White Sister (17 page)

I was hoping to just pick up the pager and get out. But coming off the elevator, I ran straight into Captain Calloway.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, startled to see me.

Cal was about five feet four with a shaved, black, bullet head
,
and Mighty Mouse muscles. He was not a guy anybody took lightly.

When I didn't answer, he said, "Hey, Shane, I want you out of here, now. Did you see that circus out front? You need to be invisible."

"Lemme pick up my briefcase and I'll get lost."

I pushed past him and got to my cubicle. There was a message slip in Cal's scrawled handwriting in the center of my desk saying that Dr. Lexington had called yesterday, along with the yellow sheets on Stacy and Lou Maluga that I'd requested. There was also a sealed envelope from ESD waiting in Sally's In-basket. My desk was a clutter. She hadn't used hers yet, so it was without a scrap of personal paraphernalia. I snatched up the ESD package without opening it and turned to leave. As I did, my cell phone rang and with it, my heart froze. Something new on Alexa?

But it wasn't the hospital. It was Rosey.

"Hey, Shane, I think we may have a line on this Bodine character."

"Where are you?"

"Meet us at Pepi's Mexican Diner on the corner of Lucas Avenue and Emerald Street in Echo Park?"

"Now?"

"This place is a grease pit. You wait too long, we'll all be in the can, fighting for toilets."

I ran to my car and sped out of the underground garage. All the way there I wondered what they'd found in Echo Park. Suddenly it hit me. If you were so down and out that you had no options left, if you were willing to sleep in a cave with rats the size of house cats, if you could endure the damp reek of the ungodly, then you would go to the old Belmont Tunnel near the corner of Lucas Avenue and Emerald Street.

That abandoned subway tunnel was the lowest rung on the human ladder. The last stop for lost souls in L
. A
.

Chapter
25.

THEY WERE SITTING out front of a small taco stand under a Cinzano umbrella which was liberally dappled with pigeon droppings. Four tough-looking black guys in Polo shirts, wind
-
breakers, and jeans. I spotted Dario and Rosey. The other two, I didn't know. I pulled up to the curb and got out. They were all eating tacos and drinking Cokes out of paper cups.

"Shane, this is Lawrence Fischer from West Bureau Vice," Rosey said as I approached and all four stood. I shook hands with Fischer, a skinny undercover cop who was obviously working street strays and dope mokes because he wore long, braided hair, beads, and had arm tats. "And this monster with bolts through his neck is Adrian Young. Known in South Central as Young Frankenstein."

Adrian Young shook my hand, popping two knuckles in the process. He was tall and square, and looked hard as a hickory.

"These guys are also in Oscar Joel Bryant," Rosey said.

"Thanks for helping," I replied. "You think Bodine's in the Belmont Tunnel?"

"Yeah, maybe," Dario said. "Some of his housing associates finally copped to assaulting him. They caught him stealing a bicycle and dusted him up. That was yesterday. Afterwards, they think he might a crawled in there."

I sighed. "If we're going into that sink hole, we're gonna need flashlights."

"And oxygen tanks," Adrian Young said. "It stinks in there."

"It ain't gonna get any sweeter smellin' while we're standin' around talking about it," Rosey said.

Everyone got a black Mag light out of their car and joined me in front of the taco stand. Then we walked five abreast down Lucas Avenue toward the decommissioned tunnel.

The old, boarded-up Pacific Electric Station sat in front of the concrete-faced tunnel entrance. The abandoned terminal was a big, two-story, concrete box with plywood-covered windows and a cathedral-sized, metal door. Over the decades, the building had become a living canvas. There was almost no tagging on the big facade. Most of the decoration had been done by aerosol artists. Dragons adorned the walls in bright colors. Some guy with a lot of leftover turquoise paint had rollered the top third of the building all the way across creating a cornice effect, giving the structure a strange art nuevo look. A few hundred yards beyond this colorful concrete box loomed the tunnel entrance itself: a large gaping arch cut into the Echo Park hillside.

