Ecstasy (22 page)

“You’re kind of a fiery little bitch, aren’t you?”

“Excuse me?”

He raised a guitar-callused hand. “Hey, no offense meant, baby. I’m just saying, you’re kind of a hottie. For an older chick,
I mean.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“So, come on… Can you spot me some dough?”

“No.”

“But I really
need
it.”

He stretched both arms out for emphasis. Unfortunately, the reptile tattoos snaking their way around both biceps didn’t exactly
inspire charity.

“Have you thought about maybe getting a job?”

He gave me a smile that probably would’ve made me swoon, if I had a crew cut and my name was Dorrie Benson. “But then,” he
said, “I couldn’t have any
fun.
”

“Poor baby.”

I’d meant it sarcastically. This clearly escaped him.

“Hey, you wanna hear a secret?” He leaned in like I was his unindicted coconspirator. “Well, do ya?”

“Sure.”

“Minute I get some cash together, I’m gonna blow this town.”

“Really? Where are you going?”

He winked at me. “Santa Cruz, man. It’s warm there twenty-four seven. Besides, I gotta get closer to L.A. if I’m gonna get
me a music deal, right?”

“Well…good luck.”

“So will you spot me some dough?”

“Definitely not.”

“Aw, come on…”

“Look, if you don’t want to talk about Deep Lake, how about you tell me a few things about your friend Rob Sturdivant?”

He shook his head, the pseudocharming smile still intact. “No way, baby.”

“Were you surprised he made bail? I mean, fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

“His folks’ve got it, so he got sprung. Good for him.”

“Axel, the guy got charged with possession with intent. He’s under investigation for selling the drugs that killed those kids.
Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Ain’t no business of mine.”

“Did you know he was dealing?”

Another shrug. “Who gives a fuck?”

This was starting to get tiresome. “Look, Axel, I gotta get back to work. If you’re not gonna tell me anything about Sturdivant
or Deep Lake…”

He laid a tattooed hand on my arm. “Come on, baby. Don’t go getting all huffy, okay?”

“Are you gonna tell me how it was done or aren’t you?”

He ran a dirty finger up and down my wrist. “Play your cards right, and I’ll do more than tell you.”

I yanked my hand away, quelling the urge to run to the ladies’ room for a hefty dose of antibacterial soap. “What’s that supposed
to mean?”

“Meet me at Deep Lake tomorrow night,” he said, “and I’ll show you.”

I
T GOES WITHOUT SAYING
that I shouldn’t have done it. I mean, meeting some scuzzy street kid in the middle of the night? Going alone, without even
telling anybody what I was up to? Trespassing?

Well, okay—I do that last one on a fairly frequent basis. But the rest of it was downright moronic.

Still, there I was—hiking to the cooling facility at quarter after midnight, hepped up on caffeine and dressed like a goddamn
cat burglar. I was running late, in fact, because I’d gone home after deadline to change into an all-black outfit: boots,
turtleneck sweater, and my new low-rise Guess? jeans. If I made a fool of myself, at least I was going to do it in style.

So I’d parked the car down the road and walked back to the heat-exchange building—slowly. I figured inching my way by flashlight
was better than tripping on something and tumbling into the lake.

I’m not sure what I’d expected; I guess I thought Axel would be waiting for me out front. But when I got there, I saw nothing
resembling a tattooed guitar player. Just a barbed-wire fence, with its front gate ever so slightly ajar.

There was just a sliver of a moon out that night, and the whole place was incredibly dark. Actually, it was
unnaturally
dark; it took me a minute to realize that the outside lights weren’t on.

“Axel?” I whispered into the void beyond the front gate. No answer.

I tried shining my flashlight through the chain-link; the beam was broad and bright, but I couldn’t see anyone. “Axel?” I
said, a little louder this time. “Hey, Axel. Are you here?”

Still nothing.

I ventured forward, shining the flashlight beam around the parking lot. There were no cars except an official Benson service
vehicle, which may or may not park there all the time. Still, the possibility that someone might be there made me hesitate
for a few minutes. Then I figured that even if I ran into a Benson facilities worker, I could probably talk my way out of
it—that’s always been a particular talent of mine—so I kept going.

