I started missing kids the morning after I was arrested. Nine years as a surgeon, four of those as a paediatric specialist, had brought me into contact with thousands of children: mopey, sick teenagers and mewling newborns and wide-eyed, excited eight-year-olds whooping as they were wheeled down the hospital corridors on stretchers, their white-knuckled parents following. In an instant, my world was full of angry adults. For nine years the only kids I saw were behind scratched, faded glass in the prison visiting room or in the pictures fellow inmates stuck to the walls beside their bunks.
When I found my apartment in Crenshaw, there was plenty I didn’t like about it. Dangerous-looking men in long white T-shirts rode bicycles up and down the street, monitoring activity closely. The bathroom ceiling inside the apartment was black with mould. The whole place was exposed red brick on the inside, even the shower cubicle; the walls, close and impenetrable. On the day I inspected the property, a cockroach was swimming weakly in the dripping kitchen sink, and when I tried to flush the pathetic creature down the drain the real estate agent assured me he’d be back – he was a permanent housemate. I was about to shake hands with the agent and leave when a troupe of children came out of the apartment next door, each carrying a guitar case the length of their body, letting the screen door slap shut behind them, to the grumblings of the old man inside. From the lawn, after the real estate agent left, I watched the children waiting for their rides, saw a teenager arriving for her guitar lesson, a bright-red electric guitar slung over her shoulder. I called the agent and took the apartment right there.
The day after the robbery at the Pump’n’Jump, I was standing at the kitchen counter drinking a coffee and watching the morning news on the TV when a small, familiar knock came at my door. I crossed the apartment in five strides and found my usual Saturday morning visitor: a small Asian boy named Quincy, clutching his ukulele.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked, as he always did. I leaned in the doorway, still half-listening to the news. Something about an elderly couple and a cop attacked and bitten by a crazed drug addict. Typical Los Angeles stuff.
‘I’m always ready for you, Quince,’ I said.
Quincy hefted his ukulele against his small chest and played ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ haltingly, skipping the part about bluebirds completely. Upon finishing, he flashed me a set of big white teeth and bowed. I put my coffee on a shelf beside the door and clapped.
‘Boy, when you’re a super-cool solo performer doing gigs downtown, I’ll buy you a martini,’ I said as I retrieved the box I kept on the shelf. ‘But right now all I’ve got is chocolate.’
‘What’s a martini?’
‘It’s a special drink for grown-ups.’
‘My dad drinks beer and my mom drinks wine. Lots of wine.’ He rolled his eyes.
‘She’s my kind of woman.’
‘I’ll just have chocolate, please.’
‘You got it, buddy,’ I said. He dug around for a while in my collection of goodies, trying to decide on a reward, making the wrappers crinkle. ‘What’s for homework this week?’
‘“What a Wonderful World”,’ he said, selecting a Twix.
‘Good song,’ I said. ‘Can’t wait.’
Quincy waved and ran to the corner to wait for his ride. I stood in the sunshine for a while, still watching the news. I knew that bribing kids to give me mini-concerts on my doorstep after their guitar lesson was weird, and potentially dangerous. It would only take one parent who heard I was a violent ex-con paying for child interactions with candy, and a world of trouble would erupt. Paul, the old guy next door who taught the classes, would face a downturn in business. My parole officer would get a call. But being around children reminded me that I had been a good person once, and that one day I might be a good mother to my own child, who I saw once a week for a couple of hours. It reminded me that somewhere deep inside me, the head surgeon who had sweated and laboured over the bodies of tiny infants in the operating theatre, who had stayed up all night reading stories to cancer-riddled toddlers, who had cried with parents for hours in waiting rooms, was still there. She was still alive, just buried. Even though I had taken a life, ‘shockingly and viciously’, as the newspapers had claimed, I was not completely irredeemable, because children still liked me.
The news stole back my attention.
‘Outrage this morning following an announcement regarding the three million dollars that was found by construction workers developing a property in Pasadena last September,’ the newsreader said. I retrieved my coffee and looked up to see an image of dirty suitcases on the screen, lying at the feet of police officers in a crowded conference room, footage from the find a few months earlier.
