The Sunset Prophecy (Love & Armageddon #1) (18 page)

23

Intersection

C
indy parked alongside the painted green curb in front of Logan’s apartment building.

Keelen called Logan one more time before stepping out of the car. She looked at Cindy with worried eyes.
“His voicemail again. It’s like he’s fallen off the face of the Earth.”

“
Don’t you have the keys to his place?”

“
Yeah, but I’ve never worked weekends and it would be awkward if I just showed up on a Saturday morning. What if he’s with that Eva chick again?”

“
Just knock on his door and say you forgot some work or something.”

“
I guess I can do that,” Keelen said.

Keelen stepped out of the car, closed the passenger door and stuck her head through the rolled
-down window. “Do what you need to do in the church, but that’s it. No need to go further. I’m telling you that there are some very angry people out there who want this book.”

Cindy rolled her eyes and whined,
“Fine, Mother. What are you going to do after you get a hold of Logan?”

“
I’ll probably head on to Matt’s gym and talk things over.”

“
Good luck.”

Keelen sighed,
“I know.”

Cindy rolled
up her window and drove north—taking the side streets toward Sunset Boulevard.

Keelen entered the building and
then into the elevator and wondered if Logan was home, actively avoiding his phone calls, or freelancing a revolution.

She stepped out of the elevator and walked up to the apartment. The bright orange welcome mat Logan had at his door was gone.

She knocked twice and paused.

“
It’s me. Keelen. I forgot something important on my desk. I’m coming in to get it.”

No answer.

Keelen pulled out her keys and inserted the gold Hello Kitty one into the keyhole. When she turned the knob, she heard the elevator doors open behind her. A short, dapper blonde girl with a pixyish grin emerged from inside the metal car.

“
Hello,” greeted Tracy.

“
Hi,” said Keelen, stiffed and leaning back against the door.

“
Is this Logan Drake’s apartment?”

Keelen gave a half
-nod and remembered that she was to guard Logan’s secrecy as well. “Um, who are you?”

“
I’m Tracy Klein, the art and culture contributor for
Estil
Magazine
,” she said, as she dug in her purse for one of her business cards. “Here, don’t worry, I’m legit.”

“
I’ll make sure he gets your card. He’s a couple of floors up. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to, um, feed my baby.”

“
Wait a minute,” Tracy said, as she narrowed her eyes. “I know you.”

“
No, you don’t.”

When
Tracy stared into Keelen’s distinctive blue eyes, she immediately recognized her from the viral video of Matt and Logan’s fight, as the girl screeching for peace at Perry’s.

“
You were in the middle of Matthew Nix’s meltdown last night.”

Keelen froze.

Tracy tilted her head and stared at the ground in deep concentration. “Hold on...”

“
What?”

She looked up and pointed her finger at Keelen.
“You screamed the name ‘Logan’ in the video.”

“
Okay, and?” said Keelen, slightly perturbed that she was now infamously cast as the screaming girl in Matt’s video.

“
Was Logan Drake there? Were you screaming Logan Drake’s name?”

“
Seriously, lady. I don’t have time for this, my baby needs me.”

“
Logan lives here, doesn’t he?”

“
No.”

“
That’s strange. Logan told me he lived here,” Tracy lied. She didn’t even have to bargain with Jack at Sotheby’s. The $5,000 Adam offered had been more than enough.

“
Did Logan really tell you he lived here?” Keelen asked, putting her hands on her hips.

“
Yes. Yes, he did. I promise, his location will be our little secret. A good journalist never gives up her sources. So, is he in there?”

Keelen paused.
“I’m his assistant. I doubt he would bypass me to set up an appointment, especially with someone who claims to know where he lives.”

“
Well, I’m here to give him something.”

“
Just give it to me and I’ll make sure he gets it.”

Tracy pulled two tickets from her black purse and handed them to Keelen.
“He’s our guest of honor for tomorrow’s fight. Front-row seats courtesy of the magazine’s editor, Adam Cagle.”

“
Kind of a last-minute gesture, don’t you think? I don’t think he’s gonna want to go.”

Tracy swallowed and then cleared her throat.
“Mr. Cagle and the magazine will make a $10,000 donation to the charity of Logan’s choice if he participates in the fight’s sponsored festivities.”

“
Really? Why would your magazine go all out for an amateur boxing match?”

Tracy shrugged.
“I don’t know, it’s my editor’s call.”

Keelen stared at the tickets and put them in her purse.
“Is there anything else you want?”

