Page 56 of 2 Sisters Murder Investigations

“You’ve got nothing to lose.”

The silence stretched, both on the line and outside my dark little pocket of rural California.

“Let me see what I can do,” Brogan said.

CHAPTER61

IT WAS A HELLISHnight on Waterway Street. Baby had never read Dante’sInferno,but she saw scenes out her window overlooking the front of the house that she presumed belonged in its pages.

Three houses down, one of the vacant dwellings seemed to have become a makeshift brothel, cars arriving every twenty minutes or so. Baby watched as men held up their phone screens to a guard at the door, were let in, then came out anywhere from ten minutes to an hour and a half later. While the system seemed orderly, it was a rowdy bunch. Girls fighting. Johns arguing over payments and girls. She saw one man get thrown clean over the dying hedge at the front of the house and another get punched in the stomach and stuffed in the trunk of his own car.

The sex work seemed to be relegated to one end of the street; the other end was where the drugs and partying were going on. One party had begun in a pretty two-story brick place, then spilled across the street to the opposite property. A guy passed out in the gutter, and a group of men came over, surrounded him, took whatever was in his pockets, then filmed themselves urinating on his sleeping form.

As the night went on, the dealers, the pimps, and their drunken and drugged clientele grew louder, more violent. The same cops who’d done a drive-by in response to Baby’s call came by again, but they didn’t exit their vehicle. They stopped to talk to a couple of men. They pointed half-heartedly at the passed-out guy in the gutter.

Baby assumed Su Lim Marshall had somehow arranged for the street to be available for whatever goings-on the bad men of Culver City and the surrounding area wished to conduct. Apparently, the only rule was that no one was allowed to die. A death would raise questions, bring unwanted attention. So, ten minutes after the second drive-by, an ambulance arrived to carry the unconscious guy off. The bewilderment on the faces of the paramedics at the happenings around them was obvious to Baby even from a distance.

With months of stress already weighing down his bones, Arthur put wax earplugs in his ears and went to bed around eleven o’clock. Baby stayed awake to fend off anyone who approached. Arthur’s house, the only one on the street without booming music or steady traffic in and out, became a curiosity for the street’s visitors, so soon some of them knocked at the front door to see what was up. Mouse’s wild performance behind the door discouraged them. But before long Baby was following the aggravated dog out back, where a shadowy figure had decided to investigate the porch. Once he’d been chased away, a group of drunk girls from the house on the left decided it would be fun to see if they could sprint across Arthur’s yard without the dog catching them and mauling them to death. Baby locked Mouse inside again, aware that the game could have fatal consequences.

When the visits stopped, around two a.m., she lay on the couch and stared at the purple and red lights from the street party dancing on the ornate ceiling moldings. She wondered if Arthur’s life had been better before she entered it. One way or the other, it was only a matter of time before Su Lim Marshall’s minions set up some catastrophe leading to Arthur’s violent but apparently accidental demise, and at least before she’d shown up, he’d been able to get some sleep at night.

Maybe Mouse was better off without her too. In other circumstances, Rhonda would never have let Baby get a dog. She would have said Baby was too young for the responsibility. And Baby hadn’t exactly provided a safe and stable home for the abused animal — she’d drafted him as a soldier in a war he couldn’t possibly comprehend. Was she any better than the pet thieves who’d used him to guard their animal-trafficking den?

At three a.m. someone hurled a brick through one of the front windows, and Mouse went charging around looking for the perpetrator, growling and snapping his jaws. Baby settled him, then started sweeping up the glass. As she knelt on the carpet and worked, tears sprang to her eyes. She swiped at them angrily. Baby had told Rhonda she could handle this situation, and damned if she would let Marshall turning Arthur’s street into a Pop-Up Gangland break her.

Baby cleaned up the mess and dragged a bookcase over to block the broken window, which exhausted her but also gave her a sense that she wasn’t completely failing. She fell into a half-sleep on the couch at four a.m.

