Dantes' Inferno (22 page)

She nods, gulping back a sob. “Bad dreams.”

“Tell me.” He kisses her lips, her cheeks, her eyelids. “It's okay, Angel Face.”

“No, no,” she says, unconsciously refusing his reassurances. She gazes up at him, visions of her dead child fresh in her eyes. “Jason told me in the dream . . . there's a monster buried beneath this city.”

“Go back to sleep,” he whispers. He runs his fingers along the nape of her neck. With these same bare hands, he has murdered his lovers. This is unusual for bombers, he knows, this ability to dole out proximate death. Blood has soiled his hands; he doesn't mind the stains. It is part of his business, tying up loose ends.

“Sleep, Angel Face,” he soothes. “I'll keep you safe.”

Amazingly, she does. Her breathing deepens, and she hardly stirs when he leaves her bed.

Eyeing him warily, the woman's improbably calico cat now occupies a windowsill. The two-bedroom apartment offers views of San Pedro's harbor. Freighters, their lights glowing yellow in the misty night air, line the loading docks. When he is restless, he can use the shipyard scenes as a tranquilizer. Even the salty smell of ocean helps to ease him down a notch. He has always been driven at a higher
speed than most of his fellowmen, but lately, the constant fast idle of his internal engine seems more intense than usual. He hungers for stimuli, for his daily fix of chaos, for destruction.

In the shoe-box kitchen, his fingers fly over the keys of his laptop. He has trained himself to record each detail of every operation. Always, he does his homework. Standard procedure. Although he no longer feels elation when a job is well done, he still gleans satisfaction. Any fucking fool can blow a federal building to hell and back. But only a master of his trade can neatly collapse twenty-five hundred tons of steel using a mere handful of explosives. And only a genius can bring a city to its knees.

He pulls up digital images on-screen: bomb squad, investigators, explosions, played and replayed. He settles on one—a head shot of the woman, Dr. Strange. For his own amusement, he adds a label:
Miss Los Angeles
.

Enlarge. Crop. Print.

M needs a good photograph of Dantes' girl; he has a date to keep with the good doctor in Santa Monica.

He checks his watch: 1:09. It is Wednesday.

He spends exactly twenty-one minutes entering data into his system—which is extensive—on the response to the bomb threat at City Hall. He does the same with the Beaudry Street scenario. He was there to observe both operations in their entirety: response time, arrival of personnel and equipment, choices, strategies, and final results.

In preparation to leave, he gathers his laptop, his jacket, the keys to the truck.

On the freeway, he heads north, then west, toward the ocean.

They are sloppy, he thinks. Out of practice. Well, he will give them more practice.

The psychopathologizing of radical dissent was never limited to the gulags and mental asylums of the Soviet Union; although I have not yet been forced to inscribe these words on a bar of soap, I am an anarchist labeled alternately as a paranoid schizophrenic, bipolar, psychotic—a man made invisible by the title of
lunatic
.

Trial transcript, John Dantes addressing Judge Heron

Wednesday, 4:34
A.M.
The telephone wrenched Sylvia from sleep. Her arm flew out, knocking the alarm clock to the floor. After three electronic bleats, she connected with the receiver. She pressed the cool plastic to her ear and rolled off the bed—one action, the kinesthetic memory of so many crisis calls over the years.

The first word out of her mouth was her foster daughter's name. “Serena?”

“You have thirty minutes to find your way downtown to the Los Angeles City Hospital—south-side loading door.”

“Purcell.”

“This is your chance to see your friend, Dr. Strange.” The silky contralto was raw around the edges.

Instantly alert, Sylvia kicked at the clock with her bare toe—the illuminated dial showed 4:35
A.M
.

“South-side door. I'll be there,” she breathed, tossing the telephone handset onto the bed. Already moving, she grabbed bra and T-shirt from the shoulders of a squat armchair, Levi's from the floor; the clothes smelled faintly of her perfume.

No time for a shower. Ducking her head through the neck of her T-shirt, she glanced around for her lightest silk jacket, which was in a soft heap behind the armchair. Sneakers untied, she strode out the door, across the lawn. She moved quickly; the shadows made her edgy.

She started the Lincoln after smearing salty dew from the windshield with her sleeve. While the engine idled, she took mental inventory: her laptop was in the trunk, where she'd left it thirty-six hours earlier, but Purcell had her briefcase, which contained necessities: cell phone, recorder, lipstick, sunscreen, cigarettes, a credit card, miscellaneous cash, stress vitamins, candy bars.

She left Leo Carreras presumably still asleep in his condo. If the situation had been reversed (which it truly should have been because Leo was the one who worked with the Feds on a regular basis), if he'd left her out of the loop, she'd be pissed. But she had to admit it—the idea of role reversal gave her a little rush.

By the time she passed the Fairfax exit doing eighty-five on the Santa Monica Freeway, any whisper of ocean mist had burned away; the air radiated stale heat like an empty oven. A three-quarter moon illuminated the endless urban ocean that flowed in all directions beneath the freeway, lending it the filtered quality of cinematic night. Warm winds skimmed off the desert. Palm trees swayed like landlocked sirens, their fronds rustling against the concrete ramparts, tapping out a haunting song.

In counterpoint, Miles Davis and “All Blues” drifted from the radio's speakers. The melancholy jazz tune ended, and a Cognac voice announced, “It's four fifty-nine in the city of your dreams, mellow LA. We're with you all the way, all night, all day, from Compton . . .”

The Lincoln ate road, sliding effortlessly onto the Harbor Freeway, the 110 north, retracing the now familiar route.
She caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror. Déjà vu. Same dark circles beneath black-brown eyes, same haunted face.

