Blackbird (15 page)

You can’t help the smile that fights its way to the corner of your lips. For the first time, you feel less alone. But you force yourself to shake your head. “That’s a really bad idea, Ben.”

“Look, you’re going to need someone there to call the police if someone comes after you again, or to—”

“The police don’t care, Ben.”

He closes his fingers around the key chain, hiding it. He just stands there, waiting for you to say something. You know it’s a terrible idea. It’s wrong to let him get any more involved than he already is.

“Fine,” you say. “I guess that means I’m shotgun.”

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HarperCollins Publishers

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THE STREET IS
a mix of rundown bungalows, strip malls, and empty lots. As you approach the address listed for Parillo Construction, you scan the sidewalk, looking for anything that seems unusual. There’s not a single person outside. The heat is already too intense, the pavement black and burning.

Ben pulls to the curb. The building is gray and squat, with five garage doors in a row. There’s no sign, and the front window is scratched with graffiti, the glass foggy and gray.

Ben plucks the piece of paper from your hand, checking the numbers you’ve written with the numbers on the front of the building. It’s the place.

“You shouldn’t park here. Keep going—past that tree.” You point straight ahead, to
where a few bushes and trees block the view from the office. The car rolls forward, then Ben throws it in park. He’s reaching for the door handle when you grab his wrist.

“Wait here for me,” you say. “It’ll be easier if there’s only one of us.”

“Are you sure?”

“Please, Ben. You’re already in this too deep.” You get out of the car and walk away, hoping he won’t follow you in.

You keep your head down as you approach the building from the side, aware of the front window, knowing that they can’t see you. There’s a security camera on one corner of the roof but it points down and away, toward the front door. You don’t bother with the office. Instead you circle around back.

There’s a man moving boxes off a truck. He spots you just as you turn the corner, and he immediately drops the crate he’s holding, coming toward you in a few quick steps. He’s not much taller than you. He’s covered neck to wrist in tattoos. You look to his waist, his hip, but as far as you can see he’s unarmed.

You glance down, pretending to read off the paper. “I was looking for Parillo Construction. Is this it? My cousin told me about you guys and I need someone to repair my—”

“We’re not taking on any new jobs.”

The man takes another step, blocking you off. Behind him you can see the first garage door is open six inches. It’s not locked.

The crates beside the truck are taped shut. You can’t make out any writing on the side and he keeps watching, waiting for you to leave. “I’m sorry, this isn’t Parillo? Do you do construction?”

“This used to be Parillo Construction, but it’s not anymore.”

“But you guys are still listed online—”

“Look. We’re closed; now will you let me finish what I’m doing?”

You try to take in as much as possible: the white truck filled with wooden boxes, the back brace you can see through his T-shirt, the snake tattoo that wraps up his left bicep, disappearing beneath his sleeve. Nothing about him is familiar. Still, you take one more look at the garage door behind him. There’s something he doesn’t want you to see.

After you leave, he follows you out to the edge of the building, watching you cross the street. You ignore Ben in the Jeep, pretending you parked and walked here from a few streets away. You disappear behind a corner.

You go up two blocks, hang a right, then another to circle around. It takes you a few minutes to find a good view of the back lot. The truck is still parked there, the cartons stacked on the pavement. The man is now talking to a woman who’s much taller than him, her plum-red hair slicked into a bun. He keeps pointing to the open garage door,
then to the front, and you can only hear a few words:
Girl. Parillo. Asking questions.

The woman says something too low to hear, then the man locks up the truck. They both disappear around the front of the building.

The garage can’t be more than thirty feet away—just a sprint across the parking lot. There’s only one security camera in the back. You hop the wooden fence and you’re gone.

As you approach the door you can hear movement beyond it, though when you press your ear to it, you can’t decipher what it is. You pull the handle and light floods the cement room, revealing half a dozen pit bulls, all in their own separate cages. When you open the door they spring to their feet, darting along the periphery of the metal pens, jowls curled back, teeth bared. The barking is so loud your muscles tense up, the shrillness a knife in your ear.

