“Market!” David said, pulling us in the direction of Central Market.
“Are you crazy?” I protested.
“We can exit through the Hill Street entrance, and we can easily lose anyone inside!”
“It’s hard to lose anyone when we won’t make it past the first line of vendors. Too many people!” I jerked his arm, forcing us to continue running.
We crossed at the intersection of Broadway and Fourth Street, and I had to close my eyes because the traffic light had already turned red for pedestrians. That gained us a renewed distance as our pursuer wasn’t able to cross until the bulk of the car traffic stopped again.
While we were being chased, I remembered Detective Moreno’s admonishing words: Whoever had killed Henry was quite dangerous and we wouldn’t want to get tangled with them. A shiver ran down my spine.
I was still holding David’s hand, or he was still holding mine, even though running with our hands joined made swerving incoming pedestrians harder. But feeling him attached to me gave me some silly sense of reassurance and calmness. Nothing bad could happen if we were together.
And then I lost him.
I panicked. I even stopped in the middle of the street. It was something that, as a native urban dweller, I never do because it goes against all the rules of pedestrian flow etiquette.
People kept bumping into me as I was literally in the middle of the sidewalk, and I was checking to see where David was, aware that our pursuer was closing in on me.
18
“Elena!”
David’s voice had to be coming from far away since I was lost and alone. Only that, when I checked to see where he was, following the direction of his words, I realized he was literally a few feet in front of me. He extended his arm toward me and I grabbed his hand as if my life depended on it. And it probably did, but I needed to get my shit together nonetheless.Pronto.
We started running again after the confusion but, when the traffic light on Fifth looked like it would force us to stop, we both decided to make a right.
A high-pitched voice called from behind, “I demand to talk to you!”
It was the Troubelmakr.
“Don’t you dare go and talk to him,” I warned David, urging him to keep running. “He’s armed and dangerous. And I need you.”
“Promise me something,” David told me, and he sounded quite breathless himself.
“I’ll promise you anything,” I replied. Why I had decided to talk when I was already so out of breath is something I still don’t understand. It only made my exhaustion worse.
“What did you do to Dashing?” the Troubelmakr yelled, adding to my distress.
“If we ever get out of this: no more fights, no more misunderstandings. Please,” David said as we cut across Pershing Square.
“If?” I managed to let out.
“Whenwe get out of this.” David’s voice and request were the only things keeping me sane in that moment.
“Hotel, hotel!” I screamed and pointed to the Biltmore in front of us on Olive Street. A group of at least a dozen uniformed police officers stood by the hotel’s ornate columned portico and its arched Renaissance Revival entrance.
This time David didn’t argue about mythingfor ritzy hotels. We both accelerated toward the one-century-old LA institution.
“Help!” I shouted as we crossed Olive Street with a total disregard for incoming vehicles. “He wants to kill us!” I gestured at the Troubelmakr behind us. You could probably gauge that I had completely lost it by then and was uncharacteristically being an absolute drama queen.
Only after seeking assistance at the top of my lungs and in a state of complete breathlessness and near exhaustion did I notice the reflectors, collapsible diffusers, rigs, and cameras sprinkled over the sidewalk. We were crashing a movie shoot, and those police officers I had addressed weren’t actual cops but actors or extras of some sort. Had I been paying attention and not worried for my life, I would have realized their uniforms and all the police cars parked in front of the hotel looked straight out of the 1950s.
But there’s such a thing as movie magic after all. The uniform-wearing people were, in fact, highly trained stunt actors who’d just endured the whole300orFight Clubor Marvel or some other unrealistic workout program. In a matter of a few seconds, David and I stopped running as our helpers chased down the Troubelmakr, overpowered him, forced him to relinquish what he’d been brandishing at us—it ended up being a pair of extremely outmoded sunglasses—and brought the stalker to us in made-for-Hollywood handcuffs.
We soon learned—thanks to the nervous divulging of an overworked production assistant—that we’d interrupted the shot of a noir film, set in an alternate 1952 Los Angeles in which all the West Coast was actually part of Canada and its colonies as our neighbors to the north were ruled by a creed of vicious alien invaders.
That’s when I saw him. I recognized him right away. He was tall, silver haired, and absolutely suave dressed in a three-piece tailored period suit. He was even wearing a fedora. And he was the star of the film we’d just crashed.
