13 Stolen Girls Page 12

  Looking like a matched set of leather-clad she-wolves, the two former high schoolers marched a couple of doors down on the deserted nighttime street to the door of the club. Layla did feel ridiculous. She didn’t understand how anyone could keep a straight face rigged up the way she was.

  “How’d you get into this?” she asked Bonnie.

  “It’s the front lines, you know? That’s always where I have to be. And the men, the submissives, you won’t believe it. They’re so thankful.”

  The doorman at Paddles was, as the club’s motto had promised, friendly enough. “Mistress Tuck,” he greeted Bonnie.

  “My friend, Mistress…”

  “Remington.” As soon as she said it, Layla realized that she should have used an alias.

  The doorman thought it was an alias. “Oh, that’s perfect! Just like the rifle.”

  When Layla offered a bill for the twenty-dollar posted entrance charge, the doorman waved it away.

  “That fee’s just for men,” Bonnie explained. “Women never pay.”

  Layla followed her into a darkened hallway. “I didn’t tell anyone you’re a cop,” Bonnie whispered. “Could be a wet blanket, yeah?”

  A steady bass-and-drum beat pumped through the interior. Bonnie was welcomed with familiarity by several underworld denizens, including the club’s blowsy blond owner, Lady Jane. Whole herds of cows had perished in order to furnish the leather outfits worn at the club that evening. Layla had always considered the S/M scene—its commercial side, anyway—to be more of a New York phenomenon, New York and maybe New Orleans. Yet here it was in L.A.

  But there was something off-kilter about Paddles. It had the unreal flavor of a play dungeon that you might find included with a dominatrix Barbie doll kit. The warehouse interior was gloomy enough. There were suspension rigs posted at intervals, and padded cubicles lining one wall. But once you stepped outside the place you’d encounter fig palms waving in the warm Southern California breeze, and a freeway that led to the beach. The contrast was jarring.

  While Bonnie—Mistress Tuck—gabbed with her friends, Layla had the chance to check out the place. A scattering of hunched, sad-looking men wandered the premises, waiting for a mistress to abuse them. Some of them were bare-chested, and most of them wore dog collars. A dominatrix thrashed a slave who crawled on all fours, pleading to be allowed to use the bathroom. The clientele flocked to witness.

  It was all too…sad. Layla thought she was hallucinating when she saw a child dressed in a satin Little Red Riding Hood outfit pass in and out of view on the opposite side of the cavernous warehouse. She looked no more than six years old. Upon closer inspection, she proved to be not a child but a little person, enjoying her status as a mascot for the festivities.

  Bonnie took Layla up to an office space overlooking the floor. Lady Jane served them mugs of blood-orange tea, then left them alone. They gazed down at the groups of squirming, wormlike men.

  “This is it, huh?” Layla asked. “How about the opposite side of the coin? Female submissives? Male doms?”

  “Whole other scene. That guy along the wall in the mask? I’d peg him as a male dominator. I noticed his leather jockstrap reads ‘U.S. Marines.’ A sure tip-off.”

  The bare-chested male stood alone. He wore a leather bulldog harness, some sort of camo thong with a codpiece and high-laced boots. His lucha libre mask covered his face, a black hood with red and white markings. Layla noticed a few geared-up others in the club, strapping, well-muscled males. She could not understand the dynamics at play. Were they gay? Straight? The whole arrangement seemed too strange to plumb.

  “There don’t seem to be any girls here,” she noted. “Not submissives, anyway.”

  “A female sub comes into a place like this, there’s a riot. You’d think she’d get taken apart.”

  “That’s what she wants, though, right?”

  “You have to be in the scene pretty deep before you understand it,” Bonnie said. “I’m just beginning to get my bearings. It’s very stylized—like Kabuki, almost.”

  “Does anyone take it seriously?”

  Bonnie laughed. “Look at you, girl, all dressed up in dominatrix leathers, asking if anybody is serious. Sure, they are. Those boys down there are serious.”

  “Dead serious?”

  “You mean…?”

  “I’m a murder cop, Bonnie. You ever hear of anything along those lines?”

