The Disavowed Book 2 - In Harm's Way Read online

  “Smells divine.” He smiled.

  “Wait until you taste it.”

  “I can’t—” Silk skipped over, grabbing a spoon, but Jenny whirled around, taking the saucepan with her.

  “Go sit down,” she scolded him. “Right now.”

  Silk saluted briskly.

  “And whilst you’re at it set up the DVD for our Arrow-fest.”

  Silk complied. By the time Jenny came through with two bowls full of the thick, chunky soup, he was seated, knife and fork in hand, and a napkin tucked into his collar. The goofy grin on his face faltered a little when the phone rang.

  Jenny planted a bowl in front of him. “Get started. I’ll answer it.”

  Silk tucked in. The call would be from either Trent or Radford and Jenny would field it so that he could get back to them. Silk reveled in the wonderful taste to the point of closing his eyes and sighing out loud.

  “Adam,” Jenny’s voice sounded far away. “It’s a man.”

  Silk nodded without opening his eyes. “Tell ‘em I’ll ring back later. Or tomorrow,” he said around a mouthful of culinary bliss.

  “He says it’s Tanya’s boyfriend. Who’s Tanya?”

  Silk stopped chewing. The taste in his mouth had just turned to ashes. “What?”

  “He says Tanya’s missing. He sounds desperate.”

  Silk went white. Nothing in his life had prepared him for this moment. Nothing. The spoon he held fell into his bowl, splashing a wave of soup over the tablecloth, but he barely noticed. His slack-jawed look must have scared Jenny almost witless.

  “A . . . Adam? What is it?”

  Silk ran, leaving the soup behind, his home behind, and his wife behind without even a backward glance. He grabbed his keys and jumped into his car, reversing out of the driveway with a slew of gravel and a screech of tires.

  He ran.

  From the life he loved straight back toward the horrors of his past.

  3

  Silk’s first task was to call Tanya’s boyfriend straight back.

  “This is Adam. What the hell’s going on?”

  Long after Silk’s initiation on the mean streets of LA, long after his dealings with black vans and bags of money, fate had sent him into the arms of a street gang. Tanya Jassman was the sole reason he made it out alive.

  Silk owed her . . . everything.

  “I don’t know,” Tanya’s boyfriend, a man nicknamed Roley, for reasons unknown to Silk, blurted out. “She drove off this morning and just never came back.”

  “Wait.” Silk eased off the gas. “This morning? And it’s—” he checked the clock on the dash “—almost twelve now. Jesus, Roley, don’t tell me you called the cops first.”

  “Sure I did. They didn’t wanna hear about it.”

  Major shocker, Silk thought. “Look, Roley, because it’s Tanya I’ll go ahead and ask the dumb question. Why do you think she’s missing?”

  Roley took a deep breath. “It’s Sunday. That’s our ritual day, ya know, for years. She wakes up, we kiss, I sleep in, and she sets out early, heads down to the beach for a little ‘me’ time. She says it’s her heaven, her way of showing gratitude,” Roley’s speech grew stilted, “that she survived.”

  “I get it,” Silk said softly. Those who survived such a wasted youth as they, always made good on the gratitude side.

  “Some kind of—”

  “Roley,” Silk said firmly. “I know exactly what you mean. Go on.”

  “Okay, man. Well she sets out at six and is always back by eight. Always. Then it’s the shops, lunch near the beach, and likely the movies. Look man, I know. I know it sounds thin. But . . .” Roley took another breath. “That’s our Sunday. For years. Do you understand? This just isn’t her.”

  “Have you checked it out for yourself?”

  “No car. She always takes it. And besides . . .”

  Silk pursed his lips. He knew what was coming.

  “I know. I just know. I . . . I can’t stop my fuckin’ hands from shaking.”

  “Alright.” It was true that loved ones sometimes developed an inexplicable bond, even true that occasionally their feelings of paranoia and worry panned out, but also just as likely that all was well and their loved one was out boinking the local scoundrel or temptress.