The electric Red Car had been an early attempt at rapid transit in Los Angeles that had lasted from the mid-twenties to the mid
-
fifties. The Pacific Electric subway tunnel had originally been dug as a shortcut for trolleys going from downtown L
. A
. to Hollywood or the San Fernando Valley. It had become a victim of the gradual dismantling of the 1,100-mile rail system as freeways took over. Eventually, the electric Red Cars went the way of the snap
-
brim fedora. The tunnel was used temporarily for city storage, until 1967 when the section between Figueroa and Flower Streets was filled in to pour the massive foundation for the Bonaventure Hotel. The existing tunnel and tracks now went into the hills only for about a mile before they abruptly ended at a concrete wall. Over the years I'd fished several dead bodies out of that miserable hole in the hill. It was the most dismal place I'd ever been. Once a year the County would come out and plow the reeking gunk and human refuse out of the cave and repair the broken-down chain
-
link fence that attempted to block the entrance. Twenty minutes after they were gone somebody would cut it open again and the cycle would begin anew.

As we neared the mouth of the tunnel, I began to pick up the sour sweet stench coming from inside. Wounded men and animals crawled in here for refuge and often to die. Homeless people cooked food or drugs over newspaper fires, slept in the tunnel's * dank confines, and defecated in the slight indentations where the red car tracks used to be. Their old cooking fires had blackened the walls while the spirits of the long dead seemed to hover in every crack and crevice.

"Welcome to Paradise," Rosey said, as we switched on Mag lights and began the gruesome trek down the bleak corridor.

Before we were a hundred yards in, a pair of feral eyes reflected in the light of my flashlight beam. Huge rats, known by tunnel dwellers as track rabbits, scurried away from us in the dark. They were ugly rodents that hunted in the dark. Anything they could digest, they tried to eat, even crouching in packs to nibble the fingertips of blitzed-out bums in a drug haze. But in this desperate place the tables could quickly turn. The tormented men and women would sometimes trap the rats and spear their rodent carcasses on sticks so they could be eaten, roasted over smoldering sections of the L
. A
. Times.

We found our first cardboard condo about four hundred yards in. The resident was a woman with stringy black hair and oozing track marks on both arms. She peered out of her crate like a ghoul in a horror flick.

"You know John Bodine?" I asked.

She had a different kind of deal in mind.

"You got five bucks I'll suck off all a you," she whispered, her voice rasping.

It was hard to understand her because somebody had knocked out most of her teeth.

"We're looking for John Bodine," I repeated.

"You don't want a blow job, then get the fuck away," she said, slinking back into her box.

We shined our lights on down the tunnel and kept moving. The beams only penetrated fifty feet ahead. From beyond the reach of our flashlights, something growled at us. Man or beast, I couldn't tell. We were flushing people and animals up the tunnel ahead of us. They would sometimes hide in the cutbacks and then try to sneak back around. We shined our lights on them as they scurried past. Nobody looked like Long Gone John.

A half a mile in, we encountered a larger cardboard condo complex: six shipping crates huddled together where people lived. Most were currently empty, but two appeared occupied. I went over and shined my light into a box where there was a man lying inside. I reached in to wake him.

"Shit," I said, as my hand touched his cold, stiff body.

"What is it?" Dario asked from behind me.

"This guy's dead."

I could smell his rotting flesh. God only knew how long he'd been there. His next-door neighbor was snoring, so I woke him.

"Whatta you want?" he groaned at me.

"Your buddy here is dead."

"Not my buddy." He sat up. "Fucking guy," the man said, leaning out and looking over at his dead neighbor who was now illuminated in the narrow beam of my Mag light. "Thought he was just sleeping off a powder fix."

"You know John Bodine?" I asked. He looked at me through tangled hair. "They call him Long Gone John," I added.

"I can know lots about him. You got some cash?"