Their faces are scarred. One dog’s cheek is ripped away. Another has marks on its front legs, the skin bloody and raw. You push through a door beside them and the stench is so strong it steals your breath. You grab the edge of your shirt, using it to cover your nose.

In the center of that room is a metal ring, the cement floor stained brown. Folding chairs are set up along the walls. Scanning the corners, you notice the far-left side of the garage, where someone has dug up the concrete. There’s a large garbage bag slung into the hole. Your hands go cold.

You approach the bag and kneel down, the smell so strong you can’t breathe. You rip a section of the plastic, just below the top, and it’s enough to make out the man’s chin. His skin is a waxy, bluish-white.

You pull the rest of the plastic away, exposing Ivan’s face. His skin looks strangely thin, as if it might slip away from the bone. His eyes are sunken in. His chin is set at a strange angle, the bruises on his cheek still visible, the blood dried black.

You let go of the plastic and step back. The fine hairs on your arms prickle. Your stomach tenses, the rotting stench so strong bile rises up in the back of your throat. You choke it down, your shirt to your face as you leave through the other room, the dogs still barking as you sprint from the building.

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HarperCollins Publishers

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YOU BANG YOUR
hand on the dashboard of the Jeep as Ben takes off. You peer out the rear window for any sign of the man or woman behind you.

“Take a right up here,” you say. “They might come after us.”

“What the hell happened?” Ben asks as he speeds ahead, barely pausing for stop signs.

“They were hiding some dogfighting ring. And . . .” You trail off, not sure if you can go on.

Ben takes a hard left toward the freeway. As soon as he sees the sign he pulls onto the ramp, barely looking at the direction you’re headed. “And . . . ?”

“And I found a body. Ivan’s body. That man who was helping me.”

As soon as you say it your throat tightens. You lean forward, your elbows on your knees, trying to slow your breaths. You knew something bad had happened, you could feel it in your gut, and yet seeing him, seeing his body, makes it all feel real.
It shouldn’t have happened like this,
you think as you watch the cars change lanes, the freeway passing beneath you. The photo is still folded in your pocket. You let your hand rest on your leg, feeling it there beneath the fabric, not wanting to look at it—to look at them. He saved your life. He was trying to help you. He lied to protect you.

Once you think it you can’t unthink it. It repeats on a horrible loop.

He’s dead because of you. . . . He’s dead because of you. . . .

Ben pulls off at the next exit. He doesn’t say anything as he drives, instead taking the turns a little too wide, stopping a little too short. As you approach his house you duck down in the passenger seat, staying hidden, still afraid the cops might be watching. You wait until the Jeep is in the garage to sit back.

Ben leans in, his hand resting on your shoulder. “It’s going to be okay.”

“How, though? How?” You can’t help the edge in your voice. How is anything okay?

“I don’t know,” Ben says. “There has to be something you can do with this information, someone you can give it to. The cops, maybe. It proves you were telling the truth. It proves they killed him.”

He reaches down and takes your hand, folding his fingers into yours. His thumb runs over your skin, tracing the lines inside your palm. You let him hold it there, setting it
down against his chest, right beside his heart.

He’s tentative as his hand slips up the side of your neck, resting behind your ear, getting lost in your hair. You let him hold you for a moment, enjoying the warmth of his hand on your cheek, listening to your breath—a reminder you’re still alive.

Ben is right. You have to do something. You have to keep going. You have to find a way.

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HarperCollins Publishers

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“PAPER OR PLASTIC?”
The bagger is an older man with knobby, arthritic hands. He holds the quart of milk up over a bag, about to set it inside.

“That’s okay. I’ll just carry it like this,” Celia Alvarez says. She hooks her finger in the handle. Then she walks toward the sliding doors, past rows of orchids and roses, crumpling the receipt and tossing it into the trash outside.