Tracy rubbed the nervous sweat from her palms and wiped them on the side of her slacks.
“No, that’s pretty much it. I would love to meet him. But this is really the only reason I came by. Just let him know that I think his work is revolutionary and I can’t wait to meet him if he does show up to tomorrow’s fight.”

Keelen flashed a polite smile.
“Good, I’ll let him know. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to...”

“
...take care of your baby?” winked Tracy.

Annoyed, Keelen curled her upper lip in a half
-smile and nodded her head. Tracy walked into the elevator and waved one more time before the doors closed.

Keelen turned around
, reinserted the key and turned the knob. The knob twisted a millimeter before locking up. She wiggled the key and tried again. The knob still wouldn’t turn.

“
Dammit!” she shouted.

Logan had changed the locks on the door. Keelen was
locked out of his apartment.

She texted Logan
:
Am I fired? Let me know, so I can move on.

She waited around the front of Logan
’s door for a minute, waiting to see if he would text her back. He never did. She had nowhere to go. Matt’s gym was a 10-minute bus ride away. She quickly stepped into the elevator and descended into the lobby. When the doors opened, she was greeted by a finely dressed, bald man in his mid-fifties with a tattooed neck. He flashed her a reptilian smile.

“
Hello,” he said, his voice airy, but with the hint of a rasp.

Keelen smiled and lowered her eyes. She hurriedly walked around the corner and saw the bus waiting at a red light. She didn
’t even have to sit on the bench. Within a minute, she was already on the bus and on the way to Matt’s gym.

Fisker made his way up to Logan
’s apartment. He knocked on Logan’s door.

“
Mr. Drake, this is agent Fisker with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Just like Keelen, he received no answer. He placed his hand on the door, closed his eyes and gauged the temperature inside Logan’s apartment.

He gripped the knob tightly and twisted it with brute strength, breaking the metal shafts and pins that held the insides of the knob together. He pushed through the door with an abrupt thrust of his shoulder.

Fisker’s eyes scanned the apartment as they eventually fixated on a living space emptied of its contents. The furniture was gone. The canvases were gone. The blood packets that had been categorized and organized by blood type and color were gone. All Logan had left behind was the dried blood on the floor near his workspace and a large white bed sheet with a blood-drawn message that hung on the living room wall:

I will show the way, the truth, and the life. No one goes to Adonai except through me. The harvest will not occur without revelation to all. For the purity of man is undeservedly blinded.
Death to corruption, death to greed, life for all.

Fisker scowled
and tore the sign off the wall and shredded the banner into fine slivers of fabric.

24

Protests and Passageways

S
he stared at the smog-free skies through her windshield as her Beetle followed a white plumber’s van. Traffic was brutal, as it usually was in the midafternoon. Cindy placed the mysterious ball on the dash. Whenever she made a turn, she watched it roll in a predetermined direction as if it contained a gyroscope. The metallic sphere behaved like an ancient GPS system as it reacted to the rod she dangled from the rearview mirror with string.

With much elation, Cindy spotted the adorned steeple of the Blessed Sacrament Church in the distance, towering over all the buildings on that particular stretch of Sunset Boulevard. Its thin iron cross displayed its iconic power like a beacon for the faithful.

Her eyes moved down from the Sunset skyline and glanced at the gaggle of hipsters who strolled on the sidewalks past the trendy secondhand stores and the burgeoning indie coffeehouse scene that didn’t include logos of polydactyl mermaids. From Echo Park on, the shops on Sunset changed from
panaderias
and
carnicerias
to co-ops and cupcakeries.

As traffic stopped, Cindy placed her hand on top of the large red book which partially stuck out of her black backpack,
quelling an urge to bond with her newest obsession. It was hot to the touch as it absorbed the sunlight through the passenger-side window.

Despite the light bei
ng green for half a minute, the traffic refused to flow. The cars behind her honked their horns. She stuck her head out the Beetle’s window and looked ahead. A parade of people marched toward the traffic, holding up signs and chanting. In front of her, a thick-necked man emerged from his white plumber’s van. She stepped out of the car and approached the plumber. Drivers behind her stepped out of their vehicles too.

“
What’s going on?”

“
I don’t know. But that’s an ass-load of people,” said the burly man. “They look damn pissed, too.”

The crowd stretched pa
st Highland and seemed to percolate all the way down through North La Brea. Without a doubt, it was the largest crowd Cindy had seen, and most likely, the largest crowd in city history.