‘A spokesperson for City Hall told reporters that investigators have found no physical evidence to support claims the buried hoard of cash once belonged to famed bank robber and murderer John James Fishwick. Fishwick is a current inmate of San Quentin State Prison and has not commented publicly on whether the exhumed money was indeed his.’
A photograph of a long-jawed man in his sixties flashed on the screen. The deadened, stale look of all mugshots. Denim prison shirt.
‘Lawyers representing the families of some of Fishwick’s victims have expressed dismay at the government’s decision to withhold the money under penal code 485 rather than use the funds to compensate those who lost loved ones during Fishwick’s criminal reign.’
I closed the door and drained my coffee. Then another knock came, harder this time, definitely not Quincy. When I opened the door and saw who it was I dropped the coffee mug on the carpet and slammed the door in her face.
‘Oh, fuck!’
‘I hate to break it to you, but that’s not going to work,’ Sneak said. ‘Open up, Neighbour girl.’
I winced at the name. I hadn’t been called ‘Neighbour’ in a year, not since I left the gates of Happy Valley, the California Institution for Women. Prison is full of unclever nicknames like that. I was Blair Harbour, the Neighbour Killer, aka Neighbour. I had met car thieves called Wheels and jewellery thieves called Jewels and gunrunners called Bullets in my time inside. I looked down at my straining knuckles gripping the doorhandle.
‘You can’t be here,’ I called through the door.
‘Well, I am, so deal with it.’ She barged into the door, causing it to smack me in the forehead. Sneak’s steps jiggled her huge breasts as she shoved her way past me into the apartment.
‘Jesus Christ.’ I scanned the road outside. ‘What the hell do you want?’
Sneak smelled the same as she had back in prison, of candy and fried food. Her leather miniskirt was squeaking, trying to contain her big rump as she headed for my kitchen.
‘I need your help. But before that, I need something to drink, all right? I’ve been out all night. What time is it? You got any ice?’ She began fishing in my fridge. Sneak talked fast, even when she wasn’t high. She was like a storm blowing into my world, knocking things over, filling the air with noise and chaos.
‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’ I slammed the fridge door shut, almost on her fingers. ‘We’re not doing this. You’ve got to get out of here. I’m on probation. You’re on probation. It’s real nice to see you but you’ve got to go. Known association with convicted criminals or fellow parolees will get us both thrown back inside. It’s one of the main conditions.’
‘Oh, come on.’ She shoved me away. Her words were slurred, running together. ‘Unless you’ve got a parole officer hiding in your freezer, we’ll have to risk it. I need help here.’ She poured herself a vodka from the big bottle in my freezer and pocketed two mini Jack Daniel’s bottles from my cupboard. The movement was quick, but not quick enough to escape my eye, because I expected the theft. ‘You were robbed last night at the Pump’n’Jump gas station, am I right? You lost your car and some cash?’
I stood back. ‘Yes. How—’
‘That was my kid, Dayly.’ Sneak gulped her vodka shot. ‘She called me up and told me she hit the Pump’n’Jump. I’ve known you worked there for a while. Now she’s gone. The last person who saw her was you. So I need your help getting her back.’
I worked my temples, looked at the front windows, dreaming of escape from this. The day outside was just beginning, full of potential. I longed for it. Jamie was on my mind again. Something stupid like this could break us apart.
I went and drew the curtains. Someone was playing ‘Hotel California’ almost perfectly next door. Sneak sloshed herself another vodka, probably pocketing items from my kitchen drawers with the hand I couldn’t see below the counter. I grabbed a picture of Jamie in a nice silver frame from the shelf near the door and stuffed it under a couch cushion. I stood uncomfortably in the centre of my mostly bare apartment.
‘She was in trouble.’ Sneak turned to me. ‘Big trouble.’
