L A Woman Read online

  Hondo looked at his pistol and said, “Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t catch him.” He showed me the .45. One of the cowboy’s bullets had hit the slide and a piece of copper jacket was wedged hard into it, leaving the slide partially open and the pistol inoperative.

  Archie heard the shots and came out of the gym. A crowd followed him to us and we told them what had happened. Archie had called the police before coming outside, and we listened to the sounds of sirens approaching.

  Hondo said, “Looks like we won’t get much done for a while.”

  Marcus was still using the camera, “Don’t worry, guys. It’s all gold today.”

  “For you maybe,” I said, “But the girl is still in danger.”

  Marcus stopped filming for a moment, then nodded. “Whatever you two want to do, I’m with you.”

  The police arrived and we were busy for the next several hours. It was going all right until the officers told Marcus they would need his video of the shootout for evidence.

  Marcus clutched the camera to his chest and yelled, “No way man! This is my career!”

  He took off running just as Emma drove up in her Beemer convertible and slid to a stop, saying “Marcus, what is it? What is it?”

  Three police officers chased Marcus as he ran to Emma’s car and began to circle it with the officers on his tail. Emma’s head was turning in circles like the young girl in The Exorcist as she screamed, “The camera! The camera!”

  The scene looked like something from a Mel Brooks movie. Archie sighed and said, “This is bullshit,” and trotted to the BMW and grabbed Marcus by the arm when he went by.

  It stopped the camerman like he’d hit the end of a chain. Marcus said, “No-no-no,” and looked at the police.

  Emma screamed, “What are you doing?”

  Archie held up his hand to the officers in a stop motion. They stopped.

  Arch said to them, “You care if they make a copy?”

  All three said at the same time, “No.”

  Arch released Marcus and said to Emma, “Ms. Storm, why don’t you let this fellow take his camera and ride with these officers to your studio to make a copy, then they can take the original with them for their evidence file.”

  Emma looked sheepish. “Certainly. Marcus, go with these officers. I’ll meet you at the studio.”

  When they were gone, Arch walked back to us.

  “Well, aren’t you just the take charge type.” I said.

  Arch said, “It was obvious your lightning quick mind couldn’t figure out what to do.”

  “I thought it was funny.”

  Arch grinned, “It was, wasn’t it.” The three of us went to our office and unlocked the door to check the damage. Arch said, “Just a few holes. A little putty and some paint, it’ll be like new.”

  “We’ll take care of it, Arch,” Hondo said. Arch nodded and went out, closing the door behind him.

  A yellow Post-it note was on the back of the door. We both walked over to read what someone wrote in blue ink: THE MURDERED MAN’S NAME WAS JOHN SUNDAY. SHE IS HIS DAUGHTER. SAVE HER.

  I looked at Hondo. “Are all the locks on our doors plastic or something? I’m starting to think a three-year-old could pick them.”

  “It’s not the locks. We keep coming up against pros.”

  “Ghost pros,” I said.

  “I hear that.”

  I picked up the receiver on my desk phone and dialed CIA Agent Harris. When Harris answered, I said, “I want a full briefing on John Sunday. Why? Because we just had the crap shot out of our office and someone left us information about him, that’s why. No, either you fill us in or we’ll go to our other sources. I’ll give you one hour. Okay, tomorrow morning then.” I hung up and said, “It’s not often you can leave the CIA stuttering on the phone when you hang up.”

  “That’s because you’re such a diplomat.”

  “Hah.”

  **

  CIA Agent Harris came by himself the next morning. I opened the door to let him in and Hondo pointed to a seat. I brought him some coffee. Harris sipped the coffee and said, “Okay. I checked you two out and read your military records.” He looked at Hondo, then at me for several seconds, “Very impressive by the way.”

  “Let’s hear about John Sunday,” Hondo said.

  Harris said, “It’s more…complex than that. It’s also about his daughter, the one you saved.”