The screaming woke her at 6:17.

CHAPTER62

SEEN FROM A DISTANCE,the house on the corner seemed no different than those around it. Every window and doorway was lit up, and there was movement inside. But as Baby moved with the crowd toward the weatherboard building, she smelled smoke on the wind. A primal energy coursed through the people converging on the house. Fear. Excitement.

It was a fire lighting up the building.

Two windows on the bottom floor exploded. Baby could see flames between the silhouettes of people crowding around the property. Smoke billowed out of the broken windows, upside-down waterfalls of coiling blackness. She pushed to the front, nudged a guy out of the way so hard, he toppled over on the grass, clearly drunk. People were watching the house burn and taking videos on their phones. She didn’t see a single person calling for help.

“Call the damn fire department!” she yelled. Nearby, someone cackled. She heard some mutters of refusal. These people weren’t the type who called 911 for anything, ever. Emergency services meant problems. It meant witnesses. Rock-solid proof of whereabouts and times. The ambulance earlier had been bad enough.

Baby hoped the light from the fire or the smoke on the wind would alert someone more responsible a few streets away. She looked through the open door of the burning house and saw flames stroking the walls of the hall on both sides. She turned, planning to dash back to Arthur’s and grab her own phone. She saw the old man at the edge of the road. His glasses were orbs of gold light from the inferno.

Then the scream came again, the same skin-tingling sound that had snapped Baby awake. It came from the second floor. She rushed forward, realizing with weird, panicked clarity that her feet were bare. The porch boards were warm. She looked down and saw glowing embers dancing beneath them through the gaps in the wood. The hall was blocked by fire.

“Up there!” someone yelled. Baby staggered back, narrowly missed being clobbered with a wooden plank that had fallen from the second floor and bounced off the porch awning. Someone was kicking boards away from a window. A hand shot through the gap, waving.

“Somebody help us!”

Baby looked at the crowd, saw lazy red eyes. Grins. Grimaces. Stupefaction was the best thing she saw, people’s bewilderment at what to do to answer that cry. The fire was so loud, Baby couldn’t tell if there were sirens coming. She hoped there were. She hoped normal people beyond the reach of the houses bought up by Enorme were on their phones, calling for help. But she couldn’t wait to find out.

She raced through the yard to the back of the house, praying the fire hadn’t reached there yet. She got lucky. It had begun in the front room and gone up. She scaled the awning over the back porch and clambered up the exterior cladding, her fingernails biting into a window ledge and her bare toes scraping the paintwork. Baby had popped a few windows in her brief time as a PI. She braced her shoulder against the top of the window frame, tucked her arm into her T-shirt, and smashed the window with her elbow. A shard of glass scraped the outside of her thigh as she squeezed into the house and hurried across the empty room.

The hall was black with smoke. Her eyes and nose ran. Baby fought her way through, coughing, to the front. A teenage boy and girl were crouched at the window, waving their arms. They must have gone upstairs when they saw the flames on the first floor, thinking they’d pop out the window and instead finding themselves trapped. Baby marched over, grabbed them by the backs of their T-shirts, and hauled them toward the back stairs.

“Come on! Come on! This way!”

It felt like a minute or less had passed since she’d entered the house. The flames had been one floor down. Now they were here, melting the cheap plastic frame of a picture that had been hanging on the wall, making it drip like melted ice cream onto the floor. Baby turned the couple around and shoved them toward a bathroom. There was one window, long and covered with frosted glass. She shoved it open. Hot air blasted past her.

“It’s too high! I can’t! I can’t! I can’t!” the girl squealed. She clung to Baby like a drowning person, a frantic, painful, skin-cutting grip. There was nothing else to do — Baby punched the girl in the stomach. When she doubled over, Baby turned her and shoved her head-first out the window. The girl tumbled and landed flat on her back on the soft grass, groaning.

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