Three To Get Deadly (94 page)

The castaways looked down at him sadly as he passed.

"Help us," a woman whimpered, her voice echoing off the roadway.

He looked up at her. There was nothing he could do, and saying so wouldn't make a difference. So he just lowered his gaze and continued on.

Once again, Marty had little choice but to go under the unstable span, passing the piles of cars, concrete, and rebar that had come down in the quake. A man's unscratched arm stuck straight out from amidst the rubble, coated with a fine layer of dust, a cell phone still clutched in his hand. For a moment, Marty thought about taking it and trying to place another call to his wife, but he couldn't bring himself to do it.

Buck would have, if he had anybody to call. Marty wondered who that made the better man.

Marty emerged from under the overpass and the valley opened up below him. He could see clear across to the San Gabriel Mountains on the other side. And in the concrete, sub-divided flatlands in between, through the haze of smoke, the face of the Big One stared back at him.

It was an angry, wickedly malicious face, the face of a vengeful giant who awakened from a deep sleep and dribbled a gigantic basketball up and down the valley, gleefully smashing entire blocks with each bounce.

Now the giant had taken his toys and crawled back into his hole in the ground to hibernate for a hundred more years before wreaking havoc again. By then, the mess would be cleaned up and everything rebuilt for him to destroy again.

Marty couldn't see Calabasas from here, it was ten miles east, but he imagined it hadn't fared much better.

He set off down the hill towards home.

4:07 p.m. Wednesday

Los Angeles shouldn't exist. It had no natural harbor, no dependable water supply, and bad air. All it had going for it was year-round sunshine.

That was more than enough, with the right spin.

Nothing symbolized this more than the San Fernando Valley, once a parched dust bowl baking under the incessant heat.

But Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis and a few other wealthy businessmen saw the potential under all that cracked, dry earth. It was lousy farmland but these businessmen were interested in harvesting a more resilient crop: money. But to do it, they'd still need water.

Otis and his cronies bought up all the struggling farms and only then used their considerable clout to divert water along massive aqueducts from the Sacramento Delta hundreds of miles north to the arid valley.

With the arrival of water, the land was worth hundreds of times what the businessmen paid for it. And what they didn't own, they took control of by annexing it into the city. Otis used the pages of his newspaper to hype the valley as paradise and soon the people came in hordes.

Of course, Marty wouldn't have known any of this if he hadn't seen Chinatown. And if he hadn't seen the movie, and learned about the scandal and dirty-dealing behind the valley's creation, he couldn't have lived there. Without a hint of scandal in its past, the valley would have been just too bland to be habitable.

The only natural source of water to the valley was the Los Angeles River, which remained bone dry half the year, only to swell in the winter as much as three-thousand fold in a single rainy day. As much as Los Angeles craved water, it didn't appreciate the unpredictability of the river and treated it as they would any other piece of land. They paved it.

Now the Los Angeles River was a concrete-lined flood channel that snaked through the valley, except for one small patch designated as a park, where the Streamline Moderne-style Sepulveda Flood Control Dam held back the water when necessary and served as a cheap film location the rest of the time.

Even when the river was flooding, there was no shortage of exciting film to be shot. Inevitably, somebody would fall in, despite the fences and steep concrete banks and would spark a dramatic rescue effort which, more often than not, failed. It made great TV nonetheless.

The flood basin beneath the spillway, so rarely filled with water, was now overflowing with people. It was one thousand acres of open space and that was the only place anyone felt safe now.

As Marty came down from the Sepulveda Pass, he could see the dam, and the flood of people, just beyond where the San Diego Freeway merged with the Ventura Freeway. He wanted to avoid the tangle of unstable overpasses that converged there and so he climbed off the freeway as it came down the base of the north slope of the Santa Monica Mountains.

He trudged down the embankment onramp alongside the freeway, then followed the street below to the stately, ranch-style homes along Woodvale and Haskell, with their collapsed chimneys, crumbling stucco, and fractured wood siding.

This was where most of the valley money was, in the gentle foothills above Ventura Boulevard and up the hillside to Mulholland. While Hancock Park and Beverly Hills was mostly old money, as old as money could be in Los Angeles, the valley was where the newly-minted TV, movie, sports, and software millionaires built their modest estates, at least by old money standards.

The old money felt when the valley rich had real money, and actually mattered, they'd move to one of the Bs—Brentwood, Beverly Hills, or Bel-Air. Until then, they deserved the valley.

Marty reached Ventura Boulevard and, having seen the thoroughfare after the Northridge Quake in '94, felt like he was looking at a rerun. The buildings on either side of the valley's "main street" had lost their faces, revealing their plaster sinew and iron skeletons. The sidewalks were buckled, the roadway rife with fissures. Broken glass, chunks of mortar, and loose papers were everywhere.

Ventura Boulevard, which ran along the entire southern edge of the valley, was one long, charm-less stretch of fast food franchises, gas stations, grocery stores, car washes, and countless, bland strip malls, with their interchangeable mix of hair salons and donut shops, dry cleaners and locksmiths, liquor stores, copy centers, and video rental places. Culturally and architecturally, no one would miss what had been destroyed, yet again.

The devastation here seemed different to Marty somehow from what he saw on the other side of the hill. It was if he was seeing it all in more detail, under more intense light. He thought perhaps the flatness of the valley and the paucity of tall buildings had something to do with it, allowing the light to spread into corners and cracks it couldn't Downtown or in Hollywood.

