Chapter 3
Andy started to ask another question, but Morales’ eyes shifted over his shoulder to something behind him. Andy turned and saw another guard easing her way through the shoppers to them.
“Lost kid down on One South,” she said to Morales and then without preamble to Andy: “So you’re the new guy.”
Andy extended his hand. “Andy Westlin.”
His new mentor took it and pumped it firmly. “LaVonne Sanders.”
There was a pause while each of them sized the other up. LaVonne was a stocky black woman who just about came up to Westlin’s chin. Her hair was cropped in a tight natural Afro and her shoulders were almost as wide as Andy’s. Not young, not old, but she had that look he recognized from associating with street cops, the tough, competent ones.
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Well, I’ll leave him to you,” Morales told LaVonne. He was turning toward the elevators when a shout brought him up short.
“Hey you! Guards.” The three of them turned and saw an overdressed but well-groomed man bearing down on them. Six foot, one-fifty or so, black hair, blue eyes. Light gray suit, patterned silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. Patterned tie to match against an olive-green shirt. Overdressed to be a businessman. If he’d been flashier, Andy would have pegged him as a pimp. As it was, Andy wasn’t sure what the guy was, except upset.
“There you all are,” he said as if it was an accusation. “Someone’s been messing with my car again.”
“How do you know, Mr. Crampton?” LaVonne said in that tone cops reserve for crazies and children.
“Here’s how!” He held up his keychain, and the tiny box on one end was flashing an orange light. “That’s the intruder alarm. I tell you someone has been fooling with my car and we’ve barely opened. How the hell am I supposed to keep my mind on business when I’ve got to worry about my car all the time?”
Morales sighed. “I guess we’d better go have a look.”
Without a word, Crampton turned on his heel and led the three into the elevator. LaVonne followed Morales and motioned Andy to join them.
“And someone parked in my space again today,” he continued as soon as they were packed into the elevator.
“Mr. Crampton,” Morales said, “we’ve told you there are no reserved spaces in the employee lots.”
He brushed that aside. “And I’ve told you, I’ve got to have a space under a security camera. Instead there’s some damn van parked there so the camera can’t even see my car!” He looked like he’d bitten into something rotten. “A ratty old Volkswagen van covered with flowers!”
The doors opened and Crampton headed for the main entrance at a brisk pace.
“Look,” Morales said as he fell in beside the store owner, “you could always leave your Porsche at home.”
Crampton looked at him as if he were stupid. “What the hell’s the good of having a Porsche if you don’t drive it? It’s bad enough that you don’t have convenient parking for the merchants, but then you don’t even provide decent security, well . . .”
Crampton had parked in the front row in the employees’ parking lot, where anyone driving by would be sure to see his Porsche.
It was quite a sight. The car didn’t merely sparkle, it gleamed. The chrome gleamed. The glass gleamed. Even the body gleamed. The paint job shaded from brownish-maroon above to jet black below.
“That’s fifteen coats of hand-rubbed enamel,” Crampton said proudly. “You get a scratch in that and it costs more than all of you make in a week to get it refinished.”
Andy, Morales and LaVonne took one more step toward it, but Crampton motioned them to stop.
“Stay back,” he told them. “Let me disarm it.”
He did something with the controller on his key ring. Then he selected a key, unlocked the door, selected another key, turned off something under the dashboard and then punched several numbers on a keypad on the console to the right of the driver’s seat.
“You can approach now.”
While Morales and LaVonne made a show of going over the car, Andy just admired it.
“I paid eight thousand dollars for that security system,” Crampton told them. “It was done by one of the best people in the state. He does Paul Newman’s cars and Jay Leno’s Cobra. Proximity sensors, motion sensors, voice-synthesized alarm, remote alarm and an automatic tracking unit that will report the car’s position to the alarm company. It’s got some special tricks too. But you don’t need to worry about that,” he added quickly. “All you’ve got to do is keep people the hell away from it.”
“Well, it doesn’t look like anyone has touched it,” Morales said finally.
“If no one touched it then why did the alarm go off?” Crampton demanded. “Someone’s been tampering with it.”
LaVonne ostentatiously knelt and shined her flashlight under the Porsche. “If they did, they didn’t leave any signs.” She stood up, brushing off her pants.
“Look, Mr. Crampton,” Morales began in that ultra-reasonable tone. “We can’t do anything if there’s no sign of tampering.” Crampton bristled but the guard supervisor held up his hand. “Now, if you do find evidence that someone has messed with your car, stop by the security office and let us know, okay?”
