Devil Wind (Sammy Greene Mysteries) (3 page)

Her fingers brushed the simple gold cross she always wore around her neck. A gift from her father when she was his innocent child. Those days were long gone. Ironic that putana was one of the names her father had called her when he’d booted her out into the cold Boston winter ten years before for shacking up with a gangbanger fresh out of juvie. She’d certainly lived up to his expectations.

She’d run away with her boyfriend, all the way to the West Coast. The first few months on the road had almost been fun. At seventeen, sleeping in alleys, begging for handouts and food, and sharing good dope was an adventure. If they got cold or hungry, there was always a homeless shelter to spend the night. For the first time since her mother’s death, Ana had felt alive. And her father could rot in hell.

Until her boyfriend moved on and never came back.

Teddy was born in the hallway of L.A. County General Hospital seven months later, amidst the screams and cries of dozens of suffering people waiting for the few crumbs of help the overburdened facility could offer. She’d always blamed herself for his cerebral palsy. There had been no prenatal care on the streets. Ana had also never forgiven her father. If he hadn’t turned her away—

Well, she and Teddy were on their own, and she wasn’t going to go back to daddy on bended knee. She’d been waiting tables at a hip café, struggling to make the rent and pay for her son’s care when Washington pulled the plug on public assistance programs. With no other options, she finally surrendered Teddy to her social worker and foster care. That day her heart had been irreparably broken.

Drugs made a lot of the pain disappear—for a while. Another waitress, Sylvie, always seemed to have an unlimited stash of meth and coke to share. And somehow, plenty of dollars. Best of all, a Santa Monica apartment with an extra bed.

Only one move-in condition.“You have to meet Kaye.”

Six years later, Ana still knew Kaye only by her first name, though Henry Higgins could not have done a better job transforming the dark-haired waitress into a glamorous blonde. Then, like the serpent of Eden, the sophisticated middle-aged madam had slowly introduced Ana to a lifestyle she could merely dream of—glittering parties, beautiful clothes, champagne and caviar, top executives and movie stars—all to be hers if she agreed to barter her body for a taste of paradise.

In the end, a Faustian bargain. Very soon, she was hooked on crack and dependent on the money she made as an “escort” to maintain her supply. The sex was sometimes kinky, sometimes even violent, but never, ever satisfying. And, in the mornings, when she would finally fall into a fitful sleep, she’d see Teddy’s face crying for her in her dreams.

Teddy was the reason Ana had entered rehab last year. Without drugs, she might be able to save enough to quit the life and bring him home.

Home. Could she return? she mused now. Perhaps this time the old man wouldn’t throw her out. He’d actually responded somewhat politely to the e-mail she’d sent last spring. Said he was thinking about retiring from his university job and moving in with Aunt Eleni in Somerville. Maybe he’d softened up enough to accept a prodigal daughter’s visit. And a grandson he’d never known about.

The purse vibrating on her lap made Ana open her eyes. Fishing inside to shut off her phone, she realized that something wasn’t right. Instead of the single key she carried, her fingers found a large loop of keys. Opening the purse, she realized the problem. The keys, the wallet, the cell phone all belonged to Sylvie. Damn! The girls had bargained for identical silk bags in a little shop on Melrose last week. “Two for one,” Sylvie had chuckled, when she’d brought the price low enough. That was Sylvie. Always bargaining. In her haste to meet her mark, Sylvie must have grabbed the wrong bag. Yep, that was Ana’s own number calling with a text message—Sylvie must have figured out the mix-up, too.

“So how much is this going to cost me?”

Ana turned her attention back to business. “The usual. Three thousand.”

That number seemed exorbitant to her, even after all these years. Still, the gurgling sound she heard in response was unexpected. Kaye’s girls were the crème de la crème. Surely the price couldn’t be a surprise to the congressman. What was a surprise was the Mercedes beginning to weave on the fairly empty boulevard. Ana turned to see Prescott clutch his chest, his features contorted. He must be having a heart attack!

Ana seized the wheel and straightened the sedan’s frightening yaw. Sliding into Prescott’s lap in the driver’s seat, she intended to pull to the side of the road and call 911 from his car phone, but the street sign up ahead changed her plans. She jerked the wheel to the right and turned south onto Beverly Glen Boulevard. In less than a couple of minutes, she could make it to the ER at L.A. University Medical Center.