  Bonnie looked away, gazing down at the action below. “Outsiders like you, when they come into a scene like this they haul along a lot of preconceptions.”

  “Yeah, one of my preconceptions about humans is that they sometimes kill each other. Why do you think I asked you to bring me here? If you know anything, tell me.”

  “Most sub-dom encounters use safety words.” Bonnie spoke carefully. “When the pain gets too intense for the submissives, or if the slaves feel that the scene is spiraling out of control, they call out a safety word. ‘Red’ is a popular one. Say ‘red’ and the clothespins come off the nipples.”

  “Only sometimes, in the heat of the moment, the safety words don’t work. Is that what you’re saying?”

  Bonnie took a sip of her blood-orange tea. “You know the Cor books?”

  Remington shook her head.

  “Science fiction, or fantasy. There’s a whole series. In the Corean world, men are always masters and women are always slaves, or whatever terminology you want to use to talk about subs and doms. The Cor books are real popular in the S/M world.”

  “So?”

  “With Corean masters, there are no safety words.”

  Bonnie told Layla that she had turned up hints—“Nothing definite,” she emphasized—of a sub-dom underground that was a great deal darker than any friendly local neighborhood S/M club.

  “You know this town as well as I do, probably better,” Bonnie told her. “I’ve heard of Hollywood guys who are deep into Cor.”

  “Hollywood guys.”

  “Some sort of network of them is supposed to exist, or a circuit, trading girls, using them up and then recruiting more. They meet, you know, like a book club or something.”

  “You have any names?” Layla asked.

  “These people, they’ve had every experience in the known world, right? They spent half their time on yachts outside territorial waters. Orgies? Ho-hum, you know? They’re jaded. They turn up their noses at vanilla. They’re not even into Rocky Road anymore. They push things to the extreme.”

  “I need a name, Bonnie. Something to go on.”

  “And I don’t have one. This is all rumor, you know, ghost stories told around a campfire to scare people. The deep reaches of the scene. What I hear is that a Corean master gets boasting privileges if he can get a slave to ask him to murder her.”

  “Wow! Like, please kill me.”

  “That’s right. It’s called the Ultimate Consummation.”

  “Sick.”

  “And what do you do when someone’s sick? You try to heal them.”

  Shaking her head, Layla gestured toward the floor of the club. “This? You consider this healing? You’re heading down a total dead end, Mistress Tuck.”

  “It’s odd, but I think we work similar gigs, Layla.” Bonnie grabbed her friend’s hand and held it. “We’re both in the business of turning over rocks, aren’t we? To see what’s underneath. I use a camera, you use that pistol you left behind in your truck.”

  —

  Remington declined Bonnie Lareda’s invitation to help make the slaves at Paddles all thankful for her attentions. She left the club and emerged onto Violet Street. The warm Southern California breeze was indeed wafting. The thing about L.A. was that it lulled you. The town never seemed dangerous, until it was. A gulf loomed between the darkness of the human heart and all that warmth and sunshine. The contrast formed a secret underpinning of the noir movies that her daddy loved.

  She was the lone pedestrian on the block. She wobbled down to the U-boat on the outlandish spike heels Bonnie had lent h
er. Glancing around to check the emptiness of the neighborhood, she quickly unbuckled the leather bustier, stripped it off and re-dressed herself as plain old vanilla Layla. She bundled the borrowed gear into a neat package and left it atop the hood of Bonnie’s GTO. She hoped it would somehow survive until Mistress Tuck retrieved it. But she could also imagine an alternative outcome, with some Skid Row bum tricked out tomorrow as a dominatrix.

  Violet Street dead-ended at a set of railroad tracks beside the Los Angeles River culvert, which was near-empty with the dry season. Beyond the culvert, the towering Boyle Heights interchange coursed with a whining thrum of vehicles. The freeways in California always flowed more steadily than the rivers.

  As she drove to the end of the block to turn around, the night descended into a nightmare.

  A human figure reared up from the backseat of the U-boat. Remington tried to shout out, but a muscular forearm choked off her windpipe. She felt herself being pulled backward.