Or maybe it was because, unlike the LA basin, he considered this home. Maybe he saw more because he knew the landscape better. As he moved slowly westward, he was aware of so many details that he'd missed before: The sour smell of rotting food. The broken parking meters lying on the street, leaving a spray of glittering change. The concrete bus benches flung into the center of the street by the force of the quake and broken in two. The layer of dust coating everything like powdered sugar. The steady stream of liquor, milk, juice, and soda flowing from shattered mini-marts. The flies swarming over the dead. The overturned mailboxes and the hundreds of letters blowing in the breeze like leaves. And, most of all, the silence.

Everything that had been wailing in the hours immediately following the quake, the car alarms and the injured people, had long since died. All he heard now was the buzz of flies, the rhythmic chopping of a helicopter in the distance and the gentle flap of banners advertising the "Circus Valdez" that fluttered from tilted street lights up and down the boulevard.

Something made him stop suddenly, just west of the intersection of Reseda and Ventura, and he didn't know what it was.

He looked around. A woman stapled a hand-written "Lost Dog-Reward" flier to a listing palm tree.

No, that wasn't it.

About fifty people, some of them barely able to stand because of their injuries, were lined up outside a Tobacco-For-Less store, where cigarettes were being sold out of cardboard crates.

The pathetic sight was worth a glance, but not a full stop.

What the hell was it that grabbed him, instinctively or subliminally, and forced him to halt?

Marty scanned the street. A guy sat on the curb outside a travel agency, flipping through a Hawaii brochure. Someone had nailed a piece of plywood over their falafel place and spray-painted the words: "Welcome to Tarzana, Some Assembly Required." A couple kids were carting a big screen TV out of a crumbled storefront.

His eyes went back to the plywood sign.

Yeah, it was kind of clever, but it was more clever when he saw the same joke after the '94 quake. That couldn't be what caught his attention. What else was there?

People had dragged some couches out of a furniture store and were sleeping on them in the street. A realtor in his bright orange jacket was sweeping up the broken glass outside of his office, as if he was actually expecting some business. A woman was picking through the rubble at a dry cleaners, carefully sorting the clothes, no doubt looking for her own. A guy was getting his wife and kids to pose in the street for a picture, something to remember the earthquake by in case they forgot.

His gaze returned to the plywood sign. Again.

What was it with the sign? "Welcome to Tarzana, Some Assembly Required."

Yes, he was in Tarzana, formerly author Edgar Rice Burrough's country estate, long since sub-divided and divided again. A city named after a fictional, tree-swinging, raised-by-apes hero. Tacky, but so what? It was just a place he drove through on the way home, an exit off the freeway, he didn't know anybody here.

Then he remembered and he knew why he stopped.

Marty reached into his pocket and pulled out the photograph Molly tried to give him. The photo of her five-year-old daughter, Clara. And he remembered what she said, as she was bleeding to death in her car.

And she showed him the photo. The same one she tried to give him when the shaking started again. The photo he wouldn't take because he was running away, leaving Molly to die. She screamed for him.

"Angel!"

He was almost home. Dandelion Preschool was out of his way. Clara wasn't his responsibility.

Marty looked down Ventura Boulevard. He was so close to Beth now. Five, maybe six miles, then his ordeal would be over and they would be together again. That was the whole point of the journey, wasn't it? To get back to his wife, to fight for her, and their marriage, again?

No, it was to get home. It wasn't about their marriage, about fighting for anything, at least not when he started.

But he knew it was now. Somewhere along the way, the destination of his journey had changed.

Now that he thought about it, Marty could almost pinpoint the moment. It was when he met Buck. Almost from the start, Buck challenged him about who he was, how truthful he was with himself and with his wife, forced him to all but admit that he was a lousy husband and that his marriage was falling apart.

And now Marty knew why. He supposed he always knew, he just never admitted it to himself. Their marriage was dying because he gave up his dream of writing and hers of being a mother. He knew the reason he stopped trying to have a kid was the same reason he stopped writing. The obstacles were too much. He couldn't deal with the failure.

But in the last two days, he'd overcome obstacles he would have found impossible to face before. Now the blank page and the empty semen cup didn't seem nearly so frightening any more.

He wasn't the same Martin Slack that he was before, he knew that now. And if he was going to prove it to Beth, he had to prove it to himself first.

5:11 p.m. Wednesday

The page Marty tore out of the phone book said that Dandelion Preschool was on Kittridge, which meant that technically it wasn't in Tarzana at all, not that it made any difference now.

He didn't have a map anymore, but he headed north on Wilbur because he vaguely remembered seeing a Kittridge street sign before, on his way to Costco, the warehouse store where Beth liked to buy things in bulk, not because they needed that much of anything, but because she couldn't resist. It was like asking her take one potato chip from the bowl when she could have a handful instead. They were still using the same five-pound container of seasoned salt they bought there two years ago, and they probably still would be for years to come.

They didn't take Wilbur to Costco, they took Tampa several blocks west, but this was the first north-south street he came across and he knew that if Kittridge crossed Tampa, and you could say the school was in Tarzana, then it had to cross Wilbur, too.

Marty didn't know what he was going to say or do when he got to the school, but he knew he had to go there. Molly's dying wish, even if it was implied rather than said, was that he save her girl. If Clara was even alive. And what if she wasn't at the school anymore? What would he do then? How long and how far would he search before going home?

He didn't have a chance to answer those questions right away, because he was immediately distracted by two things. First, was the Los Angeles River, which he could see to his left and right, which meant that he was over it and that the street he was on was actually a bridge. He'd been so lost in his thoughts, he hadn't even realized he was walking on a bridge. But he considered his alternative. The banks of the river were nearly vertical slabs of concrete. If he didn't take one of the streets over it, he'd have had to back-track all the way to Balboa Park near the Sepulveda Dam, scale the dry river bed, then come back this direction. He probably would have chosen this route anyway.

That's what he thought, and tried to tell himself, in the split second between his first distraction, and the second one, which made the first all the more horrifying: