36 Hours Page 2

  She saw flashing lights in the distance, and she turned down another side street, away from the group home. She was no longer running, because running teen-agers made cops twitch. But she had to get off the street, clean-up, find someplace to hide until Monday morning.

  Hide? She needed to find Marisa. If the Garcia gang was after her, they were certainly after Marisa.

  She doubled over in pain, cramps in her stomach. Where could she go to clean up and hang? To think? She didn’t trust any of her so-called friends, and she wasn’t going to walk into a police station and turn herself in. Garcia had people everywhere. Wasn’t that obvious from the fact that she was supposed to be in police custody and Garcia had known exactly where she was?

  She didn’t know how long she’d been walking when she realized she was only two blocks from her apartment. As if subconsciously, she’d found her way home.

  Don’t be stupid, A. They know where you live. They could be waiting for you.

  A change of clothes. A burner phone. Food. Enough stuff to disappear for the next thirty-six hours. She couldn’t stay at her apartment, that would be stupid, and she couldn’t stay with Marisa’s parents. She bit her lip. They must be worried to death about Marisa, but Angel couldn’t give them any peace. She didn’t even know where to find Marisa. Before the cops picked her up this morning, Angel had checked every place she could think where Marisa might be hiding out, but no one had seen her. Unless they were too scared of the Garcia’s to tell Angel the truth.

  Two apartment buildings down from hers, she stopped to watch for trouble. Hers was by far the most decrepit structure on the block, and that was saying a lot—most of the two-and-three story structures were sagging, unpainted, and surrounded by metal fences that did nothing to keep people out. Sheet curtains covered most windows, and the old woman in the downstairs corner had taped newspapers -- now yellowed with age -- over her windows.

  Angel sat between two bushes and worked on catching her breath. Her side still hurt and she knew in daylight she’d look like she’d been beaten up. That was fine with her, she could still blend in, but not if she had blood on her clothes.

  She had one place she could go. An abandoned warehouse on the edge of Van Nuys where runaways often hung when the weather turned bad. It wasn’t safe, not by a long shot, but she probably wouldn’t get killed because Hispanics dominated that area, and she could pass. She’d gone there before when she needed to escape—like the times her mom brought guys with grabby hands home.

  And it would be a good place to continue looking for Marisa.

  Chapter Two

  Jake Morrison sat in the far corner of the long bar where he could see both the back door and the front door. It was a dive bar that rarely saw trouble because it was filled with retired cops and old private eyes. Jake was neither, but he fit in nonetheless. Ex-Marine, ex-cop, ex-felon. Now, he took jobs where he could get them, mostly under-the-table assignments for Clive Cutler, a slimy bastard bounty hunter who had one redeeming quality: he paid on time.

  Jake didn’t much care to see Cutler this Saturday night—he’d just gotten back from a five-day chase of a bail-skipping drug-runner across the godforsaken desert in Eastern California and Nevada. California wasn’t all glitz, glamour, beaches and palm trees. He’d delivered Chester Smith to Cutler two hours ago. Went to his one-room apartment above the bar to shower the sand and grime from his body, and came down for a meal of Jack Daniels and peanuts.

  So when Cutler walked in, Jake almost slipped out the back. Except there was an expression on his face that Jake didn’t often see: worry. Cutler never worried. He was pissed off and angry most of the time, occasionally defeated, but never worried.

  Cutler sat down next to him. “Jake, don’t kill the messenger, okay?”

  Cutler wasn’t worried; he was scared. Jake said, “You know me.”

  “Yeah, I do, just remember, I’m the one who brought this to you, okay? As soon as it came across my desk, I brought it to you.”

  Jake’s gut twisted. “What?”

  Cutler slipped Jake a piece of paper. It was part of a dispatch report from LAPD. He scanned it. Two cops shot in Reseda outside a group home, one DOA, one critical. Possible ambush. They were transporting a juvenile prisoner from Sylmar.

