The call doesn’t even connect. There’s literally no sound at all. No dial, no ring, not even an engaged tone. It sounds like Sanchez’s line has been disconnected.
She grabs her things and heads out.
Hallie spends most of the bus journey listening to a bunch of teenagers talk excitedly aboutTeen Wolf, which came out a couple of weeks back, and by the time she gets off near Echo Park Lake, she’s ready for silence. At this hour, the only people who’ll be in the park are drug dealers and hookers, although if they’re there, they’re only hints—a brief flicker in the darkness, the spark of a cigarette, the occasional shouted word.
She hurries into a long road with a mismatch of Craftsman-style homes and creaking Victorian properties that have been divided into apartments. Checking the address she has for Sanchez, she stops halfway down at a set of peeling metal gates that lie ajar. She slips through the gap, past a palm tree with cigarette butts littered around its base, and heads up to the porch. There’s a door with a buzzer panel on the wall, most of the surnames bleached pale by time and sun.
She pushes Sanchez’s.
It makes no noise. Stepping back, she looks up to the windows of his place. The lights are on and she can see a silhouette moving around, so he’s definitely home. She pushes the buzzer a second time and for a second time there’s no noise.
Is it broken?
She jabs it a third time, a fourth time, but Sanchez is still moving around upstairs, completely oblivious to her being here, so she steps off the porch and heads around to the backyard. It’s been concreted, and looks more like a skatepark than a garden, and a mountain of garbage bags have been piled into one corner. Hallie covers her nose and mouth. The smell’s horrendous—rotten food, putrefied by the sun. She heads to the rear entrance. It’s hidden under a slanted roof and, as she gets closer, she can see a screen door with a slash in it.
The interior door is open.
Her heart rate increases as she moves through to a hallway, not knowing who cut the screen or how long it’s been like that. She can’t see anyone hanging around, although there are some stairs leading down to a basement—aSuperintendentnameplate on the door—and she can see a light and hear voices.
It’s two men, talking quietly.
At the other end of the corridor is another set of stairs. She takes them up, the stench of weed and fried food hitting her, and finds Sanchez’s place. There’s a window next to his door with a view south to the skyscrapers of Downtown.
She knocks.
The sound of movement from inside: things being shifted around, furniture scraping across floorboards, fast footsteps.
The door opens.
For a second, Jordan Sanchez looks weird: his expression is hard-set, artificial somehow, as if he’s readied it in advance and is trying to make himself look relaxed, even while his eyes portray something different. But then he sees Hallie and a frown forms. His eyes dart between his neighbors’ doors, then the stairs, and then he glances at Hallie again, the frown getting deeper.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
“We need to talk.”
“What are youdoinghere?” he says, checking the corridor again, his hand running through his mane of hair. He’s inhis forties and, as much as Hallie hates to admit it, is very handsome—but there’s a weathered, beaten-down blight to his face that she hasn’t seen before. She spots traces of cocaine in his stubble, dotted like pinpricks of paint along his top lip, and he’s sweating profusely. The old Victorian house is hot—its stairwells, its hallways—but it’s not that and it’s not the coke.
Something else has got him wired.
“Your phone’s busted,” she says.
He’s still watching the corridor. “The hell are you talking about?”
“I tried calling you. Your line’s disconnected.”
“No, it ain’t.”
“Whatever,” she says. “Let’s talk about Porter Sloan.”
Sanchez’s gaze instantly pings back to her, the mention of Sloan focusing him for the first time. “What about him?”
“I spoke to Malcy tonight.”
His expression darkens. “It’s too late. This is my story, Hallie. I’ve had it since Tuesday. I’ve already written it—it’s about to be printed.”
“No, you haven’t and no, it isn’t,” she says.
She glances across his shoulder to where a typewriter is set up on a table. There’s a mess of papers, notebooks, clippings. His apartment is bigger than hers, but it’s just as depressing. There’s a bathroom and bedroom at the back, and an open-plan living room and kitchen at the front. Littering the countertops are empty takeout boxes.
