Gathering Dark

me, it was like a clamp loosening from around my windpipe.
I watched her turn and run out of the shop, get in the car, and drive away.
Through the windows, Koreatown at night seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, to become unpaused. Long-haired youths knocked each other around on the corner. A man returning home from work let the newspaper box slap closed, his paper tucked under his arm. The malignant presence I’d felt out there when the girl had been in the store was gone.
I could have called the police. If not to report the robbery, to report a girl running from something or someone with the furious desperation of a hunted animal, a girl out there in the dark, pursued, surviving for who knew how long. But Los Angeles was full of people like that; always had been. A jungle, prey fleeing predators. I’d give the girl a little head start with my car before I reported it missing. I lifted my shirt and wiped the sweat from my face on the hem, trying to regulate my breathing.
My addiction pulsed, a short, sharp desire that made me pick up my phone beside the register, my finger hovering, ready to dial. I forced myself to put the phone down. The clock on the wall said I had an hour left of my shift. I thought about calling Jamie but knew he’d be asleep.
Instead I went to the ATM in the corner of the store. I slipped my card into the machine and extracted four hundred dollars, about the amount I knew the girl had taken. I went back and put the notes in the register. Though I’d never met the gas station’s true owners, I’d known cartel women in the can, and had picked up enough Spanish over the years to eavesdrop on their stories. The girl, whoever she was, didn’t need the San Marino 13s on her tail. Neither did I.
I hardly looked at the ATM receipt before I crumpled it and let it fall into the bin. It was going to be a long walk home.

JESSICA
“Here’s what I don’t understand,” Wallert said. He’d been saying it all day. Listing things he didn’t get. Waiting for people to explain them to him. Jessica guessed they were probably into the triple digits now of things Wallert couldn’t comprehend. “What the hell did you do on the Silver Lake case that I didn’t do?”
She didn’t answer, just looked at Detective Wallert’s bloodshot eyes in the rearview mirror. Jessica hated the back seat of the police cruiser, didn’t belong there. She was used to the side of Wallert’s ugly head, not the back. A biohazard company gave the back seat a proper clean out every month or so, but everybody knew that it never really got clean. The texture of the leather wasn’t right. Gritty in places. But Wallert was looking at her more than he was driving. Combined with the frequent sips of bourbon-spiked coffee from his paper coffee cup, he was eyeing the road about one in every fifteen seconds. In this case, she was in the dirtiest but likely the safest place in the car. Detective Vizchen, who they were babysitting for the night, sniffed in the front passenger seat when Jessica didn’t answer Wallert, as if her silence was insolence.
“I was there,” Wallert continued. They cruised by a bunch of kids standing outside a house pumping music into the night. “I was in the case. I was available to the guy whenever he needed me. Day or night. He knew that. It was me who came up with the lead about the trucker.”
“A lead that went nowhere,” Jessica finally said. “A lead I told you would go nowhere before you began half-heartedly pursuing it. You weren’t of much assistance to Stan Beauvoir the few times he called on you.”
“This. Is. Bull. Shit,” Wallert snarled. He slammed the steering wheel with his palm to the beat of his words. Jessica said nothing. To say that Wallert wasn’t of much assistance on the Silver Lake case was an understatement. The nearly decade-old case had been handed to her and Wallert as a “hobby” job, a spare-time filler, something Wallert hadn’t taken seriously from the beginning. The series of abductions and murders of young women taken from parking lots in the Silver Lake area had ended as suddenly and mysteriously as it had begun, four women dead within the space of three months in 2007. Wallert was sure that the killer had been a long-haul trucker, someone who probably carried on their killing spree in another state, making it someone else’s problem. He’d looked at the photographs of the four young women who’d gone missing when Jessica first handed them to him and yawned, then remarked on Bernice Beauvoir’s full, pouty lips. “You don’t get lips like that from suckin’ jawbreakers,” he’d said. The picture was of Bernice’s head sitting like a trophy on a tree stump in the wooded area where she had been found.
“House like that,” Vizchen broke the silence. “Gotta be—what? Five million dollars?”
“You don’t just give a five-million-dollar house to someone who worked on a case for you.” Wallert’s eyes seared into Jessica in the rearview mirror. “Just say you sucked his dick, Jess. It would make me feel better.”
Jessica felt her teeth lock together.
“I’d suck a dick for five million dollars,” Vizchen mused.
“Vizchen, you shut your mouth or I’ll stick my gun in it. See how you like the taste of that,” she snapped.
They pulled in to Lonscote Place. Blackened houses, perfect stillness. Wallert kept the emergency lights off but gunned it to number 4652, where the sighting had occurred, and slammed the car into park. He wanted to get this over with so he could go back to his pity party.
Jessica got out of the car, checked her weapon, called in the 459—possible burglary—and told the operator they were responding as the nearest unit to the scene. She looked at the moonlight