"Describe him. If you get it right, then we'll talk money."

"Fat guy. No teeth."

"Nice try." I turned back to Rosey. "Better radio this DB in."

Lawrence Fischer triggered his walkie-talkie and tried to put out the call, but he only got static. "We're in too deep," he said. "Gotta wait till we're outside."

We moved on. The smell was horrific. The few people we encountered who hadn't slipped past us turned away, trying to hide from our flashlight beams. They looked like grotesque Salvador
Dali sketches. The ones we did talk to claimed not to know anything. I pinned each one with my flashlight, asked about Bodine, got nothing and moved on.

"I can't take much more," Adrian Young said. "This stench is gonna make me yak up those tacos."

Half an hour later I was beginning to feel like we were wasting our time. The end of the tunnel was coming up. The opening stopped at a dirty concrete wall, which was the foundation of the Bonaventure. It seemed a striking contrast. On the other side of that wall, just a few floors above, was a luxury hotel with people eating steaks while down here they were lined up waiting to get into hell. The paradoxes in this town can drive you nuts.

The smell was not quite as bad at the end of the tunnel because very few homeless people came this far in. The walls were damp and sweating with moisture, the air cool and moist. Something large scuttled past me, and I swung my light at a possum-sized rat scurrying toward the mouth of the tunnel a mile away.

Then I saw him, all the way back at the very end at the corner of the wall, as deep in as you could go. John Bodine had finally found the end of the line. I spotted the white plaster cast first, then Chooch's red Harvard-Westlake sweatshirt. I moved quickly toward him. As I got closer I could see the information Rosey had received was correct. Bodine had been badly beaten. Blood ran down the side of his face. His lip was split and he was clutching his stomach with both hands. Dried blood caked his fingers and stained much of Chooch's sweatshirt. I knelt in front of him and looked into his dusty brown eyes. Then I raised the sweatshirt and saw a deep knife wound in his left side.

"Ain't gonna put up with no more a your half-steppin', Scully," Bodine whispered. "See what you gone and done? I'm dying here and it's all your fault."

"What the hell happened to you?" I said, shining the light on his knife wound. It looked deep but had stopped bleeding.

"Ohhhh, man. This ain't no way to treat no prince," he moaned.

"How long you been in here?" I asked.

He looked at a watch on his wrist and whispered, " 'Bout six hours, I guess."

It seemed strange that he would even own a wristwatch. I didn't remember him having one before. Then I took a second look. Of course it was mine
the good one from the top drawer of my bedroom dresser.

"This guy's been stabbed. Let's not wait for the EMTs and a stretcher. They hate coming in here; it's always a hassle," I said. "We gotta get him out now!"

The four cops behind me moved up. I lifted John to his feet and Rosey and Dario made a seat for him on their forearms. "It's almost a mile, so we'll take turns carrying him," I said.

Then we carted the Crown Prince of Bassaland out of the most miserable spot in L
. A
.

Chapter
26.

THE FIRST THING I noticed when we brought Bodine out into the sunlight was that somebody had hacked off his dreadlocks. What hair he had left was now unbraided and sticking out at strange angles, chopped and uneven. It made him look even crazier than he probably was. Lawrence Fischer and I were carrying him. As we hurried up Lucas Avenue toward my car, I asked him, "Who cut off your hair?"

"I did. African prince don't be needin' no fancy man hair. It's a tribal thing," he ranted. "In Africa, you see a brotha with no hair, says he's a revolutionary, 'cause first thing a freedom fighter in the Bassaland goes an' does is breaks his muthafuckin' hair pick, 'cause a hair pick look just like a field tool, like for pickin' cotton. Be like a rake or some such. I say to hell with the rake and the pick and the whole exploitation of my African brothers." Naturally, I was sorry I had asked.

We set his feet down so that I could unlock the car door. Whe
n w
e did that, he stopped talking about hair combs as a symbol of slavery and started screaming in pain.