Bite Back 05 - Angel Stakes (39 page)

But the crowd in front of us wasn’t thinning or drifting away. It was getting younger, more hyped every step we took. Alex and I slowed down. Nothing like starting a fight by jostling someone.

And we were out of place and in a hurry. Bad combination.

Just one more minute!

But this wasn’t shoppers in front of us. It was packs of gangbangers squaring up against each other.

On our side: Five-deuce—African American, floppy forage hats and beards, chunky gold rings and hand signals.

On the other side: Conejos—Hispanic, shaved heads and sharp mustaches, full sleeve tats and big shirts with plenty of space for guns.

Most of the market stalls were gone. Three had simply been abandoned. Whatever it was they’d been selling had been stripped clean.

No cars moved along this block. A couple were parked at the side, doors open and loud music coming out, and the street itself was like two rivers touching that didn’t mix.

At the boundary in the middle, a couple of youngsters strutted, out to show how hard they were by insulting each other.

The good thing was that most eyes were on them.

We slowed to a walk, careful where we stepped. We needed to go single file. Alex thought about it and nodded at me to take the lead, so he could watch out for me. He kept close behind me.

The gangs swirled and simmered like broth in a cauldron. Up in front of us, a knot of muscle loomed on the sidewalk that we couldn’t edge around, and beyond them, I glimpsed biker leathers.

Crap.

It started with a nudge. One of the guys caught sight of us and elbowed his friend, who turned around with a mouthful of swearing that ran down to silence when he saw me.

“Oooh, eeee! Lookee. Now you talking, bro.”

He and his friend swaggered toward us, blocking the whole sidewalk. Deuce One and Deuce Two.

The pair of them were nothing. But they had another twenty gang members who’d find party time with me more interesting than their friend in the street, if they turned around.

We didn’t have time for this shit.

“Look, guys.” I put up my open hands. Might as well try talking. “We just need to get past.”

“What? Past us? That no friendly,” Deuce One said. He looked over my shoulder at Alex. “You wanna take a walk, man. This ain’t gonna involve you ’less you stick around. Then it gonna involve you bad.”

Deuce Two reached out and grabbed my arm, pulled me close and breathed beer down at me. He was very strong. And stupidly arrogant.

“I’m staying,” Alex said calmly.

“You worry ’bout your girl?” Deuce One said. “You should, she ain’t gonna wanna come back t’you, by time we finish.”

Alex didn’t waste energy responding. I could feel him gauging the right attack, waiting for me to lead.

I twisted. Deuce Two didn’t let go, but my movement took his arm away from his body. I punched, putting everything behind it, striking him in the nerve center on the inside of his upper arm.

His arm was paralyzed, and he didn’t have time even to shout.

Alex picked him up and threw him into the street, far enough that he crashed into the back of the young blood swearing and shouting at the Conejos.

Every girl should have a freakishly strong, six-two werewolf to toss the trash out of the way.

Deuce One’s mouth was opening and closing silently.

I punched him in the throat to make sure he kept silent for a good long time.

Luckily for us, out in the street, the young Conejo found he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get a boot in when his opponent fell at his feet.

Deuces surged forward and a path opened in front of us.

Except for one guy.

I guessed he had to be Deuce Three.

Big didn’t begin to cover him. There was an NFL defense coach somewhere in the land who was crying because he didn’t have this hulk in his line of scrimmage.

He was no drooling fool either.

Everyone else was distracted by the melee in the street, but not Deuce Three.

I really had no more time for this. I had the HK in my shoulder holster, but as soon as I took it out, someone would match it. I wanted to be away from here before the AK47s came out.

Deuce Three towered over me like a cliff face.

Then he blinked.

He knelt down like a crane collapsing, his knees making separate
thunk
sounds as they hit the ground. A look of utter bewilderment on his face faded to blankness. His eyes rolled up slowly and he pitched face-forward into the sidewalk.

Standing behind him, Billie spun a big adjustable wrench like a baton and slid it back into her boot.

“Come on. The shop’s just back there.”

We ran while the going was good and we were just in time; the steel shutters were rolling down, pulled by a guy inside.

