the distance. Then a reply, a deeper bark that seemed to come from another direction. Then quickly in succession, two more. Neighbors’ dogs. Then the first barked again. It sounded like a small dog. But it was too far away to be Dingus, unless, of course, he got out and ended up trapped somewhere else. She thought to herself, There must be at least a dozen dogs in the neighborhood. It was hard to tell which direction it came from.

She looked toward the wall on the far side of the yard. The top of the concrete blocks was obscured by a large wandering wisteria. It clung to several metal pipes protruding up through the center wall. The pipes were bent so that they leaned over the edge of the yard. Between them were strung heavy strands of galvanized wire, supporting the tangle of tentacles from the vine as they spread across the top of the wall. The concrete pad underneath was piled inches deep in dead, dry leaves as if it hadn’t been swept in recent memory.

Sofia stepped to the right, away from the mess at the foot of the wall, and walked around the corner of the house. There she found a closed wooden gate. She checked it. It was shut tight and latched. Even in five-inch heels she could just barely reach the toggle to the latch on the other side, over the top of the gate. She pressed on it, but it wouldn’t open. It was either frozen with rust or locked. She peeked through a crack in the wood. Beyond the gate was a concrete walk that led along the side of the house. It disappeared around the corner of the garage and out toward the street in front. If Dingus had gotten beyond the gate he was long gone. Again she heard the high-pitched bark. It seemed a little more distant now.

As soon as she turned at the corner of the house and headed toward the back door she noticed that the yap got louder. She realized that it was coming from somewhere beyond the concrete wall on the far side of the yard. Maybe there was a dog run on the other side. If so, there was no gate. At least none she could see.

She listened for moment. It barked again, then a crescendo of deeper and louder replies. No question it was a small dog. But it was too far away to be coming from just beyond the wall. Sofia took a tentative step in that direction, then another. She was three feet from the cinder-block wall, toes deep in dead leaves, when the dog barked again. It was then that she noticed the slight muffled echo, something almost tubular in the quality of the sound, or maybe subterranean, as if the dog were in a tunnel somewhere underground. If so, he might be closer than she thought.

SIX

S
ofia stepped back a few feet away from the wall and looked up toward the top of the cinder blocks. Through the tangle of wisteria and the dark night she could just barely make out the roofline of the house on the other side of the wall. As she peered through openings in the vegetation and followed the ridgeline of the roof in the direction of the street out in front, she realized that the structure beyond the wall didn’t belong to a neighbor at all. It was part of Emma’s house, an L-shaped wing that wrapped around behind the concrete wall. It connected to Brauer’s house on the far side of the kitchen.

The adrenaline rush had her moving at a run, clicking high heels over the dead leaves as she headed across the concrete toward the back door. A heel turned and Sofia went down onto the hard cement. She sprawled on one knee, both hands out in front of her to catch herself. Her cell phone skittered across the concrete like a hockey puck and slammed into the cement step leading to the back door.

Damn it! she thought. This was not what she needed.

Her knee burned, along with the palms of both hands, which had taken the brunt of the fall. She stayed on the ground for a long moment and waited for the pain to pass. Slowly she lifted her hands one at a time and checked her palms to see if they were bleeding. Except for a few abrasions, some ground-in dirt, and the broken nail from earlier in the day, they looked OK.

Sofia reached back and touched her knee. The second she did she felt it burn. Her fingers gently plied the raw skin. She knew that by tomorrow she would have a lump like an egg, with a bruise the color and size of a thundercloud to go with it. She looked back and saw her shoe, the high heel that turned on her foot. The heel had broken off. It was hanging from the shoe by a torn strip of fabric.

“Get what you pay for!” she whispered under her breath as she slowly began to rise. Sofia had bought the heels at a discount shop two days before her interview at the firm, thinking she got a deal. Instead what she got was a banged-up knee. It was all she could afford. She was staring at college loans and car payments, as well as rent with two friends in an apartment in the Gaslamp Quarter that she couldn’t afford without help.

The source of that help was a secret. No one knew, including her parents. They were not rich. They couldn’t assist her any longer, not financially. Her father lost his job as a bookkeeper during the recession. At fifty-eight he was working two part-time jobs trying to pay off the mortgage on their house, which they had borrowed against when he got fired.

Sofia and her roommates kidded each other that at some point when they were older and established, driving around in Mercedes and living in suburban splendor, they would look back at this threadbare period as “the best of times.”

None of them believed it. Sofia knew she couldn’t pay for law school without more help. Her life was in a holding pattern until things could be worked out.

She took a deep breath and stood there balanced on her good right leg, using the injured one as an outrigger to keep herself from falling over. She waited a few seconds and put her bare foot flat on the cold concrete. She took a few tentative steps, tested her banged-up knee, and hobbled on the single five-inch heel on her other foot. From what she could tell, nothing was broken.

Sofia took off the good shoe and picked up the broken one, the heel still dangling from the torn faux leather material. She walked toward her cell phone, which was lying screen-down on the cold concrete, and picked it up. The plastic protector on the back was nicked and scratched along one side. One corner was dented.

