Authors: Gregg Hurwitz
The two dark SUVs screeching onto my street interrupted my momentary relief. Rucksack flapping on my back, I sped through the opposing alley, banged through someone's back gate, and tumbled out onto the street where I'd left my truck. There it was, parked a half block up by the intersection. A sedan was parked parallel to it, and
Sever was on his feet, peering through the passenger window. The tan, square face lifted, started to turn my way.
I pivoted abruptly and started walking away, but then I heard Sever shouting into his radio, so I dashed off again. Into the street, a bicyclist swerving and cursing at me, then across someone's terrace and through the lobby of a condo building. I spilled out the back into an alley, looking around wildly. The rev of unseen engines, eager and predatory. Two agents ran by the mouth of the alley, headed for my building. I was standing in full view, but they didn't happen to look over. I jogged the other way, rounded the corner toward Hacmed's store. Stepping out onto the street, I stared at the back of Sever's head. He was standing in the V of his open car door, gazing out at the street. I was so close I could see the white flesh beneath his freshly cropped hairline. I froze. Behind me, around the corner, I heard the crackle of approaching radios.
A dark form lunged at me from beside the Dumpster, hurling a ragged jacket over my head. I heard a muttered word--"Quiet"--and the jacket settled over my shoulders. The weight and stench were staggering. Homer threw an arm over my shoulders and tugged me, stumbling, right past Sever and out into the crosswalk. As Homer bellowed at me in a false slur, I looked at the asphalt, reducing the view of my head from behind. Just a
couple of tottering vagrants. I waited for a shout, a firm hand on my shoulder, pounding footsteps.
Behind me I heard the agents convening around Sever's car. Sever said, "Concentric circles. Let's
go."
Homer and I crossed the street, the jacket's hem drooping to my calves. I had a moment of weakkneed gratitude for my worn-out Pumas, a footwear accent to the slum attire. We stepped into the humid kitchen of a Chinese take-out joint, Homer nodding at the cooks, who looked up as one from their woks and greeted him with kind familiarity. Sidling past sizzling kung pao and vats of rice, we moved through a side door to the rear lot, with its three demarcated parking spots. We threaded between cars and trash barrels, moving west, staying off the main streets and finally winding up in a peaceful yard behind a church. A giant cardboard box, warped from water, sat by the rear door, filled with clothes.
I shrugged off Homer's aromatic coat and handed it back to him. Then I sat on the church's back step and put my hands on my knees. My arms were still shaking. I couldn't get the stench of Mack's burning flesh out of my nostrils.
"You probably just saved my life." My voice was
thin and cracked.
Homer said, "They'll be looking for a guy in a
white shirt," and pointed to the box.
I dug through. Christian-themed T-shirts. I
passed over Soak Up the Son and Tougher Than Nails, settling on the more ecumenical Forgive Us Our Trespasses, with its gray scrolled letters on black. As I pulled it on, a police siren rose to ear
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splitting pitch. On the far side of the fence, the vehicle whipped past, and then the sound faded. I had to consciously lower my shoulders.
Homer said, "I checked at the VA for you about finding guys who served with whatever infantry, but admin was unhelpful and stupid." A world
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weary nod. "The federal government in action."
"Thanks," I said. "I got the name I needed anyway."
"We'll head to the beach, wait there till night. The tunnels beneath PCH fall between patrol routes, so the cops never check 'em. Plus, they're a pain to get to, have to leave their patrol car. Or unmarked government sedan."