I grabbed the bottom and lifted it back up, practically jerking the shop clerk off his feet.

He screamed at the sight of all the leather gear and a large, still pissed-off Alex crowding into his shop.

The store sold working clothes, recycled from the other half of the city, where execs bought clothes for a dirty job on the weekend and tossed them rather than clean them. It was narrow, and the racks of clothes crowded into the channel up the middle.

There was nowhere here for Tamanny to be hiding.

“We’re not here to screw with your store,” I said. “There was a girl here, in a red dress, just a few minutes ago. Where is she?”

“That little hoochie, she was up to something.” He’d gotten braver now that I’d told him we weren’t interested in turning the shop over. “Tryin’ to boost my stock. I know she ain’t got no green anyhow, so I chase her raggedy little ass right outta here.”

I grabbed him by his jacket and lifted him off his feet.

“She was trying to hide until we got here, not steal your stuff. Where did she go?”

“Out the door,” he said.

I threw him back into his clothing rack and we rushed back out.

The shutters slammed down behind us.

Where is she?

I had a growing sense we were too late. What had we done wrong? What had we missed?

The fighting down the block hadn’t really erupted. It was still more pushing and shoving than fists and boots. Tamanny was no street girl, but she was smart enough. She wouldn’t have gone that way.

I turned south. That way was deeper into the wrong area, but what choice did she have?

How had she gotten past Billie?

A gringa in a red dress? Billie would have noticed.

And then I saw the dress in the distance, coming out from another closing store.

I took off, sprinting down the street.

The others followed me without hesitation.

It’s not Tamanny.

I could see that from fifty yards away.

It was a girl, older than Tamanny, but about the same size. She was showing off the dress to an imaginary audience, holding it out to one side and sweeping it back and forth, making ballerina steps.

She spun around just as I got there, fell over and screamed at the sight of us rushing up.

“Sorry.” I held up my hand to calm her. “
No lastimarte
.”

She crawled backwards.

“Dónde vestido?”
I said, wanting to shake her. “Where did you get the dress?”

Billie was on my shoulder. A stream of Spanish and the girl shrugged.

“Don’ need no shouting at me. Got it from the crazy.” She jerked her jaw to show
down the street
.

“Which crazy?”

What had happened? Some hobo attacked Tamanny?

“Crazy girl. Crazy wan’ my traposo clothes. Give me her dress. Shit! Fix that tear, this dress is worth fitty least.”

No, Tamanny isn’t crazy. She’s a clever girl. She’s hiding.

“What did your clothes look like?”

“Gray pants an’ black Cali shirt.”

“She went that way?” I pointed south.

The girl nodded.

“We got to hurry,” I said to Billie. My gut was screaming at me.

“You got time. She ain’t gon’ run far.”

I looked back at the girl.

“I wanted her shoes,” she said. “Sweet, sweet heels, man. Offered to pay. No deal. She no go far in them.”

We ran on, Billie grabbing passers-by and asking if they’d seen a young girl in street clothes and red shoes.

All claimed she’d only just gone past a few minutes ago. Heading south. Until: “Down that way.”

An alley, next to a closed autoshop. Trash spilled out of dumpsters and no street light reached the depths.

We ran the length of it, trusting in our wolf eyes. It was short, squeezed between blank cinderblock walls covered in graffiti. The only occupant of the alley was an old hobo, who sat hugging his legs to his chest, cowering beside his shopping cart.

He had a hood pulled down over his face and his whole body was trembling.

I took Billie in case there was a problem with language, but I waved the others away.

I knelt down in front of him.

In the tiny gap between his hood and his knees I could see his eyes staring fearfully out at me.

“Hi. We’re not here to hurt anyone. Are you okay?”

“I’m good.” His voice was like leaves in a wind, rustling out from behind his knees. “Thanks. People don’t ask me that much, no more.”

“Did you see a young girl come down here? Gray pants, black shirt. Pretty girl.”

“Oh, yeah. Angel. Yeah, I saw her in the city too.” He giggled and his shoulders relaxed a bit. His face emerged from the barrier he’d made. “I saw lots of her. Lots and lots. So many! In the windows in the city. I’m glad they let them out. There was only one came here though. Why would they want to come here? Nothing here. Except me.”