  Silk had witnessed more than one grieving partner, still with tears of worry in their eyes, try to throttle the life out of their spouse as they walked obliviously through the door, betrayed by lipstick or the scent of cologne, or that glazed look in their eyes. Knowledge wasn’t always power after all.

  “Where did she go?”

  Roley described her favorite spot on the beach.

  “Did she usually go with anyone? Meet anyone?”

  “Nah. Least, she never mentioned it.”

  “Tell me what she was wearing. And the car? License plate?”

  Silk committed the details to memory. Traffic dependent, he was less than half an hour away from Santa Monica Beach. “Roley,” he said finally. “Forgive me, I have to ask. Did the two of you have any problems lately? Any new men or women in your lives? Have you been fighting?”

  Roley’s voice was hesitant for the first time. “Umm . . . no, not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “Well, no, man. We’re good.”

  Silk let it go. For now. “Oh, and one more thing. Why me?”

  Roley was quiet for a moment, then said, “Because you’re the man. She always said so. The way she spoke I was fuckin’ jealous of you and I ain’t even met you. Far as I know the two of you ain’t met since before I dated her. But it was always you. She used to say, ‘Roley, if we’re ever in trouble go to Silk’. I used to say, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ And she said, ‘The love of my life.’ Just like that. No messin’. No tricks. And no lies. She meant it. I knew she meant it. But she loved me just the same. It’s like I said, man. It’s always been you.”

  Silk found his hands gripping the steering wheel tighter. Roley’s words had stirred up old feelings he’d thought he’d laid to rest. If Tanya Jassman believed Silk was the love of her life then the feeling was mutual. The memories he kept of her were the memories he treasured most in his life. Of her unfailing light under pressure. Of her faith and happiness in the ghastly face of adversity. Of her shining beauty amongst all that back-street filth, fury and hatred. The gang life had molded him, had shaped the course of his future, but it had never changed Tanya Jassman.

  Her true soul had helped him through, saved his own soul on uncounted occasions. If the CIA hadn’t taken him away from that life he believed he might have ended up with her, in some alternate history, some yearned-for time; and that life, he believed, might well have trumped this one.

  Such are the choices we make.

  Silk made good time to the beach and parked in the car park behind the sands to the right of the famous pier. From there he could see behind him to analyze which buildings easily overlooked the sands; to the left where the pier itself would have been empty at 06:00, and to the right where the rolling sands stretched away to the hills and a searing horizon. Dead ahead, he watched the sea surging in and, for just a second, a lurching fear overcame him.

  Would she?

  Not now. Not after all this time. Tanya’s the strongest of us all.

  Silk exited the car and shaded his eyes, staring across the blinding sands. Tanya’s favorite spot was out there somewhere, the place he never knew she went to remember their life and times all these long years. If he set off walking and followed Roley’s directions he could count the buildings along the roadside and cross-reference with lifeguard towers and another car park. For the first time a sense of dread dug into his spine.

  What the hell will I do if I find . . .?

  Don’t even think it.

  He walked, careful to keep his head empty. After ten minutes he saw the second car park emerge out of the haze. Tanya’s car, a bright white Mustang, sat alone and sparkling in the secluded lot. Purposely located away from the tour
ist route, this was a hangout and a drop-off point for locals who preferred not to be caught in the hubbub and celebrity that surrounded this glittering city.

  Silk felt his legs waver and then he ran. Hammered one foot in front of the other until the distance between him and his future dissipated to mere feet of awful anticipation. Sheer fear made him lean into the car windows when he knew he should be preserving the scene.

  Empty.

  His first instinct was relief. His second a return of the trepidation. If her car was here and she wasn’t . . .

  Silk took it all in. He ran down to the surf, turned right and ran for a while in the soft, wet sand. His shoes and the hems of his jeans became soaked and gritty. His eyes streamed in the glare. His heart pounded and ached, and not through exertion.

