Blood of Angels Page 4

  Then I noticed there was a folded piece of paper sticking out of one of the pockets. It was a note, in Nina's writing.

  Silly me. I'll freeze to death. x

  I had a destination after all.

  I locked up the cabin and set off south towards Yakima, where there was an airport. I figured I'd stay the night there, and fly on to Virginia in the morning.

  Chapter 3

  Lee John Hudek would later say he knew something was going down right from the start. He couldn't recall when he'd first sensed it, but he had a feeling for sure. This was something he'd remember, because he didn't believe in that spooky shit. At all. That was for the hucksters down on Venice Beach, and drunk girls with cheap tarot decks, or Pete Voss at a pinch—Sleepy Pete seemed to think he had some otherworldly voodoo vibe going on because his mom was an eighth Blackfoot or Buddhist or whatever the fuck. He primarily seemed to believe this when he was stoned, however, and though that was most of the time Hudek was convinced it was utter bullshit—both in Pete's case and worldwide. Hudek had understood from an early age that the world worked in hard, straight lines, and that the curvy crap was for losers. The world likes get-up-and-go. The world likes people who get in its face. Sleepy was kind of an airhead all around, no doubt, but he was big and loyal and did a slow but steady job of selling product, and he was long-term crew, so whatever.

  What Hudek did remember was this:

  Sitting in the car with Pete on the side and Brad Metzger in back, parked at the end of the turn-off on Tujunga Canyon Drive. They had the roof down, catching rays while they waited. And waited. The car belonged to Hudek, paid for in cash. Most in his position would have some souped-up retro boat—he did too, for a while—but recently he'd decided a businesslike Merc sent better signals. The cops gave you less grief, too. Not quite yet twenty years old, Hudek also owned his house outright. Nothing pimp, merely an unobtrusive three-bed in Summer Hills, but it had a pool and a big double garage and the size of his television was something to behold. Pete and Brad lived over in Simi Valley, south of Santa Barbara, with their respective parents. Everybody they knew did, having done little in the year since school except learn that jobs no longer dropped out of the trees in California and that having played mildly impressive ball in high school meant jack shit to the outside world.

  They were parked with the car pointed back up the track, the dusty, shrubby wall of the sub-canyon rising steeply on the right-hand side. It was hot. Sleepy was playing a hand-held video game that went ping, ping, beep. Brad was droning on about the chick he was boning and whether he should pay to have her nose done. Having boned the chick in question himself, Hudek was of the opinion that Brad's ability to bear her company would not outlast the post-op period, especially as the short-term potential for blowjobs would be critically diminished. He would let Brad figure that out for himself. If the guy was thinking about throwing that kind of money at a chick, he was being paid too much.

  Paid too much by Hudek, that meant.

  'I fucked her, man,' he said suddenly, on a whim. 'Year ago.'

  Brad was silent for a moment. Then he started talking about some other girl.

  When Hudek looked at his watch again it was seventeen minutes after one. They were over a half hour late now. That was unique. It was a pain in the ass to drive right across the Valley to do this, but that's the way it had always been. Hernandez had always been reliable, too, so Lee didn't mind doing it his way. This was not being reliable, which meant the pain in the ass became much more acute. Especially now. Now that he had the Plan, reliability was going to be key.

  He glanced at his watch again, unnecessarily. Still seventeen minutes past. For just a moment it looked to him as if the sweep of the second hand was slowing, as if this minute was swelling and might burst.

  Maybe that was it. Maybe that was when he got the twitch, had his odd feeling; the intimation that the day was heading down a road towards a future that was not yet signposted.

  Then it was eighteen past.

  He heard a lighter spark behind him. 'Brad, don't smoke in the car.'

  'Fucking roof's off, man.'

  Hudek turned in his seat and stared at the boy in the back.