He looked sad.

“This is not a girl called Angel, right?”

“I don’t know what she’s called. She’s pretty like an angel. But you mustn’t say that, ’cos the priest doesn’t like it.”

Okay. Pretty girl. Maybe Tamanny.
In windows?
Did he mean he saw her face on TVs in store windows? I could hope.

“Where did she go?”

“Heaven.”

Billie had had enough. She grunted and turned away.

But the hobo might have seen something, and that was more than we had from anywhere else. I was still hoping.

“Why do you say heaven?”

“Big black car came. You see them, you know someone is going to heaven.”

“A hearse?”

He frowned.

“No. Not like that. Big black car goes by. See yourself in the windows. Bang, bang, bang. Someone goes to heaven.” He raised one shaky hand and pointed across the alley. “She was there. By the dumpster. Sitting small like me. Big black car came. Then she wasn’t there. Gone to heaven.”

I ran across the street to where he’d pointed.

Someone had made a hideout from stinking trash bags, but it was empty.

Billie came up behind me.

“Yeah, maybe he saw her, and maybe he saw light reflecting on a puddle. I gotta say, he’s not all there, Amber.”

“You’re right. He’s not,” I said, looking down at the ground and feeling the world slipping away beneath me. “But Tamanny was here.”

I knelt down and Billie looked over my shoulder.

In the gutter was a shoe. A red, high-heeled shoe: pretty, impractical, and expensive.

No way she’d have left it, if she’d had a choice.

“Somehow, they found her,” I said.

It was hot in the police interview room. I’d asked for the temperature to be lowered, but their promises to do it were empty. All part of the procedure.

I’d failed. I’d told Tamanny she could trust me with her life, and now…

Forsythe had her. Whatever had happened or been about to happen in the club, he couldn’t let Tamanny tell her story. However difficult it might have been to prove, his TV show and reputation wouldn’t survive Tamanny making claims against him. On the other hand, if she just disappeared, that’d probably boost his ratings.

Would he sell her as a sex slave to his contacts outside of the country?

Or would he kill her?

How long did we have to save her?

Billie and the Belles were out searching, for whatever good that did. The surprise was, Billie had gotten the rest of the LA packs to join her. Even Pasadena.

And the Heights alpha had smooth-talked his way into the hotel and stolen some of Tamanny’s clothes, so now every werewolf in LA knew her scent.

Yelena and Elizabetta were trying to narrow the search by listing properties that had anything to do with Forsythe and his show. But there was just too much data and no information.

Which was why I was here, in the early hours of the morning. The police might have a lead we didn’t know about.

I was beginning to doubt my decision to come in.

I’d forgotten the name of the detective. He was fleshy. He enjoyed his donuts, by the look of him. Exercise—not so much. His face was going cherry with the heat. Sweat glistened on his forehead and stained his shirt.

I’d gone through the day’s events with him. Meeting Tamanny. The phone call. The race to South Central. Finding the shoe.

I’d gone through it four times.

“So, let me get this straight,” he said. “You allege you asked her to throw her cell away so she couldn’t be tracked.”

“That’s what I’ve told you four times already.”

He grunted and made a big show of flicking back methodically through his notebook. He’d written everything down. Four times.

I ignored him.

I’d asked to see Jefferson Reed and been told my request would be passed along.

Reed was already suspicious of Forsythe, and as a lieutenant in Major Crimes, he had the authority to act on our information. Elizabetta had tried calling him directly, but she hadn’t been able to reach him. She might still be trying for all I knew, but there was no sign of the man himself.

I hated being here.

I needed to find Tamanny. For her, but also for myself. Since Bian had forced me to realize what else had happened the night of my rape, the stuff I’d repressed, Fay Daniels had become a sort of symbol for me, for all the girls who must have suffered at Forsythe’s hands. If I could find her and help her, maybe that would be a step toward redemption for my failure to say anything twelve years ago. But Fay was in the wind. Tamanny was right here. Somewhere.

