Lightning Strikes

They say you can’t cheat death. Well that may be true, but if you play your cards right you can bluff him. I should know, I’ve done it….

It began on a grey day, the kind of grey you only get in cities caught between rain and smog. The tops of skyscrapers had gotten lost in dirty clouds. The air crackled with electricity. Thunder rumbled, briefly drowning the incessant clatter of traffic. Impending rain battled the smog to conceal the city. The air encased you like a damp coffin. On a day like this you wouldn’t know LA was surrounded by mountains. On a day like this you’d never mistake LA for a land of dreams. 

I was walking toward Figueroa. It was just before Christmas. Palm trees were circled by blinking lights. Shimmering plastic snow lined the edges of shop windows glistening like promises. It’s a magic time of year. Children make lists of toys their parents can’t afford. Turkeys who’ve survived Thanksgiving say their prayers. Angelinos mistake the neurosis in the air for expectation.

I’m a PI, a private investigator – it means I work when I’m sober. I’m a consultant for the local cops, the FBI, and anyone else who’ll pay me. I used to be employed by the Department. I worked for CARD - Child Abduction Rapid Deployment – tracking missing children, and the scum who took them. I was one of the big boys, one of the suits, constantly surrounded by all the debris and wreckage of a society with too many resources and not enough heart. I had worked for a cause. Now I worked for a paycheck - it was easier.  

Today I had been called in to look over the scene of an abduction. I had dressed for the part. I looked like a fine upstanding citizen in a starched white shirt, only a little sweat soggy, black pants, black jacket, black tie, black shoes, just a bit scuffed. And sober; sober as a couple of Mormons.

A four-year-old boy had disappeared from a small day care in South Central. It was just a glorified babysitting setup, ten four-year-olds and a caretaker. The kids had been napping when a blackout occurred. When the lights came on, the boy was gone. There had been no noise, no sign of a struggle, no sign of his abductor, no sign of anything except nine kids and a hysterical baby-sitter. The police had found nothing, so Blake gave me a ring, just in case I might see something other eyes had overlooked.

I do that sometimes. I have some weird ability to find what others miss, or at least Blake Collins, chief liaison between the FBI and the local police thinks I have.

I don’t like abduction cases and the police don’t like me - I’m a smart ass and a drunk, but the department calls on me for two reasons; first because Blake thinks I have a talent, and second, he’s right. Drunk though I am, I know my stuff, and often come up with a solution.

I hadn’t summoned any solutions in this case though.

The day care was downtown across the remains of a streetcar track, half buried by a veneer of memories. In the 1920’s, LA had boasted the largest electrical rail system in the world, over a thousand miles of tracks. But the Automobile Club of Los Angeles and Big Oil had put the last street car into retirement in 1961. No-one remembers them now. You’d have to be old to remember an LA Street car, and no-one in LA admits to being old.

The day care was housed in a California bungalow with an open porch supported by block columns, built so families could sit outside and enjoy the year-round LA sun. It had been a place of dreams, but now it was old and worn. Faded green paint peeled from the walls revealing splintered wood. A chain link fence surrounded a weedy garden. In the left corner of the yard, a shed of synthetic straw sheltered a fat, plastic baby Jesus. Mary, Joseph, and a few chipped barn animals loitered around the manger. The scene had been pieced together, random bits of faith carelessly assembled in a haphazard display of devotion. Joseph, camel, cow, and ass were more or less of a size about two feet tall. They lounged in the shade of the four-foot Virgin who appeared to be suffering from gigantism. Behind them two huge cactus guarded the door like prickly phalluses.

Inside a small cluttered living room ten blue mats lay on the floor. At the edge of the room, in front of curtained windows, slumped on an overstuffed couch, a large Hispanic woman wept loudly. The walls were covered by dozens of framed black and white photos of stiff, dark unsmiling people and a large, lurid, bloody, velvet painting of Jesus. His vacant blue eyes followed me as I circled the mats, searching.

The police had already questioned the kids, calmed the parents, and gone. Except for Blake, the weeping woman and Jesus, the place was empty.

On the edge of one of the mats, a white-blond hair gleamed like a strand of spider web. I should have removed it with the tweezers I always brought with me to crime scenes. But I didn’t. Instead, I picked it up with bare fingers, feeling it crackle and spark like a trapped lightning bug as I knew it would. Crazy as it sounds, I knew where this hair came from, knew it in that way you can know something without reason or explanation. It was not the first time I had found a hair that flared like a live wire. I put the hair into a small plastic container and held it out to Blake. He nodded and labeled it.

CSI would do their analysis, but I already knew what they would find: DNA so jumbled and full of garbage, it was barely recognizable as human. I didn’t tell Blake that I recognized the hair. Nor did I tell him that the man it belonged to was dead. He had died twice.

Blake knew I was a drunk, but he only suspected I was nuts. There was no point in confirming it.

I looked around and checked out the bathroom, but that was all I found. There was no point in looking for prints; the cops would have done that already. How they overlooked the hair, so pale and out of place wasn’t my job to worry about.

