City of Fire (50 page)

HER heart sank as she looked out the window and didn’t see Novak in his car. Rhodes jammed on the brakes, blocking the Taurus in the carport. But Novak wasn’t around. He wasn’t waiting in the shadows to join them. He wasn’t hiding somewhere in the smoke until backup arrived. She ripped the door open, searching through the darkness for her partner.

Then three shots rang out, one after the next, shattering the windshield. She spotted her gun on the front seat and ducked behind the door, her eyes leaping up the steps to the house on top of the hill. The lights were out, but she had seen the muzzle flash from the last round coming from a window on the first floor. She grabbed her .45 and raised it, sending five rounds back. When she didn’t hear Rhodes returning fire, she swung her body around and saw him slumped over the steering wheel. Blood was spewing out of his left shoulder. His eyes were glassy.

She lunged across the seat, pulling him toward her and dragging him to the back of the car.

“Are you still here, Rhodes?” she whispered in a shaky voice. “You still with me?”

He nodded but couldn’t seem to move.

Lena opened his jacket and pulled his T-shirt away, eye-balling the wound. It was high, but the spread looked wide and nasty. Rhodes could have a punctured lung. Tearing his shirt away, she eased it over the wound, then transferred her hand with his.

“How’s your breathing?”

“Okay,” he managed. “I didn’t see it coming. No signs he ever used a gun.”

She heard the sirens in the distance, but knew that it was rough driving and response times were up. Help would be here, but it would take a while. She looked at Novak’s Crown Vic buried in the clouds, then back at the house.

“What have you got in the trunk?”

Rhodes gave her a look. “You can’t go in.”

“My partner’s inside. What’s in the trunk?”

“A Winchester. The keys are in my …”

She dug her hand into his jacket and fished out the keys. Then she cracked the trunk open and peered inside, locating the twelve-gauge shotgun and an ammo bag. When she spotted an assault light, she clipped it onto the barrel. Then she unzipped the ammo bag and tore open a box of shells, feeling a sense of comfort that they were high-brass magnums. Fellows had his needles. She had the magnums. One pull would break the motherfucker in half.

She glanced at Rhodes leaning against the bumper loosely holding his hand over the wound. His eyes were on her as she jammed five shells into the magazine, pumped the slide and added a sixth. That faraway look was gone, but she couldn’t get a read on him.

“You gonna be okay?” she said.

He nodded again, tried to say something, but stopped. No matter what she thought of him, he didn’t deserve this. From a jury maybe, or even from her. But not from Martin Fellows.

She dug into the bag for more shells and dumped an extra fistful into her pocket. After giving Rhodes a last look, she bolted up the steps to the front door. Then she lowered the shotgun and pulled the trigger, watching the three-and-a-half-inch magnum rip the locks out and blow a six-inch hole through the wood. The sound was deafening. The smell of burning gunpowder, somehow reassuring.

She kicked the door open, reaching along the wall until she found the light switch. As she gave the living room a hard look, she realized that there was no need to search the
house. Fellows had left a trail of blood on the white carpet. And for a split second, she remembered biting that chunk of meat out of his finger and spitting it on the floor.

But the memory vanished as she followed the blood drops with her eyes and spotted the broken glass on the other side of the room. Novak had entered from the window, she figured, and Fellows stopped when he found it. He must have spent some time there because a puddle had formed. Then the blood drops crossed the room to the kitchen.

That was the first set. But a second blood trail started from the kitchen and moved through the living room to the window by the front door. The same window the muzzle flash had come from. Lena checked the far wall and ceiling, noting the holes in the plaster from the five rounds she’d sent back. After a moment, her eyes flicked down to the white carpet and the blood trail leading back to the kitchen.

Martin Fellows was alive and well and somewhere on the other side of that wall.

She crossed the room. Everything quiet and hypersteady. As she reached the corner, she took a peek, following the blood on the tiles to the open basement door. The lights were on and she could see a vial and needle on the counter beside the sink. She tried to concentrate on slowing her mind down, her eyes rocking back to the basement door. Then she took a deep breath and started down the steps. One at a time until she reached the corner and found the basement clear.

She heard something. A jiggling sound. Close.

As her eyes cut a shaky path down the corridor, she could feel her heart pounding. Her nerves breaking through her skin. The corridor had been cast in concrete tubing and looked like a tunnel that extended well beyond the footprint of the house. A bend in the tube twenty-five yards off masked the tunnel’s direction and hid its end. Lights sealed within glass jars were strung along the right side, and she could see the roots from trees penetrating the walls and reaching out through the concrete as if they were fingers attached to hands. When she spotted the steel door on her left, she looked back at the roots swaying up and down in the breeze.

The room on the left was a bomb shelter. A remnant of the 1960s when a nuclear attack seemed imminent and bomb shelters were a status symbol that outclassed a Mercedes for the lowlifes who kept score. As she eyed the tunnel, she guessed that there was a second entrance somewhere on the property away from the house. A backup exit just in case the house blew down. Even worse, there was a good chance Fellows had used it to escape.

She checked the concrete floor, but the blood drops overlapped and she couldn’t find a pattern. As she stepped into the tunnel, that jiggling sound became louder and she realized that it was coming from the bomb shelter. She locked her eyes on the doorway, tickling the trigger with her finger. Then she peered around the corner and felt her stomach back up into her throat.

She didn’t want to look at it. She couldn’t, even though she knew that she had to. It was a vision from hell. A sign left behind by someone whose humanity had been ravaged and cut down.

Novak’s body was here.

