Devil Wind (Sammy Greene Mysteries) (14 page)

Still, downed signs and power lines on the narrow road made the steep ascent treacherous—enough for the driver to ask if Ana would like to go back. In response, she leaned over the front seat and handed him an extra twenty.

As the cab climbed the slope, fewer and fewer cars passed by. Fearing she might have been followed, Ana kept peeking out the rear window. Near the top of the hill, the taxi rolled to a stop at a pair of cast-iron gates nested within a two-meter-tall brick wall. There was no sign of life outside the car.

The driver turned to face Ana. “This the address?”

Ana nodded and fished out another forty dollars from the pocket of her jeans.

“You want me to wait?” the driver asked as she stepped out into the darkness.

“No, I’m fine,” she replied with a confidence she didn’t possess.

A moment later, watching the taxi do a five-point turn on the narrow lane and disappear back down the dusty hill, she wondered if she shouldn’t be running after it. Hazy moonlight through burned tree branches cast threatening shadows—arms reaching out to grab her. She shivered as another strong gust of wind blew across the deserted crevasse.

How unusual this city was. From crowded skyscrapers to desolate wilderness in less than half an hour. That’s why Courtney said she loved this place. It was far from the action and the paparazzi that surrounded her Hollywood Hills home. Somehow, Ana figured, Courtney would come here to get well and escape after her hospital stay. She rang the doorbell and waited for a response from the intercom.

The house was invisible from the gate, through which she could only see a winding stone path leading into the darkness. No answer. After a few minutes, she tried again. Still nothing. Maybe she’d been wrong to think Courtney would come to this haven after all.

Ana walked up and down a few feet in each direction from the gate, eyeing the wall as she dodged several three-foot-tall hexagonal signs planted in her path. The signs, common around the richer neighborhoods in L.A., warned that a security company with armed response protected the estate. She saw no real foothold to scale the bricks, and the height of the barrier was far above arm’s reach.

The distant crunching and grinding sound of a car’s tires rolling on the lane, very, very slowly made her pause to listen. A driver too drunk or someone after her? Her throat tightened.

As the faint wisps of headlights turned the corner of the road below, Ana dived into an irrigation gully in front of the brick wall away from the gate. She lay flat, holding her breath, waiting until the car drove by.

Only it stopped, idling at the gate. She heard a window lowered, saw the beam from a flashlight scan the area, barely missing her cowering body in the grass. For an eternity, the cone of light searched, then, to Ana’s relief, was extinguished. She listened as the window rolled up, and the car continued slowly toward the end of the lane.

Finally, daring to peek, she saw that instead of the white security van she’d expected, the vehicle creeping up the road was blacker than the darkness of the night. Ana shuddered. She knew that road was a dead end and that in a matter of minutes, the car would return. Even if she ran, it would catch up with her eventually. And?

Sounds of tires sliding on the ground, then turning.

Now she had no choice. She had to get over that wall. The thought came to her out of the blue. It was her only chance. One by one, she tugged a pair of the security company’s metal signs out of the ground. Pushing with all of her might, she stuck the metal posts back in the dirt next to each other, abutting the wall. As the turning sound stopped and the rolling sound began in the distance again, Ana placed one foot on the flat edge atop each of the signs and stepped up, balancing her body with both hands on the rough surface of the brick wall. Yes! The height of the signs had given her enough lift so her fingers could reach the ledge.

Without pausing to look behind her and ignoring the throbbing in her arms, Ana pulled herself up, her feet clambering in the small ridges of the brick as she climbed. The black car’s headlights inched into her peripheral vision. She figured two more seconds before she’d be exposed. With a burst of energy driven by terror, Ana gave one last pull and swung her torso over the top of the wall, landing roughly, but safely, on the manicured lawn on the other side.

She scurried along the base of the wall as far from the gate as she could, hiding among a bed of rosebushes a few feet north. Still panting, her eyes and throat burning from the particles of ash in the air, she watched a pair of hands struggle to open the gate. Fortunately, it didn’t yield and the reach of the flashlight’s beam through the gate wasn’t strong enough to expose Ana’s crouched and shaking form. She heard a loud guttural sound of frustration, then saw the light extinguished. A moment later, the car squealed, its tires grinding through the gravel as it headed off down the road.

Not until her heart stopped racing, did she allow herself a victorious grin. This was probably the first time in history anyone had used a security company’s protective gear to break into a house.