I crossed the parking lot to the main door, a reinforced-steel affair that didn’t exactly invite one to come in and stay a
while. Then I noticed that, like the fence gate, it was slightly ajar. I reached for the handle but—after several years of
covering crime and one of sleeping with a cop—it occurred to me that maybe I didn’t want to leave any fingerprints. So I used
the butt of the flashlight to open the door, and found that the building was just as dark inside as out.

“Axel?” I whispered again. Zippo.

But the fact was, even if he was there, he probably couldn’t have heard me. The Deep Lake Cooling system was on, and the cavernous
room was filled with the whooshing of water through pipes and the thumping hum of pumps forcing the chilled liquid back up
the hill to Benson. The whole place felt alive, like you were standing inside some gigantic body, lungs breathing and heart
pumping blood in an endless circuit. I half expected to feel the ground shift, like I was trapped in the gut of some sci-fi
monster.

If you’re wondering if I was scared, well… the answer would be
hell yes.
I’m generally terrified by campfire ghost stories; poking around a deserted industrial building in the pitch dark had me
more than a little freaked out. I was glad for the weight of the flashlight in my hand. The hefty red Maglite was Cody’s idea
of a Valentine’s Day present; it takes four D batteries and could work nicely as a bludgeon, should the need arise.

I shone the light across the room in a slow arc, and the beam illuminated the far wall a good hundred feet away. Huge teal
blue pipes emerged from the darkness like tentacles—an analogy that immediately struck me as counterproductive to my own peace
of mind. The light glinted off innumerable dials and other assorted gizmos that kept the place running, but it revealed not
the slightest bit of Axel Robinette.

Cursing myself for being sufficiently idiotic to be there in the first place, I forced myself to do a sweep of the entire
floor. I paced around doing some lame impression of bravery, trying not to jump every time the light cast creepy shadows off
the twisted piping—and, for the record, not having a whole lot of success.

I knew from my tour at the open house that the heat-exchange facility had three floors: the main one I was on, an upper gallery
with an office and a lot of computer equipment, and a lower level housing the huge pumps and the intake pool. Because the
upstairs struck me as less icky, I opted to check that out first. The office was locked up tight, computer screens and other
monitoring equipment blinking through a long window; otherwise nothing.

So I went back down to the main floor and made my way to the narrow metal staircase that led to the bottom level. The temperature
dropped after just a couple of steps; the air was cold and clammy, like the inside of a cave. On the tour Shardik had told
us that because the water was drawn from deep at the bottom of the lake, the pool was a constant 38 degrees.

“Don’t fall in,” he’d told us, leaning out over the waist-high metal railing. “Unless somebody fishes you out, you’ll die
in three minutes.”

Shardik had been laughing when he said it, like he was enjoying giving the shiny-suited dignitaries a little scare—
you’ll die in three minutes, har-har-har
—and we’d all laughed along with him. But his little joke didn’t seem so funny as I inched down the stairs, one hand on the
flashlight and the other on the chilly metal railing. When I got to the bottom, I swept the light across the room. Unless
somebody was hiding behind the massive pumps—and I really hoped no one was—I was all alone down there.

I was just about to go back upstairs when the sensible part of my brain said,
Look in the pool.

Hell no,
said the rest of me.

Come on, you big chicken. Just turn around, aim the goddamn flashlight, and look in the pool.

So I did.

And guess what: I immediately wished I hadn’t.

T
he body was facedown, arms and legs floating freely in the black water. Because I spend way too much time at the movies—and,
more to the point, because I was in the process of flipping out—my brain flashed the opening scene of
Sunset Boulevard,
when William Holden is lying dead in Gloria Swanson’s pool, but he goes ahead and narrates the whole rest of the movie anyway.

Now, I’m sure a more normal person wouldn’t have thought of that. In fact, a sane human being might very well have had the
presence of mind not to go to an empty industrial building alone in the middle of the night in the first place.

But there I was, standing there in the dark, my flashlight trained on a corpse lolling in the jet-black water. My first instinct,
in case you’re wondering, was to get the hell out of there as fast as was humanly goddamn possible. But I managed to ignore
it; I even talked my foot into taking half a step toward the pool.