He had been stripped and thrown on top of Harriet Wilson. His head was turned toward the door. His eyes remained open, but were lost in a lazy, thousand-yard stare. As she moved closer and touched his face, as she searched his skin for warmth but couldn’t find it, something deep inside her rattled and rolled. She looked at his outstretched hand. His wrist locked to the cot with a pair of handcuffs. When she realized that she was weeping, she tightened her grip on the shotgun and pushed back.

The mattress was vibrating. She stepped around a large pool of blood and looked down at Harriet Wilson. The woman was still alive, trembling beneath the weight of Novak’s dead body.

Lena took a deep breath and exhaled. She needed to keep cool. Find a way through the horror and punch out the other side.

She gave her partner’s body a push, rolling him off the girl toward the wall. From the amount of blood, she sensed
that he had been gutted, but kept her eyes pinned on Wilson. She ripped the tape away from her mouth. Spotting a set of keys on the floor, she unlocked the woman’s wrists and ankles. But it didn’t seem to make much difference. Harriet Wilson was frozen in terror. When the woman opened her mouth, nothing audible came out. She was in another place, two or three stations beyond words.

“Help is coming,” Lena said, stroking Wilson’s hair. “You need to hold on.”

Her voice broke and she forced herself out of the room. Raising the Winchester, she started down the tunnel. Shoot first, she told herself. Shoot fast.

The lights strung along the wall stopped as she reached the bend. Switching the assault light on, she plowed through the darkness. The roots eating through the concrete were thicker here. More horrific and harder to see through. As the tunnel straightened out, her eyes leaped forward to the steel ladder bolted into the concrete.

There was a hatch and it was open. Waves of smoke were streaming by, the wind howling above.

She wiped her sweaty hands on her jeans. Tightening her grip on the shotgun, she climbed up for a look at the madman’s escape route. But as her head popped through the ground, she wasn’t sure she could believe her eyes. It was a wooded landscape with a view of the Hollywood reservoir. And the hills were burning, the flames reflecting off the water and reaching two hundred feet into the sky. A vision of hell from another angle. L.A. was on fire.

She looked around but didn’t see any sign of Fellows. Just bands of firefighters on the other side of the water, backing away from a burning house.

Then something skimmed across her leg and she flinched. Before she could look down or even jump out, someone grabbed her ankles and pulled. In a split second she lost her grip on the shotgun and was falling through the air. Hitting the floor ten feet below with a devastating smack and covering her head. As her eyes cut through the gloom, she saw Martin Fellows walking toward her brandishing a long knife.

His massive chest was bare, his skin oiled. He was wearing a pair of skintight workout pants and high-top athletic shoes. And something was tied around his neck. As he moved closer, she got a better look. He was wearing a necklace. Two toes were attached, one old and one new. Lena’s first thought was Nikki Brant. The second toe had to belong to Harriet Wilson.

He swung the blade at her, grunting under the strain. When she managed to get to her feet, the giant burst forward and knocked her down. She wanted to scream, but didn’t. She kept her eyes on the blade swinging through the darkness. And as the tip smashed against the floor an inch from her face, she spotted the shotgun behind her.

Fellows wheeled the knife through the air, missing her body and bouncing it off the concrete again. She could hear voices shouting now. Footsteps pounding down the basement steps at the other end of the tunnel. When they caught the view from the door to the bomb shelter, they would stop just as she had. Just like Novak. Help wouldn’t reach her in time.

She grabbed the shotgun, pulling it into her body. As Fellows raised the knife, she slapped the balls of her feet against his stomach and pushed her legs out with all her strength. Then she swung the shotgun around, blinding the madman with xenon light.

He squinted at the brightness, arching back on his knees as if he had been hit with a punch. Scrambling to her feet, she stepped away and lowered the barrel. He got up and froze, shielding his light-sensitive eyes with his hands and glancing at the ladder. His escape route and a list of options that added up to zero. When he dug his toes into the floor and charged her, she wasn’t thinking about Fellows or even her own survival anymore. She was thinking about her partner. Her mentor. The man who had shown her the way. A cop who wanted to retire and spend the rest of his life fishing but was murdered when everything went to shit.

She pointed the muzzle at Fellows’s chest and pulled the trigger. Then she pumped the slide and pulled it again.

What was left of his body slammed against the wall and flopped onto the floor. As the noise radiated through the tunnel, Lena kicked his head with her boot. His eyes were open and it looked as if he was smiling at her. Pumping the slide, she felt the weight of the weapon in her hands and took another shot.

LENA entered the bureau floor and noticed the small package on her desk.

It had been five days since she’d lost her partner. And five days wasn’t long enough to forget. Every time she glanced at Novak’s empty chair, she lost her way and had to pick herself up again. The weight of the silence in the room, the absence of the usual banter in the unit, only deepened her loss and made everything worse.

She sat down and opened the package, revealing a box. When she figured out what it was, she pushed it away. The printer had finally delivered her business cards. She would never have to jot her name and number down on a generic card again.

More bad timing. The kind that played with the soul and cost $25.31.

She left the room without a word, rode the elevator down to the ground floor, and walked over to the Blackbird. Ignoring the recognition on the server’s face, she paid for her coffee and found an empty table on the other side of the room.

Lena Gamble had caught Romeo and gunned the madman down.

It was the kind of story the sixth floor liked. A story the new chief could offer the media and watch them eat it like candy. When she saw a video clip of herself on TV over the weekend, a shot of her face splashed with blood outside Fellows’s house and still holding the Winchester, she poured a stiff drink and spent the rest of the afternoon out by the pool.

The memory faded. Removing the lid from her coffee, she let the steam warm her face. After a first sip, she turned and gazed out the window. The view seemed more like the planet Venus than downtown L.A. The wildfires were still spewing tons of smoke into the air, shrouding the city in perpetual darkness. Although the sun was visible, it burned a dark red and appeared so powerless that she could look straight at it without squinting.