Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (30 page)

Twenty minutes came and went while Raszer waited
in the alley, across the street and a hundred yards south of the building’s
main entrance. Four lanes of coursing rush-hour traffic separated him from the
revolving door through which Layla would exit. A couple of women had already
come out, neither wearing a yellow dress. The door and the broad steps leading
up to it were within shouting distance, but Temple Street ran one way
southeast, and he’d have to circle the block to get to her. He might have
waited curbside, but at this time of day, that would have put him in a traffic
lane. He was concerned she wouldn’t see him, and had just about decided to walk
over when there was a knock on his passenger-side window. He rolled it down.

    
“Nice
car,” said Agent Djapper. “I haven’t seen one of these in years. Is this the
original leather?”

    
“Yes, it
is,” said Raszer. “I bought it at an estate sale. An old guy from Mar Vista who
never took it out of the garage. I don’t treat it quite so delicately.”

    
Djapper
ran his large hand over the doorpost. “I think I’d have repainted it,” he said.
“Cream yellow’s a little soft for a guy’s car.”

    
“I like
to think of my cars as girlfriends,” Raszer came back. “I’m not sure I’d feel
the same about a guy color. Anyway, it was a gift from the old fellow to his
wife. The story was, he bought it for her on the day she left him, and it never
clocked a mile. When there’s a story connected to something, I leave the color
alone.”

    
“Hmm,”
Djapper grunted, and leaned farther in, resting his arms on the door. “Listen,”
he said, “I didn’t mean to cramp your style in there. Some of that was for
show. I didn’t know about your connection with Borges. You worked MP with him?”

    
All the
while, Raszer had kept one eye trained on the revolving door, but here was what
seemed to be an olive branch, maybe even a prelude to an offer of help.

    
“Just
long enough to get my license,” Raszer said. “But I learned a lot. He’s a very
sharp cop.”

    
“Yeah,
well, listen . . . he says you’ve got a gift. And, frankly, we could use one on
this case. It’s been stone cold since Katy Endicott disappeared. As clean as a
mob hit. Now, I don’t know what connection this Darrell kid has to the
Coronado, or exactly where you fit in, but—”

    
“Hold on
a minute,” said Raszer, putting his palm up. There was an after-image in his
brain, a black blur. He’d let his focus drift for a moment, but in that tick, a
sleek form had passed in front of the alley, headed southeast. A black limo,
the least unusual sight in L.A., on the edge of his vision. But what was it
that had raised his pulse?

    
“So,
anyhow,” Djapper continued. “I was hoping we could—”

    
“Hold
that thought,” said Raszer, a little more firmly, his hand still raised. He
closed his eyes. The transient smear of an image would remain on his visual
cortex for only an instant longer. What?
What
?

    
“Oh,” said
Djapper, fingering the leather upholstery. “Yeah. Borges’s guys told me about
this. You’re having one of those visions, or whatever. Those things you—”

    
Blue license plates
.
Blue plates with few numbers
.
Diplomatic
plates
.

    
“I gotta
go, Agent Djapper,” Raszer said, as calmly as he could. “Do you have a card?
I’ll call you.” He glanced across the street and saw a flash of yellow
refracted through the spinning door, cursed, and dropped the gearshift into
first. He gunned the engine, holding the clutch just below the break point.
Djapper lazily peeled a business card from his billfold and held it out to
Raszer. His upper lip drew back from his teeth in what was supposed to be a
grin but looked instead like a lapdog’s snarl.

    
“In a
hurry?” he asked.

    
“Yeah,”
said Raszer, snatching the card and nearly taking the man’s arm off as he tore
out of the alley. “I am.” He wasn’t sure that Djapper had heard the last part.

    
But for
the constant stream of traffic, Raszer would have cut a wide arc across the
one-way street and swung around to the curb. For an instant, he remained
perpendicular, straddling two lanes, horns blaring, weighing the risk of
plunging into the face of the stampede. Layla had now exited the building and
stood on the top step, scanning the busy street, her yellow scarf waving like a
racing flag on the stiff breeze. Raszer made his move, carving a reckless
diagonal across four southbound lanes and maneuvering himself into the right
turn lane as quickly as he could. The limo, if it was bound for Layla, already
had a good half block on him.

    
Chrissake, Raszer
, he told himself.
It’s probably an airport limo
. The
plates might’ve been livery plates, the driver some out-of-work actor hoping to
pick up a mogul and schmooze him all the way to the Palisades. They wouldn’t
risk snatching Layla in broad daylight, here in the midst of the law
enforcement sector, in snarled traffic, with motorcycle cops and helicopters
deployable on a moment’s notice. And yet Raszer had a physical certainty,
trickling like a cold stream of mercury down the back of his throat, that this
was precisely what they intended to do.

    
Los
Angeles was not New York, not a fortress island whose bridges and tunnels could
be blockaded, whose teeming sidewalks would furnish a thousand witnesses. In
spite of the all-seeking sun, or maybe because of it, it was a city of shadows,
and a long black car could slip into any one of them.

    
He raced
around the long block, onto Main, then First, then Broadway, hugging the curb,
never leaving second gear, laying on the Avanti’s reedy, bipitched horn. But
even so, the circuit could not be made in less than three minutes, and by the
time he made the right turn back onto Temple, there was no more yellow dress at
the top of the stairs. He pulled over to the curb, threw on his emergency
flashers, and leapt out of the car, sprinting to the top of the steps to survey
the congested street.