  “I don’t know the cops. And most aren’t my friends anymore.” Not after he nearly beat to death a fellow cop and was sent to prison for two years. Jake would do it all over again, but this time without witnesses and no one would find the body. Any cop who not only made it easy for underage prostitution to thrive, but participated in it, deserved worse than the beating Jake had dished out.

  But in L.A., Jake would never have gotten a sympathetic jury especially after the asshole judge tossed Jake’s evidence of the dirty cop screwing thirteen-year-old runaway prostitutes, so he took the plea agreement his lawyer negotiated and considered himself lucky.

  “It’s not the cops; it’s the prisoner they’re hunting. A material witness in some big case, and considered a possible accomplice. With a thousand cops looking for her, thinking she helped a cop killer, she’ll be dead on sight. You know that.” He paused, nervous. “I thought you’d want to know.”

  Jake had no idea what Cutler was talking about. He looked at the sheet again, read it more closely.

  Iliana Estella Saldana, aka Angel Saldana

  “Are you fucking with me?”

  “No, swear to God Jake, it’s legit. I don’t know what she did to get dumped in juvie, I don’t know what’s going on other than every cop in L.A. is looking for her.”

  Jake pushed back from the bar. “Call me as soon as you find out anything.”

  Jake went upstairs to get his gun. It wasn’t legal for him to carry, but he didn’t much care.

  The only thing that mattered was finding his daughter before a trigger-happy cop found her first.

  Chapter Three

  Angel waited for a good ten minutes before she left her hiding spot and ran across the street. It was night and had started to drizzle. People in L.A. didn’t handle rain well. This helped her, because though it was Saturday, there weren’t many people out. Even the gangbangers who dominated the apartment building next to hers weren’t loitering on the corner.

  She went around to the back and climbed onto the Dumpster. She’d done this before, when she needed to get into her apartment incognito. If the window was locked, she could have pried it open if she had her tools, but she had nothing.

  The window was cracked open. That couldn’t be a good sign.

  Still, she listened and heard nothing coming from her small unit. Instincts told her to run, but she hesitated. No sirens, no noise except for half-deaf Mr. Whitmore in the far corner apartment listening to his stupid sitcoms at maximum volume.

  In or out? Come on, Angel, make up your mind!

  The pain in her side made it up for her. Something was wrong with her, and maybe in the back of her mind she knew what it was, but she wasn’t even going to acknowledge it until she had five minutes to think.

  She pulled herself up, wincing as every muscle in her body ached. She landed on the floor of her mother’s room. The threadbare carpet reeked of cigarette smoke, over-cooked food, and old booze. She got up, didn’t turn on any lights, and walked through the apartment. It was stale and closed up and filthy. She hated this place. Her mother was a drunk, her father a deadbeat, and all she wanted to do was get her high school diploma and leave. College was out of the picture for girls like her, girls with records and attitude. And what was she expecting to do? Become a doctor or lawyer or some such thing? She just wanted to survive.

  If someone had been here, Angel couldn’t tell. She pushed a chair under the front door knob—not that it would keep anyone out for long--then went back to her bedroom, grabbed a change of clothes that smelled cleanish, and went to the bathroom. She cracked the door so she could hear if anyone was trying to get in and turned on the light.

  She looked like shit. Her face was filthy, her hair stick
ing up, scrapes and cuts up and down her arms. But her hair pins had fallen out, and the bright red wasn’t as noticeable with her hair down. Her tank top was dark with dirt and possibly blood. She pulled it off and winced as the material pulled on her side, where dried blood had clotted with the cotton. Pulling it off made her side bleed.

  She’d been shot.

  It wasn’t serious—it couldn’t be serious, right?—but it looked like a bullet had just ripped into her waist and gone right on through. It burned and hurt and now was bleeding again. The indention was about as wide as her finger.

  She searched the bathroom for anything to clean it with, and found nothing but old peroxide and Band-Aids that had been soaking in some gunk at the bottom of the drawer. She rinsed out a towel with hot water and pressed it against her waist.

