City of Fire by Robert Ellis

Author:Robert Ellis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: mystery, Suspense, Thriller
ISBN: 0330450557
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

SHE couldn’t go there. Even though Novak insisted that she leave the crime scene, take the day off and get some rest, she couldn’t go home. She had seen the tears in her partner’s eyes, heard his voice cracking, thought he was making sense. Yet she couldn’t do it.

That’s where all the memories lived. Inside the home she once shared with her brother.

The light turned green at Franklin and Gower. The decision beckoned. When someone behind her started working their horn, she made a right and followed the hill down to Sunset.

Her body was still trembling, her mind, unable to lock in on the present. Somehow she didn’t think that her memories qualified as memories anymore. She didn’t have her back to the past. She was facing it again, staring at it. Her personal history was lurking in the gloom from somewhere in the future, waiting to be rewritten and reused.

Tim Holt had moved back to L.A., buying a home from Sally and Joe Garcia. Now he and his girlfriend were dead.

She crossed Sunset and pulled into the lot at Gower Gulch. Seconds ticked off as she bought a pack of smokes at the drugstore. Minutes streamed by in a direction of their own as she ordered a tall coffee-of-the-day at Starbucks.

It had been her choice. Get juiced at the Cat N’ Fiddle until the world blurred or sharpen the edge with both eyes open and force herself to gaze at the infection. Before she knew it, she was back in the car, watching herself drive up Gower, make the left onto Hollywood Boulevard, and then the right of all rights onto Vista Del Mar.

Her brother, David, had been gunned down on Vista Del Mar. A single shot in the center of his chest.

She eased off the gas, rolling forward at a crawl. To her left was an empty parking lot. To the right, an auto body shop surrounded by a chain-link fence and barbed wire. The road petered out at the base of a short hill and an abandoned one-room chapel, the grounds blanketed with spent needles. The refuse left behind from cash-and-smack deals and trips to the moon via the Holy Grail.

She pulled over and cut the engine. Leaning back in the seat, she removed the lid from her coffee. The hot steam rose up into her face, warming her cheeks and mouth as she took a first sip and savored its strength. After several moments, she let her eyes wander past the cup and outside the car, crossing the street slowly, deliberately, until they reached the spot where she’d found her brother’s body five years ago.

The stillness hit her in waves. One after another until she finally let the nightmare in.

She had been on duty that night, cruising the boulevard with her partner when their radio lit up. An anonymous call had been placed directly to the front desk at the Hollywood station over on Wilcox, bypassing the 911 system and the audio recorders that backed it up.

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