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Arts & Entertainment

NoHo Noir Short Fiction: 'Collateral Damage'

Ethan's first day back on the job is someone else's last day on earth.

Ethan was about to go Code 7 for a late lunch when he got a call about someone brandishing a weapon at the 7-Eleven store at the intersection where Riverside Drive branched off into Camarillo.

Up until then, it had been a quiet shift. Ethan hadn’t had to get in and out of the car too much and could let his wounded leg rest. Even though Ethan had convinced the doctor he was okay to go back to work, his leg still hurt like a son of a bitch if he put too much weight on it for very long.

He’d stopped taking pain killers while still in the hospital; hadn’t even filled the ‘script they’d given him. Ethan was afraid of pain killers. He’d seen first hand how easy it was to get addicted to them. Then there was his roommate. Jill had had a problem with vikes when he met her; he didn’t want to tempt her by having them around the house.

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As he swung his car around to go east on Camarillo, Ethan could feel his heart rate starting to climb.

Please let this be some citizen over-reacting, he thought, but the dispatcher had said there was a possible fatality. Eyewitnesses were notoriously unreliable when it came to describing crimes in progress but it didn’t take police training to recognize a dead body.

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7-Eleven

Camarillo Street

North Hollywood, CA 91602

1:47 p.m.

Sure enough, by the time Ethan got to the crime scene, one person was dead and another was circling the drain.

He pulled up well away from the store and got out of the car with his hand on his weapon, reading the scene for immediate danger, scanning from left to right.

A dazed-looking teenage girl in a Starbucks apron was hovering in the doorway of the convenience store, sucking down a beer she was way too young to have bought legally.

A beefy older guy was standing guard over a man lying face down just outside the door.

A few steps away, a tiny woman was bent over the other guy, her arms red to the elbows, trying to staunch the blood geysering from his chest.

Oh hell, Ethan thought. I hope that guy doesn’t have AIDS.

 “Over here officer,” the beefy called out, as if Ethan couldn’t see the body at his feet.

“I’m the one who called,” he added.

Ethan could hear sirens approaching and glanced over at the guy bleeding out. The woman looked up briefly and caught his eyes. The message in hers was clear.

"He’s not going to make it.”

The beefy guy followed Ethan’s gaze.

“He’s not going to make it, is he?” he asked.

The teenage girl overheard him.

“Oh God,” she said and went back inside. The beefy guy’s eyes followed her, focusing on her teenage butt.

“Sir, I need you to step back,” Ethan said because the beefy guy was standing in a pool of blood.

“I’m the one who called 911,” the guy repeated, as if that entitled him to contaminate Ethan’s crime scene.”

“I need you to move back,” Ethan said again. It annoyed him when he had to repeat himself. “You’re in the way,” he added. Then he appended a belated “Sir.”

The guy stepped back.

Ethan bent down to check the guy’s pulse.

“He’s dead,” the beefy guy said.

Thank you for that keen observation, Ethan thought as the paramedic truck rolled up.

Two guys jumped out of the truck and rushed over to the bleeding man, gently shoving the woman aside. Another paramedic—a stocky redhead Ethan didn’t know—came over to examine the body.

“He’s dead,” the beefy guy said to him.

The paramedic leaned down to take his vitals anyway.

He looked up at Ethan and nodded in confirmation.

Ethan took the beefy guy aside and asked him his name.

“Joe Lorca.”

“Okay Mr. Lorca,” Ethan said, “I need you to tell me what happened here.”

Lorca’s eyes kept drifting over to the body, which was now covered with a tarp the store owner had found in the back.

“Mr. Lorca?”

The guy’s attention snapped back to Ethan.

“I came in the store to buy a pack of cigarettes,” he said. “Lindsay was at the counter.”

“Lindsay?”

Lorca indicated the girl in the green apron.

Starbucks girl, Ethan thought.

“Then that guy,” he pointed to the dead man, “came running into the store screaming that his brother was trying to kill him. He practically ran Lindsay over.” Lorca’s attention wandered to the store, where Lindsay was talking to one of the paramedics.

Dude, you’re about 20 years too old and fifty pounds too heavy to tap that, Ethan thought.

“Mr. Lorca?”

“Yeah. Sorry,” Lorca said. “Anyways, the guy went running into the back. I guess he was looking for an exit. And then this other guy came running in yelling, “Where is he?”

“Can you describe this other guy?”

“He was white,” Lorca said. Ethan waited. Lorca screwed up his face in an almost comic look of concentration. “That’s all I remember,” he said finally.

Ethan sighed inwardly.

“Thanks,” he said. “With any luck we got him on the security camera.”

He wondered where the detectives were.

The security footage was not going to be much help. It showed the dead guy running in and the other guy running in after him and knocking Lindsay into a display of snack food. You couldn’t really see much of his face, though.

To Ethan’s surprise, the little barrista, despite the beer and the shock, was extremely precise when it came to describing the assailant. She’d noticed a tattoo on his right forearm and a scar on his neck. And his eyes. She’d noticed his eyes because they looked so crazy.

“The weapon wasn’t a knife,” the small woman who’d done first aid told Ethan. “It was a bayonet.”

Her name was Noi and she was a nurse. She’d received medical training in the Marines and had seen duty in Iraq, she told him. She knew what a bayonet wound looked like.

She nodded toward the body on the ground. “Nobody could have saved him,” she said. “His heart was probably cut in two with the first blow. A bayonet is a nasty weapon.”

“What about your guy?” Ethan asked her. He’d still been breathing when the paramedics arrived and they’d whisked him off to St. Joseph’s, which was, coincidentally, where Noi worked.

She shook her head. “He’s going to be DOA,” she predicted.

She was right.

By the time the detectives arrived, Ethan had pieced together the story. The dead guy’s driver’s license identified him as Curtis Wade. He’d been stabbed twice—once inside the store and once outside, which is when the other guy—who’d just been driving by according to Noi—saw what was happening and jumped out of his truck to help.

He’d tried to pull the assailant off Curtis, been stabbed himself and gone down as the assailant fled on foot.

“He went east on Camarillo,” Noi said. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.”

The detectives took everyone’s statements as Ethan kept the lookie-loos away.

The lead detective, who didn’t really like Ethan very much, pulled the Good Samaritan’s name and address off the registration in his truck, which was still sitting in the parking lot with the driver’s door gaping open. He brought it over to Ethan.

“Yeah, Ethan,” Eastman said. “We’re going to need you to make the notification.”

Oh hell no, Ethan thought. Isn’t that your job?

***

The address turned out to be a neat little California bungalow on a side street not far from Universal Studios. The front yard was planted with lavender and rosemary and lilies of the Nile that matched the blue trim on the windows and door.

Ethan pulled up in front of the house and took a deep breath.

He levered himself out of the car and started up the walk toward the house, trying not to limp.

This is going to suck, he thought.

He could hear music coming through the open windows.

That made him feel worse.

He knocked on the door.

A pretty barefoot blonde opened the door.

‘Yes,” she asked, somewhat dismayed to see a cop at her door.

“Is this the home of Christopher Sillesen?” Ethan asked and watched the color drain from her face.

“Yes,” Jessica Ruttan Sillesen said. “Yes it is.”

 

 

 

 

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