Maybe saving Tamanny would be my redemption.

“Yeah. You did say that,” the detective said eventually. “But here’s the thing: we can’t track it. The number exists, but we’ve got no idea who owns it, or where it is. There’s no proof it belongs to Miss Harper.”

“The battery’s probably dead. You can find the calls made from the cell. There’ll be a couple to my number and one to her mother. What does her mother say about that call?”

He ignored that. “You don’t even know if she threw it away. Anyway, what made you think someone else might be able to track it? It’s hard enough for us to get it tracked.”

I just stared at him.

He threw up his hands. “You come in here with this list of wild assertions and allegations against Mr. Forsythe and Judge Veringen, without any proof or reasoning, and you’re sitting there refusing to answer questions—”

“I’ve answered every question four times at least. How many do you need?”

Veringen, not Veringham as Tamanny heard it. Now I had something useful, at last.

“Ms. Farrell, you don’t seem to be taking this seriously.”

“I’m not taking it seriously? When a child is kidnapped, the first twenty-four hours are crucial. You know that. You’ve wasted four of them talking to me. I’d say you’re the one not taking it seriously, detective.”

Enough trying the legal path. Time to split. Maybe Judge Veringen would provide the key to this.

I got up.

“We haven’t been idle,” he was saying. “We’re conducting inquiries—”

Reed came in carrying a pale green folder.

“Thanks, Bob,” he said. “I’ll take it from here.”

Bob left without a word. Reed tossed the folder onto the desk, pushed the chair back and sat. He hitched the fabric of his pants and crossed his legs, leaning back in the seat.

I sat back down and he looked silently at me.

The temperature of the air started to fall. Air conditioning rather than the lieutenant’s expression.

One step forward and two back?

I waited him out. I was a graduate of hard stares training from people he couldn’t imagine.

“What are you doing in LA?” he said finally.

“I’m Head of Security for the Kingslund Group and we’re currently—”

He held up his hand.

“I know all that shit.” He flicked open the folder. “Army. Police. PI. Head of Security at Kingslund. Shit. Who are you really, Farrell? Homeland Security? Defense Intelligence Agency? CIA? FBI?”

“Head of Security at Kingslund.”

He slammed a hand on the table.

“Army records sealed. Police records sealed. Crazy shit goes down in Denver this year and guess what I find? The FBI has tried slapping a cover on that as well. I go hunting federal databases and ten minutes later I have a very polite call from Washington asking me the fucking nature of my interest.” He uncrossed his legs and leaned on the table. “What the hell does a business like Kingslund need with a Special Forces Head of Security? Oh. Wait. Don’t tell me. That’s sealed as well.”

He glared at me, breathing heavily.

“You are fucking me around, Farrell. You
and
your friends. I’ve had enough. You come in here and tell me you’re not with some federal agency. You come in like the fucking cavalry and destroy a covert operation that I have been running for two years. Two years,” he yelled. “Let me tell you something.” He started hammering his finger on the table for emphasis. “You better have a safety line all the way back into Washington, because if you don’t, whatever’s left when I finish with you is going to get reamed in the courts by Forsythe.”

I leaned over the table as well, so our faces were inches apart.

“But you know I’m right, don’t you, Lieutenant?” I said, quietly. “You
know
that sick bastard has kidnapped the girl. You
know
what’s likely to happen to her.”

“Yeah. That’s a real problem, and it’s one you caused.”

“If you think giving Tamanny my number at lunchtime is what caused Forsythe to set up whatever disgusting abuse he planned that evening—”

“No—”

“So, which would you prefer? Tamanny realizes it’s hopeless and goes along with it, or she gets out of the building because she thinks there might be one person who—”

“One person who manages to achieve precisely nothing, except blow my entire operation.”

“He’s guilty! We both know it.”

“So? I don’t know how they let you operate in Denver, but here we have something called the rule of law. And by that, you’re the one with the problems.”

We stopped.

We were both right, and it got us nowhere.

I slumped back. It was clear the police weren’t going to help. Just the opposite, in fact.

“You want to know how it looks to every other person in this building?” he said. “You want to know what Forsythe’s bitch of a fucking lawyer is saying right this minute out there?”