A few miles north, the dark, late model Bentley navigated up the serpentine Roscomare Road, buffeted by the strong winds that were bringing in ever-thickening smoke from the Bel Air hills above. Visibility diminished as black flecks of soot filled the air, settling on the windshield like a swarm of strange insects. Fahim heard the sounds of sirens following him up the canyon well before he saw the flashing red lights in his rearview mirror. Praying that they heralded the fire brigade and not pursuing police, he pulled over toward the far edge of the road and turned off his headlights.

Lucky Prescott had insisted he park next to the guesthouse. Now that his all-nighter had evolved into a journey of a different sort, the estate’s private drive had become an escape route allowing him to bypass the mob crowding the valet stand at the front gates.

The sedan shook as the fire engines skimmed by. Once the last truck had passed, Fahim maneuvered the Bentley a few hundred yards north until he could make out a gravel shoulder on the right.

Stopping his car again, he waited, listening for passing traffic, but only hearing distant echoes of retreating sirens and whistling winds. Shrouded by thickening smoke, he stepped from the car and opened the trunk. Eyes and nose watering, he lifted the bruised and battered body of the young blonde and dumped it in the brush next to the gravel. Judging by the dense fumes and growing heat, the fire couldn’t be too far away. He assumed the flames moving down the canyon would reach her body and consume it.

Gagging and coughing, Fahim raced back to close the trunk. In it, to his dismay, he spied the woman’s silk purse. Cursing, he threw it next to her feet and hopped back into the driver’s seat, gasping in filtered breaths of air through the Bentley’s vents as he fled the burning cloud of sparks.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dr. Reed Wyndham dabbed a little jelly on the ultrasound probe and slowly glided it around the teenager’s tattooed chest. “So tell me again how you got shot.”

“I was on this guy’s roof. I didn’t do nuthin’.” The boy threw a defiant look at the LAPD officer standing guard in the corner of the examination room.

“And why were you on the roof?” Reed asked as he studied the black-and-white moving picture of the patient’s beating heart on the monitor by his side.

“I was taking the TV.”

Reed pushed the probe a little more to the left. “His TV?”

“Yeh, but he didn’t need it.”

The ER resident who’d paged Reed down for a cardiac consult snickered. The cop just shook his head.

“I see.” After spending four years at Boston Medical, the last as chief resident in internal medicine, not much surprised the thirty-year-old doctor. He pointed to the monitor, and said to the ER physician, “No pericardial effusion.”

“What’s that mean?” the young man interjected.

“That means you were lucky this time, kid. The bullet missed your heart. Next time—” He stopped what he sensed would be a futile lecture, shut down the machine, and peeled off his latex gloves.

“He’s all yours,” Reed said to both the ER resident and the cop, knowing that once the kid was patched up, he’d be shipped to juvie for a few years of criminal training. Nothing more he could do, Reed appeased himself with a sigh. He was a cardiology fellow, not a psychiatrist.

Finished with his consult, Reed ambled over to the corner of the ER where a half dozen of the staff compared notes by the coffeepot. At one a.m., he didn’t think he could get back to sleep. Besides, odds were he’d just get paged again the minute he hit the pillow. He poured himself a cup of the lukewarm brew and grabbed a piece of leftover cruller.

“—and when I asked the guy to pull down his pants so I could see his rash, he hands me his cell phone with a picture of his penis!”

“And the rash?” another resident asked, laughing.

“Picture perfect chancre.”

“Full moons and Santa Anas.” Lou, the desk clerk, invoked it as if it were a curse. “Betcha the loons are out tonight.” He turned up the volume of the radio boombox he’d balanced precariously on a pile of charts.

“Go ahead Brenda from Venice. You’re on,” the announcer encouraged.

Reed froze. That seductive voice couldn’t totally mask the Brooklyn accent. Sammy!

“The homeless are dangerous. They’re aliens.”

“Now wait. Some may be undocumented immigrants, but—”

“No, they’re aliens. Real aliens. From space. This happens when Mercury’s in retrograde. They’re here watching us, trying to—”

Lowering the volume, Lou caught Reed’s astonished expression and chuckled, “See? Told you.”

“No, no.” He shook his head. “I know her.”

“The loon?”

“No, the DJ. She’s uh,” he hesitated, “an old friend. From back East.”