The parking lot is quiet. It’s nearly eleven o’clock. As she roots around her uniform pocket for her keys, she thinks again of the video from the interview. How many times had she watched it? Gallagher made fun of her, saying she was obsessed, that they knew all they needed to know. Junkies. Arson. They found syringes. They found vodka bottles and gasoline. The girl was at best mentally ill, schizophrenic maybe, suffering some strange hallucinations. She was convinced people were hunting her.

Celia hits the button on her keys, momentarily missing her Civic, which is hidden behind a red van. The lights glow and there’s a beep. She continues toward it. What about the girl’s story, though? So much of it matched up. The time line, for one, and her details were internally consistent, her account unwavering. Gallagher said she might’ve been on drugs. She wasn’t, though. There’s no way . . .

Then there was Celia’s own story—the one she’d told the two officers as they came around the back of the house, looking for the girl. She’d grabbed the girl’s wrist. She’d taken out the handcuffs, but had she really meant to arrest her? When had she ever let someone get away? She only pursued her for a few yards before stopping. She hadn’t even climbed the fence.

It was like she was going through the procedure, arresting the girl because she was told to, all the
while knowing it wasn’t right. It was against her instincts. Had that been it? Had she
wanted
her to get away?

In the past few days Celia found herself looking for the girl as she passed local high schools, wondering if she was walking in those sidewalk crowds. She studied every face of every girl along Hollywood Boulevard. The ones who slept with blankets pulled up to their necks. The ones who sat with cardboard signs. The ones who stood in darkened doorways, asking for a ride.

For this reason she wonders if she’s imagining it when she sees the girl sitting beside the red van. The girl stands, backs away, watching Celia’s hands to see if she’ll reach for the gun. She doesn’t. She just takes the girl in. Her black hair falls past her shoulders. Her clothes are clean, though they’re several sizes too big, the basketball shorts folded over her hips.

“Please don’t do anything,” the girl says. “Please just listen. Please.”

Celia doesn’t need her to beg. She already has this strange motherly instinct to hug her, even though Celia’s only thirty-four, with no kids of her own. The girl seems smaller next to the van. Her tone is even but her expression is tentative, as if she’s nervous. Afraid?

“I followed you from the police station. You need to know I wasn’t lying the other day. All of it. It was all the truth.”

“I know,” is all Celia can manage.

The girl stands by the van’s bumper, watching her, keeping a good ten feet between them. “There was one thing I didn’t say at the station,” she says. “I only remembered it after. The supplies in the house—they had the name Parillo Construction on the sides. I can’t tell whether it’s a real company or not, but I went there.” She takes a breath. “I found the body of the man they took, Ivan. Someone was in the process of burying it.”

Celia pulls the pad from her front pocket and writes it down. “When was this? Today?”

“This afternoon. There were all these dogs in cages, too. . . . It looked like they were running a dogfighting ring.”

“Did they see you?”

“Two people saw me looking around, but they didn’t see me go into the garage. They probably haven’t moved the body yet.”

Celia nods, considering. She’ll have to get a lead on the dogfighting ring, following it there. She can’t let anyone know she saw the girl, that she let her get away again. It would be too suspicious.

“One more thing,” the girl adds, taking a few steps back. “You said that stuff about San Francisco . . . Club Xenith . . . but there’s nothing in the articles about me. Did you find my name or where I’m from? Anything about who I was before?”

Celia leans on her car. The girl’s not lying, that’s even more obvious now. She really doesn’t remember anything before the day at the subway station. She doesn’t even know her own name.

“They didn’t have a name on file for you,” she said. “Everything I’ve read just has basic info. In San Francisco the other kids called you Trinie. One of them told police you were originally from a
town near Palm Springs . . . Cabazon, I think it was.”

“Where is that?”

“A couple hours east. It’s hard to know whether that’s the truth. You were camping in a park in San Francisco. It seemed like most people you were with were runaways. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot of information about you.”