Just do the work. Stay focused. This might be her only opportunity to see Dantes—she wasn't going to ask herself why the FBI needed to roust her from her bed before dawn. Questions would wait until she found Purcell. She had minutes to make it to the LA City Hospital.

With one hand, she riffled through her pockets, searching for cigarettes. She'd given up smoking in the past three months. Several times.

After two hits of nicotine, she pinched the tip of the cigarette and tossed it out the window. She knew City Hospital was located on Sixth Street. She took the next exit.

Her internal engine was speeding faster than the machine she navigated through the unsettling urban landscape. Steel and glass high-rises shimmered with ghostly light. Blinking traffic signals lent the impression of an abandoned city. Like the devil's breath, steam fumed from gutter vents.

An absurd snatch of dream floated to consciousness: a young woman standing on the crest of a white dome, staring up at huge cutout stars suspended in a painted pitch black sky; a godlike voice commanding,
Come back when you've lost your mind
.

Sylvia in Griffith Park . . . God, she'd been a miserable lost child, a runaway in Los Angeles. A girl searching for a father, searching for herself . . . back in time when the craziness of the city matched the mania of her psyche. Back when she believed she'd die if she didn't escape.

Why did LA always mirror the more psychotic moments in her life?

Sylvia accelerated along the overpass, noticing distant head lamps in her rearview mirror. She kept tracking the
other vehicle. It trailed her for two blocks before it turned into an alley. She was aware that Dantes—this case—had left her vulnerable. She was wide open in more ways than one.

On the west side of the freeway, the neighborhood changed; the buildings, less structurally imposing, seemed diminished.

A man wearing slacks—no shirt, no shoes—darted across the intersection of Lucas and Fifth; a woman in a skin-tight dress and stiletto heels followed, her movement more indolent sax riff than walk.

Sylvia guided the Lincoln past the crumbling facade of City Hospital, circling the block. When she was back where she'd started, she slowed to a stop.

She heard the shrill and plaintive whistle of a freight train in the distance. No sign of Purcell, but high beams flashing briefly in her rearview mirror caused a burst of adrenaline. The truck raced past, and she watched the red taillights until they disappeared.

Sylvia turned down a narrow alley, cruising slowly, scanning the dark building for another loading area. Nothing. No one. Had she been hallucinating? Purcell had called, hadn't she?

Once more around the block.

This time, when she passed the south-side dock, she caught the angry red flare of a cigarette. It illuminated the ghostly shape of the federal agent stepping out of shadow.

She parked, locked the car, and covered the shadowy distance at a walk-run. The night had her spooked.

“Where's Dantes?” she started to ask Purcell.

“Cream, no sugar.” The special agent greeted her with one hand thrust out, offering coffee in Styrofoam. “I didn't know how you take it.” Her voice was slow and Southern as molasses. “I've still got your briefcase, by the way.”

Thrown by the sudden downshift, Sylvia said, “I got over here as fast as I could.” She accepted the cup, took a sip, and lukewarm coffee dribbled down her chin. Restlessly, she pressed the heel of her hand to mouth and chin, then she returned her full attention to Purcell, and asked, “Where the hell are we?”

“Knocking at the back door.”

Sylvia thought the special agent looked awful. Even by the glow of cigarette and distant streetlights, she had the stunned look of an injured animal. The woman was ten years older than yesterday. Then there was the curious lethargy—what had happened to the urgent command to show up within minutes?

“Hurry up and wait,” drawled Purcell, the mind reader. “We should get the go-ahead anytime.”

“Is this an authorized visit?”

“You'll only have a few minutes with him.”

“Sure.” Sylvia nodded, wary, feeling her pulse flip-flop, allowing the night air to slow her down. Purcell wouldn't, or couldn't, meet her eye.

Sylvia took a few moments to study their surroundings. They were sheltered in a loading area behind the old brick hospital. The faint stink of trash hovered in the warm air; the temperature was the coolest it would be for the next twenty-four hours.

She kept expecting the big red-haired LAPD detective to appear from the shadows. Disbelief, outrage, grief were all part of the emotional package he'd left behind; and this for a man she'd known less than eight hours.

Sylvia said, “I'm sorry about Detective Church.”

Purcell shook her head, closing dark, velvety eyes. She held her body stiff and still, as if something dangerous passing in the night might be blind to her presence.

She took a labored breath, turning to Sylvia. “Do you
believe in fate—” Her words died away, punctuated by the abrupt, birdlike twill of an electronic pager. The agent tossed her Styrofoam cup into an open Dumpster. “Follow me.”

Sylvia did. Right down the throat of the subterranean corridor to the basement of City Hospital. Fluorescent lights flickered, footsteps echoed on tile, the faint stench of mildew reached her nostrils. She was actually stepping on the soft debris of peeling paint, the tunnel sloughing off its own skin.

Where were the Feds keeping Dantes? Where the hell were she and Purcell, underneath how many tons of earth and concrete? Uneasily, she quashed thoughts of restless geologic faults—the discovery of hundreds of new and unsteady seams below the city, the fact that the LA basin experienced thousands of invisible shocks each and every day.

The passage ended at a heavy steel-lined door. Using her muscled weight for leverage, Purcell crossed the threshold, guiding the way into yet another corridor, a near replica of the previous one, except the angle of trajectory was up, not down.

This subterranean section of the old hospital had probably been condemned after the most recent quake. Twice, Sylvia was certain she felt the ground vibrate; overactive imagination, she told herself.

They stepped through another door, this time entering an institutional-looking hallway.

When someone gripped her arm, Sylvia jumped.

“Sorry,” Dr. Mendoza murmured, her name tag prominently displayed over her left breast pocket. She was a plump, dusky woman with pert features that sharply contrasted with melancholy wide-set eyes. “Dr. Strange?” Mendoza caught Purcell's confirmation—a quick nod of the head. She said, “Dantes has been asking for you.”