Blank (6 page)

Facing the four leaderless kitchen staff and their eight bottles of vodka, whiskey and, in one case, Benedictine, Honor had one extraordinarily durable bottle of Wild Turkey. She was most decidedly outgunned and the kitchen staff now knew everything she could teach them about weaponizing liquor bottles. But she hadn’t yet taught them everything she knew about liquor bottles.

With a touch of magician’s flare Honor presented her loyal Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit on the tips of the fingers of her right hand and elaborately and carefully uncapped it with her left. Her audience looked on, duly curious but not yet sufficiently impressed to copy her. Bringing the bottle to her nose, she made a show of appreciating the noxious bouquet of a freshly opened bottle
of 101 proof bourbon. She smiled broadly, licked her lips like a pantomime child-snatcher, and drank deeply.

With a few false starts, particularly when confronted with corks, the kitchen staff of Milo’s restaurant took to spontaneous binge drinking with an enthusiasm well beyond anything for which Honor could have hoped. They opened and sampled and in some cases emptied at least one of everything. Soon the atmosphere was a dangerous mix of shared curiosity and aggressive evangelism as the kitchen staff forced new taste sensations on one another but from Honor’s perspective the chief development was an overarching lack of focus. They had completely forgotten about her.

Honor sashéd between the indifferent drinkers like a hostess excusing herself momentarily to see to a doorbell and left Milo’s staff cocktail soirée in the store room. Immediately she found the door she wished she’d found about a quart of bourbon earlier — the door marked “lobby”. In fact the door led to a little office, the very office that had been Darryl’s entire world for most of his short life, and from there Honor found her way back to the foyer. Apart from Darryl who, sadly, no longer registered on the census, the foyer remained empty and that suited Honor to a nicety because she had lost her taste for adventure and, more particularly, for the consequences which seemed so often to fall hard on the heels of adventure. She no longer wanted fast cars or caviar. She wanted to be home and safe and, ideally, armed.

Crossing the lobby Honor was captured by the mirror behind the bank of phones and had in that moment the sort of epiphany that rarely comes in adult life — she realized that she wasn’t Chinese. The photograph on her license had been of a dark and mysterious oriental girl but the face in the mirror was heavily influenced by generations of breeding beneath the sunless skies of Ireland and reflected back mainly inarguably red hair and a round and robust face, generously freckled under a neon sunburn.

It had been Honor’s plan to get back on her Harley and go to the Beverly Hills address that she remembered from her driver’s license. But the license wasn’t hers and the address wasn’t home and, issues of identity aside, the street had become a primitive war zone. In the time that Honor had spent on the worst group date in history the sun had begun to set and the nascent communities of police officers and golfers and religious nuts had become militantly partisan and were beating each other to death.

The policemen, unaware that they were wearing sidearms, were hitting the Hare Krishnas with garbage can lids and newspaper vending machines and the cultists were fighting back with whatever was at hand, mainly tambourines. A substantial platoon of businessmen in shiny suits was trying in vain to force its way into the many occupied cars trapped on the street and a pair of store mascots — a caterpillar and a butterfly — had managed to set themselves on fire. Across the street the cinema and stores and offices had been invaded in spite of the previous impenetrability of picture windows and, most disturbingly, revolving doors.

There were no women among the warriors and so all that remained to fight over was food and anything that resembled food but the fighting was never-the-less fierce and ominously well-organized. Honor mused briefly on the effect of introducing a female into the melée and decided, for the moment, to hold her ground in the hotel. There were cars everywhere and her motorcycle was only yards from the hotel entrance but the frenzy stood between them and Honor like an acid storm. She needed another exit and she needed a vehicle. With these fundamental truths she returned to the labyrinth behind the reception desk.

The kitchen staff had spilled into the hall and begun the vomiting phase of the binge drinking process and posed no serious threat. Honor found what she needed in the lost property room and returned to the restaurant and then the kitchen. The kitchen was windowless and dark and the emergency lighting had burned itself out but Honor could see the only thing she needed to see — the outline of the inevitable receiving door which all professional kitchens use primarily for smoke breaks. She could only guess what lay beyond the door. It sounded like unsuitably skilled workers dismantling a greenhouse but was likely yet more running street battles. But very soon there’d be mindlessly wild and dangerously sober cavemen invading the hotel and in any event Honor had a target and a plan and a BMX bike from the hotel’s lost and found.

Honor and her bike burst from the door not so much prepared for anything but unconcerned what anything might be and so when she found herself jetting off a six-foot concrete loading bay as though off the side of a cliff she maintained control of the bike and hit the ground with the wobbly confidence of a natural cyclist on a pint of bourbon. She quickly recovered her balance and peddled with the strength and speed so often consequential of being instantly pursued by a high-density mob of mindless neanderthals with a paleolithic sense of the romantic.

Just as she’d recognized the zoo and the interior of a Ferrari with no memory of ever having seen either, Honor knew exactly where she was going and what she was going to do when and if she got there. She was going to the police station, and she was going to get a gun.

As keenly as Honor was recollecting the path back to the LAPD headquarters she’d passed on her way onto Broadway, the actual measure in distance was proving elusive. Partially because she was quite drunk but mostly because she was backtracking on a bicycle a route previously charted from the luxury of a Harley Davidson. She could see the revolutionarily ugly glass triangle jutting from its cinder block housing like a gargantuan broken widget and knew that she must be approaching police headquarters from the rear, which was roughly the plan, but it seemed to get no closer.