‘She told me someone was after her,’ I confirmed. ‘She was injured. Looked scared. But that’s all I know, okay? Whatever this is, I can’t get involved, Sneak. I’ll lose everything. If I go back to prison I’m facing another five years.’ Sneak wasn’t listening. I took my wallet from the counter. Throwing money at problems was still a reflex, even after so many years away from my life as a Brentwood medical celebrity. I had been very wealthy before I was locked up. I treated the kids of the stars, drove a Mercedes-Benz, vacationed in La Jolla. Once, I went to Oprah Winfrey’s house in the middle of the night to treat the child of a friend who was staying over, suffering a fever. All that was before I shot my neighbour in cold blood and stood watching him bleed out on his dining room floor, doing nothing, while his girlfriend screamed at me.
‘I don’t even have any money to offer you to—’
I stared into my empty wallet. I’d had a twenty-dollar bill, all that was left to my name after I’d paid for Sneak’s daughter’s theft. Now it was gone. Sneak had probably snagged it when I went to close the curtains. I tossed the wallet on the counter.
‘Okay, I’m good now.’ Sneak swallowed her third vodka, gasped and exhaled hard. ‘Let’s get rolling.’
‘We’re not—’
‘We can talk on the way.’
In the cab I leaned against the window and wondered how on earth I’d let myself be abducted into a fellow ex-con’s personal troubles, and how I could best extract myself. Sneak rambled beside me and wrung her hands. The confidence and determination I’d seen in my apartment was draining away from her. She had me now, and was gearing up for the next challenge. Prison does that to you: gives you the ability to put up a tough front to get what you want, but then it burns out and moves on, like a grass fire. I was looking now at the face of a terrified mother, something I’d seen plenty of times in hospital hallways, and in the mirror. Sneak was drunk and high, but she was wavering on the edge of screaming panic.
‘You never even told me you had a kid,’ I said.
‘I’m not lying. Not this time.’
‘All that time in Happy Valley together. All those hours you listened to me talking about Jamie, you never once mentioned it.’
‘We only just got back in touch.’ Sneak shifted in her chair. ‘I gave her up as a teenager. It was kind of embarrassing, okay?’
Sneak had been a good friend of mine on the inside. Good enough that I’d overlooked her constantly stealing my things, coming up with grandiose lies to entertain herself, waking me up in the winter with her ice-cold hands on my face. I could feel those hands now, slapping at my cheeks and brow. Her big blue eyes peering at me over the edge of the bunk. Hey. Hey. Neighbour. Wake up. I’m bored. That cute guard on seven just got here. Come be my wingman.
‘She called me from a payphone,’ Sneak said. ‘This morning, maybe one am. She said she fired a gun at the woman behind the counter. I figured it had to be you. There couldn’t be too many women stupid enough to work a night shift in a place like that.’
‘Desperate enough, I think you mean,’ I said. ‘It was the only place that would—’
‘She would hardly let me speak.’
‘I know the feeling,’ I sighed.
‘She said I should watch my back, that someone was coming, something real bad was going down.’ Sneak chewed her nails. ‘Then we got disconnected. Like, fast. She went quiet suddenly and the line went dead.’
‘Why did you wait so long to come get me?’
‘I had to see what the street was saying first. Get a feel for what Dayly was telling me about someone being after her. But nobody’s heard anything. Usually if there’s some kind of hit out, people will know.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘To Dayly’s apartment.’ Sneak blocked a nostril, inhaled, made a snorting sound. Irritated sinuses from bad coke. ‘I’ve been there a couple of times. Like I said, we’ve been trying to make good with each other. She looked me up. She’s angry, I guess, but it wasn’t my fault, her childhood. My parents made me give her up.’
I knew some things about who Sneak had been before she turned to a life of drugs and prostitution. Walking by her bunk one day at Happy Valley, I’d spotted a newspaper cut-out on the floor. A yellowed picture of a lean young girl in a gymnast’s outfit. The resemblance to Sneak was minimal – the girl was fresh-faced, grinning broadly, blonde ringlet curls held up in an elaborate scrunchie, and a sculpted, muscular frame shining in lycra. The headline read Dreams shattered. Sixteen-year-old Emily Lawlor had been warming up for her performance at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney when she landed wrongly after back-flipping off a floor beam. She suffered a traumatic fracture in one of her cervical vertebrae. I’d stuffed the newspaper article back under Sneak’s pillow, where I assumed it had come from. Another inmate told me Sneak had got hooked on oral Vicodin after the accident, then moved to heroin when her insurance ran out.