  She thrashed wildly. Her assailant knocked away her flailing hands. Remington had neglected to remove the elaborate collar rig that Lareda had fastened onto her earlier in the evening. The hard plastic of the neck plate saved her.

  “You fuck with us,” her attacker hissed in a thick male voice. “We fuck you.”

  Her pistol. She had left the Ruger 9 mm in the glove box. Twisting and kicking, she managed to bust the little compartment open. The sidearm wasn’t there.

  The U-boat remained in gear, its progress blocked by a curb. Remington was half dragged out of her seat. She could barely reach the pedals of the vehicle. With a desperate lunge, she twisted sideways and jammed her foot on the accelerator.

  The SUV bucked once, leaped the curb and rocketed forward. It smashed through a shaky chain-link that cut off access to the triple set of railroad tracks running alongside the river. Bumping and crashing across the tracks, the truck’s undercarriage sent off showers of sparks. The front tires blew with twin explosions that sounded like gunshots. Another pair of bangs came as both front-seat airbags deployed.

  The ride was too rough for Remington’s attacker to maintain his hold. Their heads were slammed repeatedly against the U-boat’s roof. Her foot slipped from the accelerator and their forward progress slowed. Fighting past the airbag, she found the pedal again.

  The truck careened into the enormous concrete box culvert of the river. It took a slow, greasy drift to the side, then toppled over. Still sliding, sparks flying, the U-boat plummeted toward the thin trickle of water below. The windshield exploded into chiclets of glass. The attacker remained somewhere behind Remington in the backseat. She heaved herself upright and leaped free from the truck, hitting the concrete hard and bouncing like some sort of human pinball.

  The U-boat spun downward. Flames appeared on its back end as the showering sparks ignited gasoline spilling from the fuel tank. Flung out onto the culvert’s concrete lip, Remington watched as the truck splashed into the river water and exploded.

  Orange-black flames burst into a skull-shaped fireball. Remington could feel the heat from where she lay sprawled. Not quite believing what she was seeing, she witnessed her attacker dash out from amid the roiling blaze. He staggered away from the wreck. She half expected him to be on fire himself, like some movie stuntman.

  “Police.” Remington’s breath had been knocked out of her. The word barely rose to a shout. She couldn’t even hear herself above the roar of the burning SUV.

  “Police!” she yelled louder. “Stop!”

  The effort cost her a coughing spasm. The neck plate hung broken at her throat. She tore it off and flung it aside. She began to slip down the angled concrete of the culvert, sliding directly toward the flaming truck. Only a desperate roll kept her from being engulfed by burning gasoline.

  Fifty yards away by now, fading into the dark toward the looming freeway interchange, her attacker turned and pointed at her. Too late, Remington realized that he was aiming her own gun in her direction. The shot echoed loudly. A ricochet ping sounded against the concrete ditch.

  She ducked, trying to put the smoking hulk between herself and her attacker. The last glimpse she had of him, he was loping away to the south, limping but still managing to run. He splashed across the shallow river and disappeared into the night.

  In the mad jumble of the crash, Remington had managed only a single close look at the guy. The image burned itself into her memory. A red-and-white lucha libre mask, the same one worn by the big dom whom she had seen at the club earlier in the evening.

  —

  Remington’s father wanted to see where the U-boat had screwed the pooch. Two days after the incident, they headed out together in his ancient F-150 pickup.

  Remington had brutal pavement burns on both hands, plus bumps and bruises all over her body. Her beloved U-boat was a charred wreck in the shallows of the Los Angeles River. But, for all that, she counted herself lucky.

  Bonnie Lareda had arrived at the scene around dawn, when she left the club and noticed the police presence at the end of Violet Street. The burned-out SUV was still being processed by a Multidisciplinary Accident Investigation Team, or MAIT, from the California Highway Patrol. Layla shepherded her photographer friend inside the perimeter. Bonnie took a couple of rolls of the wreck and the MAIT folks surrounding it.

  The attempt on Remington’s life triggered an immediate response by her cohorts in law enforcement. The police debriefings were not all that brief. First, the LAPD and then the LASD focused on what the hell she had been doing in that neighborhood in the middle of the night. They asked a lot of “why hadn’t” questions. Why hadn’t she kept the Ruger with her? Why hadn’t she checked the backseat before entering her vehicle? Remington got a whiff of blaming the victim.