  “What’s her name?” Hondo asked. I glanced at Hondo’s hand on the coffee cup. The knuckles were whitening.

  Harris said, “Her name is Jett Sunday. But this all really begins decades ago, with John.” Then he told us the story.

  John Sunday was born to a dysfunctional family, back before they used the D word to describe such things.

  His father was a big man given to wild mood swings that regularly erupted into terrifying violence.

  John’s mother kept vodka bottles hidden in the house and took combinations of pills as she drank “orange juice” from early morning to late evening, when the sounds of the father’s snoring would at last release the tension in her shoulders.

  It was not a fun home. John didn’t stay there much, only enough to keep the heat off his mother. Instead, he ran with a rough crowd, got in fights, did minor theft and B&E, and forged identification to sell to underage college kids so they could buy alcohol.

  He had a knack for it. John analyzed things and came up with methods to improve the documents. He always went home each day, but seemed to incur his father’s wrath at an ever more frequent pace. Some of the beatings left John with eggplant colored bruises and ragged cuts that should have been stitched. However, he was a large boy and grew larger and stronger over the years. Things came to a head shortly before his fifteenth birthday.

  John arrived home that afternoon and saw his father raising a flashlight to strike his wife as she tried to get behind the couch. John caught his father’s arm and shoved the older man against the wall.

  “Oh, boy, you shouldn’t a done that. Now I’m gonna have to make an example of you.”

  “Get with it then,” John said. He was six-one and weighed one hundred sixty pounds. He had also lived in the weight room at school for two years and was powerful beyond his slender frame. His father was an inch taller and forty pounds heavier, but John didn’t care. It was time to stop him.

  It was a terrible battle that broke furniture, knocked holes in sheetrock walls, destroyed the television, and pulled the phone line out of the wall, but in the end, it was John Sunday who stood over his father.

  He said to the man on the floor, “You ever touch her again, and I’ll do worse than this.” He toed the man’s chin, “You understand me?” His father nodded, glassy eyed.

  John went to the bedroom where his mother cowered on the bed. She said, “Johnny, you get out of here. He’ll hurt you when he gets up.”

  “He won’t be getting up for a while.” John said, “What you have to do is leave here. Get some clothes, get whatever money there is and go. You can start over somewhere else, live a decent life. I’m going, too. I’ll contact you when I can.”

  John hugged her a long time before breaking and walking to the door. He stopped and said, “Call the ambulance before you leave.” When John went out, he didn’t glance at his father.

  John Sunday didn’t waste any time. He altered his own birth certificate to show he was eighteen and headed for the nearest army recruiter. The war in Vietnam was escalating and it seemed like the perfect place to hide out for a few years.

  He thrived in the military environment, put on ten pounds of muscle and excelled at self-defense, firearms and explosives. He also showed an unusual ability to pick up foreign languages.

  John was assigned to the First Battalion, 7th Cavalry. In November, one day before his fifteenth birthday, John and four hundred other soldiers were transported by helicopter to LZ X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley, where they fought over two thousand highly trained North Vietnamese regulars in a three-day battle so fierce
the Vietnamese renamed the place The Valley of Screaming Souls.

  It was while in the military that he found his calling. A CIA team needed to work clandestinely across the border in Laos. John had some knowledge of the border area and could speak Vietnamese, so was assigned with them. He hit it off with the men and, although their mission didn’t locate its target, they kept him in mind for other missions. After John’s military time was up, the CIA invited him to join.

  He worked Southeast Asia until the end of the war, and then had assignments in Europe, India and South America. His specialty was solo deep cover ops. One assignment in the seventies also introduced him to a new technology, which he instantly took to: the personal computer and the internet. His expertise was all the more unusual because of his age. Most of the computer geniuses setting the pace were young and independent. John learned from them all and became an expert at hacking personal and company computers, including those in other countries.