  Brad shook his head, opened his door, got out. He walked a little way from the vehicle, over to the canyon wall. Sat on a rock and smoked the cigarette down. What he wanted (fuck, needed) was a joint, but while Lee blew hot and cold on cigarettes he was uniformly down on people doing weed at work. Brad was going to be glad when this bit of work was done. It always freaked him, a little. Nothing had ever gone wrong yet but drug buys were drug buys—a fizzy thing to endure even if you didn't have an All-Star hangover, which Brad most certainly did. He had spent the previous evening hanging around the pool with the Reynolds kids and a bunch of others over in Santa Barbara, the Reynolds Seniors out at an attorney-rife party down in Hollywood, cocktails and canaps and jokes about the new DA. Meanwhile their kids juiced their own party mix: wine, weed and Xbox. Brad wound up passed out in a bedroom with some girl. Not the one who wanted her nose fixed, Karen, who had some big-deal family dinner she couldn't get out of. Just some fifteen-year-old from the High, whose name he never found out but who evidently liked cocaine a whole lot and who he really, really hoped would have forgotten about the whole episode. At 7 a.m. Mr Reynolds came into the room, went to the closet and chose a tie.

  As he left he said, 'Good morning, Bradley.'

  'Morning, Mr Reynolds,' Brad mumbled.

  That was that. Mr Reynolds looked like he had stuff on his mind. Maybe some big law case or something. Hopefully not the fact that his teenage son and daughter were zoned on Valium half the time, supplied by Hudek, via Brad.

  As he sat on the rock Brad was more interested in the question of whether Hudek really had slept with Karen Luchs. It was possible. You never knew with Lee. Though Brad had known him most of his life, walked the same halls and kicked, caught and dribbled the same balls, he never felt he'd gotten to the bottom of his friend. There were questions unanswered. Like where Lee got his drive. Like how he knew how to do things. Like how he was one of those guys you wound up working for, instead of the other way around. Maybe he had screwed Karen, maybe not. Most of them had screwed most of the others at some point in time. It didn't really matter in the end, probably.

  Brad looked up when he heard a polyphonic snatch of the theme from The Simpsons, saw Lee put his Moto to his ear. The conversation lasted about a minute. Hudek didn't raise his voice, but he seldom did, so that didn't prove much. Finally he flipped the phone shut and crooked a finger at Brad.

  'Delay,' Hudek said, when Brad got to the car. His eyes were hard to read.

  'Delayed how?'

  Hudek shrugged.

  'That's kind of fucked up, Lee,' Brad muttered. The sun had made his head hurt worse. 'Lot of people waiting.'

  'I know that.' Hudek shrugged again. 'Can't do it now, is all. Have to be this evening. No biggie.'

  Far as Brad could see, it actually was kind of a big deal. It had never happened before, point one, and point two it was Saturday and a ton of people were waiting for weed and coke. The later they took delivery, the later it would be before they could stop driving around doing drops and start partying themselves. But Hudek was staring out through the windshield in a way that said he was unhappy enough already, so instead of saying anything Brad reached in and got the gun from where it had been lying ready in the rear seat footwell. He took it around back and put it safely in the trunk for the journey home, wrapped in a beach towel. As always, he felt a lot happier when it was put away.

  He dozed off on the way back across the Valley, as Hudek drove a steady fifty along 118, not saying a word. Sleepy played his game all the way home. Beep, beep, ping.

  The sun poured down, making everything flat and bland.

  •••

  After dropping the others off at the Belle Isle mall Hudek drove around the Valley, not heading anywhere in particular. Wound up at a table outside Frisbee's wit
h a cheeseburger and chilli fries, watching cars go by. Anyone glancing his way would have seen a blond kid, sport-toned build and medium tan, clean baggy jeans and a T-shirt that wasn't cheap. A single barbed wire tattoo around the left bicep (no faux gang crap for him) and looks that weren't head-snapping but would pass for decent anywhere in the continental USA. Standard-issue local fauna, in other words, the young male of the species that roamed this particular valley plain.

  His phone rang a few times and he answered it, methodically fielding enquiries as to why people hadn't received their goodies yet. He knew these people socially, and no one got uptight. It was all cool. Lee would provide. He always did. Always had, anyway. The one person who didn't call was the guy he most needed to hear from, with a new time/place to meet. It was getting, as his dad would say, 'most unusual'.