Crampton sighed loudly. “No, it is not okay, but I can see that’s all I’m going to get from you people. Mall management is going to hear about this. I’ll bring it up at the next meeting of the Merchants’ Association, too.”
“That’s certainly your privilege, Mr. Crampton,” Morales said neutrally.
“Who is that, anyway?” Andy asked as the three of them walked back into the mall leaving the man fussing about the car.
“Name’s Crampton,” LaVonne said. “He owns Smilin’ Jack’s, one of the men’s stores.”
“Pain in the ass,” Morales added. “He’s nuts about that damn car.”
LaVonne nodded. “It used to be anyone parked next to him and the damn siren would go off. Finally, we made him turn the sensitivity down, and you should have heard him bitch about that. Then he wanted to bring one of those one-car fiberglass garages down here and set it up in the parking lot.” She snorted. “Complete with a goddamn built-in fire extinguisher!”
“From the looks of it, it’d be worth doing just to shut him up,” Andy said.
Morales shook his head. “Against the mall rules. Anyway, that stupid silent alarm keeps going off, and every time it does he comes running to us.”
“If you ask me,” LaVonne put in, “that car’s paranoid. Just like the owner.”
“I think he’s got it confused with his cock,” Morales said.
LaVonne struck a hip-shot pose. “Honey,” she said in a fruity ghetto accent, “I guarantee he ain’t got no cock what needs no eight-thousand-dollar security system.”
###
The guards weren’t the only ones who were thinking about Jack Crampton. Just then he was very much on Dawn Albright’s mind as well.
Dawn was model-tall and still model-slender although it had been years since she had set foot on a runway. As befitted the supervisor of the Business Boutique at Sudstrom’s department store, her white linen suit was as elegant as the wearer. But the suit was cool and unwrinkled and right now Dawn Albright was neither.
Ostensibly, she was trying to work out the merchandise floorplan for next week. That meant deciding what items to display most prominently, what to feature in the instore displays and how to keep up flagging sales of women’s business apparel as Sudstrom’s at Black Oak moved into the summer doldrums.
What she was really doing was reviewing her date last weekend with Jack Crampton and trying to figure out what was bugging her about it.
Jack was amusing, attentive, well-off and good in bed. He always knew the best places to eat and the latest places to go. Thinking back on it, Dawn couldn’t remember ever having a bad meal or a bad time on a date with Jack.
Every girl’s dream in a Porsche. So why wasn’t she satisfied? She sighed and tried to focus her attention on the layout sheets—and away from irritating questions.
She slapped the pencil down on the diagram and looked up in time to see her assistant approaching with her arms full of clothing.
“Don’t tell me we’re out of hangers again!”
Pat Loney, almost as tall and almost as slender, younger and brunette, shrugged apologetically and held up the skirt and three blouses she had just taken from the fitting rooms.
“Would you please tell me,” Dawn asked, “how we can leave the store at ten-thirty with every garment in the department on hangers and come back in at eight the next morning and four or five of them are on the floor and the hangers are nowhere to be seen?”
Pat only shrugged again. The hanger shortage was an old story in fashion retailing. Merchandise arrived in the departments on hangers, and when the clothing left the store the hangers often stayed behind. Yet everyone always seemed to have more clothes than hangers.
“You haven’t got any more stashed, have you?” Pat asked hopefully.
“I ran out yesterday. Have you looked down in Alterations?”
“Casual Shoppe cleaned them out this morning.” She hesitated. “What shall we do?”
Dawn considered her options. She could send down to the stockroom for more hangers, but extras were charged against the department’s budget. The alternative was to beg some off one of the other departments. Every savvy department manager tried to keep a private stash of hangers, and sometimes they were willing to barter for favors.
“This is getting ridiculous. We’ve gone through three extra bundles this month. No one’s taking them home, are they?”
It was a rhetorical question. At Sudstrom’s, hangers were guarded only slightly less closely than the cash drawer.
“No one’s shoplifting them either,” her assistant said. “I checked that after we had to get that last bundle.”
“Well, something is happening to them.”
“Maybe something’s eating them,” Pat suggested, then wilted under her boss’ glare.
Dawn reached behind the counter for the phone. “We’ll get another bundle. And this time ask people to at least try to keep track of them.”
###
“That’s one of the problems with this job,” LaVonne told Andy after Morales left them. “Merchants like Crampton are a pain in the ass, but they pay our salaries, in a manner of speaking.”
