36 Hours (2 page)

I
so
do not want to be here.

“These people know I’m not in trouble, right?”

“They know you’re a material witness and we’ll be picking you up at seven thirty Monday morning to escort you to the courthouse.”

“My own chauffeur service,” Angel said.

Martinez turned off the car and stared at her. “Your mouth gets you in trouble, doesn’t it
chica?”

She shrugged.

“Don’t cause problems,” he said.

She gave him her most angelic smile. “Who me?”

Friday got out, opened her door and said, “Watch your step.”

She got out and then hesitated. Just a moment.

Angel had survived fifteen-and-a-half years because she had sharp instincts honed in the womb. Every synapse told her to duck. She didn’t know if it was the van, if she saw it move, or if it was a sound, but something was
wrong
and Angel trusted her gut.

As if Friday could read the expression on her face, or maybe she’d said his name, or perhaps his own cop instincts had kicked in just a moment too late, he turned, his hand on the butt of his gun.

The van’s side door slid open and Angel flattened her body on the ground as soon as she saw the glint of a weapon under the streetlights.

She rolled under the cop car the second before gunfire started. Semi-automatic weapons, the kind that weren’t legal and probably never had been, broke the silence with a roar. She slid to the other side of the car, the underbelly scratching her leg, the rough asphalt scraping her arms and stomach. When she was clear, she half crawled, half ran across the street.

She heard shouts and screams behind her, and one of them yelled in Spanish, “She’s across the street!”

Then she heard, “Bitch! Get back here,
punta
!”

Like she was going to stop for him or anyone else who was
shooting
at her.

The gunfire stopped and the van came to life, the headlights bright.

A burst of energy, her survival gene, had her sprinting. She should be a damn Olympic runner, she thought as the van squealed behind her.

She had to get off the street and into hiding. Her apartment wasn’t far, maybe a mile away, but they probably knew where she lived.

How did they know I would be at the group home? How did they know when I’d get there?

Angel couldn’t think about that now, not when men with guns were gaining on her. Not when two cops were down and probably dead.

She turned down a side street that ended in a cul-de-sac that backed up to an elementary school. She scaled the gate of one of the houses and ran through their property, maneuvering the toys and junk littering the cement yard. The back of their fence was lined with half-dead trees which made it easy to climb up. As soon as she grabbed the top and hoisted herself over, splinters cut into her hands. The fence teetered under her weight.

She scrambled over, scraping her shoulder on the way down, reminding her that she was in a tank top and jeans, freezing in the L.A. winter.

Angel ran along the far side of the open playground. Maybe she’d screwed up. There was nowhere to hide, and the front of the school would be gated with razor wire.

The lights from the van cut into the cul-de-sac she’d escaped down. What if they started going after the people in the houses? What if other people died because of her?

Save yourself, Angel.

She couldn’t save anyone else, she could hardly save her own ass, and now she was trapped.

Except … she wasn’t. She’d go out the same way she came in, just a different yard and different street.

Sirens cut through the night. The van burned rubber and was gone.

But Angel didn’t even know if she could trust the police anymore. Not after tonight. Someone had told Garcia’s people where she was going to be. And what if the cops blamed her? What if they thought she was part of this, getting their boys in blue shot up?

Her stomach retched, and she barely managed to keep it together.

People might see or hear her in their backyard, and she didn’t know who would be shooting first and asking questions later. The first yard she approached had two big dogs watching her. They could have been friendly, or they could rip her lungs out. She wasn’t taking the chance.

The next house looked dark, and she jumped into their back yard, then walked fast down the side. Getting over the next gate was hard because her hands were all cut up from the wood fence. She pulled over a metal chair, cringing at the way it scraped on the concrete, and used it to boost her over.

The garage door opened and a large black woman emerged. “What are you doing? Breaking into my house? Damn Mexicans! You get off my property!” The woman lunged for her, her hand raised as if she had a weapon – and Angel supposed her hand would make a very good weapon – and Angel ran again, the pain in her side getting worse. Her whole body ached, and she just wanted to go home. But home wasn’t safe.

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 sticking 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.