‘I don’t know who the father is,’ Sneak said. ‘I was knocking boots with a lot of bad guys. Some of them are in jail now. Like, forever.’
I watched my former cellmate from across the cab. She looked older than her years, her mouth downturned with worry. I realised she and I had both given up our babies unwillingly; her as a teen being pushed by disappointed parents, me in the Happy Valley infirmary only an hour after giving birth to him. Though Sneak and I hadn’t been able to be there for our kids, the idea that they might fall into peril still throbbed, in the back of my mind, at least, like a burn that never really healed. From the moment our children had left our hands they’d fallen into the big, bad world, and it looked as though Dayly was in the grasp of some of that badness.
‘What do you think your daughter’s into?’ I asked.
Sneak pursed her lips and looked away from me. ‘I don’t know. It can’t be drugs. She’s so disgusted with who I am as a person, she’d never go there.’
‘Don’t bash yourself up so much, Sneak,’ I said. ‘That sort of thing won’t help right now.’
‘She’s a good person.’ She thought about it and shrugged, bewildered. ‘I don’t know how she ended up that way. She was preaching to me about rehab. She’s really smart. Likes animals. Wants to do something with that. Study them or whatever. This thing is completely out of character. Dayly is not like me. I was never around her long enough to stain her that way.’
Dayly’s apartment building was a stucco and terracotta-tiled place near the Warner Bros. lot. I watched the billboards roll by, prime-time television shows I was never at home to watch, Ellen DeGeneres’s cartoonish eyes peering over a cut-foam letter ‘E’. Sneak headed up the stairs before me and stopped abruptly. There were people on the landing. Residents of the building, it seemed, four or five of them hanging around looking bemused. One man was wearing a blue towelling robe. Sneak went directly to a young woman, a thin redhead wearing a T-shirt that read Be Kind To Bees, standing in the open door of one of the apartments.
‘What happened? What happened?’ Sneak asked the girl. Her voice was higher now, almost shrill. She didn’t wait for an answer, went inside the open apartment. The girl turned to me and the crowd.
‘We should call nine-one-one.’
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
‘I was just telling these guys,’ the girl in the bee shirt said, gesturing to the people around us. ‘I was out last night. I had an audition. I stayed with my boyfriend. This morning I came back and the door was open and the place is . . . There’s blood in there. Hey! She shouldn’t go in there. That’s Dayly’s mom, right? She should come out. I think . . . It might be, like, a crime scene. What if it’s a crime scene? Do we call nine-one-one?’ The girl fell into tears. No one seemed game to hug her.
I entered the apartment. There were droplets of blood on the carpet just inside the door. An overturned chair on the way to the tiny kitchen, a little table knocked askew. There was smashed glass on the floor, papers brushed off the front of the fridge where they had been arranged with colourful magnets. It was the sight of all the lights on in the apartment that made my stomach plunge. Whatever happened here, it had happened in the dark hours.
Sneak had been right – her daughter had been doing well for herself. The apartment was cluttered and small but obviously shared between two young women who worked hard at their dreams and lived busy lives. A dying peace lily on the kitchen windowsill told me they were rarely home. Dust on a magazine near the couch. There was another blood smear and a picture knocked from its hook in the hallway. I found Sneak in Dayly’s bedroom, standing by the desk.
‘Her bag’s here.’ Sneak pointed to a handbag on the floor by the messily made bed. The bag flopped open, showing the usual things a woman kept in her everyday carryall: tissues, a notebook, some make-up. I knelt and went through the bag, moving things about with my knuckle when I could to avoid leaving prints.
‘No phone,’ I said. ‘Did she have a car?’
‘No,’ Sneak said.
‘Well, she does now.’