I didn’t want to know, but I had to. He was going to tell me anyway.

“You’re part of some kind of cult that kidnaps kids. You con your way into her hotel by posing as a journalist. You manage to persuade her to run away. You lure her down into South Central, which you conveniently make a police-free zone by instigating a potential riot and under cover of that, you abduct her. Then you have the balls to come out and blame her mother and her employer.”

His voice calmed down. He’d gotten it off his chest. Most of it.

“But you don’t believe that,” I said.

His lips narrowed, but there was something else in his look now.

“No. Shit, I believe everything you’ve said about the girl, but I’m compromised.”

“What does that mean?”

“I had to do what I could. I went to bat for you. Now we’re liable to be screwed for conducting an unsanctioned, unauthorized operation against prominent citizens. One of them, just for your information, plays golf with the mayor, and the other, for Christ’s sake, is a judge.”

As Elizabetta had said, Reed was a good man.

“But surely, it doesn’t matter if it was a personal investigation you started? It’s a legitimate case.”

“Not unless we have proof, which we don’t. And as for
personal
, Farrell, the stuff that the FBI hasn’t covered up is where you were at school, and who was there with you.”

He didn’t say any more. Didn’t ask questions that were fair for him to ask, in his position.

A
good
man.

We’d said as much as we could to each other.

“Am I under arrest?” I asked.

“No. Not yet.”

I got up.

“You’re going to have to leave it to us now, Farrell, or show your federal credentials.”

I nodded.

“I mean it,” he said. “That bitch of a lawyer, Spiegler, she will skin you alive and suspend
all
police activity on this inquiry if you give her so much as a suspicion of acting outside official sanction.”

“I hear you.”

But there were methods of operation that were outside the understanding of the courts.

If it was that or leave Tamanny in Forsythe’s hands, there was no contest.

Skylur—well, I’d have to handle that.

With Reed behind me, I walked down the corridor and emerged in the bull pen.

“Shit,” muttered Reed at the sight of a group arguing in the middle of the floor. There was no way around them.

From the conversation, I gathered the stone-faced man facing me was the Major Crimes captain. He was being berated by a woman with her back to me. She had short black hair, lawyer’s files and a slim gray business suit that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a fashion show. I gathered this was Forsythe’s lawyer, Spiegler, and she was trying to rip the Captain a new one.

He wasn’t backing down.

“I repeat, we’ve done nothing that’s not standard procedure in these cases,” he said. His eyes flicked to register Reed and me. From his expression, he was looking forward to passing the grief on.

And Forsythe. Standing there, hands in pockets, radiating aggrieved innocence.

My steps faltered.

I hadn’t seen him since that night. His hair was still carelessly floppy, the pose still elegant, the clothes so fashionable, but now I could see behind the façade. The hairspray, the posing practice in the mirror, the expensive tailor.

And the eyes. How could my seventeen-year-old self not have seen behind the eyes?

The shock of it all had me stumbling, coming to a halt.

I hated that he could have that effect on me. My guts were churning. My vision narrowed down. Wolf focused. Wolf smells. Wolf sounds.

Can’t lose it here. Can’t.

I didn’t dare move. If I moved, I would
change
, and I’d tear his throat out.

Close up! Close up! They’re yelling and the camera’s cold eye is staring right at me and Tanner’s grunting and shouting and thrusting.

I felt the wolf starting to rise.

No. No.

Spiegler turned.

Shock on shock.

A smirk on her face, she slapped an envelope against my chest and I caught it instinctively.

Injunction…legal suit…defamation…harassment… Words flowed past me.

My wolf twisted in confusion. She wanted to come out. She wanted to kill. She didn’t understand.
I
didn’t understand.

No. No.

Movement. Forsythe’s group had gone. I was being guided through the doors. More people. My House.

Outside.

Alex was murmuring soothing encouragement in one ear as Julie spoke in the other.

The Belles would be tailing Forsythe and Spiegler. At least two bikers per target, working in rotation, another team on standby. Julie had briefed the Were on how to run a tail using teams and handovers.