  He met his wife Elizabeth while stationed in Washington, D.C. working the computers and getting his headquarters time. She was smart, pretty, and funny. They hit it off and soon became inseparable. Elizabeth helped him reconnect with his mother shortly before she died of liver failure.

  Life was better than it had ever been, and to top it off, Elizabeth bore him a child: Jett.

  Jett was nine when Elizabeth discovered a lump in her breast.

  **

  Jett lost her mother two years later. John was devastated. He might have stayed in the depression if it hadn’t been for the kid. During the next year, Jett kept close to her father and comforted him in small ways, made optimistic statements, told jokes, and fixed meals. It paid off. John slowly recovered his enjoyment of life. He and Jett became very close, with John talking to her about adult things and asking her opinion on a number of issues.

  Jett was twelve when John returned from a two-day assignment with his arm in a sling, and a bullet wound in the shoulder that wept a pink stain through the bandage.

  John thought about her that night and came to a decision. If anything happened to him, there was no one else for her. The next morning he began to teach Jett the things he had learned over the years, things both legal and illegal, things that could mean survival.

  By thirteen, Jett could pick the lock on any door and disarm most alarm systems, car or home. She could hot wire vehicles, repair engines, handle a checkbook, case a neighborhood, lose a tail, and survive on the streets or in the wilderness. She also learned quickly how to hack into company computers, and how to forge a new identity.

  John took her on assignments, both as a cover and because he loved her and didn’t want to be parted. Jett began participating after the third one, primarily acting as a decoy or lookout.

  By fourteen she was tall, beanpole thin and could give him fits when they practiced Krav Maga. On one assignment in Miami, Florida during the Christmas holidays, several burly Cubans stopped John when he tried to enter a condo in South Beach. John was after a file put together by a recent Cuban stowaway who lived on the second floor. In the file was correspondence from Castro’s brother outlining a plan for expanding espionage in Florida.

  Jett saw what was happening with her father, so she went to the side of the condo, shinnied up a manicured gumbo-limbo to a window, jimmied it and went inside. A shower was running and a man was singing some Spanish song. She moved past the open bathroom door and made it to the master bedroom where a locked file cabinet sat in a corner. She had it open in seconds, grabbed the file and was about to close it when she saw a copier in the small office off the bedroom. Jett went in, closed the door to keep the noise down, and copied the file.

  She returned the original, locked the cabinet, and was out the window and down the tree before the singer finished his shower.

  By her fifteenth birthday, Jett was participating in almost all of John’s clandestine activities for the Company. Sure it was against all CIA policy and if they had been caught, John would probably be fired and then jailed for allowing it to happen. Nevertheless, Jett and her father were too close to think of doing anything else. Heck, they were closer than close.

  At seventeen, their stability wobbled. John moved them to Los Angeles and assumed another identity. The Agency set them up in a home in Culver City and John went about creating another normal looking life for his family. This one would be a long assignment for a deep cover operation, at least a year, maybe two, and he wanted some semblance of order for Jett.

  The assignment was deemed highly dangerous, too dangerous for Jett to tag along. Intelligence sources indicated terrorist cells were growing in the City of Angels and John’s mission was to infiltrate and identify the participants and ascertain how far along they were with their plans. As weeks grew into months, John told Jett portions of what he learned, but he never told her all of it. He was getting closer, moving deeper into the group, and he carried the increasing tension that went with it. His daughter noticed, and was worried.

  Jett was nineteen when they murdered John Sunday. She was at a school friend’s home in Hermosa when she heard her father’s alias spoken during a breaking news story on the local NBC affiliate. Several men gunned John Sunday down in broad daylight near the intersection of the Sunset Strip and Laurel Canyon. A witness said he saw the man running down the sidewalk as two cars full of men with guns raced to him. They fired before the vehicles even stopped, dropping the running man in his tracks. The vehicles sped away as pedestrians scrambled for cover, with no one getting a license plate number.

