2 Sisters Detective Agency(9)

Ashton understood the situation immediately. He was being driven to his death.

He curled now into a ball, eyes wide in the dim light, his heart hammering. His wrists were bound with something thin, like wire. There was tape on his mouth. He shifted, looked around him. Nothing he saw brought his terror into check. A case lay beside him, hard and black, three-quarters the length of his body. An unzipped duffel bag, which he could see held pliers, drills, clamps. A folding chair and sheets of plastic.

Ashton told himself that he could talk his way out of this. The guy probably wasn’t a serial killer. Why pick off a rich kid from Beverly Hills and cause a media sensation when you could grab a dozen homeless kids from Culver City without anyone batting an eye? So if he knew Ashton’s family had money, that meant the guy was a businessman. This was a kidnapping.

He’d heard tales from other kids at school about this sort of thing. A guy in economics class had a cousin who’d been abducted in Tapachula for ransom while his father was working down there on trade deals. The cartels could smell money and had clocked the family as soon as they arrived in town. Ashton shook in the dark, staring up at the motionless silhouette of the man in the ball cap in the driver’s seat, as he remembered the guy in school saying the family had paid the ransom but never got their son back. A few months later a shriveled hand had arrived in the mail at the family’s mansion in Brentwood.

The van stopped, and Ashton lay panting in the dark. He squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed down sobs as the man crunched through what sounded like gravel outside the van.

The van doors opened. Ashton was dragged and dropped onto the ground. His ribs crunched. He spotted dark mountains. A distant road, the red and yellow lights of passing motorists. Too far to hear his scream. He still couldn’t see the guy’s face.

The man caught Ashton’s wrists, cut the tie. Ashton ripped the tape off his mouth and scrabbled away on the ground, almost crawling right over the edge of a gaping ravine lit by silvery moonlight.

He thought of running, but the van blocked both him and the man on an outcrop of rock with only a narrow escape route on either side. Ashton let a few sobs escape as the man went back to the van and returned with a huge black rifle.

“Oh, Jesus.” Ashton’s voice was high, thin. “Oh, please. God. Please no. Listen! Listen! Listen! I know what this is.”

“You do, huh?”

Ashton didn’t recognize the voice. He cowered on the edge of the cliff, blinking at the silhouette against the van’s headlights.

“I-I-If you look in the contacts list on my phone,” Ashton stammered, “you’ll get my parents. They can have the money here in-in-in—”

“Do you recognize me yet?” the man asked.

Ashton’s stomach sank. A person didn’t kidnap someone who knew them. “This is a mistake!” he cried.

The man shifted the rifle in his grip. Ashton scrambled back as far as he could, sending rocks and dirt crumbling into the ravine.

“There’s no mistake, Ashton,” the guy said.

“I don’t know you, man!” Ashton pleaded. He glanced over the rocky edge into the blackness. “Jesus! I don’t—I’ve never seen you before in my life! I—Please, man, please! I’m sorry. I’m sorry! Don’t hurt me. I’m just a kid!”

A thunk sound. A spray of dirt. Ashton realized with sickening clarity that the guy had shot into the ground at his feet, an inch or two away from the toe of his right sneaker. The rifle had a suppressor on it the thickness of a Coke can. Ashton backed onto the last few inches on the edge of the cliff. There was nowhere to go. Thunk, thunk. He screamed and curled into a ball on the ground, his feet hanging in the dark air over the edge.

“Just a kid, Ashton?” the guy said. “Just a child? An innocent child? Tell me, what do children deserve, Ashton?”

Another spray of dirt. The guy had shot into the ground near his face. Ashton drew his arms up over his head and face, too terrified to move. It was the sound that drew him out of it. He expected another thunk from the suppressor, or a grinding sound as the mere inches of dirt and rock on which he perched over the deadly drop gave way. But instead there was a blip. A short, high-pitched wail. Ashton blinked through tears. Down on the distant road, new lights had joined the snail trail of yellow and red. They were blue and red.

Ashton looked up. The guy’s silhouette was watching the distant lights too. Paused, calculating. Ashton gripped the ground for life, hanging on to dry shreds of grass and sharp rock, his teeth clenched and toes curled, his clothes soaked through with sweat and piss.

“Go,” the guy told him.

Ashton didn’t have to hear the word twice. He fast-crawled toward the van, squeezed past it, then bolted down a slope beside the cliff. He ran blindly downward, no idea if there were sharp falls or loose embankments ahead, thinking only of getting away from the van on the cliff above him.

Another thunk behind him. Another into the boulders of granite on either side of him. He followed the narrow natural trail, stumbling over cactus and rocks, falling and getting up and pulling himself onward as the shots followed him into the night.





Chapter 10



There was a beautiful young Black woman sitting in the waiting room of Ira Abelman’s office on Wilshire Boulevard in Central Los Angeles. I guessed her to be around twenty-five. She was the first Angeleno I’d seen up close. True to the city of beautiful people, she was tall and rake thin, and I’d bet she paid her hairdresser more than I paid my mechanic. She gave me the Fat Person Look-Over and turned back to her phone, clicking a moody selfie of herself in the plush leather chair.