Lifeblood ~ Excerpt

Chapter One

Rachel had heard the noise in the middle of the night, the faint metal-on-metal tapping, knocking, drumming.

                That she didn’t get up to find the cause would haunt her for the rest of her life.

                She’d thought it was just one of the street people, gone a bit nuts—such things happened around downtown Los Angeles—rapping with a spoon or something on one of the parking garage doors below her apartment. She couldn’t risk opening a door to find out and she didn’t want to call the cops on some poor crazy soul. So she turned over and went back to sleep.

                And she would never forgive herself for that.

***

                The following morning arrived fresh, sunny and clear. October was Rachel’s favorite month. The heat was gone, the smog fading.

                She had overslept, and was still licking the crumbs of her breakfast bagel and cream cheese from her lips as she strode down the ramps to her glass cubicle on the parking garage’s street level. She rarely took the elevator. She figured she needed the exercise. Besides, walking through the parking levels gave her the chance to check things like burned-out lights, litter, wall damage, and what vehicles had been left overnight, which was okay as long as they belonged to regular clients and weren’t left there too long.

                She was surprised to see a dusty white van parked behind one of the big cement pillars in the area generally used by fleet cars belonging to InterUrban Water District. But InterUrban’s fleet was all black sedans. Rachel didn’t cater to public parking, the signs outside the building said so. All her spaces were leased, but every now and then an interloper got in. She was hoping to avoid the expense of installing machines and gate arms and issuing cards.

                She’d been operating the garage for about three years; inheriting it from her grandfather had more or less saved her life by pointing her in a fresh, if odd, direction.

                Did the van belong to someone at one of the companies that leased space? Hard to know. The places cars were parked had more to do with when they arrived than where their drivers worked. Still, most people recognized the spaces for fleet cars and didn’t intrude. Rachel was running a few minutes behind, and needed to get the garage open for the early arrivals. She’d have to check back after the morning rush. With any luck, someone would pick it up.

                Rachel unlocked the huge doors, listened to the crunching and creaking as they rose above the driving lanes. She went to the side doors, the people doors as she called them, and remembering the sound in the middle of the night examined them for marks of something hitting the red metal surfaces that faced the sidewalk. No chipped paint, no sign of damage. Rachel painted the people doors every few months. She liked the way they looked in the white brick wall.

Opening rituals done, she took up her post in the cubicle as the early cars began to swarm in like bees hunting for the best flower. She liked to be on hand in case someone had a dead cell phone, a flat tire, a deceased battery, whatever. Happy clients would keep her garage financially afloat.

                Catching sight of her reflection in the glass of the cubicle, Rachel turned her head from side to side. Hank had persuaded her to let her hair grow longer. She hadn’t wanted to at first, but examining it now, she found she liked it—straight, almost to the shoulder and parted in the middle. Her eyebrows were still too straight, her chin too strong. Her mother had called it stubborn. Continual plucking might force her eyebrows into an arch, but she knew she wouldn’t have the patience to keep it up. Her father thought the new hairstyle made her look too Latina.

                “But you’re half Mexican,” she told him. “That makes me part Mexican. So I shouldn’t look it?”

                For the first time she wondered if her father was anti-Mexican. If so, was it because her mother’s parents were sort of anti-Mexican? Marty Chavez would have done absolutely anything to keep her mother happy; even stop being Mexican.

                But Madeleine had slipped away from both of them after being thrown from her favorite horse. No. Her mother might have recovered from that. She died after Rachel, edgy from caring for an invalid, had taken time off, left their farm in the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta for a shopping trip to San Francisco. She brought back a very nasty virus. She recovered. Her mother didn’t.

It seemed a lifetime ago but Rachel still could hardly bear to think of it. The nightmare of it all had sent her and her dad skidding down a slippery slope with nothing to break their fall. Madeleine had been the one who furnished stability. Neither Rachel nor Marty were ever the same again.

                It was nearly eleven before Rachel remembered the van.

                She found it wedged between two SUVs that had parked a bit over their lines. The plate was Arizona. She’d noticed that before, but people who moved here often waited as long as possible before paying the taxes and doing the emission tests to get a California license.

                The van was a panel truck. Was it abandoned? Stolen? Damn, that would be a pain in the butt.

                She wasn’t fond of dealing with cops. There was that record of the DWI and possession arrest up near San Francisco and then the insane situation with InterUrban Water District, a lease client whose CEO had been killed with a company car. Rachel had found the guilty car in her garage. There were days when she regretted reporting her own part in the grizzly mess, undergoing the interrogation, the interminable waiting, all the while wondering if she would be charged with a murder.

                In the end, she wasn’t, and the event had brought her Hank. With him, the loneliness that had plagued her for years was beginning to fade.

                Rachel tried the back door of the van. Locked. Not surprising. She tried to peer inside, but the windows seemed to be painted black. She had to turn sideways to slide between the van and its neighbor. The driver’s side window was heavily tinted, which she thought was illegal. She tried the door. That, too, was locked. She moved on to the front window, which by law had to be plain glass. The brown plush front seats were worn and empty except for a couple squashed beer cans and some crumpled balls of paper.

                But what was that behind the seats? A metal grill of some sort. Cupping her hands above her eyes, she peered through the glass. The grill looked like a cage. Maybe an animal cage? Something behind the grill caught her eye. Had someone left a pet in there?

                But, no. In the shadows, she could make it out now.

                A thin wrist. A hand.