We traced an equally circuitous route, winding up north of San Vicente, where the streets dipped toward sea level. Homer rushed me down a run of stained concrete steps, and then we were safe in the tunnel, a few nervous beachgoers on their way back to their cars scurrying past the homeless. It was dank and otherworldly, our footfalls bouncing back as innumerable echoes. The stale air magnified the stench of urine. Homer coughed, the warped sound commanding through the tube until the wind across the far entrance sucked it away. He hooked my arm, and we stopped at the midway
point, sliding to sit, our backs to the curved wall. A ragged man wearing spectacle frames with no glass in them stumbled past, followed by a gaunt woman air-playing a stringless tennis racket like a fiddle. Several more colorless forms, rank with sweat and waste, negotiated and joked and played with their odd, broken props--a homeless circus. The breeze shifted, breathing fresh ocean air through the concrete throat. Pacific Coast Highway thrummed overhead, timpani on endless vibration. The circle of sky at the end glowed with the kinds of colors they name crayons after. It was a weirdly beautiful scene.
I turned to Homer and said, "Thanks for bringing me here."
He said, "Remember to tip the help."
Across from us a skinny, ancient man slumbered under a blanket of newspaper. A headline shouted, INCUMBENT SURGE--BILTON COMING ON STRONG. The consequences of what I carried in the rucksack sent my thoughts rippling outward until the implications grew too vast to comprehend. As the sun descended to the glittering plain of the Pacific, our shadows stretched grotesquely up the curved tunnel walls.
I tilted my head back until it tapped the sweaty concrete. Buried in a piss-drenched tunnel beneath a freeway, on the lam with a homeless alcoholic whose name was an alias. I'd been seen leaving the burning apartment by numerous eyewitnesses.
They could hang Mack's murder on me. They'd been ready to hang Frank's on me for less.
The shooter on the opposing roof could have killed me. But instead of launching the rocket into the bedroom at me, he'd shot it through the open window into the front room. Sever had been waiting in position to grab me. They were planning to sit me in an interrogation room like the one they'd put me in seventeen years ago and use their newfound leverage to squeeze me for answers. Or maybe they had a different plan to make me talk--a chair, restraints, and a gallon of gasoline.
I tugged the two pieces of Mack's key from my pocket. They lined up perfectly at a skinny part between teeth--no missing slivers. A stutter-beat of stress at my temples. I said, "We gotta go."
Homer's breath whistled through his nostrils. "Wait for dark," he said. "For dark." He patted my knee, an uncharacteristically avuncular gesture.
His head nodded forward, and I couldn't help thinking of Charlie's son. The dead weight in my hand as I'd pulled his face up to reveal the gash across his windpipe. Mack hadn't told them what they needed to know, and now they needed me to produce it.
At the tunnel's end, in the constricted, desperate glimpse of sky, the sun dropped from view. Silhouettes disappeared into blackness. All around, the rustle of humanity heightened, somehow connected, bodies rasping and murmuring in concert,
an elaborate windup toy. Among the faceless shadows, all fleeing, all fallen, I felt my eyes well and then tears spill. I kept my throat locked, a hand clamped over my mouth to stanch the dread. Not a sound, just trickles of moisture across my knuckles and an invisible fist in my throat. It wasn't fear, not exactly, but something denser and more awful. It was a cold kind of horror and the weight of a pressure I couldn't withstand.
I'd been kidding myself that I could ever enjoy a normal life. I needed to walk away while I was still on this side of dead, shoulder the rucksack of cash and hop a bus to another city, another state. Leave it all behind again. No matter how awful the prospect, I could start over. I'd done it before.
But then I'd never know. Then maybe no one would ever know.
It was dark now, the tunnel filled with grumbling and snoring. I glanced over and prodded Homer awake. "Can you get me to Montana Avenue without being seen?"
"Of course."
"How?"
"I'm the only person who's not a cleaning lady who actually rides public transportation in this town." He grumbled his way to his feet, then swayed a bit, rocked by malnutrition or boozy fallout. "And nobody sees anyone who's riding a bus in Los Angeles." He belched, pressing both hands to his enormous gut. "What's our business there?"
The jagged pieces of the post-office key poked at the inside of my fist. "I need to see a man about a lock."
Chapter
31
I caught Raz closing up. Stepping from the shadows, I clutched his arm and said, "Can you make a whole out of these halves?" I opened my fist and let the brass pieces glitter. "I'll pay you well."