“That’s why we all went out to look? I’ve seen fewer officers at a homicide.”
The black woman nodded. “That’s it. You sure as hell don’t have to do everything the tenants want, but you don’t give them the idea you’re taking them lightly. They’ll be all over mall management, and Dunlap will be all over your ass.”
“I’ll remember,” Andy said glumly. Politics and kissing up to important people had never been his favorite part of being a cop.
“It’s not that bad,” Sanders assured him. “Most of the people are pretty nice. Come on, I’ll introduce you to some of them. The employees, mall rats.” She turned and strode off toward the escalators.
“Mall rats?”
“You know,” she said over her shoulder, “kids who hang out at the mall.”
“Are there very many of them?” Andy asked as he caught up and matched LaVonne’s easy stride.
“Hundreds. But only two or three dozen you’ll see almost every day.”
Just like the street, Andy thought. Except most of these regulars probably weren’t carrying guns.
“Now we don’t have a regular training program,” LaVonne told him. “We don’t hire that many new people. Mostly it’s just common sense, and the rest is in the regs in the security center. Just go by the regulations and you won’t have any trouble.”
“With as little crime as there is here I don’t see why they need us to go armed.”
“Who told you we don’t have crime?”
“Morales. He said there aren’t even any car thefts.”
The woman considered. “Car thefts, no. No strong-arm stuff either, what with all the cameras. But let me tell you, when things go wrong around here they can go real wrong. Back when the place first opened they had the guards in blazers and slacks. The non-threatening look, you know? Turned out that wasn’t such a good idea. The badge and gun give you psychological size, and sometimes that’s all you’ve got to keep the place peaceful—and you healthy.”
“Have you ever had a problem?”
LaVonne shrugged. “Once or twice. I had some crazy pull a knife on me and a couple of lads tried to give me trouble one time.” She made a dismissive motion, like brushing off flies. “The thing is, you’re mostly out there alone. Especially at night. You’ve got to look out for yourself, and the best way to do that is to make damn sure trouble doesn’t start in the first place.” She shrugged. “It’s mostly attitude. When I was an MP, I used to break up fights between paratroopers. You just look tough and act like you mean it and you’ll be all right.”
Looking at her, Andy could believe it. LaVonne wasn’t that big but she was stocky, she wasn’t carrying any excess weight and she moved like someone who could handle herself.
“Besides,” she went on, “there’s plenty of crime, don’t let Morales lad you. The store dicks say this place has a terrible record for shrinkage.”
“Shrinkage?”
“Merchandise that walks off. Shoplifting and employee theft, mostly. Some of it’s accounting and inventory mistakes.”
“Is that a problem for us?”
“Nah, that kind of stuff comes and goes. It doesn’t look good right now, but it will probably even out over the next six or seven months. It’s not our problem, anyway.”
They turned a corner, threaded their way between two planters, and then they were in front of a set of escalators.
“The escalators are the easiest way to get from one level to another, even when they’re not running,” LaVonne explained. “During the day, they let you watch the whole level as you ride up.”
Andy looked out over the level falling away below them. The open center of the mall let him see over the planters and down the entire leg of the mall. He looked up two more levels to the translucent white ceiling. The sun must be high by now, but the light streaming down was still soft and even. In the background he could hear something he vaguely recognized as Bach played by an orchestra with way too many strings. Then he turned to face the next level and stiffened.
The man was leaning on the rail and looking down over the court. He was surfer tanned and surfer blonde, with a shock of bleached hair that hung down over his forehead. He was wearing a surfing T-shirt, a pair of baggy pants and tennis shoes with no socks. Wraparound sunglasses hid his eyes. From a distance he looked maybe eighteen or nineteen. It wasn’t until you got close enough to see the wrinkles around the eyes and the leathery texture of the skin, the way the hair was coarsened and beginning to thin, that you realized he wasn’t nearly that young. And if he took off the sunglasses, what you’d see in the eyes would tell you he was older yet.
Andy gave him a professional once-over as he and LaVonne came up the escalator. The surfer gave both of them a single disinterested glance.
“I think I know that guy,” Andy said as soon as he and LaVonne were away from the escalators. “I used to see him around sometimes.”
“So?”
“So he’s bad news.”
“As long as he keeps his nose clean in here, he’s no kind of news at all,” LaVonne told him. “He’s just a shopper so don’t go hassling him.”