  Tears sprang to her eyes but she held the towel there until the bleeding had almost stopped.

  She folded a dry face cloth and pressed it to her side, then went to her room for a roll of zebra-patterned duct tape she had under her bed. She taped the cloth in place, then pulled on a dark, clean T-shirt with her favorite band emblazoned across the chest. It would hurt like a bitch when she took it off, but she didn’t want blood all over the place, either.

  There was pounding on her door. At first she thought cops, but then she realized they weren’t announcing themselves, they were trying to break down her door.

  She ran to her mother’s room and opened her nightstand drawer. There wasn’t much money, a few ones and coins, but she stuffed it all in her pocket before climbing out the window. There was no ledge. Why was it always easier to climb up than go down? She hung off the sill until her toes found the top of the Dumpster, then she dropped.

  A shout at her back didn’t slow her down. She didn’t want to be dead. Wasn’t that pathetic? She had no life to speak of, but the idea of being killed, of being just wiped off the face of the earth, terrified her.

  Her side hurt and felt warm. She hoped the face cloth would soak up any blood. She thought she’d taped it on tight enough. She ran on, cutting through the courtyards of every apartment building on the block, until she reached the corner.

  To the right was Reseda Boulevard, to the left was a neighborhood. A bus stop was across the street, and thank God, a bus was approaching. There were several people waiting for the bus in the drizzle of spit that came down from the sky. Safety in numbers? Not if someone had a semi-automatic gun or three. Gangbangers like Raul Garcia and his crew didn’t give a shit about collateral damage.

  She waited until the bus was closer before she ran across the street. The bus slammed on his brakes. She swung inside.

  “Girl, you’re going to get yourself killed,” the driver said. “I should kick you off.”

  Angel bit back a sarcastic remark, because the driver would kick her off, and she didn’t want to be on the street. Not now.

  “I’m sorry,” she said meekly and put her coins in the box.

  “Watch yourself,” he said. Angel nodded and shuffled to the back of the bus. She glanced out the window. Though the light in the bus made it difficult to see anything outside, she could have sworn she saw a shadow running down the street toward her.

  Go, go, go!

  No amount of talking to herself was going to get the bus driver to move any faster, so she quickly slouched in a seat.

  The bus lurched forward. She found a position to sit that didn’t pull at her wound and where she could also see everyone who got on the bus. They were heading south, toward West Hollywood, and it was only a few stops before she’d have to get off to make her way over to the warehouse.

  She counted the money she’d taken from her mother’s drawer. A five, three ones, and about three dollars in change. She wouldn’t be able to buy her way into hiding. And she wasn’t going to spread her legs for it, either. She might be able to sneak in, but that would be tricky, too. If Marisa was already there, that would help, but could Marisa have hidden out at the warehouse for this long? Angel doubted it. Not with the Garcias looking to kill her. They had too many kids working for them, and it only took one to turn.

  If she could just find a place to hide until dawn, she’d be okay. She could ride the bus around until midnight, but then would have to get off. Daylight afforded more options.

  As she considered her limited choices, her thoughts went back to the group home. The shooters had been hiding in the van, they must have known who she was and what time she’d get there. If the cops were part of it, they wouldn’t have gotten themselves shot, right? What did that mean? Who else knew she was going to be at that specific group home tonight?

  The information was probably in her police file, which different people could access—social workers, cops, lawyers. Just about anyone, right? If there was someone on the inside who was selling her out to the Garcias, there was no one she could trust. Not the cops, not the D.A.’s office, and no one on the street.

  You’re in deep shit, A. How are you going to get out of this mess?

  Chapter Four

  Someone had been following Angel since she got off the bus.

  He was in a car, she couldn’t see his face, and it looked like only one person. Which meant, probably not the G-5 gang or the cops.

  Still, she wasn’t going to stop and ask him what the hell he was doing trailing her. Probably some perv who thought he could pay her twenty bucks to suck his dick. Not.