Of appreciably greater concern was the growing density of the street-fighting which Honor was having more and more difficulty dodging as her lungs and legs began to submit to the stress and heat. So long as she was able to keep to a pace just a notch above a breathless sprint then even those who noticed her and gave chase soon abandoned the pursuit but the factions were sweeping the streets in shoals now.

Suburban dads were the main occupying force, holding store fronts and upper floors and exploring the military applications of fire and throwing heavy things out of windows. A crack team of road workers was maneuvering against the small but select collection of women being archived by the staff of a condominium showroom. A regiment of confederate soldiers — almost certainly movie extras — were entrenching their positions in a pitched battle with a leathery corp of farm workers for control of a truckload of tomatoes.

As she soldiered on Honor noticed the high ratio of policemen among the rioters and reflected on the brutality they’d brought down on the heads of the Hare Krishna. She realized that her plan of riding a bicycle into the city’s highest concentration of policemen was exactly the sort of strategy conceived by people who’d just pounded a pint of Bourbon.

She estimated, probably optimistically, that she could keep her diminished pace for another mile and began to look for shelter. The closest option that didn’t require riding up stairs or through a fountain was an open underground parking garage and she steered toward the ramp and disappeared into the darkness.

She bore deep into the back of the garage. No one followed and as near as could be determined in the darkness she was alone. And there were cars everywhere, she needed only choose one. She cast a discerning eye for something that had the firepower she’d need to get through the immobile traffic and found herself harboring sentimental thoughts of the bulldozer she’d abandoned at the zoo. But all the cars were exactly alike. They were almost all Chevrolet Caprices and they were all black and white. Honor had accidentally broken into the headquarters of the LAPD.

Honor switched on the bike’s light and the beam fell immediately on the door to the stairs. She took that as a sign that she should return to plan A and investigate the availability of weapons. She promised herself that she’d go no further than absolutely necessary to secure a firearm and then return to the garage, hotwire a police car and get as far from LA as it would carry her. She was sober enough now to ask herself if the plan was sound. She answered herself that it was.

And indeed when Honor peered through the thin slice of risk that she allowed through the door of the ground floor stairwell the plan seemed to be unfolding with the machine-precision of a carefully planned and expertly executed museum heist — the entire floor was empty. Certainly that which could be seen of the ground floor was empty but that accounted for a considerable amount of acreage in the open plan, glass-partitioned breadth of the ground floor of the absurdly inappropriate headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department. She could see all the way to the front of the building, through at least five layers of conference rooms and briefing rooms and offices and finally the foyer and the outside, which was where all the action was. It appeared that the staff, in search of food or fresh air or broader horizons, had established a beachhead in the park across the street. There the uniformed officers and civilian staff had split into distinct factions and established a brisk arbitrage in women.

Honor sacrificed a shoe to prevent the door closing and locking and stepped into the lair with an unworried gait very much approaching a saunter. She immediately encountered the first obstacle to the plan — as much as the police department resembled the shopping concourse of a busy modern airport there was not, as Honor had vividly imagined, a hall of convenient shops dedicated to the keeping of peace and enforcing of law and she couldn’t immediately see where they kept the guns.

In fact as Honor toured the transparent halls she observed that were it not for the mug shots taped to the glass walls of the briefing rooms the police station would have looked much more like a very peaceable stockbroker’s on a warm Sunday afternoon. And it was precisely while making this observation that Honor had for the first time that she could ever remember a flash of total and certain recognition. From among the scarred and angry and defiant faces on the opposing wall of a long and narrow briefing room Honor’s curious attention was returned by a dead stare from a face that she knew. A face that she’d seen as recently as the Regent Hotel when she caught her reflection in a mirror.

Her name was Gale, also known as Gale Force Winds, Gale Smith, Gale Jones, Gale Lencewicz, Mariantoinette Hapsbourg and “Solenoid”. She was wanted for, among many other things, theft, felony theft, auto theft (43 counts), theft by deception and theft by forced entry, making a false statement to a police officer, assaulting a police officer, impersonating a police officer, criminal nuisance (uttering a bomb threat by telephone) and escape from custody (state mental facility). She was currently at large and presumed to be in Los Angeles and under additional notes someone had added “riot cuffs”.

As she read she became sensitive to a rising feeling of undiluted elation. She was, here in Los Angeles where nobody’s anybody until they’re at least a little bit famous, a star. A giddy smile pulled at the corners of her mouth while a melancholy tear for her lost celebrity formed in her eye. It must have been one long and uninterrupted hoot but now it was gone and nobody knew Honor’s lore, not even Honor. She plucked the little wanted poster from the glass wall of the briefing room to serve as her new ID, her single touchstone to the past and her credentials in the future. And as the still face came away from the window it was replaced by another uglier, hungrier and much more animated face. The face of a police officer with no mind nor memory nor motive apart from eating and mating, and it looked as though he’d already eaten.

Honor assumed that pedigree of startled that can only be bred by a sudden face at a window and uttered a brief and high-frequency yelp. The policeman treated this like a starter’s pistol and immediately mashed his face into the glass and was startled in an altogether different way. Honor turned toward the door to find it blocked by a small coterie of police officers who had come from, by all appearances, nowhere.

The alpha cop was a generously obese desk sergeant and he held back the others with outstretched arms that indicated inarguably that they would have to wait their turn, and he approached Honor. She was trapped in the briefing room and backed quite literally into a corner. The desk sergeant, operating on a millennia’s old instinct and comprehension of sartorial apparatus, fumbled helplessly with his belt. Honor considered her diminished options, including that being so primitively proposed, and she realized to her horror that she had only one left.