“Then come with me.”
“What about my people?”
“Bring them. Getting crowds through the Room isn’t easy, though, so you’re going to have to hold hands and I’ll pull you out.”
Abbot shouts orders to the few gu
ards left alive and they form a scared-shitless conga line as I grab Abbot’s hand and yank all of them through the nearest shadow.
The smoke in the cabin makes my lungs ache, not because it’s noxious but because I haven’t had a cigarette all day and now it’s all I can think about.
I bring them out in the parking lot, well back from the faction shooters.
The moment we’re clear, a couple of the non–Sub Rosa guards raise their rifles. I reach over and pull the barrels down.
“Leave them alone. Let the boat sink.” I look at Abbot. “Let them think they killed you.”
“He’s right,” Abbot says. “Everyone with a weapon, put it down.”
Reluctantly, the guards follow their orders. I don’t know any of them, but I get the feeling some of them know who I am. The ones frowning want to run. The ones who don’t want to run want to shoot me, despite anything Abbot might say.
I look at him.
“Do you have a car? I can take you to the city through the Room, but you’re going to need to get around once you’re back.”
He points across the lot.
“We have a van over there. Let’s go.”
We duck-walk as fast as we can across the lot to an SUV the size of a freight train. The doors are thick with armor and the windows are two-inch-thick ballistic glass. Of course Abbot has one of these. He’s the Sub Rosa Augur, king high fuck-all, and this is L.A. Cars are sacred objects here. It wouldn’t do for a big shot like him to be seen in anything less than a four-wheeled Stealth fighter.
We slip out of the lot while his burning yacht slumps onto its side, leaking oil and diesel fuel. The water ignites and the damned boat goes up in one big boom. The fireball lights up the whole marina. But swaddled in all this bulletproof glass, all anyone hears is Abbot talking to himself.
“Damn it. I forgot my phone charger.”
WE DRIVE TO a Sub Rosa safe house near LAX. It’s a rusted and half-collapsed metal-frame warehouse just north of the airport. A typical Sub Rosa dump. They pride themselves on selecting places with the shittiest exteriors possible, while the insides are something else entirely.
It looks like the warehouse used to store bathroom supplies. Pipes and U-joints spill from rotting crates. Local kids have used the pipes to smash mirrors and piles of porcelain toilets. The sound of rustling wings echoes down from where birds have built nests along the roof beams.
The desolation always ends if you know the proper path, though, and Abbot leads us to an office at the back of the warehouse. Invoices and shipping orders are still tacked to a corkboard, and a lone wooden desk chair rots in the corner. Abbot ignores all of that and heads for an old-fashioned girlie calendar on the back wall. It’s like something from the fifties. A model in worker’s coveralls, the front zipper open to reveal a lot of skin, lounges seductively on a stack of shiny pipes. Every plumber’s dream girl, abandoned here how long ago? Abbot flips past January to February. It’s a leap year. He presses his thumb against the 29 at the bottom of the page, and the back wall swings open like a vault door. He goes inside and the rest of us follow.
Lights flicker on in a spacious living room decorated like a high-class hunting lodge. Big rooms. Dark wood along the walls and the ceiling beams. The furniture looks like it was stolen from the lobby of a fancy hotel trying to pass itself off as folksy. I’ve seen worse Sub Rosa layouts, dripping with gold and animal heads on the walls like a narco boss’s palace.
Abbot heads to a living room area with sofas facing each other and quaint tables with Tiffany lamps.
“Why don’t you all go into the kitchen?” he says. “There’s plenty of food and drinks. Relax. Decompress. You’ve all had a hard night and I appreciate everything you did. I’ll come and talk to you individually later. Right now, though, I need to talk to this one.”
Abbot points at me. Everyone looks in my direction.
I shrug and take out a battered pack of Shermans.
“Can I smoke in here?”
“Under no circumstances,” Abbot says.
I point to a sideboard in the corner of the room.
“Can I at least have a drink?”