There was no blood in this room, no signs of disturbance. I noticed a laptop charger peeking over the edge of the desk, leading to a clear space where the laptop must have belonged among the papers, takeaway coffee cups and pieces of stationery that covered the surface.
‘Laptop’s gone,’ I noted. ‘So she’s somewhere, and she’s got her phone and her laptop. But no bag. Or a different bag than her usual one.’
‘You see a bag on her at the Pump’n’Jump?’ Sneak asked.
‘No,’ I admitted.
‘So what did she do? Put the laptop on the ground outside before she robbed you?’
‘I don’t know, Sneak.’
‘Whoever attacked her has got the laptop, probably the phone, too.’
‘We don’t know she was attacked,’ I said.
Sneak didn’t answer. We stood quietly together, locked inside a bubble of dread. I tried to take Sneak’s hand but she pulled away from me, went to the little desk and picked up a flyer that was sitting there.
‘Parachuting?’ She showed me the brochure. A flight school in a place called San Chinto was advertising tandem parachuting adventures for $200 per drop. A windswept, grinning couple was leaping out of a plane on the cover. Sneak pocketed the flyer and went to a table by the door, which held a fish tank. I picked up a strangely shaped piece of plastic from the desk. Layers of sticky tape rolled into a small tube, cut and unravelled, like snake skin. There were notes pinned on the backing of the desk. Reminders, it seemed, from Dayly to herself. Stay on track! Chin up! I dropped the tape and peeled off a small yellow note that was stuck to the edge of the shelf above the desk.
BIRDS ONLY.
When I joined Sneak at the fish tank, I noticed the thing had no water, just a layer of sawdust and a blue plastic wheel.
A small, brown, rat-like creature was huddled in the corner of the tank, licking its small pink paws and brushing them against the backs of its tiny ears.
‘Oh, wow. What is it?’ I asked, whispering in case I startled the animal. ‘A hamster?’
‘A gopher.’ Sneak picked up the little creature from where it crouched and cupped it in her hand. ‘She found it sitting in a driveway, poisoned.’
‘So she brought it here?’ I asked. I’d had gopher men to my house in Brentwood more than once to poison dozens of the creatures that were digging holes in my lawn. I’d never seen one, only their small round tunnels and the devastation of my expensive landscaping. The gopher ran across Sneak’s palms as she made an endless track for it, putting one hand in front of the other.
‘She’s like that. A bleeding heart,’ Sneak said. ‘Always picking up wounded and stray things. I was the same when I was her age. I picked up a few birds. They all died.’ I looked at the Birds only note on the desk and wondered if it was somehow connected.
‘Sneak, we should go,’ I said. I could hear voices in the living room. ‘This might be a . . . It might be important for the police to see the place untouched.’
‘I knew a guy once,’ Sneak said, focused on the gopher. ‘His daughter was kidnapped down in Mexico. Young kid, like seven. They grabbed her out of a playground toilet block, asked the family for money. The cartels, they’ve got this rule – sometimes they let you switch out another family member for your kidnapped loved one if, like, they’re too vulnerable or whatever. The guy I knew, he tried to give the cartel his wife and his sister in exchange for the daughter, just while he drummed up the money.’
Sneak had been renowned for her ‘I knew a guy once’ or ‘I knew a chick once’ stories in prison. Either they were all elaborate falsifications or she alone had somehow befriended all of the wildest, most eccentric and misfortunate people who ever lived. Most compulsive thieves I had known in prison were also gifted liars. Sneak’s ‘I knew a guy once’ stories always ended in tragedy.
‘What happened?’ I asked, regardless. ‘He get the kid back?’
‘No. The cartel took the wife and the sister as well and tripled the ransom demand.’
‘We can’t think like that right now, Sneak,’ I said. ‘And we can’t hang around here much longer. We’ll get caught together.’
‘We can go.’ Sneak nodded, replacing the gopher and taking Dayly’s bag. She wavered, the vodka and whatever she’d taken before it hitting her suddenly. ‘Wherever my baby is, she’s not here.’