  At last he fell to his knees, no longer able to search, no longer able to call her name. The white Mustang shone to his right like an everlasting memory; a reminder of old hope and long forgotten promise.

  An accusation. After all we went through you let it come to this.

  But he would never give up. Already his gaze was drawn to the buildings whose windows he could see. The lock picks were back at his own car but he could soon fetch them. The Mustang’s trunk would need to be searched; the area all around it; every inch of asphalt leading up to the main carriageway.

  Silk rose. He would find her. The best thing Tanya had instilled into him was a sense of hope. She used to keep a diary, their tether to real life and mundane events of escapism. She used to sit there in the half dark, flashlight in hand, on his rough bed when they were teenagers and read from it. Told him stories of a normal life, of what they could one day attain. Kept him positive when chaos and blood threatened to sweep his sanity away. Tanya and that diary—they had saved him more than once.

  Now it was his turn.

  4

  The Mustang yielded nothing. The area around it was lightly dusted with sand and hundreds of footprints. Recent tire tracks did lead away through the sparsely sifted grains and up to the roadway, but without a good script writer and a load of TV cameras he doubted he could make a mold and match them to the single vehicle with a mismatched tread in the entire city just as the final credits started to roll. If something had happened here around 06:00, the people most likely to have witnessed it were the ones staying in nearby hotels, or maybe passing joggers, but they would be harder to track. Silk brushed off his clothes and shoes and made his way up to Ocean Avenue.

  The sound of his cellphone ringing made his heart skip several beats. He answered the call without checking. “Roley? Tanya?”

  Trent’s stony voice stopped him in his tracks. “Where are you?”

  “Aaron? I’m in Santa Monica. What do you want?”

  “Jenny called. Says you got a call that turned you white and then you split. She’s worried. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Something from the old days. I’m taking care of it myself.”

  “You know you should have called.”

  “Just trust me. It’s fine.”

  “At the moment I’m trusting Jenny and her description of what happened. Tell me where you are. We’re already on our way.”

  Silk swore softly. “Radford too?”

  “Right here, bud. ‘Sup? You don’t want our help?”

  “Some things are more personal than others, that’s all.” Silk paused at the first of the hotels he had picked out.

  “You don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want to.” Trent’s voice softened. “Just let us help you.”

  “I know that. Head for Ocean Avenue. I’ll see you.”

  Silk slipped the cell back into his pocket. Mixed emotions spread through him like a debilitating poison, disrupting his train of thought. He became aware that he was staring through the front door of the hotel with no idea as to how long he had been standing there. In reflection, he appeared to be a man in shock, someone who had witnessed a grave trauma. Deep inside, he knew it was true. The feeling made him think of all the things people lost and all the things that simply slipped away.

  Good times. Good nights. The people he spent them with moved on to other things, the group still remembering the best times of their lives but never quite able to relive them.

  Everything changed.

  Sometimes for the better, most times for worse. Silk snapped out of it, rubbed his cheeks hard to regain a little color, and pushed through into the lobby. Time was, he’d have talked to the desk clerk, slipped the guy a few bucks. These days, Silk simply headed for the elevators. The only rooms that had a view of Tanya’s car were on the top two floors. Silk held a fake ID in his pocket, also retrieved from his own car. Something Radford had once cooked up in about forty minutes. It would do the job.

  The thankless task of knocking on doors often yielded surprising results. The statistics were high on cases solved or mostly solved by pure, old-fashioned legwork. Silk achieved a 40 percent success rate on both floors, talking to many occupants, but had to admit to the fact that most of them, tourists no doubt, would already be out on the streets. Maybe he would come back later.

  Quick to leave in case of an unusual level of security within each hotel, Silk canvassed the entire row in just under an hour. It got a little easier when Trent and Radford arrived and took on a few rooms of their own. It was typical that the only clue came from the final hotel, on the last floor.

  “Yeah, yeah, I seen that car. White Mustang? Got one just like it back home.”

  Silk eyed the man, partially hidden behind his door. Once you managed to get someone talking you then had to decide if they were topping the entire spiel off with bullshit.