“Yeah, she’s new. Only been on a couple of months. Better than the deadhead they used to have on after midnight. Jim something. She’s pretty good. Knows how to stir things up.”

Reed didn’t think he said the words out loud. “That’s for sure.”

“I work for a living. If you ask me, the police should pick ’em all up and lock ’em in the hoosegow. That’s where they belong.” The caller clearly wasn’t the compassionate type.

“Even the children?” Sammy rolled her eyes and made a face at Jim. This was the third meshugganah nutcase in a row.

“Shouldn’t have children unless they can afford them’s what I think,” the caller continued. “Don’t want my taxes supporting somebody else’s kids.”

“You’re dating yourself,” Sammy said. “ ‘Greed is good’ went out with the eighties. We’re approaching a new millennium. And we’ve got a chance to make it the best ever.” She hung up the line and added, “Right after these capitalist messages.”

As the series of commercials began playing in her headphones, Sammy clicked off her air mic and turned on the intercom. “Hey, Jim, I thought you were supposed to be my screener.”

“It’s the winds, baby. Brings out all the crazies.”

“Swell.”

“Speaking of winds, Merry Christmas,” the producer pointed to the TV monitor beside Sammy, its orange glow casting an eerie light in the dark studio. “Looks like the hills are alive—”

The screen displayed a fiery inferno shot from a news helicopter hovering overhead. Horrified, Sammy watched the CNN reporter gesturing at the hillside behind her, the wind whipping long tendrils of hair around her beautiful face. Without sound, Sammy squinted to read the moving crawl under the pictures of the blaze. Where?

The caption on the crawl read Beverly Glen. How far that was from Canyon City, she had no idea. She’d only been in L.A. a few months. The myriad names of the hundreds of neighborhoods here that passed for a city still confused her. Hancock Park, Baldwin Park, Baldwin Hills, Beverly Hills. It would take years to become familiar with the hundreds of small towns that together made up this very sizeable metropolis.

Sammy suppressed a shudder as the camera panned the scene. Fanned by the winter winds, the blaze seemed to be spreading uncontrolled down a forested hill. Like dry kindling in a fireplace, a house nestled among the trees burst into a firestorm of sparks and was soon immolated under the intrusive lens of the helicopter cameras.

I hope they had time to get out.

Unlike Brian. She swallowed a sob at the memory of losing her old friend more than four years ago. The pain was no longer there every day, but when it returned, it was as potent as ever. The fire inside her college’s rickety radio station had trapped her talk-show engineer, burning him alive. His warm smile and loving soul would be scorched into her heart forever.

“Ten seconds,” Jim’s voice interrupted. “You okay?”

Nodding, she switched on her mic and began on cue, “We’re back, let’s talk to Bill from Bel Air. You’re not anywhere near the fires, are you?”

“Hi. Actually, yeah. The smoke’s pretty bad, so we’re getting out. But, that’s not why I called. We can’t get through to 911, and I need to tell somebody about the burned body we almost ran over on Roscomare Road.”

Ana tried deep breathing to quell the adrenaline surge that had fueled her maniacal drive to the hospital. Pulling up to the emergency room entrance, she jumped out of the Mercedes and ran into the lobby screaming, “He’s having a heart attack.” Then she watched, terrified, as a tall blonde doctor whose nametag read “Michelle Hunt, M.D.” and two nurses raced to the car and pulled the barely conscious congressman onto a gurney.

“He clutched his chest and just blacked out,” she explained, her voice trembling. Prescott’s color was no longer his ruddy hue, but a cadaverous ashen. “Is he dead?”

Intent on their tasks, no one bothered to answer. The gurney rolled into the triage area with Ana in tow. “BP one sixty over one ten, pulse one thirty,” a nurse called out. The doctor nodded, tossing her stethoscope back around her neck. “Heart sounds are faint,” she reported to a large-breasted nurse behind the triage desk, “rule out MI.”

When the doctor pushed Prescott through another set of doors, one of the nurses thrust a hand in Ana’s face. “Sorry, you can’t go back. Have a seat in the waiting area. We’ll call you as soon as your husband’s stable.”

Ana stood motionless for a long minute, dazed, and deaf to the world.

“Your car, miss?” the desk clerk repeated. “If it’s out here, you’ll have to park around the side.” He handed her a four by eight card. “Put this on the dashboard.”