“Doesn’t look like he’s buying anything to me.”
“Doesn’t look like he’s doing anything either,” she retorted. “Look, Westlin, around here the rule is live and let live. He don’t cause problems, we don’t give him grief, no matter what he does anyplace else.” She snorted. “Hell, there’s a bunch of bikers that come in here all the time. As long as they don’t cause trouble that’s fine.”
“Bikers shop here? That sure doesn’t square with the mall’s image.”
“Not so much to shop. They like the video games in the arcade. We’ve had to warn one or two of them about their language when they start shouting or screaming at the machines, but they’re not much trouble.”
Andy thought about admonishing a biker to watch his mouth and shook his head. “And they do it? That doesn’t square with the image either.”
The woman shrugged. “Like I said, you gotta know how to deal with people. Just speak softly and be polite. Do that, don’t let them get behind you, keep one hand on your gun, and they don’t give you trouble.”
Andy grinned. “I’d hate to see what you consider a serious problem.”
“There’s an example right there,” LaVonne said with a jerk of her head.
The only thing to their right was a kitchen gadget store. Andy stared for a moment but he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. “Where?”
“That.” LaVonne pointed at a rack in the store entrance.
Andy bent over to peer at the display of combination corkscrew-nutmeg-grater-garlic presses.
“I admit it’s a silly idea, but . . .”
“No.” LaVonne pointed again. “That.”
Andy looked down at the floor. The rack was at an angle so one corner extended beyond the metal track where the store’s sliding door ran.
“That’s encroaching,” LaVonne explained. “It’s against the mall rules.”
“What do we do?”
“Unless it’s a safety hazard, nothing. That kind of thing’s mall management’s problem, not ours.”
“It doesn’t look like much,” Andy said. “He’s what? Six inches over the line?”
“Around here that six inches is like six feet.”
Andy just shook his head.
“There are all kinds of rules like that,” the woman went on. “The stores can’t use certain colors, their signs have got to be just so, they’ve got to be open certain hours, they’ve got to get their sales and promotions approved beforehand. All kinds of stuff.”
“And the stores just put up with it?”
“Sure. All the malls have rules like that and they can make a hell of a lot more money in a mall than they could anywhere else. It’s kind of a deal with the devil. The merchants give up a lot of control and a potload of money, and they get the opportunity to make even more money. Oh, they bitch about it all the time, but they keep signing those leases—if mall management lets them.”
Andy jerked his head back at the offending display. “What will they do about that?”
“What they could do is throw him out of the mall. The leases let them if the stores don’t follow the rules exactly. What they will do, most likely, is make him move it back.” She shrugged. “Anyway, it’s not our thing. If anyone tries to suck you in on something like that, just send them to mall management. Oh, wait a minute, here’s someone you should meet.”
She led him over to one of the planters and the man working at it. He wore the light blue shirt and dark blue pants of a maintenance worker. He was lean, balding and his silver hair was pulled back in a ponytail that reached down to his shoulders. He was using a pair of hedge shears to trim the bushes in the planter.
“Hi, Billy, how’s it going?”
Billy Sunshine turned his head slowly and blinked at the two as if trying to bring them into focus. “Groovy, man,” he said at last. “It’s like, really cool, you know.”
“That’s great, Billy,” LaVonne said heartily. “You keep it up, you hear? Andy, this is Billy Sunshine. He keeps our plants looking pretty. Now, Billy, this is Andy Westlin. He’s a new guard here so you’ll be seeing him around.”
Andy offered his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Billy.”
Billy blinked at him and then shook hands. He had a surprisingly firm grip. “Peace, man.”
“We gotta be going, Billy,” LaVonne said. “We’ll see you around, okay?”
Billy nodded amiably. “Later.” Then he turned back to the hedge.
“He checked most of his brain in Haight-Ashbury in 1967 and lost the claim stub,” LaVonne said as soon as they were out of earshot.
“He’s not a problem, is he?”
“Ol’ Billy? Not if you don’t get too close to his van when he’s toking up on his lunch break. You know, if anyone was to find him smoking dope in the parking lot they might have to do something about it, and Billy’s too good to lose.” She made a face. “He’s the only person in the whole damn place who’s really happy all the time.”
Andy started to move off, but LaVonne laid a hand on his arm and gently steered him in the opposite direction. After a second’s disorientation, he realized he’d been headed back the way he had come.
“Easy to get lost in this place,” LaVonne told him. “That’s deliberate. It encourages people to wander and spend money.”
