Lippe Simone - Blank

There were no women among the warriors and so all that remained to fight over was food and anything that resembled food but the fighting was never-the-less fierce and ominously well-organized. Honor mused briefly on the effect of introducing a female into the melée and decided, for the moment, to hold her ground in the hotel. There were cars everywhere and her motorcycle was only yards from the hotel entrance but the frenzy stood between them and Honor like an acid storm. She needed another exit and she needed a vehicle. With these fundamental truths she returned to the labyrinth behind the reception desk.

The kitchen staff had spilled into the hall and begun the vomiting phase of the binge drinking process and posed no serious threat. Honor found what she needed in the lost property room and returned to the restaurant and then the kitchen. The kitchen was windowless and dark and the emergency lighting had burned itself out but Honor could see the only thing she needed to see — the outline of the inevitable receiving door which all professional kitchens use primarily for smoke breaks. She could only guess what lay beyond the door. It sounded like unsuitably skilled workers dismantling a greenhouse but was likely yet more running street battles. But very soon there’d be mindlessly wild and dangerously sober cavemen invading the hotel and in any event Honor had a target and a plan and a BMX bike from the hotel’s lost and found.

Honor and her bike burst from the door not so much prepared for anything but unconcerned what anything might be and so when she found herself jetting off a six-foot concrete loading bay as though off the side of a cliff she maintained control of the bike and hit the ground with the wobbly confidence of a natural cyclist on a pint of bourbon. She quickly recovered her balance and peddled with the strength and speed so often consequential of being instantly pursued by a high-density mob of mindless neanderthals with a paleolithic sense of the romantic.

Just as she’d recognized the zoo and the interior of a Ferrari with no memory of ever having seen either, Honor knew exactly where she was going and what she was going to do when and if she got there. She was going to the police station, and she was going to get a gun.

As keenly as Honor was recollecting the path back to the LAPD headquarters she’d passed on her way onto Broadway, the actual measure in distance was proving elusive. Partially because she was quite drunk but mostly because she was backtracking on a bicycle a route previously charted from the luxury of a Harley Davidson. She could see the revolutionarily ugly glass triangle jutting from its cinder block housing like a gargantuan broken widget and knew that she must be approaching police headquarters from the rear, which was roughly the plan, but it seemed to get no closer.

Of appreciably greater concern was the growing density of the street-fighting which Honor was having more and more difficulty dodging as her lungs and legs began to submit to the stress and heat. So long as she was able to keep to a pace just a notch above a breathless sprint then even those who noticed her and gave chase soon abandoned the pursuit but the factions were sweeping the streets in shoals now.

Suburban dads were the main occupying force, holding store fronts and upper floors and exploring the military applications of fire and throwing heavy things out of windows. A crack team of road workers was maneuvering against the small but select collection of women being archived by the staff of a condominium showroom. A regiment of confederate soldiers — almost certainly movie extras — were entrenching their positions in a pitched battle with a leathery corp of farm workers for control of a truckload of tomatoes.

As she soldiered on Honor noticed the high ratio of policemen among the rioters and reflected on the brutality they’d brought down on the heads of the Hare Krishna. She realized that her plan of riding a bicycle into the city’s highest concentration of policemen was exactly the sort of strategy conceived by people who’d just pounded a pint of Bourbon.

She estimated, probably optimistically, that she could keep her diminished pace for another mile and began to look for shelter. The closest option that didn’t require riding up stairs or through a fountain was an open underground parking garage and she steered toward the ramp and disappeared into the darkness.

She bore deep into the back of the garage. No one followed and as near as could be determined in the darkness she was alone. And there were cars everywhere, she needed only choose one. She cast a discerning eye for something that had the firepower she’d need to get through the immobile traffic and found herself harboring sentimental thoughts of the bulldozer she’d abandoned at the zoo. But all the cars were exactly alike. They were almost all Chevrolet Caprices and they were all black and white. Honor had accidentally broken into the headquarters of the LAPD.

Honor switched on the bike’s light and the beam fell immediately on the door to the stairs. She took that as a sign that she should return to plan A and investigate the availability of weapons. She promised herself that she’d go no further than absolutely necessary to secure a firearm and then return to the garage, hotwire a police car and get as far from LA as it would carry her. She was sober enough now to ask herself if the plan was sound. She answered herself that it was.

And indeed when Honor peered through the thin slice of risk that she allowed through the door of the ground floor stairwell the plan seemed to be unfolding with the machine-precision of a carefully planned and expertly executed museum heist — the entire floor was empty. Certainly that which could be seen of the ground floor was empty but that accounted for a considerable amount of acreage in the open plan, glass-partitioned breadth of the ground floor of the absurdly inappropriate headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department. She could see all the way to the front of the building, through at least five layers of conference rooms and briefing rooms and offices and finally the foyer and the outside, which was where all the action was. It appeared that the staff, in search of food or fresh air or broader horizons, had established a beachhead in the park across the street. There the uniformed officers and civilian staff had split into distinct factions and established a brisk arbitrage in women.

Honor sacrificed a shoe to prevent the door closing and locking and stepped into the lair with an unworried gait very much approaching a saunter. She immediately encountered the first obstacle to the plan — as much as the police department resembled the shopping concourse of a busy modern airport there was not, as Honor had vividly imagined, a hall of convenient shops dedicated to the keeping of peace and enforcing of law and she couldn’t immediately see where they kept the guns.

In fact as Honor toured the transparent halls she observed that were it not for the mug shots taped to the glass walls of the briefing rooms the police station would have looked much more like a very peaceable stockbroker’s on a warm Sunday afternoon. And it was precisely while making this observation that Honor had for the first time that she could ever remember a flash of total and certain recognition. From among the scarred and angry and defiant faces on the opposing wall of a long and narrow briefing room Honor’s curious attention was returned by a dead stare from a face that she knew. A face that she’d seen as recently as the Regent Hotel when she caught her reflection in a mirror.

Her name was Gale, also known as Gale Force Winds, Gale Smith, Gale Jones, Gale Lencewicz, Mariantoinette Hapsbourg and “Solenoid”. She was wanted for, among many other things, theft, felony theft, auto theft (43 counts), theft by deception and theft by forced entry, making a false statement to a police officer, assaulting a police officer, impersonating a police officer, criminal nuisance (uttering a bomb threat by telephone) and escape from custody (state mental facility). She was currently at large and presumed to be in Los Angeles and under additional notes someone had added “riot cuffs”.