Was it Axel? That seemed the most likely thing, didn’t it? I took another half step forward to get a better look at the body,
but I couldn’t see much. The waterline was about four feet below the floor, and the face was completely submerged. Since he—or,
I suppose,
she
—was wearing a baseball cap, I couldn’t even tell what the hair looked like.

I was just steeling myself to go all the way to the edge of the pool when I heard something. In retrospect, I think it was
just some ventilation system going on, but anyway it scared the hell out of me. I turned tail and ran up the stairs—flashlight
bobbing every which way, boots clanking on the metal steps, fight-or-flight instinct set firmly on
flight.

I ran up the stairs and out the front door, suddenly terrified that the fence gate was going to be locked. If I hadn’t lost
it before, I sure as holy hell did then.

What am I going to do if I’m locked in here? And what if whoever shoved whoever’s in the pool into the pool is still here—assuming
it wasn’t an accident, right? And what if I can’t get out, and I’m going to get killed because I left my goddamn cell phone
in the car because I’m a moron and I don’t know enough to…

The gate was open. I was too relieved to feel stupid.

I ran toward the car, vaguely aware that—considering that I was dressed like a bloody ninja—the bobbing flashlight was the
only thing keeping me from getting run over. And though it was probably just the fear talking, the whole time I had this incredibly
creepy sense that somebody was watching me.

I’ve never been much of a runner, but—darkness be damned—I booked down the road like I was in the goddamn Olympic relay. After
what felt like ten or twenty miles, I made it back to my car, hand shaking as I tried to dig the keys from the pocket of my
fashionably snug jeans. Once I finally retrieved them, I had to go through a whole other shaking thing as I scrambled to slide
the key into the lock.

Then the car alarm went off.

It sounded like a bloody air-raid siren—to me, anyway—and I jumped back so far I wound up in the middle of the road. Luckily,
no one chose that particular moment to run me over, because I spent a fair amount of time just standing there trying to calm
down enough to remember which little button I had to push on the key chain to stop all the flashing and honking. I fumbled
with the gizmo for what seemed like forever until I finally got the thing to shut up. It wasn’t until I jumped into the car
and locked the doors that I achieved something approaching normal breathing. I started the engine and, the Beetle having a
snug little turning radius, pulled a one-eighty and headed back toward town along East Shore Drive.

When faced with dead bodies—something I’ve encountered far more times than a girl would like—I’ve been known to go running
straight into the manly arms of Detective Brian Cody. And, well… this time was no different.

Okay, call me a wimp. But where the hell else was I gonna go?

He answered the door in a pair of navy sweatpants flecked with white dog hair. Don’t ask me how I remember that, but I do.
Also, please don’t ask me to defend the following conversation, which was utterly nonsensical:

“Alex, baby, what the—”

“Remember how I told you I had to work late tonight?”

“Uh…yeah.”

“There’s a dead body in the Deep Lake Cooling pool.”

“What?”

“Somebody’s floating in the Deep Lake Cooling pool.”

“In the…?”

“It’s really cold in there. You die in three minutes.”

That’s when he grabbed me by the arm and walked me over to the couch.

“Just sit down, okay?”

“I don’t need to—”

He pushed me down on the couch, then went away and came back with a glass. I sniffed at it.

“Tell me that’s not whiskey.”

“The medicine of my people.”

“Do you seriously expect me to—”

“Bottoms up.”

I did as I was told.

“You know,” I said a minute later, “you giving me whiskey is what we writers call a creaky stereotype.”

“And it’s obviously working.”

“Huh?”

“You already sound more like yourself.”

“Oh.”

He was sitting at the opposite end of the couch, looking at me like the proverbial bug under the microscope. “You feel ready
to talk now?”

“I was ready to talk before.”

He let that one pass. I sat up and told him about my evening’s adventures, which took all of five minutes. (Granted, I saved
some time by editing out the part where I ran out of the building like terrified poultry.) Then he spent a while berating
me for being dumb enough to meet Axel at the Deep Lake Cooling plant by myself in the middle of the night. He seemed inclined
to continue in this vein for quite a while, but eventually he had to stop reading me the riot act and report the body.