She didn’t understand, couldn’t think straight. He was talking as if he knew her, as if they had a history.
Well, of course they did. He was the boogeyman, wasn’t he? The terror of her childhood, come back to haunt her again…
His hands were on her mouth now, opening her lips, her jaws. She was in a dentist’s chair and he was saying, “Wider, wider.” No, she wasn’t. She was on the floor in the hallway of her house, and the man with leather gloves was putting something into her mouth. It tasted like rubber. It was spongy yet hard, like a tennis ball-firm but hollow, squeezable. It filled her mouth and cut off her breath.
He’s suffocating me, she thought, but then she drew air through her nostrils, and felt her lungs expand. She could breathe. Only her mouth was blocked.
“I got so sick of your yackety-yak,” he said. “Should’ve done this years ago.”
Now there was pressure on her cheeks and against the back of her head. The pressure increased as a strap was drawn taut and secured with a buckle or a Velcro fastener.
She knew what this was. She had seen it used on mentally ill arrestees who tried to bite the cops who restrained them. It was called a throttle. In plainer language, a gag.
He’s got me bound and gagged, she realized, and those words- bound and gagged -registered with her in a way that her previous thoughts had not.
She was helpless. Couldn’t fight, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. He could do whatever he liked with her. Could kill her in her own house, and she couldn’t scream for help.
Fear flashed through her, and she flopped on the floor, arching her back, fighting against the tape and the gag, and trying to see what she was up against, but she couldn’t see, there was only darkness.
Open your eyes! she yelled inwardly, and then with a worse shock of fear she understood that they were open and had been open all along.
Blind? Was she blind? Or He slapped her. She felt the hard sting of his hand on her cheek.
“Why are you fighting me, you stupid bitch? This is only what you agreed to. You took a vow, remember? I guess it didn’t mean anything to you, but it meant something to me. Remember, C.J.?”
She didn’t remember. She didn’t know who he was or what he was talking about.
“Till death do us part,” he whispered. “That’s what you swore. Remember? ”
He was laughing, and the laughter, even more than his words, brought the memories back. The judge, the ceremony, the small handful of guests, the party afterward at a restaurant in Westwood. No honeymoon-they’d both been too busy for that.
Adam.
It was Adam.
His voice, his hands, his body next to hers.
Adam, not the boogeyman. Adam, not a random stranger.
A scream of anguished confusion welled in her throat and tried to force its way past the throttle in her mouth, but only a muffled squeal came out, overridden by his laughter, then silenced by his gloved hand on her face.
“Want another whiff, you bitch?”
The damp cloth, pushed into her face. She refused to inhale.
“Go on, breathe it in, C.J. We’ve got places to go.”
Past his voice, past the hammering of her heart, a new sound.
Her phone was ringing.
For some insane reason she caught herself thinking that calls always came at the most inconvenient times.
23
Tanner and Chang were the first officers on the scene of the 187-California Penal Code parlance for homicide. There were three victims, only one of whom was deceased. The other two lay on the sidewalk, bleeding out, while a pair of paramedics waited at a cautious distance. They wouldn’t move in until cops secured the scene.
“Come on, tube these guys. Give ’em plasma or something,” Tanner yelled.
While the EMTs did their work, Tanner and Chang cordoned off the dead body with a length of crime-scene ribbon strung from a utility pole to a fire hydrant.
“Another lovely evening in the City of Angels,” Chang observed.
Tanner just shook his head. Working this part of town had made him something of an expert in the unending rivalry between the Crips and the Bloods-or more precisely, between the ever-proliferating gang cliques, called “sets,” that allied themselves loosely with one gang or another.
This stretch of turf was controlled by a set named the Neighborhood Crips. The three gunshot victims were part of that set, an allegiance they advertised by wearing the Crips’ color-blue baseball caps, blue nylon jackets, blue T-shirts underneath. One of them, the dead one, even had blue socks and sneakers.
Tanner knew the dead kid’s name, or at least his gang alias-Peep. He wasn’t sure how the boy had gotten stuck with that nickname. Now he supposed he would never know.
The other two, the survivors, were unknown to him. Chang thought one guy, who looked like the oldest of the three, might have been a banger called Jarhead, but he wasn’t sure. The guy hadn’t been carrying any ID, and his face had been messed up so badly that his own mother would have had trouble identifying him.
There were plenty of witnesses, at least. While Chang guarded Peep’s body, Tanner got busy interviewing them. Mainly he just needed their names, phone numbers, and addresses; the homicide detectives could follow up. But he asked enough ancillary questions to get the picture.
The three vics had been walking out of a video store with a couple of rented tapes, which turned out, unsurprisingly, to be pornographic movies of no evident socially redeeming value. They were strolling south on Hooper Avenue and had almost reached the corner when the gunshots started. It was a drive-by, but descriptions of the shooters’ vehicle varied widely. All anyone could agree on was that it was dark in color.
Multiple rounds were fired at the three teenagers, who went down without returning fire. The shooters flashed gang signs identifying themselves as members of the Shotgun Pirus, a local Blood set. Then their car veered around the corner and disappeared. Somebody called 911, and that was that.
As Chang said, it was just another evening in LA.
Homicide detectives normally took their time about getting to a crime scene, but tonight the wait wasn’t long. It was 6:30 when an unmarked Chevy Caprice wheeled up to the cordon and two plainclothes officers got out. Tanner knew them. Their names were Hyannis and James, and they worked Homicide out of the East LA Sheriff’s station.
Hyannis was the friendlier of the two, and the better cop, as well. Tanner gave him the rundown on what had happened, which was hardly necessary, since Hyannis’s pale olive eyes had seen it all before.
“No tag number on the shooters’ vehicle?” the detective asked.
“Not even a definite make and model. One guy thought it might be a jacked-up Monte Carlo, but someone else said an El Camino.”
“Okay, Tanner. Thanks for holding down the fort. We can take it from here.” Hyannis looked at the body on the sidewalk. “You know this asshole?”
“Yeah. Peep, they called him. I don’t know his real name.”
“Randall Washington.” Hyannis sighed. “I ran him in a few times. Sent him to Kilpatrick once.” Camp Kilpatrick was a county juvenile facility in Calabasas. “Know how old he was?”
“No driver’s license in his wallet. I’m guessing fifteen.”
“Fourteen,” Hyannis said.
Tanner looked away. “Shit.”
“That’s one way to put it.” Hyannis shook his head wearily, having long ago resigned himself to the city’s ugliness. “Have a nice night.”
“Thanks. Hey, Frank?” Distantly it occurred to Tanner that he had never used the detective’s first name