When she turned the phone over, her heart sank. Cracks spread like a spiderweb across the tempered glass screen protector. Under it there were several nicks and what looked like a hairlike crack in the screen itself. She wondered if the phone would work. She hit the button at the bottom and the backlit screen fired up. She held her thumb to the button until it read her print. The icons assembled under the fractured glass. She touched the screen with her finger and tried to flip the page to the next screen, but it didn’t respond. She was sick. Maybe they could fix it.

The phone was Sofia’s prized possession, that and her car. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t find the tears.

The dog barked.

Sofia turned and looked at the wall in the yard as if she wanted to kill the pooch. She knew it wasn’t to blame, but still. Instead, she slipped the shattered phone into her jacket pocket and stepped toward the door. Next to it was a trash can. She lifted the lid and dropped her shoes onto a couple of plastic bags of trash in the bottom of the can and put the lid back on. Dejected, she headed into the house.

Inside the kitchen Sofia headed straight toward the closed door next to the stove. She opened it and looked down the dimly lit hallway. There was another bathroom at the far end. The door was open. A window there allowed in some light.

She took out her phone and turned on the screen to add a little illumination, then headed down the hall. In front of the open bathroom door she turned right and saw another door, closed, about ten feet away. In the distance she could hear the dog yapping. Finally! About time, she thought. She opened the door. The barking got louder, but the dog didn’t come out.

“Where the hell are you?” She called him by name several times. “Here, Dingus!” All she got in reply was more barking. She flashed the light from her phone around the room. The dog continued to bark. If he was there he was hiding.

The room looked like a study, a man’s office. Sofia figured it must have belonged to Emma’s father. There was a rolltop desk against the far wall and an old swivel-back wooden chair in front of it with some filing cabinets against the side wall on the left. The window was covered by what looked like an old olive-drab army blanket, dusty with cobwebs clinging to it.

In her bare feet, Sofia was careful where she put them. She glimpsed a wooden yardstick next to the desk, shined the light on it, checked it for spiders, then picked it up. Using it like a sword she pulled the blanket off the curtain rod and suddenly the room came to life. Light from the house next door streamed in.

The room was a mess. There were papers all over the floor, dust and cobwebs everywhere she looked. The trash in the can next to the desk was overflowing. Against the wall behind her was a gun rack. It held several rifles, all of them covered with dust. Everywhere she looked was a filigree of spiderwebs. A map on the wall to her right looked like Western Europe. She recognized France. There was a door next to the map that was closed.

It had to be a closet, since there wasn’t room for much of anything else. Just beyond the room in that direction was the concrete wall outside. Next to the closed door, sitting on the floor, were two pairs of black leather boots, old and cracked, abandoned as if someone had forgotten to put them away, maybe fifty years ago. There was no doubt about it, the sound from the barking dog was coming from beyond the closed door.

Sofia kept her eyes on it as she drew near. She held the light from her phone toward the opening side of the door, reached over, turned the knob, and pulled. As it swung open she expected to get her first glimpse of the dog as he came rushing out. But he didn’t. The closet was empty except for a few items of clothing on hangers. They looked like assorted pieces of old military uniforms. She could hear the dog more clearly now. It was coming from somewhere down, beneath the floor. He couldn’t be more than a few feet away. The barking was incessant, almost constant. To Sofia it sounded like a dog who had gotten himself in trouble. Wherever he was, he wanted out.

She flashed the light toward the floor inside the closet and saw the inlaid brass finger pull. It was countersunk into the thick hardwood flooring. She ran the light across the floor to the other side of the closet and saw the brass hinges on the back of the trapdoor.

Sofia wasted no time. She stooped over, reached down, put her finger through the loop in the brass, and pulled. The door was heavy, three foot square, solid wood, three inches of oak flooring and subfloor. She jerked it with all her strength and slowly it started to come up.

It was a good thing Sofia didn’t have to lift it out. She could never have done it alone. It was all she could do to raise the door on its hinges and lean it against the wall on the other side of the closet.

As she looked down into the darkness she could hear the dog yapping wildly. She shined the light down into the yawning hole. Two gleaming eyes set into the black fuzzy face shined back at her. Dingus bounced and barked like a rubber ball all over the concrete floor in the cellar. Sofia didn’t have to be a dog interpreter to realize he was overjoyed that someone was finally coming to get him.

“How did you get down there?” She looked at the fixed ladder, almost vertical, straight up and down. There was no way the dog could have climbed down. The drop to the floor below was at least ten feet. The fall onto hard concrete would certainly have injured him. She assumed there had to be another way into the cellar, but Sofia wasn’t going to waste any more time looking for it.

“Give me a second.”

Now that the door was open and Dingus could see the way out, he wanted to be there immediately.

Sofia had to free up her hands to use the ladder. She slipped the phone back into her pocket. Then, holding on to the frame at the edge of the closet door, she carefully eased her foot into the gaping darkness beneath the floor. She felt with her foot until she found the top rung of the ladder, put her weight on it, and started down. The rest was easy. A few seconds later she was standing on the cold concrete down below, looking up at the square of light above her. Dingus jumped almost up to her waist. He pawed and scratched her legs as he barked.