Night Talk (6 page)

He usually enjoyed the sudden quiet and calm of the dark, empty streets after being on the air. With the van behind him pacing him like a demon-possessed car in a Stephen King horror story, tonight they were long, lonely blocks. Worse, there were streets to cross. Picking him off on a crosswalk would be easier than jumping the curb to nail him.

Greg thought about it some more, took some steps forward and then said, “What the hell.” He spun around to face the van and headed toward it.

*   *   *

Leon slammed back against the driver's seat, letting out a startled yell. What the hell was that bastard doing? He was coming at him, to attack him.

He popped the clutch and hit the gas pedal, burning rubber as the van shot forward.

“You're dead!” he screamed.

*   *   *

Greg froze as the van jumped the curb with the passenger-side wheels and came at him, half on the sidewalk. He couldn't move or think as the van surged forward like a rocket. Some primeval instinct kicked in and he threw himself to the left, slamming up against a shoe store display window.

The van's side-view mirror brushed his right arm and wind whipped him as the vehicle flew by in a flash. It hit a city trash can on the corner and sent it flying into the intersection.

The van made a sharp right turn, rear end swaying, tires screeching, and disappeared around the corner.

Greg leaned against the store window. He was breathless. The crazy bastard had nearly killed him. He was lucky he hadn't broken the window.

He hurried to the corner and looked for the van. It wasn't in sight. Someone with a malicious sense of humor, he thought, and then corrected himself. If he hadn't moved fast, it would have hit him. This was no joke. Yet had the intent been to harm him, the van could have done so earlier when he had his back to it. The attempt to hit him was an impulse. But isn't that how many killers operated? They suddenly saw an opportunity and went for it?

He still thought it might have been a company van, someone on a call or returning from one. As it flashed by he again saw the wording on the side, probably a company name, but didn't catch what it said. And white vans were as common in the city as smog alerts.

Even if he had gotten a look at the company's name and reported it to the police, the driver would probably tell them he'd been moving slow, looking for an address, when some crazy guy on the street suddenly charged at him. He hadn't gotten a look at the driver.

He stared at his own reflection in a store window. He looked even worse than before. Now he looked like a man who had lost a battle but still didn't know who the enemy was.

It had been a hell of a night. Ethan killing himself. Getting stalked and nearly killed by a crazy in a van. A call from the dead.

Maybe Chicken Little was right.

*   *   *

In the van Leon's sense of glee had immediately deflated as soon as his rage dissipated.

He knew he was in trouble with the Voice. He had been told to follow the man, but stay in the background and intimidate him with the van's ominous presence. He would be punished for his disobedience and it would be painful because while logic and reason had little impact on his behavior, severe pain did.

When it started he pulled the van quickly over to the curb.

The feeling began in his testicles, a feeling that something had grabbed them. And squeezed. He cried out but the pressure got worse. Squeezed until his balls felt like they were being crunched in a vise.

He shouted promises, swearing that he would never disobey an order again.

Then he screamed.

 

11

The iconic little funicular called Angels Flight was the shortest railroad in the world, about the length of a football field. The cable cars connected Hill Street up a steep incline to Bunker Hill.

Greg had a laundry list of things like insufferable traffic and dirty air that he hated about L.A. What he loved was the city's surprises. Like a good movie, the City of Angels had constant plot twists to keep you on your toes as you made your way around its vast basin, which extended from the desert, being chewed up by four-by-fours, to beaches lined with surfboards.

Only a block or more from some of the greatest movie palaces ever built on the planet, in an area that had been going through a Latino renaissance but was bordered by Skid Row, where the homeless lined the sidewalks with tents, trash bags, boxes and shopping carts, he was about to step aboard the smallest and strangest railroad in the world. The cable car would lift him a few hundred feet to Bunker Hill, an elegant water garden and billion-dollar high-rises.

Bunker Hill overlooks Broadway and the rest of downtown. It was once the bastion of L.A.'s wealthy, who looked down their noses from elegant Victorian mansions at the common folk in the flat streets below. Stately mansions slowly evolved into slum housing as the rich moved away from the smells and traffic of downtown, the old buildings eventually got torn down, the terrain got lowered a bit and glassy skyscraping office and residential high-rises and art and museum venues went up.

Despite all the changes to Bunker Hill over the years, one thing hadn't changed from Victorian times—you could still see the common folk and Skid Row on the flatlands from its heights.

A cable car was waiting and he hurried to board before it started up. The tiny railroad had two counterbalanced cable cars—Sinai and Olivet. One car went up the short, steep incline as the other slid down. Operating in opposite directions on overlapping tracks, the railcars appeared destined to collide at the halfway point but swerved at the last moment to pass. At least that was the theory. In 2001 there was a fatality and injuries when Sinai, nearing the top, suddenly reversed direction and went down, hitting the other car.

The two cable cars had an unusual layout inside: the interiors were just as steep as the tracks because the tracks were on a steep grade from start to finish. After entering the steep interior of the bottom car, passengers climbed a series of steps and platforms to exit at the other end once the car reached the top.

No staff were in the cars—the operator stayed in the small station house at the Bunker Hill end. The ride cost fifty cents and you paid exiting at the top.

Two of the greatest names in film noir and detective stories, hard-boiled Philip Marlowe and hard-hitting Mike Hammer, rode the little railroad while investigating the city's dirty underbelly.

He didn't realize a woman had entered behind him until he made his way up the sharp incline to a seat at the top platform of the car. The woman was the only other person in the railcar. She took a seat at the bottom soon after entering instead of making her way up the ascent to the top to be close to the exit, as most people did.