  She turned down a street not much wider than an alley. Everything was shut down for the night—this was an industrial area. Half the businesses were closed permanently and boarded up. The other half were simply gated and locked, their owners coming back tomorrow or Monday. Lots of repair places and auto body shops and businesses that served the Van Nuys Airport and whatnot.

  The car didn’t follow her, but she suspected he’d try and catch up with her on the other side. She slid through a walkway—barely wide enough for a person to pass, a place she wouldn’t normally walk through day or night, except that she was being followed. Fortunately, the drizzle had turned to rain and kept everyone in. Unfortunately, she was now cold and wet. It was a mile walk to the abandoned warehouse where she might—and that was a big might—be able to find a roof for the night.

  Once she was confident she’d lost the creep, she headed east on Sherman Way until she crossed under the 405, turned north, and tried to blend into the shadows as she cut through residential streets.

  An unlocked car in front of a dark house tempted her—there was a sweatshirt on the front seat. She was freezing. She quietly opened the door and grabbed the sweatshirt, closing it with a barely audible click. She slipped it on—it was several sizes too big, but it was warmer than nothing. She hugged herself and walked faster. Looking down, she saw that it was a UCLA sweatshirt. She would have killed to go to UCLA, but at this rate, she wouldn’t be able to afford community college. And if she got herself killed, then any college was out of the question.

  She felt bad about stealing the sweatshirt, but she’d done worse, and she was freezing. It didn’t help that she also had a hole in her side.

  Don’t be such a wimp.

  In all the years she’d lived in some of the worst areas of the Valley, she’d never been shot at let alone shot. It made her unusually depressed.

  Her trek through the east side of Valley seemed to take her forever, but finally she passed Saticoy and was entering another business and industrial area. This place was far worse than the place she’d lost whoever was following her. People loitered under the eaves of boarded up buildings. Most of them were harmless—the older homeless, the mental cases, the ones who might yell at her but didn’t know what they were saying or even who they were talking to. But as she got closer to her destination, the homeless dried up and she saw her peers—runaways, gangbangers, thugs, and misfits. She focused on the building where she’d once been given sanctuary when her mother’s then-boyfriend tried to get in her pants, but sanctuary was never guaranteed.

  It really depended on who
was in and who was out.

  “Hey, Chica, you’re in the wrong neighborhood.”

  Two girls stepped out from between buildings, across the street from where Angel wanted to go.

  “I’m looking for Owen.”

  They glanced at each other. They were both street kids, one white, one half-Hispanic. By the distrustful look in their stoned eyes, Angel suspected they were hookers.

  “Owen ain’t here anymore.”

  Angel tried not to let her disappointment show.

  “Who’s in charge?”

  “You think we’d tell ya?”

  Angel had to hazard a guess—otherwise she’d be here arguing, fighting, or running.

  “Pete.”

  The white girl snorted. “Yeah, right. Like we said, Owen ain’t here. Think his little minion butt boy would hang around?”

  If Owen and Pete had left or been runoff, that meant Kai was in charge, and Kai was bad news.

  “Fine,” Angel said. “Tell Kai congrats on the victory and that Angel would like to see him.”

  Bingo. White girl stayed to watch her while the darker girl scampered across the street.

  The girl leaned over. “There’s no room at the inn, bitch. You’d better run while you can.”

  “It’s raining. I just want one night.”

  “No one is going to want to share their bed with you.”

  “I don’t share with anyone.”

  She laughed. “Oh, chica, you might as well leave. You don’t play, you don’t stay.”

  Kai and Owen had a turf battle on this block. Not gang warfare, because when it was them against the gangs, they teamed up. But when it was about rules and favors and risks, they fought bitterly, and once Kai had pushed Owen off the roof and he broke his arm. It could have been worse. Kai left after that; Angel was sorry he’d returned. He could be nice and friendly one minute, then could stab you in the back the next.

  Five minutes later, the girl came back. She looked a lot younger than Angel first thought. Thirteen? Maybe fourteen, tops.