Eye of the Sh*t Storm by Jackson Ford (most romantic novels .txt) 📕

spot I know south of you guys, in Frogtown. Adam’s Gym. They’re right by the river, and they’ve got this big-ass rotating sign on top of the building. You can see it for miles, and I know for a fact it’s still there. Get to the gym, meet me out front.”

“What if I just, I don’t know, drop a pin somewhere? Share it with you?”

“Nah. Cell service is still spotty. It’s been fine for me today, but the last thing we want is for me to lose data at the wrong time. Oh, and you probably don’t want to be carrying a phone around if you don’t want your team to find you.”

Give him this: he might not be a lawyer any more, but he’s got the mind of one. Reggie might not know about Leo’s phone, but who’s to say she won’t start scanning for signals in the area? Or checking to see if I’m signed into my contacts? Shit, maybe she’s even done it already…

No point worrying about that now. “Adam’s Gym. Big-ass sign on the roof. Roger that.”

Nic ends the call. Doesn’t even say bye.

Well, that was fun.

Not like this next bit is going to be any better. “Up for a walk?” I say to Leo.

“Why were you fighting?” Leo says.

“I—”

“You can’t, can’t fight with friends.”

“He’s… it’s… he is, it’s just…” I trail off. How do describe the concept of ghosting to a four-year-old? Leo’s smart, but he’s not that smart.

I break the moment by getting to my feet. The only place to stand is in the ankle-deep water. Not like my feet aren’t soaked anyway. To the north, the brewing thunderstorm gives off another low rumble. The clouds are above our heads now, slowly edging towards covering the sun.

Nic’s comment about the phone comes back to me – it’s very possible that Reggie could track it, and it would make sense to destroy it in the same way I wrecked mine. But that would leave us without any sort of communication, and the last thing I want is for us to get lost, or miss Nic somewhere. I don’t care how visible this sign is – I want options.

I settle for turning the phone off. Reggie might still be able to track it, but she’d have to suspect I was using it first. I think that’s a stretch, and I can live with the odds. For now.

“It doesn’t sound like it’s too far,” I say. “Ready?”

“Are we going to the place right now? The one with, where my dad is?”

He must mean Compton. No point lying to him again. I kneel in front of him. “Not right away. It’s pretty far, and I don’t have a car. The person I just called is gonna help us, but we gotta go meet him. We’re gonna find your dad, though, bud. I promise.”

Leo takes an age to respond. He literally chews his lip for a minute. But then he looks up at me, his eyes bright.

“OK.”

SIXTEENTeagan

It’s harder going than I thought it would be. And I did not think it would be easy.

The water tracks a serpentine course between the sloped, concrete sides. The ankle-deep section we started in quickly gives way to knee-deep, then waist-deep water. I was hoping we could just walk alongside it, along the hard-packed dirt. But the bushes and vegetation are thicker than I thought they’d be, cut through with little offshoots from the main stream. We spend too much time clambering across slippery rocks, pushing through undergrowth and thick, almost impenetrable clumps of bamboo.

There’s hardly any wildlife – no birds, and definitely no fish in the green-brown water. It’s the lack of birds that bothers me the most. This much vegetation, you’d expect to see something.

The sun has edged behind the cloud bank, plunging the world into that weird pre-storm half-light. It’s not raining yet – small mercies, I guess – but the air is muggy, almost syrupy. It’s doing nothing for my comedown. I’ve slipped into a kind of queasy, uneven trance, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, and doing my best not to concentrate on the pounding headache and the hollow, yawning howl in my gut.

The area we’re heading to, Frogtown, isn’t actually an official place. It’s a local nickname for Elysian Valley, a neighbourhood just to the north of Dodger Stadium, bordered in the west by the 5 freeway. I have no idea why it’s called Frogtown, and it wasn’t exactly an appropriate question to ask Nic. All I know is, it’s south of where we are now. We keep pushing south, and everything will be OK.

Every so often, there’s a structure at the top of the concrete slope – a flat wall, like a billboard, maybe ten feet tall by twenty wide. The bottom sits flush with the top of the concrete slope. They appear in clusters, three or four at a time, on both sides of the river, and there doesn’t appear to be any logic to where they’re placed. This being LA, they’re riddled with graffiti. Some pretty good pieces, too. I spot some WRDSMTH, some Kim West, even one piece that looks like a Mr Cartoon job.

But what the hell are the walls the graf is painted on? I stare at them for the longest time before it hits me: flood barriers. The City of Los Angeles is putting up some extra insurance in case a real big dump happens.

What I don’t get is why the barriers are spaced so strangely. Is it strategic? Like, they’ve worked out where a potential flood would breach the edges of the river? Are they trying to protect specific buildings? Maybe the quake knocked the others down… only, I don’t see any debris.

Annie would know. Hell, I can hear her now. Damn city builds some, stops for a while, builds some more, tears some more down cos they ain’t up to code or some shit. Same motherfuckers moving folks out of