  Like a lot of his friends, Hudek got on okay with his folks. The difference was that while most tolerated their parents because they gave them so little grief, floating in the background of their lives, giving rides where needed, making cash available for clothes or counselling or rehab, and only intermittently taking time out of their busy careers to wonder aloud if their son or daughter might seek some kind of employment, ever, Hudek genuinely semi-dug his father. When he was around. Hudek Senior was in real estate development, and travelled a lot. He seemed to have plenty contacts and made outstanding amounts of money, and yet he wasn't ostentatious with it. Both he and his wife owned a lot of very expensive stuff which never even left the house, and was tidied away when guests came. He had a sense of humour, too. Lee's choice of ringtone was an in-joke with himself, in recollection of—many years before, when he was just a little kid—seeing his father watching The Simpsons and laughing hard when Homer turned to his children and said: 'Remember—so far as everybody else knows, we're just a normal family.' Ryan Hudek's motto was similar, and unusual for his place and era: if you understand what you're worth, not everybody else has to know.

  Lee had taken that on board, along with a lesson enshrined in countless movies and reinforced every week in real-life cop TV. Showy gets attention, and attention isn't good. So far as most people would ever know, Lee was just another boy with not much to do on a hot Saturday afternoon. That much was cool with him.

  After a while he remembered it was his mother's birthday. He picked up a card and a bottle of the stuff she wore and drove around to their house. His dad was out somewhere, golf probably, so Lee went straight out back.

  Lisa Hudek was semi-reclined on a lounger by the pool, wearing dark glasses and not doing much. She accepted the unwrapped gift and a kiss and smiled in her son's direction, or at least nearby.

  Lee sat out with her for an hour, watching the flickering of the water in the pool, while his mother drank steadily from a tall, frosted flask. Finally the cell rang and it was Hernandez.

  Revised meet was seven thirty. Yes, very late, but that's the way it was. Deal with it. They'd beep him a venue later.

  Oh, and this time could he come alone?

  Hudek muttered 'Yeah, right,' and went inside to make some calls.

  •••

  At seven fifteen he pulled to a slow halt halfway up the block where Roscoe Boulevard crossed Sennoa Avenue. At the junction fifty yards down was a gas station, as he'd been told. Opposite was a low building Hudek had driven past many, many times in the last few years, without giving it much of a glance. When he was a kid it had been a buffet restaurant, and he was pretty sure the family had eaten there a couple of times. Then it went out of business, became a carpet store and a car spares place and a variety of other things before becoming fundamentally invisible. One of those places, sometimes boarded-up, sometimes in generic business, that drifts slowly off people's mental radar.

  'Okay,' he said, turning off the engine.

  'Very, very far from okay,' Brad said, shaking his head. This time he was in the passenger seat. Sleepy Pete was in the other car, with Steve Verkilen, the fourth member of the inner crew. They were just around the other corner from the gas station. Brad could just see the front of their vehicle. It wasn't reassuring him much. The pistol was under Brad's seat, but that wasn't helping either. Something was making him suspect that tonight it was finally going to get used. That wasn't good. It wasn't there to be used. It was there to be owned, for other people to know you had it. Once, just once, they had sent a burst across the front of some guy's house in the night, as a warning, when they knew for certain he wasn't home. Using it for real was a whole different bag of shit. It stopped it being an even remotely reassuring object. Brad thought he could sense the thing radiating coldness up through his seat: feel it limbering up, waking and stretching, sipping a coffee and saying, 'Well, kid, what did you think I was for?'

  The fact there was a second gun under Hudek's seat only made things worse. It was there next to the bag of money.

  Brad lit a cigarette in the hope this might make a difference. 'Front's locked and boarded. How are you supposed to get in?'

  'Door around the back.'

  'Are you really going to do this?'

  'No,' Hudek said. 'We are.'

  'Lee, look, man. Look. It's…if they specifically say just you, what are they going to do if we both turn up?'

  'That's what we're here to find out.'