“The crowds don’t help. I don’t believe this place is so busy this early on a weekday.”
“Busy? Hell, this is slow.”
Andy looked around. “But the place looks full.”
The woman smiled. “It’s supposed to look that way. You get even a few people in here and it looks like a crowd. Saturday afternoon we’ll have two or three times as many people in here and it will look just as busy, no more.
“A while back Cogswell had one of the architects come out and talk to the mall employees about the way this place was designed. Turns out it’s just full of tricks.”
She pointed on ahead. “See the way the mall zigzags? Just far enough so no one gets claustrophobic and close enough so it breaks up the sight lines. Personally I think it’s just another gimmick to get people lost and wandering.”
Andy shook his head. “I’m going to need a map and compass to get around in this place.”
“Compass won’t do you any good. You know the South Court? It’s at the east end of the mall.”
“Then why call it the South Court?”
LaVonne shrugged. “Maybe they thought it sounded better. Now, notice something else?”
“What?”
“No windows. Just the skylights and the smoked glass doors at the entrances. They could be having a goddamn blizzard outside and there’s no way you’d know it. It’s deliberate. The way you’ll never find a clock in a Las Vegas casino. It’s a gimmick to isolate people from the outside.”
“I hadn’t noticed it, but yeah.” Andy looked around slowly. “Air conditioning, artificial lighting or diffused sun. In here you’re completely cut off from the rest of the world.”
LaVonne laughed. “That’s because this ain’t the real world. This is Oz, man.”
Andy thought about that for a job description. “Security guard in Oz.” He decided it wouldn’t add significantly to his resume. He looked around again in wonder. “It’s all pretty overwhelming.”
“You get used to it.” She smiled. “Pretty soon it seems almost normal.”
They turned a corner again, and they were in a wide space with white wrought iron tables and chairs on a Tuscan tile floor. There were twenty or thirty food booths along the walls, and the smell of fried food and spices filled the air.
“The Food Court,” LaVonne explained unnecessarily. “This is one of the hot spots. People who are just hanging out tend to congregate here, especially the mall rats. And folks will do dumb-ass things like leave their purses on the table when they go back for a refill on soft drinks.”
It was barely mid-morning, so there was only a sprinkling of people at the tables, some solitary, some mothers and kids and a few groups of teenagers and preteens.
“You want to keep a close check on the bathrooms back here,” LaVonne said as she led him through the maze of tables and chairs. “If something’s gonna go down, that’s a favorite place for it.”
An old man sat at one of the tables. He was hunched over a cup of coffee like a vulture, pale wattled neck stretched out of his dark suit. He glared at them as they walked by. LaVonne ignored him.
“That’s one kind of trouble right there,” she said quietly once they were past.
“Doodle dasher?”
LaVonne chuckled. “Looks the type, don’t he? No, he doesn’t expose himself. We call him the Preacher. He thinks he’s commanded to witness for God Almighty everywhere he goes.”
“What does he do?”
“We’ve caught him preaching in the mall, putting fliers on cars, even slipping stuff in folks’ shopping bags. He’s been thrown out of every mall in the valley three or four times, but Black Oak’s his favorite. We must have thrown him out eight or ten times.”
“Can’t you just bar him permanently?”
She looked at him. “Morales give you his little spiel about this being private property? Well, it’s not that simple. We can ban a lot of things you can’t restrict in public places, but we’re not exactly private either. On free-speech stuff, we usually have to wait until they do something before we can throw them out.
“Now the Preacher, he’s under a court order. He doesn’t harass nobody and we let him alone. If he starts preaching or handing out his little pamphlets, then he’s violating the order and out he goes.” She shrugged. “Anyway, it’s all spelled out in the regs down in the office.” She looked off past Andy. “Oh, here’s someone else you should meet. Hey, Slick.”
The kid was skinny, maybe sixteen. He was wearing a pair of baggy blue shorts that nearly reached his knees, a black T-shirt advertising a rock band in indecipherable Day-Glo lettering, and a baseball cap turned backwards. His hair was shaved close to his temples on the side and down over his collar in back, and he wore a pair of funny-looking tennis shoes.
“Whoa, like greetings, dudes.”
“Slick, this is Andy. He’s a new guard here. Andy, this is Slick.”
Andy nodded.
“Wow! Like excellent, Your Secureness!”
“Anyway, don’t be giving him no lip, you hear?”
