1
Two seconds after Dr. Gary Bendigo pulled into his parking space outside the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center and turned off the car’s engine, a bird shat on the windshield. He looked at the thin white splatter, heard the unmistakable woodwind cooing of mourning doves in the trees above, and instead of recognizing it as the omen it was, he bitterly counted back the hours since he’d washed the now-soiled vehicle. It was nine.
He sighed. Half the reason he’d washed the car in the first place was because, only a week earlier, he’d been blindsided in this very location. Arriving at his parking space outside the lab, McDonald’s cappuccino in the cup holder, tie undone, hanging around his neck. A young male reporter with waxed eyebrows and a painted-on suit had ambushed him about the backlog, cameraman hovering behind him. Bendigo had watched footage of the stunt on Dateline. He’d noticed, alongside the nation, that the neighbor’s kid had traced WASH ME! in the dust on his back window.
None of it looked good.
Dr. Gary Bendigo: can’t find the time to tie his tie.
Or make his own coffee.
Or wash his car.
Or get through more than five hundred untested rape kits for the Los Angeles Police Department.
He’d hoped he could easily change America’s perception about one of those things. The birds thought otherwise.
There were no suited reporters in the parking lot today. And, strangely, there had been no security guard manning the open boom gate, though Bendigo had seen an officer on duty the past three Sundays when he had pulled into work. Another omen he ignored. Beyond the fences, State University Drive was quiet and the freeway was dark. For three weeks, seven days a week, Bendigo had been clocking in before the morning mist in Los Angeles’s University Hills district had cleared and clocking out to walk the lonely stretch to his car under the glare of orange sodium lamps. He was growing accustomed to spotting the occasional racoon or possum, other nighttime creatures braving the open plains of concrete.
He swiped his entry through one of the large glass doors and walked across the airy foyer, glancing out of habit at the big Cal State crest over the reception desk, a happy yellow sun wedged beneath insignias for the sheriff’s and police departments. The door to the wing of the building that housed the Trace Evidence Unit gave him trouble, as usual, requiring him to swipe his access card three times before the little red light went green and an approving bleep sounded. He flipped on lights as he walked down the hall, his shoes squeaking on the linoleum. Fluorescent tubes blinked on over sprawling, sterile evidence-collection rooms.
He flipped more lights, illuminating a computer lab, a file room, and then a plaque on the wall advised that he had passed into the forensic biology and DNA section of the building. Bendigo went right to the break room and turned on the coffee machine, scanned the noticeboard above the sugar, sweetener, and tea canisters for anything new. Since yesterday, here had appeared a sign-up sheet for a staff Christmas barbecue, divided by unit. Three people had already put their names in the “Salads/Sides” column. Bendigo looked at his watch and sighed again. It was mid-October. Only scientists planned a salad three months in advance.
Mug in hand, he was still thinking about the distant-future salad neurotics when he turned into lab 21 and stopped at the sight of people standing there in the dimness. It took a moment for him to put it all together, for his mind to begin screaming. Because what he was seeing wasn’t unusual, in a sense. There were plenty of guns in the lab. Guns moved in and out of Bendigo’s section by the dozen every week. But the particular gun he was looking at now, held by a man wearing a denim jacket, wasn’t tagged.
And it was pointed directly at Bendigo’s face.
That was unusual.
A woman was holding another untagged gun, this one pointed at a security guard who was curled on the floor with his arms bound behind his back.
It wasn’t the guns, or the blood, or the zip-tied wrists that terrorized Bendigo. It was their assembly. Their unique composition. Bendigo felt his stomach plunge. The man in the jacket, whom Bendigo didn’t recognize, moved the pistol’s aim from Bendigo’s face for an instant to gesture to his coffee mug.
“Good idea,” the guy said. “We’ll need some more of that.”
* * *
They told him to get on his knees. Bendigo just stood there like an idiot, the coffee mug still clutched in his fist, wondering how the hell a person does that. How they stop being, say, a regular guy in his midsixties who’s just arrived at work, en route to the inevitable slog through his email inbox, and become—what? A hostage? The couple looked as if they’d stepped into the lab straight from a leisurely morning dog walk. She was wearing skinny jeans and had gathered her yellow-blond hair into a messy bun, and he was sporting thick-rimmed black spectacles, the square, Clark Kent kind that young men wore these days with their fades and their manicured beards. There were no catsuits, no balaclavas, no bomb vests. Bendigo jolted when the man snapped at him.
“Get the fuck down!”
He set his coffee on the steel tabletop, hitched his trousers, and kneeled. When the woman came around him and gripped his chubby wrist, slid the cable tie around it, Bendigo got a whump of adrenaline in his belly. The zipping sound of the cable ties set Bendigo’s teeth on edge. This was real. The young security guard on the floor looked to be unconscious. There was a big gash on his forehead, blood drying on his heavily stubbled jaw. He was snoring in that thick, vulnerable way Bendigo had seen once when he was a kid and his buddy got knocked out cold by a fly ball at the local park.
Copyright © 2023 by Candice Fox
