Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

drenched in sweat, his body slumped awkwardly against the curved side of the tunnel.

“Just through here,” Ada was saying to him, pointing at the wall where Fred and I were digging. “A couple of feet at most. That’s what you’re saying? You better not be fucking with me, Ramirez.”

“It can’t be far,” the man heaved. His eyes wandered to me. It was clear he recognized me from the driveway outside the house. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t me who had brought this on him. That I hadn’t been responsible for whatever happened to Dayly, that I was as much a slave to the people around us as he was. But there didn’t seem to be time.

“You can let him go,” I told Ada. She looked at me. “He’ll survive if he gets medical attention soon.”

Ada raised her gun and shot Ramirez in the head without taking her eyes off me. I turned to the wall before me, dug madly, relishing in the simple act of throwing, lifting, twisting, dumping the soil, trying to escape this moment. An hour passed. Maybe more. The final moments of my life. There was no phone to distract myself with this time. No Alejandro. I was going to die down here in the earth, directly below a police station, exactly how deep I didn’t know. Sasha was going to have to explain all of this to Jamie. She could barely account for what I had done to Adrian Orlov a decade earlier. I had no idea how she would deal with this. A strange thought occurred to me in the blackness, that my best hopes of Jamie ever knowing that I hadn’t meant to get myself involved in the horror in which my body would be found was Jessica Sanchez. Jessica, the woman who had arrested me all those years ago—she knew that all I’d wanted was to help my friend, to find and save Dayly. Jamie would never know that I’d tried to save Lemon, to save Ramirez, and that I’d wanted to help the man in the house at the beginning of the tunnel, who would surely die as Ada, Mike, and Fred made their retreat. I could only hope Jessica would tell my son I was a good person. I almost laughed. Hours earlier I had been standing on Mulholland Drive with Alejandro, flirting with the idea of leaving my life behind again, and now all I wanted in the world was to be able to go back to it again.

My shovel hit what I thought was a rock, but Fred snapped to, grabbed my shovel off me and pushed me away. He hit the spot I’d hit again, made sand fall, and I heard what he had heard: a hollowness.

I stood back with Mike and Ada while Fred dug. The dirt around the suitcases was loose, disturbed decades earlier by John Fishwick’s hand. Mike dragged down an enormous suitcase wrapped in a plasticky film not unlike what Sasha covered Jamie’s school books in. The first case was covered in a once-white film that was now filthy, patterned with toucans that were aged and pale. The second case was wrapped in plastic wrap covered in pictures of yellow tigers. The third suitcase, from the bottom of the stack, was indiscernible.

There were no words exchanged. Mike stepped forward, took a knife from his belt and flicked it open. I stood watching as he slashed open the wrapping around the toucan case and unlocked it, shoving it open.

Stacks of hundreds. Messy, faded, used bills bound with elastic bands and stacked neatly. The suitcase was jammed so full of cash that stacks got caught in the lid when it opened and flopped out onto the floor.

We all stood and stared at the money.

“What do you think?” Ada asked.

Mike cocked his head. He counted the stacks on the top briefly, reached out and pressed down on the piles, tried to gauge the way they sprang back against his hand.

“Seven at least,” he said. “Three cases. Twenty-one million all up. Probably more.”

I looked at Ada. She was smiling at me. The smile never wavered as she lifted her gun and shot me in the leg.

A white-hot pain, too sudden and shocking to give voice to. I hit the floor, grabbed my limb, felt the blood bubble up for the first time, seeping into my jeans. Nausea came and went. I braced for darkness, but it didn’t come. I looked up and realized Ada was turned away from me. She was looking at the sewer end of the tunnel, at Sneak, who was bloody and filthy and holding a police-issue Glock pointed right at Ada’s face.

Ada was stunned at first, but she recovered quickly, a snake rearing and then turning liquid, coiling on itself, reconfiguring for another strike.

“I wasn’t going to kill her,” Ada said.

Sneak cocked the weapon.

“I wasn’t,” Ada laughed. “Come on. Why would I have shot her in the leg if I was going to kill her?”

“Get out,” Sneak said. “All of you. Get out.”

Mike and Fred and Ada grabbed the handle of a case each, lifted them, and walked out. As Ada passed me, I realized the wrapping on the last case was covered in crows, their wings spread and beaks open.

When the crew had been gone a few seconds, and the sound of their footfalls had faded from the tunnel, Sneak bent down to help me up. She was covered in blood. I thought of the man in my apartment in the night, the feel of his hands on me. Those same big, calloused hands having already grabbed me in the West LA police station and shoved me into a wall. The work of those hands on my friend, now. It seemed stupid to have not made the connection before.

“Tasik,” I said. It was all I could manage.

“Yeah.” Sneak nodded.

“Did Jessica get away?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Sneak said again. “But Dayly didn’t.”

She helped me hobble to the sewer tunnel.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.