His burly arms paused from securing the shop's front door. "You into some crazy shit, bro."
He pinched his dense mustache with a thumb and forefinger and led me back inside. I'd left Homer up the street outside the Duck Blind liquor store with a forty of King Cobra. He'd drunk it before I'd finished paying, and he'd elected to stay out back, digging through the trash cans in case anyone had left a swig in the bottom of a discarded bottle.
The shop was dark and cramped, and Raz kept the overheads off, out of respect for the illicit nature of the undertaking. Clicking on a boom
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mounted light, he held up the pieces of the key and made a big show of squinting at them. "This will be tough to remake for working key. I do not have seven-pin blank, bro. I told you I must order from Canada."
"I didn't know I'd need it."
"Yes." He sighed sadly. "Yes, they never know until they need. I will use other type. I will try. I will try for you." His wide fingers fussed over a tackle box filled with key blanks. "This is illegal, to copy this key."
"Yes," I said, "it is. But I need to get into that P.O. box."
"Like other P.O. box?"
"Yes."
"What is inside these very important P.O. boxes?"
"I don't know what's inside this one."
He pouched his lips and leaned forward, appraising me. "I help you, bro. But why? I don't know what you do with this key. Maybe I should better call cops on you."
He paused for dramatic effect. Then he clamped the key bit into the milling machine, adjusting screws, gripping handles. "But I don't. That's how it work. Like for my grandfather. First they have him turn in his hunting rifle. For war effort, bro."
He bent to the task, and the cutter head revved up and bit metal. Setting the second piece of the broken key, he did his best to align the angle. He spoke between blazes of sparks, short sentences offset by the shrieking cuts. "Then they tell him he and my grandmother will be relocated. For own good. Always for own good. They were escorted. Escorted, like one of your prom date. Across
Anatolia. On the way they rape the women. Starve many to death. No water. They die in ditches. The skin, like paper over the ribs."
He ran the key along the deburring brush. More sparks flew, creating an orb of light in the dark shop that illuminated his face, his wide, firm cheeks. He did not wear eye gear. For a moment he looked like a boy. He swept his fingers over the teeth of the new key. Then he shook his head, dissatisfied, threw the key into the trash, and started over with a fresh blank. "You know this story. It is same story. Crusades, world wars, Croatia, the Sudan, Iraq. This is mankind."
Again with the deburring brush, again the sparks flew, his face a ruddy portrait in focus. "On the march, a peasant woman hide my grandparents in chicken coop. Why? I do not know. If she was discovered, she would be killed. People help people sometime. They don't know why. But this is also mankind."
He sat back on his creaking stool, stuffing showing through the split vinyl at the sides. He looked at the latest key, his mouth twitching. "I am sorry, bro. Here I go on like windbag about help, but I cannot. I cannot make working key from pieces. Not with substitute key blank. I can order proper key blank from Canada."
"I don't have time to wait."
Raz mused on this weightily, chin set on the boulder of his fist so his cheek rose in wrinkles
beneath the eye. "I have idea. Way to get P.O. box open. One time only. You will have one chance. It is confidence game. You must commit. You can commit?"
I said, "I can commit."
I cased the block by the post office and found no one waiting, but given their technology, if they were hiding, I wouldn't see them. The bus stop was two blocks away, waiting to whisk me back into oblivion. I looped over to Homer, sitting on the curb in a strip-mall parking lot up the street.
"I'm gonna go. Meet me at the bus stop in five?"
He waved me off dismissively.
Tentatively, I approached the Sherman Oaks post office, moving behind trees and parked mail trucks. Every passing car put a charge into me. Finally a break in traffic. I slipped through the front doors and put my back to the wall. The lobby with the counters and registers was locked up, but the wing to the left with the banks of boxes was open as advertised, if dimly lit to discourage nighttime visitors.
A movement from outside caught my eye. Homer strolling boldly down the sidewalk. He shoved through the front doors, regarded me, and said, "What? I got bored."