  CHAPTER 10

  From that point on, Jett Sunday lived by her wits and stayed away from their home in Culver City. No one in the CIA could locate her, and it was as if she had vanished from the face of the earth.

  Hondo said, “Until we showed up.”

  Harris nodded, “Until you showed up. Now we need to find her. She’s in danger.”

  I slapped my forehead, “So that’s it!”

  Harris looked like he tasted something sour, “Very funny, Baca.”

  Hondo said, “What do they think she has?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Are you saying that because it’s the truth, or because you don’t want to divulge it?”

  “The truth. We don’t know, can’t seem to find out, and we’ve been trying for two months. But Berenko and his people are behind it.”

  I felt like Harris was lying, but wasn’t sure.

  Hondo said, “Why not pick up Ajax or John Wesley and take them in for questioning?”

  “The locals issued attempted murder warrants for John Wesley, but we don’t have enough concrete evidence to arrest Berenko for anything.”

  I said, “What about Magilla?”

  Harris looked away, then said, “Who?”

  “Magilla Sykes. He’s shown up almost everywhere John Wesley has, except for here in our office.”

  Harris said, “I’m not familiar with anyone by that name. I’ll do some checking.”

  Hondo said, “So will we.”

  Harris stood up, suddenly in a rush to leave. He said, “If you come up with any more information, you have my number. Call me.”

  I said, “And you’ll call us if you come up with anything, right?”

  Harris looked hard at me, then left.

  I turned to Hondo and said, “I don’t like this.”

  Hondo said, “Good guys lying to us, bad guys lying to us.”

  “So, pretty much business as usual. Say, are there any donuts left?”

  The rest of the day, we made phone calls trying to find Jett, and in between calls, we studied our script pages for tomorrow’s big callback audition.

  The next morning I arrived first at the office and Hondo walked in a minute later with a box of donuts. I was so nervous I didn’t even want one. Hondo put the box on my desk and said, “Are you sick?”

  “Nah, just nerves. You realize what this could do for our careers if we get these parts?”

  “It could put us on a whole other level.�
��

  “And thinking about it doesn’t make you nervous?”

  “I’m excited about it.”

  “You’re not worried you’ll forget your lines?”

  Hondo sighed, “Would you quit? We’re going to do fine. Whether or not we get the parts isn’t up to us. So relax, enjoy the journey.”

  “Oh great,” I said, “Now you’re going all Gandhi on me.”

  Hondo opened the donut box and pushed it towards me. “Eat one of those while I get you some coffee.”

  I looked inside and there was a fresh, still-warm chocolate covered donut sitting right on top of the others. I said, “Can you bring me a napkin while you’re at it?”

  **

  The auditions were again taking place at the Le Montrose. We arrived early and walked toward the meeting room and gorgeous Colleen.

  I said, “Can your eyes get any greener?”

  Colleen said, “I think it’s my necklace.” She wore a beautiful marquis-cut emerald on a slender silver chain.

  I said, “Your eyes make that emerald jealous.”

  She grinned, “Charmer.”

  Hondo asked, “How many are auditioning?”

  “Six, counting you two. David narrowed it down very fast because of the push to get started. And he’s doing two at a time so you two can read off each other, since the parts are for partners.”

  I said, “That’s cool. Are we first?”

  She said, “There were two others scheduled first, but I don’t see them around. If they don’t show up in the next few minutes, I’ll send you in. But, if they do show, they go first. Give me a second to talk to David,” Colleen got up and went into the meeting room. It was game time and I suddenly had a major urge to pee.

  I said to Hondo, “I gotta go,” and I skip-walked towards the bathroom.

  “You better hurry.”

  I pushed on the door, put my hand to my zipper and ran straight into Bob-O and Davester at the sinks washing their hands. Both of their jaws dropped.

  “Professor?” Bob-O said.

  I hurried to them and put my hands on their shoulders, “Fellows, we’ve had another nano-quake and LAB-GEPO sent us straight here.”