  Brad started to reply, and found Hudek was looking at him. He realized immediately that there was nothing he could say. Not in the face of the fact he owed money, and that Hudek was the only place it could be found. If Brad said anything more it could only be by opening the car door and walking away, and if that happened the future was a poor and unknowable place without drugs or money or a position in life.

  'I could have just brought you along as usual,' Hudek said. 'Not told you what they said. But I kept you in the loop.'

  'Okay,' Brad said. 'Okay.'

  Hudek sent a beep to Pete and got one back. They watched as Sleepy and Steve got out of their car and walked across the junction, disappearing up the other street. Waited until there was no one likely to pass by, then they got out of the car, pulled the pistols out and wedged them quickly down the backs of their jeans. Jackets on over the top, bag of money in Hudek's left hand. Hudek looked at Brad and nodded curtly. Ready to go. Just two guys out for a stroll. You could almost hear the soundtrack start to play.

  Oh yeah, Brad thought, feeling faintly nauseous. We're fly as all hell. This fucking cool, what could possibly go wrong?

  He followed Hudek across the road, his head up and his stride regular and strong. They walked straight into the small lot in front of the building, and headed around the right-hand side. A narrow passageway here gave access to another, bigger lot around the back. This was empty apart from a battered square of tarpaulin lying in a crumpled heap over to one side. At the far end was a low concrete wall, as Hudek knew from a drive-by two hours before. The other side of this wall, hidden around the side of a rusted dumpster, would be Pete and Steve.

  When they were halfway across the lot, Hudek stopped. He had to admit the place was a good choice. Broad daylight, yet completely hidden from the road. A doorway was visible in the long, flat expanse of the back of the building, but he didn't head straight for it. He glanced around the lot instead. Listened. Took his time, looking for all the world like a predator on his own territory.

  Brad admired his cool. Admired it a lot. And really, really hoped it would be enough.

  'We told you to come alone.'

  Brad's heart nearly leapt out of his chest. The voice had come from behind them. Of course.

  'Turn around,' it said. 'Slowly.'

  Hudek and Brad turned together to see three men standing ten feet away. All were lean, dark-haired, dark-eyed. Must have waited until they saw them come around the back, then followed up the passage. Oh Christ.

  The only one Brad recognized was Hernandez, their regular contact. He was around thirty and had a face like a second-hand axe. He shook his head at Hudek.

  'We told you to come alone,' he said, again. The in
flection was exactly the same the second time.

  'And I heard you,' Hudek said. 'You told me to suck your dick, I wouldn't be doing that either.'

  Hernandez pursed his lips and nodded soberly, as if in appreciation of the response, its genre appropriateness, as if the older man was a digitized bad guy in Grand Theft Auto VII and this was Available Riposte number 3.

  He turned to the guy on his right, and nodded some more. This guy nodded back. They both looked at Hudek and nodded.

  The moment went on a beat too long and the whole thing was beginning to seriously freak Brad the fuck out.

  'You said to meet you inside,' Hudek said. 'What's this crap out here in the lot? What's the creeping up on us about?'

  'To check you'd followed instructions,' Hernandez said.

  'You seriously think I was going to?'

  'We hoped.'

  'Life is full of disappointments, dude. Deal with it. Can we get this done? I've got half the West Valley waiting on a high.'

  'Maybe we find some other rich kid to run our shit. Someone who does what he's told like a good boy.'

  'See, you're getting mixed up about something,' Hudek said, theatrically shaking his head. 'Really just, completely turned around. You seem to think we're going to stand here and take this kind of crap from you guys. That's sort of not going to happen.'

  'Is that right?' Hernandez was smiling again now. Brad didn't like it when he smiled. It was not convincing. He needed lessons. Brad realized one of the other guys was holding a gun, casually, down by his side. Probably always had been, but he'd been too wired to notice. Take their crap, Lee, he thought, urgently. Please, Lee, let's just take their crap and get out of here.

  'Pete,' Hudek said, suddenly, his voice loud. 'Why don't you come join us?'

  There was silence for a long moment. Sleepy Pete did not appear from around the side of the big metal block.