“Just for tonight,” Pappajohn had insisted when he’d entered Sammy’s apartment earlier that evening. They’d come straight from the morgue. She’d suggested they stop for a bite to eat, but he’d told her he wasn’t hungry. He’d tried to tell her he didn’t want to impose, that he needed to be alone, but she’d refused to listen.

“You’re exhausted. I’m working all night. You’ll have the place to yourself. There’s not much food in the fridge, but feel free. If you want to leave in the morning, you can check into a hotel. No problem,” she’d said. “In the meantime, mi casa es su casa.” Waving a hand at the living/dining/kitchen half of her small one-bedroom home, she’d added, “All I can afford in this town, but at least it’s furnished.”

Reluctantly he’d agreed, dropping his carry-on next to a well-worn living room couch.

True to her word, after showing him around her tiny place, Sammy had disappeared into her bedroom to prepare for her show. Pappajohn had laid his stiff and weary body down on the lumpy couch for what he’d thought would be a short catnap.

Now, hours later, he woke with a start, his body drenched in sweat. The image that had soothed him in slumber, his daughter and wife, Ana and Effie, smiling at a St. Sophia Church picnic had dissolved into a nightmare. Flames leaping from the barbecue pit had enveloped Ana and were burning her alive, her screams of “Daddy, Daddy,” a knife to his heart. Desperate, he searched left and right for his wife. Nothing.

Water, I have to get water.

No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t move his limbs. Ana’s pleas grew stronger and, still, he remained frozen, his daughter agonizingly beyond his reach, until her screams faded and her body collapsed onto the charred grass.

No, onto a cold slab in a downtown morgue.

Clawing his way out of sleep, Pappajohn opened his eyes, trying to remember where he was. The morgue? He sat up stiffly, peering through the darkness at the strange room. Oh, yeah, Sammy’s. Right. She must have thrown a blanket over him. Relief at waking from his nightmare lasted just seconds, as the reason for his being here in Los Angeles punched him in the gut like a champion boxer’s strike. Ana was dead.

Pappajohn kicked off the hot covers and lay back on the couch for a long while, straining for sounds he recognized. Traffic noise mixed with sirens and helicopters. So different from the bucolic Ellsford University campus in Vermont, or even suburban Somerville outside Boston where he’d moved in with his sister Eleni. The rattling of the sliding doors to Sammy’s balcony indicated that those smoky winds had picked up again. The fire department would have a bad night trying to control the flames.

Too edgy to sleep, Pappajohn got up and wandered into the adjacent hallway leading to Sammy’s bedroom. A faint shaft of illumination spilled out from the partly opened bathroom door.

“Sammy?” He glanced at his watch: one a.m. She’d obviously been gone for hours. Hadn’t she said her radio show ran from midnight to three?

He went inside to use the toilet, relieved himself, then washing his hands, stood in front of the mirror, staring at his reflection. The old man who returned the gaze had ena pothi ston tapho, one foot in the grave.

“What happened to you?” Jim asked when Sammy rushed into the studio at three minutes to midnight, “I know this is radio, but I still have to look at you.”

Sammy crinkled her nose at her producer. Where Brian, the engineer at her college station, had been a loveable teddy bear with whom she’d enjoyed good-natured sparring, Jim was a cynical Ichabod Crane look-alike with three-day-old salt-and-pepper scruff, whose barbs she no longer found amusing. Especially tonight. “You’re not exactly a vision of loveliness yourself.”

“Hey, it isn’t the face that gets the ladies, it’s my charm,” he said in his trademark monotone before zooming in for another bite of his grande burrito.

Sammy deposited the slew of papers she’d brought on the desk section of her console and leaned over to turn on the TV monitor next to her mic. “Bet your phone never stops ringing.”

Jim swallowed and shook his head. “I don’t give out my number,” he chuckled, “Don’t take it personally. I calls it like I sees it, men or women. So, who ran over you with a truck?”

Sammy plopped down in her chair. The news would be over in a couple of minutes. How to summarize twenty-four hours of tragedy? “The victim we got the call about last night?”

Jim nodded as he chewed.

“She didn’t make it.”

Jim washed the bite down with a swig of coffee. “That’s too bad.”

“I knew her.”

The producer looked surprised.

“No. Not really knew her. Knew of her. She was the daughter of a friend. I had to tell him.”

“Life sucks,” Jim said, his attempt at consolation.