Slick looked pained. “Ooh, bogus. To think that I would cause problems. That is, like, most bogus indeed.”
Andy put on that cop smile which is friendly and intimidating at once. “Oh, I’m sure Slick and I won’t have any problems.”
“Outtasight,” Slick agreed. “Well, like later, dudes.” He swung off down the mall.
“Skateboarders,” LaVonne explained as they moved on. “They’re not supposed to bring their boards onto the property, but as long as they leave them outside and don’t ride them in the lots, we pretty much leave them alone.”
Andy looked after the boy. “I didn’t know anyone really talked like that.”
“They didn’t until the movie came out.”
Andy shook his head. “Amazing.”
LaVonne looked at him narrowly. “Where you from, Westlin?”
“I grew up around here. Well, in Huntington Beach, actually. We moved there when I was twelve and I’ve lived in Southern California ever since.”
“You act like you’ve never been in a mall before.”
“Only to shop. And not very often.”
“You mean you didn’t hang out at the mall with the other kids?”
Andy’s lips set in a thin, hard line. “Not all us white boys had time to hang out at malls.”
LaVonne led him along the second level past three or four zigzags, then down another set of escalators and along the first level almost to the far end of the mall. Finally, they stopped in front of a short arm of the mall.
“Now this is the other hot spot,” LaVonne said. “The real name is the Amusement Court but everyone calls it The Pit.”
The stub was a neon-lit cave. Glaring red, blue and orange tubes outlined the dozen or so tiny shops along the sides and spelled out “Arcade” over the gaping dark entrance at the far end. The place looked like the anteroom of Hell to Andy, but it was thronged with teenagers.
As soon as they turned the corner they began to hear rock music. It got louder as they walked toward the back, and by the time they reached the arcade entrance it was well-mixed with electronic bleeps, squawks and computer music from the games. The din was deafening and the place smelled of cigarette smoke overlaying old grease and cheap food.
The combination of violently clashing neon, noise and blindingly bright lights in the small stores made Andy’s head hurt. The kids and the workers seemed oblivious to the racket and the glare. Andy wondered if it was familiarity, nerve deafness, or ear plugs and sunglasses.
Without comment, LaVonne led him back to the arcade entrance. There didn’t seem to be anyone in the place over twenty-five, Andy noted, and a number of the kids were pointedly ignoring the guards.
At the very entrance to the arcade two lads were not just ignoring Andy and LaVonne, they seemed to be ignoring the whole universe. Each was skinny to the point of emaciation and had hair down past his shoulders, one bleached blonde and one dark. They were dressed in old rock T-shirts and faded, artfully tattered jeans. In the dim light, Andy couldn’t be sure if they had their eyes closed or not, but they were both playing air guitar to the music.
The blonde one did a knee slide on a particularly heavy riff. The other one duck-walked backwards, holding his imaginary instrument straight out before him. A couple of girls came out of the arcade and stepped past, seemingly as oblivious to him as he was to them.
“What’s their thing?” he shouted, gesturing at the pair.
LaVonne leaned up and put her lips close to his ear. “As near as I can figure out, playing air guitar and faking brain damage.”
“Druggies?” Andy asked just as the music ended with a drum flourish that sounded like a combination car crash and artillery barrage.
“Huh?”
Andy raised his voice. “I said, are they on drugs?”
LaVonne shrugged. “Not around here.”
“Why do they allow this?”
“Huh?”
“I SAID, WHY—” but they turned the corner and the sound died away as if by magic, leaving Andy shouting in the quiet mall. “. . . do they allow that?” he finished more softly, reddening. “I mean it looks like trouble to me.”
LaVonne shrugged again. “Those lads are going to come here anyway. The Pit gives them a place to hang, keeps them out of everyone’s hair and lets us watch them. Did you notice all the cameras in there? Eight of them, just for that little space. You can’t make a move in The Pit without being seen in the security center.”
Which probably explains why the Surfer is at the escalators instead of down here, Andy thought.
“Besides,” she continued as they dodged around a group of middle-aged women wearing identical “Born to Shop” T-shirts, “it makes money. The Pit is one of the highest-grossing areas of the mall on a square-foot basis.”
“And I’ll bet they spend half the money they make on handling trouble in there,” Andy said sourly.
“You’d be surprised,” LaVonne told him as they maneuvered around two mothers with strollers. “First off, the kids here, they’re good kids, most of them. Just ride ’em a little and don’t let ’em think they can get away with too much and they stay in line.