  “Is that why you recognized it?”

  “Sure, sure. And the babe stretching out alongside it o’course.” The tourist, white-vested and stinking of beer, turned away to belch back inside his room. “I got a condition,” he said. “Fuckin’ gas is killin’ me. So what do hotel security want with her?”

  Silk’s heart had tripped when the man mentioned the ‘babe’. His face remained stoic. “Nothing much. Do you happen to know when the car left the lot?”

  “Far as I know it’s still there.”

  Silk nodded slightly. So the guy was probably spying on beach babes. Hell of an odd way to spend your vacation but each to their own. “See any other cars down there this morning?”

  “Sure did.”

  Silk struggled to remain calm. “Go on, sir.”

  “Well, this black transit turned up. You know, like a Ford or something? The type you go get yer groceries in. It turned up, I took an extended trip to the bathroom,” he rubbed his ample stomach. “Feeling sick on account’a the gas, ya know? I came back, it was gone and the babe had run off.”

  Silk tried to hold the wandering gaze. “She ran off? Did you see her?”

  “Well no, just assumed she jogged on, ya know?”

  “Maybe she left in the van.”

  The man blinked rapidly. “Well, I guess she coulda.”

  “It has been a long time since she ‘jogged on’.” Silk pointed out.

  “Has it? Time ain’t one of my strong suits away from home.”

  “This transit,” Silk tried. “Any markings? License plate? Did you get a look at the driver?”

  “No, no, and . . .” The man screwed his face up in thought. “Umm, no.”

  Silk knew when a source was tapped out. He walked away, joining Trent and Radford in the elevator and exited the hotel in silence.

  Out in the street he told them his findings.

  Trent was watching his face in that careful way of his. “Adam,” he said after a while, “do you think Tanya was abducted?”

  “Well, she sure ain’t been out jogging or sitting on the beach for seven hours.”

  “Could be just a random abduction then.”

  “The Tanya I knew,” Silk said before he could stop himself, “would never let herself be taken. She was hard, resourceful, and tough. And yet—” he shook his head. “Full of
. . . beauty. It’s . . . it’s been a long time.”

  “How about telling us some more of the Tanya you knew?”

  Silk tried but couldn’t hide the smile. “She could calm me with a touch. Light the dark. Make the bad things go away.”

  “She was your age?”

  “I know what you’re thinking. Surrogate mother figure, yeah? Well, perhaps. But she was more than that. She kept me alive,” he said simply. “Many, many times. And I think I did the same for her.”

  Radford broke the moment. “Did you two . . . have a thing?”

  Trent shook his head. “Trust you to ask that, Dan. I don’t think that’s relevant here.”

  “We had everything,” Silk said as if he hadn’t heard Trent speak. “I owe her . . . everything.”

  “And you kept her quiet all these years,” Trent said. “You never spoke of her? And you weren’t with her. Did you even keep in touch?”

  “She slipped away.” Silk made a motion with his fingers, imagining sand pouring through his outspread digits. “The good things always do. And before you know it they’re too far away to reclaim or save.”

  Radford nodded as if he knew exactly what Silk meant. “I hear you.”

  Trent reached out to touch Silk’s arm. “We’ve done all we can here, Adam. I think we should visit the boyfriend.”

  Silk nodded. “I think you’re right.”

  5

  Trent followed Silk’s shiny red Camaro through the early afternoon gridlock. Silk knew all the tricks, but it still took him a precious half hour to make his way through traffic.

  Silk found a curbside slot and parked. Trent pulled his own vehicle in behind. Together, the three men headed toward the house, each one forming his own impression of Tanya’s current lifestyle as they came closer to the front porch. Trent took in the half-filled gutters and dirty shuttering, the untended lawns, the fence in need of a new-season coat of paint and the sparse furnishings he made out through the big front window in the front room, and concluded that these people were busy, underpaid, and probably just scraping by; one of the normal, everyday lifeblood inhabitants of a city that generated billions.