Cal was about five feet four with a shaved, black, bullet head, and Mighty Mouse muscles. He was not a guy anybody took lightly.
When I didn't answer, he said, 'Hey, Shane, I want you out of here, now. Did you see that circus out front? You need to be invisible.'
'Lemme pick up my briefcase and I'll get lost.'
I pushed past him and got to my cubicle. There was a message slip in Cal's scrawled handwriting in the center of my desk saying that Dr. Lexington had called yesterday, along with the yellow sheets on Stacy and Lou Maluga that I'd requested. There was also a sealed envelope from ESD waiting in Sally's In-basket. My desk was a clutter. She hadn't used hers yet, so it was without a scrap of personal paraphernalia. I snatched up the ESD package without opening it and turned to leave. As I did, my cell phone rang and with it, my heart froze. Something new on Alexa?
But it wasn't the hospital. It was Rosey.
'Hey, Shane, I think we may have a line on this Bodine character.'
'Where are you?'
'Meet us at Pepi's Mexican Diner on the corner of Lucas Avenue and Emerald Street in Echo Park?'
'Now?'
'This place is a grease pit. You wait too long, we'll all be in the can, fighting for toilets.'
I ran to my car and sped out of the underground garage. All the way there I wondered what they'd found in Echo Park. Suddenly it hit me. If you were so down and out that you had no options left, if you were willing to sleep in a cave with rats the size of house cats, if you could endure the damp reek of the ungodly, then you would go to the old Belmont Tunnel near the corner of Lucas Avenue and Emerald Street.
That abandoned subway tunnel was the lowest rung on the human ladder. The last stop for lost souls in L. A.
Chapter 25
They were sitting out front of a small taco stand under a Cinzano umbrella which was liberally dappled with pigeon droppings. Four tough-looking black guys in Polo shirts, wind-breakers, and jeans. I spotted Dario and Rosey. The other two, I didn't know. I pulled up to the curb and got out. They were all eating tacos and drinking Cokes out of paper cups.
'Shane, this is Lawrence Fischer from West Bureau Vice,' Rosey said as I approached and all four stood. I shook hands with Fischer, a skinny undercover cop who was obviously working street strays and dope mokes because he wore long, braided hair, beads, and had arm tats. 'And this monster with bolts through his neck is Adrian Young. Known in South Central as Young Frankenstein.'
Adrian Young shook my hand, popping two knuckles in the process. He was tall and square, and looked hard as a hickory.
'These guys are also in Oscar Joel Bryant,' Rosey said.
'Thanks for helping,' I replied. 'You think Bodine's in the Belmont Tunnel?'
'Yeah, maybe,' Dario said. 'Some of his housing associates finally copped to assaulting him. They caught him stealing a bicycle and dusted him up. That was yesterday. Afterwards, they think he might a crawled in there.'
I sighed. 'If we're going into that sink hole, we're gonna need flashlights.'
'And oxygen tanks,' Adrian Young said. 'It stinks in there.'
'It ain't gonna get any sweeter smellin' while we're standin' around talking about it,' Rosey said.
Everyone got a black Mag light out of their car and joined me in front of the taco stand. Then we walked five abreast down Lucas Avenue toward the decommissioned tunnel.
The old, boarded-up Pacific Electric Station sat in front of the concrete-faced tunnel entrance. The abandoned terminal was a big, two-story, concrete box with plywood-covered windows and a cathedral-sized, metal door. Over the decades, the building had become a living canvas. There was almost no tagging on the big facade. Most of the decoration had been done by aerosol artists. Dragons adorned the walls in bright colors. Some guy with a lot of leftover turquoise paint had rollered the top third of the building all the way across creating a cornice effect, giving the structure a strange art nuevo look. A few hundred yards beyond this colorful concrete box loomed the tunnel entrance itself: a large gaping arch cut into the Echo Park hillside.
The electric Red Car had been an early attempt at rapid transit in Los Angeles that had lasted from the mid- twenties to the mid-fifties. The Pacific Electric subway tunnel had originally been dug as a shortcut for trolleys going from downtown L. A. to Hollywood or the San Fernando Valley. It had become a victim of the gradual dismantling of the 1,100-mile rail system as freeways took over. Eventually, the electric Red Cars went the way of the snap-brim fedora. The tunnel was used temporarily for city storage, until 1967 when the section between Figueroa and Flower Streets was filled in to pour the massive foundation for the Bonaventure Hotel. The existing tunnel and tracks now went into the hills only for about a mile before they abruptly ended at a concrete wall. Over the years I'd fished several dead bodies out of that miserable hole in the hill. It was the most dismal place I'd ever been. Once a year the County would come out and plow the reeking gunk and human refuse out of the cave and repair the broken- down chain-link fence that attempted to block the entrance. Twenty minutes after they were gone somebody would cut it open again and the cycle would begin anew.
As we neared the mouth of the tunnel, I began to pick up the sour sweet stench coming from inside. Wounded men and animals crawled in here for refuge and often to die. Homeless people cooked food or drugs over newspaper fires, slept in the tunnel's* dank confines, and defecated in the slight indentations where the red car tracks used to be. Their old cooking fires had blackened the walls while the spirits of the long dead seemed to hover in every crack and crevice.
'Welcome to Paradise,' Rosey said, as we switched on Mag lights and began the gruesome trek down the bleak corridor.
Before we were a hundred yards in, a pair of feral eyes reflected in the light of my flashlight beam. Huge rats, known by tunnel dwellers as track rabbits, scurried away from us in the dark. They were ugly rodents that hunted in the dark. Anything they could digest, they tried to eat, even crouching in packs to nibble the fingertips of blitzed-out bums in a drug haze. But in this desperate place the tables could quickly turn. The tormented men and women would sometimes trap the rats and spear their rodent carcasses on sticks so they could be eaten, roasted over smoldering sections of the L. A. Times.
We found our first cardboard condo about four hundred yards in. The resident was a woman with stringy black hair and oozing track marks on both arms. She peered out of her crate like a ghoul in a horror flick.
'You know John Bodine?' I asked.
She had a different kind of deal in mind.
'You got five bucks I'll suck off all a you,' she whispered, her voice rasping.
It was hard to understand her because somebody had knocked out most of her teeth.
'We're looking for John Bodine,' I repeated.
'You don't want a blow job, then get the fuck away,' she said, slinking back into her box.
We shined our lights on down the tunnel and kept moving. The beams only penetrated fifty feet ahead. From beyond the reach of our flashlights, something growled at us. Man or beast, I couldn't tell. We were flushing people and animals up the tunnel ahead of us. They would sometimes hide in the cutbacks and then try to sneak back around. We shined our lights on them as they scurried past. Nobody looked like Long Gone John.
A half a mile in, we encountered a larger cardboard condo complex: six shipping crates huddled together where people lived. Most were currently empty, but two appeared occupied. I went over and shined my light into a box where there was a man lying inside. I reached in to wake him.
'Shit,' I said, as my hand touched his cold, stiff body.
'What is it?' Dario asked from behind me.
'This guy's dead.'
I could smell his rotting flesh. God only knew how long he'd been there. His next-door neighbor was snoring, so I woke him.
'Whatta you want?' he groaned at me.