  The fact that a department-issued weapon had been stolen seemed extremely important to her interrogators, even more vital, she began to think, than the fact that the breath had almost been choked out of her. A police sidearm on the loose worried everyone. Layla had been forced to borrow Gene’s Colt in order not to go about naked in the world.

  She told her interviewers some but not all of what had happened.

  “You were wearing this?” Deputy Johnny Velske fingered the cracked gorget that had effectively saved Remington’s life.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “The whole thing was just a goof, Johnny. A girls’ night out.”

  After the debriefings, Layla took some off-duty time. Gene was worried, she could tell. He was always her best nurse. Whenever she fell sick, he’d put her up in the extra bedroom he kept for her in his condo. She knew he wanted her to move “back home,” as he would have phrased it, completely and for good. She was liking the West Side more and more, but it wasn’t just that. Approaching thirty and living with her dad? As much as she loved Gene, no thanks.

  The two of them drove downtown together. The warehouse district looked even seedier in the cold light of day. Paddles was shut up tight. High-tension wires hung above the river. The freeway interchange resembled a busy hive.

  “Right about here.” Layla pointed. Her dad parked at the dead end of Violet Street. They both got out.

  She had visited the site once before, just a drive-by. In addition to Bonnie Lareda’s shots, there were some photos of the flaming truck taken from the freeway and posted on social media.

  A couple days had passed, and the wreck still hadn’t been pulled out of the culvert. A yellow-and-black strip of police tape hung across the gap where the U-boat had blasted through the railway fence. The scar from the runaway ride slashed itself across the rails beyond. Gene and Layla slipped the tape, waited until a Metrolink commuter train roared past, then hurried across the rail line toward the river.

  Layla went to the edge of the box culvert. She could see the burned truck lying on its side in the trickling river.

  “You okay?” Gene was always anxious lately. “Not having post-trauma flashbacks or anything like that?”

  She shook her head,
stepped off the rim and started to hike down. Her dad came behind her. The two of them skittered along, half sliding down the concrete slope.

  “You know the movie Them!?” Gene asked. “Giant radioactive ants battled it out with the U.S. Army in the riverbed right along here.”

  Layla didn’t feel much like talking classic cinema with her dad.

  The poor U-boat. The vehicle had given Layla good service ever since she got boosted up from patrol. She had always worked un-partnered, and “U-boat” was local L.A. police slang for a solo ride. Now the SUV listed at a crazy tilt, charred and smashed, its guts torn open. The violent rips in the sheet-metal body displayed shiny, knife-sharp edges.

  “How’d you survive this, Princess?”

  “I got out.”

  “God was watching over you.”

  She wanted to point out that the Big Guy in the Sky had allowed some vile creep to attack her in the first place. Such brushes with mortality—her own or that of others—always gave rise to thoughts of her mom. She died when Layla was too young to remember more than a few moments of her—an image, an embrace. Mona Seeger Remington. Maybe that’s who had been watching over her.

  Sentimentality didn’t suit Layla. She walked the scene, already thoroughly pawed over by first responders and then, later on, by the MAIT from the highway patrol. Debris had been left scattered over a broad area. There were cracked pieces of reflector lenses, a crazily intact side window, a side panel crushed into the shape of a heart. The smell of gasoline was faint but still noticeable.

  An investigator had discarded a mess of latex gloves in the river, where they remained, a blue rubber clump with the feeble current flowing around it.

  Gene came up beside her. “He wanted to finish you, darling.”

  “Maybe it was a warning.”

  “Kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it? To kill the person who’s being warned?”

  Layla looked up from the bottom of the culvert, tracing the U-boat’s hundred-yard plunge. Opposite, across the river, she noticed a lone figure standing on the freeway shoulder, looking down at her. A tall male, stocky and bald, poised in half-shadow and side-lit by the sun. Maybe a looky lou, wanting to see the wreck. But in her present mood of post-attack paranoia all sorts of suspicious thoughts occurred to her.