Brad Thor - Full Black

Ava’s family-her mother, father, and Alisa-had joined in a united front. They would pay for rehab, if she would fully commit to it, but other than that, she was on her own.

Alisa kept in contact with Ralston from that point forward. Ava was so angry with her family for not “helping her out” that she stopped speaking to them.

When Ava finally lost her apartment, Ralston knew that if he didn’t let her move in with him, some opportunist would take her in and get her to do God only knew what. As screwed up as she was, he loved her. He wasn’t a complete idiot, though. He still had to work during the day and so cleared all of the booze out of his house, along with anything of value she might be tempted to steal and pawn for drugs. He also quit drinking, hoping that by setting a good example, he could help her get clean. It didn’t work.

Ava used the brains her family was renowned for, and what little of her looks she had left, to get what her addiction-riddled body needed. Bad people reentered her life from an earlier time, before Ralston. Alisa, though, did know them, and she warned him to keep them away from her. Ava was circling the drain. There was little Ralston could do, short of kidnapping her and taking her deep into the mountains somewhere to go completely cold turkey.

He decided that there was no other option. If she kept going like this, she was going to kill herself. He began looking for a cabin to rent and started studying the phases of detoxification and what to expect.

Alisa bought a stack of nutritional books aimed at rebalancing the body and had them sent over to his apartment. She also offered to pay for half of the expenses for renting the cabin. Ralston appreciated her offer. He wasn’t exactly rolling in money.

He was wrapping up a project with a studio and figured he could be on the road to the cabin with Ava in two weeks. Ava had even mentioned that if they could “just get away,” she thought she could hit the reset button on her life. It made him feel better about his plan. Maybe there was hope after all.

That hope faded after about two days. Ava’s hybrid was repossessed, and at first Ralston thought that might be a good thing. It was better that she wasn’t driving. Then she took another turn for the worse.

She disappeared for three days and came back with needle marks in her arms. When Ralston asked her where she had been, she told him she didn’t want to talk about it. She pushed past him and went into the bathroom to take a shower. She was in there for hours, and Ralston could hear her crying the entire time. He needed to get her the hell out of L.A.

He called the producer he was working for at the time and asked to be let go early. The producer said that they couldn’t afford to replace him at the moment and said that he was sorry, but Ralston would have to stay.

Ralston went in to work the next day and when he came home, Ava was gone again.

At two in the morning, she called him crying. She was incoherent, but he managed to get her to tell him where she was.

The abandoned house was near Crenshaw Boulevard in L.A.’s dangerous Hyde Park area. Ralston kicked in the door. There were empty liquor bottles, beer cans, and cigarette butts, but no Ava.

In the back portion of the house, he found a filthy mattress lying in the middle of the floor. A couple of portable lamps were positioned on each side. They had been switched off, but were still warm to the touch. Nearby was the plastic packaging for a particularly vile sex toy. Ralston’s heart sank. He’d been on enough movie sets to know what he was looking at. He needed to find her.

As he stepped into the kitchen, he heard a noise from outside. It sounded like the lid of a dumpster had been dropped. When he made it to the alley, he saw two men in the distance, running away. He also found a dumpster. Without opening its lid, he knew what he was going to find inside.

Praying to God, Ralston eventually found the strength to lift the lid. What he saw broke his heart wide open. By the time he dialed 9-1-1, the men he’d seen running from the alley were long gone.

In the days that followed, the cops asked him a lot about Ava’s drug use. They wanted to know who she bought from. Ralston couldn’t help them. He had no idea. Alisa provided the police with a ton of information. Ava had met her dealer through one of the soap opera’s crew members. Alisa even knew the identity of the next person up who supplied her dealer.

The detectives found her depth of knowledge interesting, to say the least, and wanted to know how she knew as much as she did. Alisa was no fool. She was an attorney, after all, and never answered the officer’s questions, at least not truthfully. That didn’t come out until the trial.

Alisa and her father had paid off both the dealer and the supplier to not provide Ava with any more drugs. Both of the subhumans had agreed at first and then tried to extort more money out of the family, threatening to hook Ava on even worse substances. When they refused, the drug pushers had made good on their threat.

Both Alisa and her father were convinced it was the same two men who had been responsible for Ava’s death. Putting them at the scene of the crime would have been all that was necessary to secure a conviction. But as much as Ralston wanted to see the people responsible for Ava’s death pay, he hadn’t seen the faces of the men in the alley. He couldn’t ID the two drug dealers as the figures he’d seen running away from the dumpster.

Even the district attorney tried privately to convince Ralston to testify against the two men. They were career criminals with horrific records. It didn’t matter if they were really the ones who were responsible. They had been responsible for untold suffering, and if they didn’t kill Ava, they were going to wind up killing someone else’s son or daughter.

The arguments were not lost on Ralston. At the very least, these were the men who had gotten Ava hooked on drugs and continued to feed her addiction. But Ralston had only one thing that truly belonged to him in life: his honor. As much as he wanted to kill both the pushers with his bare hands, he couldn’t lie. He could not positively identify them as the two men from the scene.

Without his testimony, the case had fallen apart and so had his relationship with Ava’s family. They had needed him, and in their minds, he had let them down.

Now, several years later, he needed them. “I understand why you’re still angry,” he said.

“Are you patronizing me? Boy, do you have balls. You know, I should have had you drummed out of the business.”

“Alisa, I need your help.”

The woman laughed. “You want my help with something? Let me rephrase my prior statement. You have colossal balls.”

Ralston considered telling her that not a day went by that he didn’t think about Ava; that he didn’t wish for some sort of penance he could perform for letting Ava down. Though he knew Ava’s addiction was just that-Ava’s addiction-he still felt incredibly guilty for her death. He tortured himself wondering whether, if he had quit the movie he’d been working on, he could have gotten Ava up to that cabin and gotten her sober. He wondered what would have happened if he’d chased those men down the alley. Would he have been able to ID them in court? Would he have even survived the altercation? All he had was the tire iron from his car. What if they’d been carrying firearms?

“I never wanted Ava to die,” he said. “Please.”

There was silence, several moments of it.

“Please,” he repeated. “I need your help.”

Alisa knew that Ralston was a good man. She also knew that the men accused of Ava’s death were the ones who were responsible. She was one hundred percent sure about that. Ralston had allowed Ava’s killers to go free. It made it very difficult to hear from him now, much less be asked to help him.