Always a
sucker for subversiveness, Cindy was tempted to join in on the protest, but she had to get to the church. She turned around and faced the sea of cars behind her and begged the car next to her to back up a little so she cut through an alleyway next to an old bookstore. The driver glanced over his shoulder and reversed the car an inch away from hitting another car’s front bumper. Cindy gave a thankful wave of her hand, jumped back into her Beetle and willed her car through the improvised gap in traffic.

When she got to the end of the alley, traffic was jammed in every direction.
Cindy parked the car in an empty parking space behind the bookstore and walked the last few remaining blocks before reaching the church’s front steps.

The crowd spilled over onto the sidewalks. Cindy navigated the overwhelming mass of humanity with quiet pleasantries and surprising agility fueled by a sense of urgency.

The crowd chanted in slightly scattered unison,
“We shall not be deceived! We shall not be deceived! We know the truth!”

Cindy stopped in front of a news team interview
of a middle-aged woman with badly dyed scarlet hair and wearing a white jumpsuit.

“
He gave me the message. I was put in charge of giving the message to the world. We are being deceived. The young handsome man who did not appear in the video gave me the message,” said the woman, excitedly.

Upon hearing her revelation,
Cindy walked up to the lady and grabbed her arm. “Who gave you the message?” she asked.

The pretty brunette reporter with the plastic nose shoved Cindy away from the woman, with the help of the cameraman.

“Wait,” Cindy exclaimed. “I think I may know the man in the video.”

The reporter ignored Cindy
’s claims. There was too much mayhem surrounding the news team.

“
Wars are manufactured,” the woman said to the reporter. “Here’s the proof. Take it, I don’t care, I’ve made copies. It’s all over the internet. That’s how all these people joined in on the march. We are all connected. This beautiful young man is exposing all the lies. Evil people are making money off our backs, off the lives of our sons and daughters. He’s going to reveal even more truths. There is something much bigger than us happening.”

A heavyset woman wearing a ragged USC Trojans sweater, with mismatched jeans two sizes too small, screamed into the microphone.
“My son was killed in the desert. I no longer have my son, and for what? What have I gained out of this? I’m poorer now than I was when my son first joined the Marines. There is a huge hole in my heart. I want these men hanged,” she declared, in an East L.A. accent.

The scarlet-haired woman cut her off
. “No, we cannot hang these men. The young man who gave me this message expressed that we must seek the truth through peaceful means. Like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Son of God. Through love and knowledge, we shall overcome. Let truth sort them out. We must forgive.”

The
woman who claimed the loss of her son’s life hugged the scarlet-haired protester and began sobbing on her shoulder.

Resigned, Cindy continued walking furiously toward the church. The thought of Logan causing the upheaval that had poured out onto the streets of Los Angeles gnawed at her for a brief moment.

She dialed Keelen’s phone as she wiggle-waggled through the protest.

“
Kee, are you near a television?”

“
No, I’m on the bus on the way to Matt’s gym, why?”

“
There’s a huge protest on Sunset, like right now.”

“
Really? What are they protesting?”

“
I think it has to do with Logan—have you talked to him?”

“
I can’t reach him, he wasn’t at the apartment.”

Cindy was running on adrenaline. She managed to carry a conversation while a squall of shoulders and arms came straight at her small frame. The church was just one block away. She picked up her steps and continued to juke the crowd like an all-pro running
back.

“
I hope he’s safe. There’s a burgeoning revolution happening and you need to start watching your back. You and Matt were in that video.”

“
Now you’ve made me paranoid, thanks.”

“
This is getting serious. I’m just looking out for you. If you get a hold of Logan, let me know.”

“
I will.”

C
indy panted and huffed as she reached the terracotta steps of the Blessed Sacrament Church. She looked up and marveled at the church’s frescoes. They weren’t magnificent-looking by Old World standards, but for Los Angeles, they were like staring at the Vatican.

A statue of Ignatius Loyola stood in a
niche on the main wall at the front of the church. Sparrows used his shoulder as nesting grounds; spiders used his feet as death traps.

She stood at the top of the steps and gazed down Sunset
Boulevard as hordes of Angelinos continued to march in an endless stream of flesh. Inspired flesh. LAPD, in riot gear, began assembling on the sidewalks. Some held their nightsticks with both hands, eager to push the protesters away from private property and shops. Typically, protests of this nature required a permit from the city; however, this protest was much too large and was very quick to assemble. No one was to be arrested for violating code, there were no leaders of the movement, it was as if the collective consciousness of the people instinctively gathered, like a hive of bees, or a colony of ants. Swarming.

Cindy walked through one of the four heavy chromed doors of the Blessed Sacrament. An empty marble lobby greeted her. Above the main center door, an inscription read,
“I am the bread of life; The bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”

“
Sacrifice,” Cindy muttered to herself.