“Second thing,” she said, stepping expertly between a couple of running kids and a woman with her arms full of shopping bags, “is that if they don’t behave we run their asses right out of here. Hey, you lads slow down,” she called after the running children. She smiled. “The threat of getting thrown out of here scares most of them worse than jail.”
“What about the gang members?”
“We don’t allow obvious gang stuff in the mall. Raiders stuff and things like that. There’s a list in the duty office. Check it on the way out.” She made a face. “Not that there’s a real Crip or Blood within five miles, unless he’s driving by on the freeway. Out here they’re just wannabes. But we don’t want them getting any ideas.”
By the time they broke for lunch they had made two quick tours of the mall and Andy was thoroughly disoriented. All the stores looked the same, and every direction looked alike.
LaVonne timed it so they finished up back at the Food Court.
“Most of the food stands give discounts to mall employees,” she told him. “There’s also a mall employees’ lunchroom down behind the mall offices if you want to bring your lunch. I’ll meet you back here in half an hour or so and we can go on.”
There was an orientation packet in his box when he got back to the security office. On top was a pamphlet welcoming him to the “Black Oak family” with a cover picture of Kemper Cogswell, the mall’s developer, and several hundred words inside that added up to nothing much. Looking at Cogswell’s picture, Andy thought he looked like he played too much tennis.
Most of the rest were clippings about Black Oak Mall and how Cogswell had the vision and foresight to take a piece of land with a prime location but “undevelopable” topography and through daring and genius blah blah blah.
There was also a booklet of rules for mall employees. Andy set that aside to read later. The most useful things in the packet were some maps and diagrams and as he finished his sandwich, he went over them.
The mall was built on, or rather into, a ridge that jutted up sharply from the surrounding valley. The site was too steep to build on by conventional means so the architects had terraced the whole ridge to make the parking lots run up the sides of the mall and had built the stores partially on and partly into the hill.
Looking at the cross-sections, Andy saw that there were between three and five shopping levels in the mall. According to the material, there were over three hundred stores in the complex, which made it one of the biggest malls in the United States.
The mall ran zigzag along the ridge. At each point where it changed direction it opened out into a “court.” In addition there were smaller courts along the runs on the upper levels. The arrangement wasn’t complicated, Andy saw. The thing that made it confusing was that the same basic plan was repeated over and over. He put a couple of minutes into memorizing the names and relationships of the courts. That would give him a rough guide to where he was.
###
Slowly and deliberately, Billy Sunshine worked his way down the planter. His shears moved at perhaps three clips a minute, but he left the hedge behind him almost mathematically straight.
The people swirled about him: shoppers striding by, intent on getting from Store A to Store B; teenagers in groups of three or five, giggling among themselves and intent on seeing and being seen; parents trying to herd their children past the carnival of distractions. And over all the concealed speakers poured out sweet, syrupy music.
Since Billy was neither for sale, socially interesting or something to sit on, the people ignored him. Billy’s attention was totally focused on the slow, steady movement of his hedge shears.
There was a sound like a tiny giggle.
Billy stopped and looked around slowly. None of the people passing by looked like the giggling kind, and the elevator music certainly didn’t include a part for gigglers. He blinked twice and then went back to trimming.
He took two more clips when he heard it again. It was definitely a giggle, like someone was tickling a mouse.
He paused in mid-clip, shears open and poised over a scraggly bunch foliage.
A head about the size of his fist poked out of the greenery almost nose to nose with him. Billy drew back so his eyes could focus.
Whatever it was had big bat ears, a long crooked nose and a mouth so wide it covered half its face. Its skin was grayish-green and it was parting the branches with tiny hands with long, long fingers. The eyes were enormous, dark and lit by a combination of merriment and madness.
Another head poked out of the leaves next to the first one, and then a third. All three of them looked at each other and then looked back at Billy. Then they giggled in chorus.
Billy did what he always did when he was nonplussed by strangers. He held up his right hand with the first two fingers extended in a V.
“Peace,” he said.
All three of the little creatures giggled again and vanished into the bushes, leaving Billy making a peace sign at a half-trimmed boxwood.
He stood frozen for a long minute, right hand in a peace sign and his left grasping his hedge clippers. Then he blinked again as he absorbed what had just happened to him.
“Oh, wow!” Billy said at last. He reached down to the Bull Durham bag in his shirt pocket, pulled it out and looked at it reverently.
“Outtasight shit!” he breathed.
