'I'm Shane Scully, detective three at Robbery-Homicide,' he said as the man turned and walked toward him. Shane dug out his badge and showed it to the man.
'I heard about you. You got a lot of ink last year.'
'Right.' Shane smiled, trying to disarm what seemed like a negative attitude. 'I notice all these Plain Janes here have a black dust of some kind all over them.'
The sergeant wrinkled his brow. 'You working for the motor pool now?'
'No,' Shane said. 'I was just wondering what it is.'
'It's burned jet fuel. These jets take off every minute or so, and they spew black exhaust. Gets all over the cars that live around here.'
'No kidding,' Shane said, looking at a plane that was just taking off, climbing out past the terminals, trailing dark smoke out of four huge engines. 'Got it,' he said. 'Thanks.'
Shane got into his car and pulled out of the parking lot. He didn't know what he was looking for, or even what he was doing. Maybe it was just the vast amount of free time he seemed to have on his hands these days. He drove aimlessly around the Los Angeles airport, picking neighboring streets, looking at cars parked at the curbs. The ones that looked like they'd been there for a while all had the same layer of black dust on their hoods, trunks, and windshields.
Then Shane saw the green-covered fence.
It was at the end of one of the streets near the airport and seemed to run for several blocks. He parked, got out, and moved up to the chain-link, which was covered with Highway Department green plastic so you couldn't see through it. He took out his pocketknife and cut a hole in the plastic.
Inside the fence was a vacant neighborhood, just like the one he was in, only there were no cars on the street, no tricycles or toys strewn around on the brown, unwatered lawns.
'Whatcha doin'?' he heard a voice behind him demand.
Shane turned and saw an old man with a long, string-bean neck. His Adam's apple looked like a ball bouncing up and down on the end of a rubber band when he spoke.
'What is this place?' Shane asked.
'Noise-abatement area,' the old man said. 'They condemned all a'them houses 'bout two years ago, 'cause they sit right at the end a'the runway and the people who lived in them was all the time complaining about jet noise. Not that it's any better out here,' he said. Then, as if to make his point, a jet took off, rising overhead, its engines screaming, trailing black exhaust.
'See,' the old man shouted over the racket.
'Shit, that's loud.'
'They say you get used t'it, but y'don't. Fuckin' drive y'nuts. Can't never sell these here houses 'cause only a deaf moron would buy 'em. We built here in the thirties, 'fore there was an airport.'
'So, nobody lives inside this fence?'
'Nope,' the old man said. 'Three square blocks, empty as a hooker's heart.'
'Nobody ever goes in there?' Shane asked.
'Once or twice, some cops. Showed us badges; said they was using the neighborhood to practice clearin' barricaded suspects house to house. Only seen 'em go in there a couple a'times.'
'Any way to get in?' Shane asked.
'There's a gate right up the street on the Florence side, but it's all padlocked.'
Shane nodded, thanked him, then got into his car and drove up the street to have a look.
What he found inside that fence defied all reason, as well as most of the core values he believed in.
Chapter 15
THE FENCE WAS topped by barbed wire.
Shane slid the picks into the heavy Yale padlock and flipped the tumblers. The padlock jumped, clicking open in his hand. He removed it from the chain that was wrapped around the center posts, then pushed the gate open enough to get through. He could see recent tire tracks in the black dust at his feet.
Shane reached down, withdrew the Beretta Mini-Cougar from his ankle holster, chambered it, and repacked it, tucking the weapon into a handier place in his belt. He moved into the deserted four-block neighborhood, then closed the gate behind him and relatched the lock the way he had found it.
Every two minutes a low-flying jet screamed overhead, shaking the ground and the houses with a deafening roar.
Shane steeled his nerves against the racket, slipping into the fenced noise-abatement area. A broken sign announced the street he was on as East Lannark Drive. He was moving slowly, cautiously from house to house, staying out of sight of the few unboarded windows, seeking cover behind chipped, unpainted garden walls or dead hedges. The effect of the neighborhood was startling: the houses had long been unattended, the lawns brown- bone-dry from lack of water; hedges and trees were skeletal and dusty; only a few hearty weeds clung stubbornly to rock-hard flowerbeds. The entire neighborhood was covered with the same fine black exhaust powder, turning everything dingy and gray.
Another jet screamed over him. Shane jumped in response to the shrieking roar of its four huge engines passing just a few hundred feet above his head.
Shane followed the tire tracks on the dusty pavement, running from hedge to house to wall, his senses quivering, his eyes darting back and forth, searching for any movement-any sign of life.
Could this be where Jody and his undercover unit are cribbing?
The tire tracks he was following turned right into one of the driveways. The house was a standard forties wood-frame, shake-roof number that had once been cheery yellow with white trim. But the yellow had faded to a dirty cream and the once-white trim was now gray and peeling. Shane sprinted across the dead grass to avoid leaving footprints on the dusty pavement; he pressed flat against the east wall of the house. Somebody had removed the plywood that covered the front bay window looking out onto East Lannark Drive.
Another jet took off and he jumped again, his frayed nerves unprepared for the ear-splitting roar. 'Shit,' he muttered. This was going to take a little getting used to.
Shane crept up to the locked front door. He could see that it had a shiny new brass dead bolt. He felt exposed and didn't want to stand there trying to open the lock, so he left the porch and continued down the driveway, ducking under the kitchen windows, past the locked garage door, pausing to look in through the dirty windows. Cobwebs dominated the empty space inside. Nobody had been in the garage for a long time.
He turned and moved silently up onto the back porch, where he found another new Yale lock. He pulled out his picks and in a few seconds had the back door open. Shane moved silently into the kitchen, closing the door softly behind him.
Another plane screamed overhead, rattling his nerves and the kitchen cabinets.
Late-morning sunlight streamed through dirty windows. A lone drinking glass was sitting in the sink next to a large nozzled bottle of Arrowhead water propped up on the counter. Shane tried the sink faucet, but as he had suspected, the water in the neighborhood had been turned off long ago. He picked up the glass, placing his fingers on the inside to preserve any fingerprints, and held it up to the window. He could see some latents smudged on the surface, so he put it down, reached into his pocket for an ever present detective Baggie, which all cops carry, then popped the glass inside, putting it in his jacket's flap pocket.
Shane crept slowly out of the kitchen. He could not hear any movement in the house but pulled the Mini- Cougar out of his belt as he slipped into the small dining room.
A large slab of plywood, which had probably come off the front window, was laid across two sawhorses, forming a crude dining-room table. It was littered with maps. Some were of a portion of South Central L. A.-the tangled narrow streets south of Manchester. In a separate box at the end of the table were half a dozen folded maps, all in Spanish. Shane picked them up. He couldn't determine what Latin American country the maps depicted. He hadn't heard of any of the cities. Somebody had written San Andresitos on one of the maps. Most of them