A
spiral staircase was at each end of the vestibule. She fought the impulses of her inner child by not rushing the stairs. Instead, she placed the mysterious ball on the cold, hard floor. The ball rolled, feeding off the energy from the engraved, metal rod. It didn’t go toward either of the two staircases, or outside the church. Rather, the ball approached the left door that led into the chapel. Cindy pushed through the door and waited for the ball to spin through before entering herself.

The high ceiling was the first thing that caught her eye when she walked into the chapel. The wooden beams
above drew her eyes upward. Impressive celestial carpentry held up the majestic high-arched ceiling without effort. Slack-jawed, Cindy stared above at the wooden engravings and gold trimming on the beams; it reminded her of a hull of an ancient ship.

She looked to her left, and there stood a
four-foot stone statue of what she at first perceived was the Virgin Mary, with a set of praying candles at its front. Cindy narrowed her eyes at the Madonna’s visage. The lips were thicker than the usual representation of the Virgin, and a sliver of curled hair protruded out from the static, stoned veil. She held what looked like a single lily in her hands. The traditional statue was familiar to Cindy, but increasingly eccentric when scrutinized further.

Cindy looked across the darkened chapel, a small congregation gathered in front of the afternoon service the church provided during weekday afternoons. The unremarkable priest, with the receding gray hairline, thin
-framed glasses, and green polyester smock, spoke about staying true to the Word, despite the recent clamor that was taking place outside the church.

The ball continued unimpeded down the left aisle. Cindy took off her shoes. She didn
’t want to disturb the service nor the draw the parishioners’ attention to her footsteps. The ball came to rest at a set of steps that led to an entrance behind the sanctuary, where the Mass stewards prepared for the main service. Cindy glanced at the small service across the chapel; no one made eye contact with her. She picked up the ball and placed it on the carpeted walkway that led behind the sanctuary; the ball continued its predetermined roll, while Cindy sneaked quick intermittent glances at the small service.

She stood in the large room behind the sanctua
ry. Her heart beat fast, her eyes widened with nervousness. Although Catholic churches were notorious for their openness and liberal approach toward random visitors, she knew that being behind the sanctuary, where gold chalices and bottles of wine sat on tables unattended, would, at worst, be considered trespassing.

Cindy lifted the rod. The ball stopped its
roll in the middle of the large room.

“
Come on,” she whispered. “You gonna keep moving, or what?”

She gave the ball a gentle kick. It stood firm against the black carpet. She got on her knees and grunted as she pushed against the metal sphere with her hands and the thrust of her small hips. Cindy stood up and began tapping the floor with her foot, hoping for an echo or a variation of sound within the floor
’s acoustics. Only the sound of hard concrete reverberated against the walls.

“
Think, Cindy, think,” she said to herself while tapping the side of her head. She immediately regretted not making a copy of the church’s floor plan from the Bradbury Library.

S
he inspected every corner of the room, and began lightly tapping the walls—nothing but solid masonry.

She checked the cupboards, the drawers, and all the closets. Right as she began opening the last closet door by the other entrance, the faint tap of slow footsteps channeled through the walkway and into the room. Cindy stared at the ball in a panic. There was no time to get it off the floor. She hid in the closet and closed the door.

Her heart raced faster than ever and planted her cheek against the cold door. The parish’s youngest priest came to the room looking for one of the main containers of holy water.

“
What’s this?” he muttered to himself, with a quiet laugh.

As he crouched to the floor,
Cindy heard his knee joints crack.

“
Hmm,” he huffed. “I wonder if Rogelio put this here.”

After inspecting the curious ball, the young priest left the room in search for answers. Cindy waited until it was completely quiet before stepping out of the closet. She wrinkled her brow and stood still and contemplated leaving the ball behind. It was only a matter of a minute or two before the young priest came bac
k with a custodian she assumed was Rogelio. She bounced with anxiety and her eyes darted for an answer, any answer to the riddle of the brass ball stuck in the imaginary muck.

“
Kufikiri hekima moja kufikiri,”
she chanted to herself, in Swahili. A go-to prayer she kept in her spiritual hip pocket whenever faced with adversity. She crossed her arms and took a step toward the exit. Then something small caught her eye. In the corner of the room, the carpet lipped upward. She walked toward the corner and tugged at the woven edge of fabric and it pulled up with ease. No stapling. There was no foam pad underneath the carpet either. Just the old, concrete floor the church had had since its construction over a hundred years ago.