Then he shook his head and went back to trimming.
###
LaVonne was finishing a slice of pizza when Andy joined her back at the Food Court.
“Think of any more questions?” she asked as she dumped the contents of her tray in the garbage can.
“A few. You said there wasn’t much violent crime. What about drugs and prostitution?”
LaVonne shrugged. “Probably some dealing going on, but it’s real discreet. As for the working girls, take a look around. Notice anything about the crowd?”
Andy glanced over the now-crowded Food Court. “Mostly women and kids.”
LaVonne nodded. “Women, kids and families. That’s about eighty percent of it, even weekends and evenings.” She chuckled. “Only exception is Christmas Eve and the day before. Then this place is packed to the rafters with men and all of them with this haunted expression in their eyes. Anyway, this just isn’t prime hunting ground for hookers.”
They turned the corner from the Food Court into the main mall again.
“Now if you do see something suspicious you can use those extra-legal powers Morales is so fond of. Get an ID and order them off the property. Then post the information in the daybook for the rest of us. If you do have trouble, your radio’s your best weapon. Or get to one of the information kiosks, punch nine-one-one and your badge number. That’ll get you a direct line to the security center.”
“They’re tied in?”
“They’re run off the same computer. Just like the lights, air conditioner and nearly everything else in this place.”
Andy laughed and shook his head.
“What’s so funny?”
“Just thinking. A few weeks ago I was worrying about drug dealers and armed robbers. Now my biggest problems are likely to be a street corner preacher and a paranoid Porsche.”
LaVonne grinned. “Beats working for a living, don’t it?”
They walked on a ways in silence.
“Westlin, mind if I ask you something?”
“Go ahead,” Andy said, dreading the question.
“Why’d you want to go from being a cop to doing this?”
“Being a police officer turned out to be a lot more—intense—than I thought. I decided I wasn’t right for it.”
He waited for the inevitable follow-up, but LaVonne didn’t ask. Instead she stopped and looked out over shoppers below.
“See,” she said, as if she was talking to herself, “the thing is, being a security guard’s nobody’s first choice of jobs. So the people who end up here, well they’ve all got stories.”
She looked back at him. “You know Dunlap, the head of security? He was a lieutenant with the IAPD. When the Rodney King riots happened he made a real bad decision and some people got hurt. Morales, he’s from some dinky little department down near San Diego. I don’t know the whole story but he was fired and he sued them. Part of the settlement was they can’t say anything about why they fired him and they’ve got to give him a good recommendation.
“Me, I’m thirty-two. I got twelve years in the Army, a GED and an eight-year-old kid.” Her jaw firmed. “But it ain’t for much longer, I tell you that. I got one more semester of night school, and I’ll have an associate’s degree in accounting. Then I’m out of here.”
She relaxed again. “Point is, none of us are in any position to be too curious about someone else’s past. We just ignore it and go by what the person does here. Anybody who pulls his weight and doesn’t screw up, he’s fine.”
“Kind of like the Foreign Legion, huh?”
“More like a rest home. Things don’t work out, one way or another, you got some police experience and you weren’t caught banging teenyboppers in the squad car.” She shrugged. “Well, here you are. Mostly we don’t ask too many questions.”
“Thanks, LaVonne.”
The woman shrugged again. Then she stopped suddenly and turned to him, so close their bodies almost touched. “Hey, Westlin, you’re all right. Let me tell you something.” Her eyes flicked around. “Don’t trust those guys. Dunlap, Morales, and the rest; they’re some bad apples. Don’t let them pull you into anything.” She stepped back, turned and continued walking next to him as if nothing had happened.
“Is that what happened to the guy I’m replacing?”
“Fogerty? Nah. He was a rummy. One night he started seeing things in the parking lot and freaked out.” She shrugged. “Pink elephants or snakes or something.”
###
It took nearly three hours for one of Sudstrom’s stockboys to bring the hangers up to the Business Boutique. Unfortunately for Dawn Albright’s temper, the stockboy was Joe, the one who liked to make rude noises when women walked by. Dawn was torn between the hassle of filing sexual harassment charges with management and the simple pleasure of decking him. Since Joe was as thin as Dawn and perhaps half a head shorter, that wasn’t an idle thought. She eyed him balefully, but Joe was no less dense today than usual.
“Here you go, mamma,” he said as he handed the bundle of hangers over. “That’s four this month. You got something up here that eats them?”
Dawn sniffed.