Sammy slipped on her headphones, and watched Jim’s finger for her cue. “Yeah, it does.” His finger dropped, and her theme music filled the studio, to be faded away as she turned on her mic.

“Sammy Greene on the L.A. Scene. Everybody breathin’ easy tonight? Well, me neither. The L.A. fire chief just reported fires moving west through the mountains toward Malibu. Apparently, there are scattered power failures in the area. Hope that doesn’t keep any of you from tuning in. Because it isn’t just the fires and the smoke, people. It’s knowing that there are over ten thousand on the street tonight. On Christmas Eve. Half of them in Red Cross shelters. We’re all praying that your homes will be saved by the firefighting heroes on the front line.

“The other half have been kicked out of home after home, and the only place they have to go is a tent city. That’s right, folks, five thousand men, women, and children, at last count, are living under tarps on a parking lot next to Canyon City Hall at the dawning of the twenty-first century. That’s a crime and we, you heard me, we are the criminals!”

Sammy took a quick sip of cold coffee before continuing. “How much did you give the man standing at the on-ramp this morning? Nothing? Didn’t have change after buying that barrel of java at the 7-Eleven? Maybe you could’ve read the National Enquirer in the checkout line and given three bucks to the woman in the parking lot instead. How much more about Courtney Phillips do you really need to know? She’s got a drug problem, but she can afford to get help. The homeless can’t afford to eat!”

All ten phone lines were blinking insistently, Sammy noted with pleasure. She was looking forward to some heated exchanges with her listeners once she’d finished her rant. Even Jim, with receivers in both ears, had a hand free to give her a thumbs-up.

“Canyon effing City is spending over fifty million dollars to renovate a bell tower on its City Hall! A bell tower! A shonda! Look, I wasn’t here in ninety-four, but aren’t there cheaper ways to make structures earthquake safe? Why not just take the tower down and use the leftover money to help starving children? In our own city!

“Because we don’t want them in our city, isn’t that right? Not if our city’s Beverly Hills anyway. Apparently, Congressman Prescott was one of the movers and shakers behind this year’s new ‘Not In My Backyard’ law in the old 90210 zip code. Didn’t want any homeless wandering around his expensive rental properties to clash with the landscaping. That’s right. The same Beverly Hills PR firm that did that ‘Safe Streets for Beverly Hills’ campaign just ran a two-million-dollar fund-raiser for Orange County’s senior representative and didn’t let in a single grocery cart. Hey, Neil Prescott, you’re all heart. Speaking of heart, I guess God’s not too happy with our congressman right now. He was admitted to Schwarzenegger last night with a heart attack.”

Sammy clicked off the mic to clear her throat, then clicked back on. “Maybe He’s trying to tell you something, Congressman. You’re a big shot in D.C. As soon as you’re back on your feet, show some heart and get some funding out to California to help poor people in need. Earn you some points with the big guy, eh?

“We’ll be right back to take your phone calls after we pay our dues. Fifteen after.”

Trina Greene switched off the radio show in disgust. “That daughter of yours is going to ruin everything. You have to do something.”

“What do you want me to do?” Jeffrey asked. “She’s an adult now. I haven’t seen her in years. Besides,” he said, desperate to calm his wife’s legendary temper, “no one listens to that rinky-dink station.”

“Trust me. It’s an election year. Someone is listening. And if word gets out that Prescott’s involved in any kind of scandal your daughter stirred up, he’ll pull your deal.”

“All right. I’ll have a talk with her, have her come to the office next week.”

Trina gave him a pointed look. “Now, Jeffrey. Call that cabrona right now!”

From the bathroom, Pappajohn wandered into Sammy’s bedroom. Hazy moonlight smothered by smoke and ash filtered through the window, bathing the tiny space in undulating speckled shadows. Los Angeles’s version of a snowy Christmas Eve.

As his eyes adjusted, Pappajohn explored the small bedroom, thinking how much it reflected Sammy’s personality—a kind of passionate chaos. Books on politics and several daily newspapers were thrown on the hastily made bed. The utilitarian wooden desk was cluttered with scribbled notes, a small radio, and a computer. Posters of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were taped to the wall. Pappajohn smiled in spite of himself. The girl hadn’t changed. In the footsteps of martyred heroes, fighting impossible battles. Though he didn’t agree with the way she’d rush headlong into the fray, he had to admire her spunk.