Gunshots blew the glass insert out of the door, and I lunged at Bobby, taking him down to the porch’s painted wooden floor. Shards and splinters rained down on our heads, and it took me a moment before my brain processed someone was seriously trying to kill us. I shoved at Bobby to crawl away from the line of fire, and he flipped over onto his side, glaring at me.
“Where’s your gun?” he shouted, trying to be heard over another round. Car alarms were going off, and somewhere, someone was screaming at the top of their lungs in full-out terror. Thankfully, I didn’t seem to be the one who was screaming.
“I don’t have a gun!” Of course I yelled that back during a long stretch of silence so the shooter could probably hear me quite clearly.
“Why the fuck don’t you have a gun?” Bobby pushed me off of his legs and began to scramble backward.
“Because I didn’t think I would need a gun to talk to an old man about his dead wife!” Another shot blew out the top of the doorframe, and I weighed the risks of putting myself in the line of fire to get to the steps leading to the yard. “Stay away from the windows. Try to get off the porch.”
Bobby took a way out I hadn’t even considered, launching himself up off of the floor and over the hip-high decorative stucco wall surrounding the porch. It had a wide enough sill to provide him leverage to catapult over. It seemed a lot closer and safer than the steps, and I went over the same wall a second later.
He landed in a bush.
I landed in the cluster of cacti.
“Fuck!” Swearing didn’t help the prickles of pain along my thigh and arm where the oddly fuzzy-looking cactus pierced through denim and leather. Rolling off left me clear of any more thorns, but it still smarted like hell, and I’d somehow torn my second-best jacket on something sharp in the flower bed. “Bobby, you okay?”
“Yeah.” He was already up in a crouch, scanning the area around us, and I reluctantly followed, feeling every burr and bruise I’d collected over the last twenty-four hours. “Sounds like the shooting stopped.”
I didn’t hear any sirens, but that didn’t mean the LAPD wasn’t on their way. Torn between staying down and not being mistaken by the cops as the shooter or going in to check on the state of my potential client, I poked my head up just in time to see denim-clad legs sprint across the porch and down the steps.
“He’s doing a runner,” I shouted, taking a long stride forward to give chase. But Bobby grabbed me by the back of my jeans.
“I’ll go. You go check on the old man,” he ordered, already on the move. “Call 9-1-1! Make sure they know you’re in the house.”
There was no arguing with him. There never was. I took the stairs two at a time, realizing I’d dropped my phone somewhere when I couldn’t find it in my pocket, but I was betting the house phone would work. The Brinkerhoffs were of an age where being without a landline was inconceivable, or at least I was going to bank on that. The inside of the house was dark, the curtains drawn tight against any sunlight, and the plaster walls were burdened with a deep honeyed-oak wainscoting and crown molding. The lack of light dragged the walls down to the floor, shortening the high ceilings above my head.
The foyer was like the one in our house—opening into a wide archway on either side leading to a massive front room to the left and the kitchen on the right. I could see the remnants of an elegant-yet-comfortable living space, blossoms of doilies scattered about the floor, mimicking a spray of tulips lying among the ruins of a cut-glass vase. The davenports were a taupe velvet and sliced apart, the fabric cut so thin I wondered if our assailant was a sashimi master. A wooden coffee table as heavy as the darkness in the room sat up on its edge, one of its legs smashed and dangling from a single bolt.
A glance toward the kitchen told me there was as much chaos wreaked in there as the living room, heavy crocks of flour, sugar, and salt bashed to smithereens on a sea of red Spanish tile. The refrigerator doors were open, and the freezer’s contents were scattered about on a small round table set into an eating niche. Our shooter had taken the time to tear open bags of frozen vegetables and dump out everything onto the floor and counter. Ice cube trays were emptied, the cubes left to melt on the cushions of the kitchen chairs. All of the drawers were upended, mingling silverware with the flotsam and jetsam people gathered in their kitchen’s nooks and crannies.
I stood still and listened. Then I called out Brinkerhoff’s name, the echoing stillness in the shattered house staining my panic with fear. A low moan came from down the hall, and I sprinted toward it, snagging a cordless phone from the side table as I went by. I dialed 9-1-1 mostly by feel and dropped the phone on the floor when I entered the small room at the back of the hall.
Arthur Brinkerhoff was beneath a mattress, his frail shaking body pinned down by its heavy weight. Dark purple splotches marbled the papery skin stretched over his finely boned skull, a fringe of white hair circling the back of his head and spotted with blood. His lip was swollen and split, black speckles clinging to the corner of his mouth, and his eyes were crazed when I pulled the bed off of his chest.
The man was a fighter. I had to give him that, because as I crouched over him to pull him out of the mess he’d been trapped under, he gave me a solid left hook across my nose. I saw enough stars to qualify as a planetarium, but other than a little bit of ringing in my ears, it felt like my sinuses were still intact. I grabbed at his flailing arms, securing his wrists in a loose hold, mostly because I was afraid if I gripped too tight, I would shatter his delicate bones.
He was a lot older than I remembered, dotted with age spots and worn with grief. His baggy brown pants were dark across the crotch. The stink of stale urine hit me in the face. I didn’t know how long he’d been under that mass, but it couldn’t have been more than a few hours. I’d only spoken to the man that morning, but he was lost somewhere, trapped in a terrified maze with no anchor to pull him free.
“Arthur,” I practically shouted into his face, hoping to shake some reason back into his unseeing eyes. “It’s Cole McGinnis. You called me. You’re safe now.”
“McGinnis.” His watery eyes fixed on my face, and he grabbed at my shirt, his surprisingly strong grip stretching out the cotton fabric. He swallowed hard, and tremors shook through his thin arms, rattling his chest and legs as shock rippled through him. “You’ve got to save my Adele. They’re trying to take everything I have left of her. You’ve got to stop them. Please.”
Four
“I SWEAR to God, Los Angeles would be a safer city if I just threw you in jail,” O’Byrne snapped, shoving her jacket back with a flourish and planting her feet into a firm stance. “I’m pretty fucking sure criminals would break in just to beat the shit out of you.”
“Just charge admission so I can have a water bed,” I grumbled back, fidgeting on the short wall enclosing the Brinkerhoffs’ front lawn while an EMT cleaned out one of the cuts in my forehead. He’d already picked out a couple of chunks of glass, closing the tiny wounds with butterfly bandages, but from the clicking of his tongue against the roof of his mouth, I was going to be there for a little bit. “And I’ll need conjugal visits. At least once a day. Three times on Saturday.”