    
Amid the
Infinitis and Lexuses and the odd, cratered Nissan belching burned oil, Raszer
spotted no less than four limos. Two of them were Town Cars, but neither bore
the distinctive blue plates. Traffic was piling up behind the flashing Avanti,
causing cacophonous havoc in the two right lanes. Turning on his heel, he
pushed through the revolving doors without much hope, calling her name into the
reverberant lobby with its marble steps and drab oil paintings of past mayors
and DA’s. Nothing. Raszer exited the building and shot a glance across the
street. Agent Djapper had left. That got him thinking, until something way off
in the distance caught his eye.

    
Raszer
took the long steps two at a time and scrambled into his car, all the while
trying to keep what he’d seen in focus. Nearly a block and a half down Temple,
highlighted only because a ray of the setting sun had nicked the corner of a
skyscaper’s glass facade and been diffracted down to the busy street: the tail
of a yellow silk scarf, caught in the rolled-up window of a black Town Car and
flapping at thirty miles per hour.
Goddamnit!
Raszer hammered the steering wheel as he squealed away from the curb, boxed
in on all sides. He cursed because it was all so obvious now. Of course these
people could not allow Layla Faj-Ta’wil to provide testimony, and probably the
only reason they hadn’t killed her was that they wanted her back in their
employ, if indeed she had ever left it.

    
A couple
of blocks ahead, Temple Street crossed Alameda and narrowed as it entered a
residential section of Little Tokyo. A left turn would take them north into
Chinatown, a right would steer them into South Central, but Raszer guessed that
the driver would avoid broad thoroughfares and instead jog south onto First
Street and head across the river into East L.A., where things got confusing and
there were a thousand places to duck out of sight. At least, that’s what
he
would do. Racing to catch up, Raszer
weaved roughly in and out of traffic, hearing the engine whine in protest as
the tachometer hit 6,000 rpm.

    
He got
close enough to see the Lincoln make the first right turn, but after that, it
was all intuition, because the car had disappeared from sight. At the junction
of Alameda and First, Raszer waited at the light, gunning the engine and
switching his left turn signal on and off. Indecision was excruciatingly
unpleasant for him. His mind skittered over the possibilities.

    
A
double-back into the city and a quick trip to LAX?

    
No, they wouldn’t risk passport control just
yet
.

    
A detour
to the westside diplomatic sector?

    
No, the license plates had to be a ruse
.
These men were not agents of any state,
though states might well have reason to fear or protect them
.

    
A stop at some faceless safehouse in the barrio,
where they could conduct their own interrogation of the prisoner?

    
The
third possibility seemed the least unlikely, and so Raszer made the left and crossed
over into East L.A., where the buildings were smaller and humbler and English
was a decidedly second language. The Los Angeles River, printed as an
undulating blue band on city maps, had long been nothing but a concrete-walled
drainage channel, coursing with runoff only during the rainy season. A good
four feet of water was left from the most recent downpour; the rest had been
washed to sea, along with the leavings of a city with no public trash pickup.
In spite of fencing and locked gates, the river had remained—as rivers
do—stubbornly in the public domain. Poor children picnicked on its steep cement
banks and played perilously close to its retaining walls; their elders breached
the fences to dump in things they didn’t need but couldn’t afford to have
hauled away: sofas, TV sets, and the occasional corpse. The ocean claimed them
all.

    
Boyle
Heights was the central city’s most vibrant Latino district, and home to its
best Mexican food. The air was soon filled with the smell of newly griddled
tortillas, and Raszer became aware that he was ferociously hungry. As he
cruised north on Sotto Street, looking left and right down the residential side
streets with their parched but well-tended squares of lawn, his hope of finding
Layla began slowly to lose out to his appetite.

    
A
plaintive trumpet solo drew his ear left to Mariachi Square, the hub of the
neighborhood. There, the best of the local musicians displayed their skills in
a ceaseless competition for wedding and birthday gigs. A dozen versions of “Santa
Lucia” vied and congealed into a sound collage of Latin brass and string. Young
girls danced in frilly whites and black patent leather as old women nodded
their heads in time.

    
Raszer
pulled up to the light and rolled down his window. On the nearest corner of the
square, a man was grilling flour tortillas and spooning in carne asada.

    
The
aroma drifted into the car, displacing all others, and Raszer closed his eyes
for just a moment. When he opened them, the light had turned green, and the
thought of food temporarily fled. On the far side of the wide intersection, on
a gravel lot adver-tised as E
stevez
F
leet
S
ervice
, sat the black Town Car,
distinguishable from dozens of other Lincolns, Caddies, and pimped-out stretch
Hummers only by the yellow scarf whose tail hung limply from its right rear
window. Raszer rolled across the six-way intersection, growing more aware with
each yard that he had no weapon, no backup, and no law enforcement authority.

    
It was a
situation peculiar to his trade. He had to make the best of it. He also had to
ask for help when he needed it.

    
He
flipped open his phone as he pulled alongside the lot and began to punch in
Borges’s pager number. Two young mestizo men, armed with whisk brooms and
minivacs, appeared at the Lincoln’s rear doors and revealed it to be empty.
Raszer turned into the lot, drove up to within six feet of the Lincoln’s
bumper, and turned off the ignition.

    
“Buenas noches
,” he called out to the
cleaning men, for the dusk had come down. “Hello.” He walked toward them at a
measured pace with both palms open.

    
One of
them, dark-skinned and wiry, ducked out of the backseat at the sound of
Raszer’s voice and froze. From the look in his eyes, he might have been just
one night
 
over the border. He shot a
nervous glance at the office kiosk in the center of the lot, from which there
protruded the massive paunch of an older man, wearing a gray suit and a bolo.

    
“Con permiso
,” Raszer said, directing
his words to the less antsy of the two.
“Una
pregunta
.” He indicated the Lincoln.
“La
limusina. Donde esta—”