“See anything else?”

I didn’t. I shook my head.

“Good work,” Blake said.

Yep, it was another shining triumph for Eddy Evers, PI extraordinaire, one child gone, one hair retrieved.

Not that I should complain. I had a company phone, and if I was injured on the job they’d cover my health care. I was a lucky man. I should have been grateful to get any work at all. I had given my all to the force, and now my all wasn’t much. Now I was the kind of guy who goes out for happy hour in Hollywood and wakes up in Reno three weeks later with a wife, two kids and one hell of a hangover.

“I don’t think there are any answers to be found here,” I said. “I hate cases like this, no clues, no logical explanations, no solution. I’m going to go home, and do some thinking.”

“Thinking or drinking?”

“Probably both,” I said. “No amount of contemplation can match the inspirational capabilities of a well-made cocktail.”

It was only four thirty, but due to the impending storm it was darker than most LA nights. Without clouds acting as a buffer, traffic, neon, billboards, and spotlights kept the sky a dull orange.

I headed toward Adams and Figueroa to get a cab. LA isn’t like NY; cabs are rare, but I figured it wouldn’t be difficult to find one on Figueroa where new hotels were multiplying faster than Catholic rabbits.

I don’t drive – not anymore. I know it’s crazy, a detective who doesn’t drive, especially in LA, the city that’s a monument to the automobile, but ever since the crash, I shake like a junkie when I get behind the wheel. Taxies are an expensive and sometimes dangerous habit. But what’s the point of a safe habit?  

I walked down Twenty-Third Street. Once, very long ago, this had been one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the city. The streets still boasted a few Victorian gothic mansions covered in round-end shingles with three-sided bay windows and gingerbread turrets. But now, most of the shingles were chipped, conspicuous as missing teeth. Inside, the grand ballrooms were divided into warrens; their once smooth wooden floors coated with decades of cheap paint. Now, they house families of immigrants, mostly illegals – twelve to a room, too scared to complain about building codes or the lack of plumbing.

Behind a few of the rotted wooden fences, plastic blonde virgins with vacant blue eyes bent over cradles in neglected yards. They were the only blondes around.

Sandwiched in between the big old houses, a few little stores huddled like beaten junkies, stores that sold cheap rotgut liquor, and stronger things if you knew who to ask. I was walking by when a door opened and a man walked out. He had blond hair, pale skin and eyes you could never forget; one a whirl of greens, like a cat eyed marble; the other the pale blue of a sky after rain. I had never met him, but I had seen his picture and I knew him, knew him like a punch in the gut. He was the man who had shattered my life.

He didn’t know me though, so there was no reason for him to bolt. I guess something in my eyes or some small movement before I sprang must have alerted him; either that or he had a guilty conscience, because he took off.

I leapt for him, running full out. I used to be a sprinter. I can still do ten mph for brief stretches, but now I was doing fifteen, fueled by the memory of despair. I wanted to wrap my hands about his throat, to destroy him as thoroughly as he had destroyed me. Not that it would make things better, nothing could, but vengeance does not keep company with logic.

The guy tore into a slate dark alley bright with gang insignia. Thunder rumbled, and the rain started. It came down hard, sheets of water thick as glass. I shook the droplets out of my face, shielding my eyes but he was gone. I’d lost him.

The slow creak of swinging metal made me look up. The rain tried to blind me, but I could see him. He was twenty floors up balancing on the thin grey slats of a fire escape, climbing into an open window like a shadow in the sky. I leapt up, grabbing a ladder which dangled seven feet above the street. I missed, cursed and jumped again. Then I noticed that the front door of the building was wide open. I’m clever that way. I dashed through, vaulting up the stairs, pausing at each landing to listen for footsteps. I didn’t hear any.

At the top of the building the stairs ended. A thin dirty hallway snaked backward. It smelled of stale cigarettes, burned beans, and the remains of uncounted small sad lives. Rushing down the corridor I skidded round a corner and almost fell over him. My hand reached out, I grabbed his jacket. A shock ran though me. It was like touching a live wire. Reflexively my hand opened. He pulled backward, ran to the open window and jumped through without hesitation.

I looked down, knowing what I would see – a body as empty as I was, but much, much stiller. We were about thirty feet high, a long way to drop onto hard pavement.

But the man had landed, catlike. He took off without even pausing to catch breath. I shook my head, trying to clear it, trying to rid myself of amazement, and hold onto hate.

I raced down the stairs after him. By the time I got to the street he’d reached the end of the alley. I knew I’d never catch him, but I raced after him anyway. .

The rain had made the street slick as lies. Lightning lit up the darkness like a strobe in a funhouse. A small black shape dashed in front of the man. He tripped, stumbling into a trashcan, and fell, sprawling on the ground. I slid up to him. As I bent over his twitching body, fury rising in my throat like the taste of spoiled milk, a bolt of lightning shot from the sky. It hit the can, ricocheting toward me bright as the second coming. In the brief minute before darkness fell, the man under my hands dissolved.