He did a double take and quickly looked away, not wanting to appear obvious. Was it the same woman he saw in an entryway when the police and EMTs were tending to Ethan's body? He hadn't gotten a good look at the woman earlier but two different women in similar dark hooded coats was too much of a long shot. But he didn't know what her presence now and earlier added up to. And he didn't feel comfortable approaching a woman with a question about what she was doing alone on the streets at night. It was the sort of situation that could go to hell fast.

Not wanting to get caught staring, he snuck a look at her out of the corner of his eye. Around thirty or a little more, he guessed, tall, slender. Her hooded coat was black. The coat looked expensive, probably cashmere. Some untamed chestnut hair stuck out from the hood. Her features were partially covered by the hood but he could see that her complexion was pale. He wasn't sure, but guessed her eyes were light, maybe green or gray.

He knew why he was out on the street in the wee hours, but wondered about her. Too early to be on her way to work at an insurance company or law office in a Bunker Hill tower. Had she been on her way home from a night on the town or with a lover?

Something about her didn't jibe with being a businesswoman. She didn't seem artsy, either. It was something else. She was self-absorbed. Introspective. More than just being cautious about making eye contact with a strange man. Her body language was guarded and tense.

He left the railcar when it stopped at the top. The ticket booth was just outside the exit gate. Beyond the ticket booth was California Plaza's water court, a granite oasis with a dancing water fountain, open-air eating areas and greenery set in the shadows of two skyscrapers.

He dropped his ticket in the drop box and was walking away from the cable car, deliberately going slow in the hope that she might give him an opening to talk to her. A polite smile or a nod would do it.

He heard her say something and he swung around.

She was still in the cable car, standing at the railing in the car's exit cage. The railing was closed because the car was about to descend.

“I'm sorry, were you speaking to me?” he asked.

“It's just begun.”

“What do you mean?”

The car started its descent and she turned and went into the interior as he stood rooted for a long moment.

What the hell?

He slowly let go of the urge to take the next car down and chase after her on the street below. He wasn't sure he'd heard her right.

No, that wasn't true. He'd heard what she said, he just didn't know what she meant. She might be a crazy and start screaming for the cops the moment he approached her. He shook his head. All he needed to wrap up a strange night was to tangle with a woman on the street who accused him of harassing her.

He turned in the direction of his apartment and got his feet to move, but the impulse to run after her stayed with him. So did her cryptic remark.

It's just begun.

What bothered him most was the dead accuracy of her remark. The sky sure seemed like it had started falling.

 

12

A feeling of morbid anxiety, gloom and doom followed him from the water garden to his penthouse apartment. It wasn't one thing but everything, as if he had accidentally kicked the lid off Pandora's box and unleashed some of his own demons to taunt him.

Entering the apartment didn't bring a sense of relief. The place felt empty even though it was well furnished—expensively, at least. It had modern white sectional couches with straight lines set before a large-screen TV and entertainment center he rarely turned on except for music; large smoked-glass coffee and end table; a well-stocked Italian gray marble wet bar, and more marble on the hearth of a fireplace that rarely got turned on because it was in L.A.; those floor-to-ceiling windows that now were reminders of a tragedy; and a balcony beyond. There was no artwork on the walls, just some Mesoamerican art pieces scattered around on tabletops.

He had left the furnishings to an interior designer because he had little interest in the apartment. It was hollow to him because it was just a place to sleep, to camp out in between shows and for entertaining. There was little of him in it.

He felt more at home where he could walk barefoot in the sand than on the plush carpeting of a martini penthouse. A little north of Malibu he had a weathered beach house that had been pounded by wind and surf and roosted on by gulls long before he walked the earth. He had felt at home there the moment he walked in and bought it as a place to think and recharge on the weekends as guest hosts ran the show.

He was on the road so often with speaking engagements he didn't get a lot of time at either place he hang his hat. When he was in town, he enjoyed having a date and interesting guests to his beach house. He moved freely around people, that's what made him a good talk show host, but he also would hang back at a party with a glass of wine and study people rather than be in the limelight. He was so used to extraordinary people and ideas that pushed the envelope swirling around him that he found small talk a bore.

He turned on his cell phone after he entered. He didn't remember turning it off on the street, but he must have after getting the strange call. A voicemail signal popped up and his guts clenched. Another phantom call from the dead? Someone asking about Ethan? He was too beat, too raw and empty inside to hear from someone calling out of curiosity because they'd heard about the suicide on the news.

The moment he heard a Jamaican accent he knew it was Rohan, a best-selling author who, like a rock star, went by one name. Rohan was a media personality in the area of alien abduction. He claimed he had been abducted and examined by aliens during a university sleep and dream experiment. The experience involved a strange encounter with what appeared to be a woman on the surface but that Rohan realized was an alien taking the form of
women
—Rohan observing changes in the age, look, color and shape of his partner as they had sex.

Writing about it turned out to be a money machine for him. He'd been on the show a number of times to talk about his experience, always emotional about being violated. Rohan was angry that he had been used as a guinea pig. “The teachers running the program sold my soul to aliens,” he said in the opening to his book. “To the professors it was no different than parting out the organs of someone close to death so they can get rich.”

Accusing the university of selling people to aliens sold a lot of books.

“It's started,” Rohan said on the voicemail. “They killed Ethan because he got too close to their secret objective. Now they'll come after the rest of us who can expose them. Any one of us can be next but agitators like you and me will be first on their list to eliminate. We have to stick together or they'll pick us off like Ethan, one by one. Don't call me—I made this call from a neighbor's phone because they'll be listening in on my calls. We need to talk, to figure out what to do before Murad's creatures get us. Get over here so we can talk.”

The words came out at the speed of bullets in a tone frantic with fear and paranoia. There was enough slurring to make Greg wonder what he had been drinking or smoking before he made the call.