Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,92

through, and since being married, I’ve been woken up for every single one because Jae still hasn’t become acclimated to them.

And he’d been born in California.

I’m not too sure what he expected me to do in the middle of a small quake, but I was now awake for them. Thankfully, we usually found something to do after the few seconds of shaking died down. So maybe Jae wasn’t so much unsettled by earthquakes as much as they made him frisky.

I didn’t mind the lack of sleep.

Digging down into the Los Angeles dirt usually led to a multitude of complications nobody wanted to deal with. There were old gas lines and sewage tunnels left over from generations of haphazard, slapdash building, but going deeper presented a whole different kind of problem. Depending on where you were in the LA Basin, old infrastructure was the best thing you could find. The worst-case scenario was—believe it or not—fossils.

Sure, you could hit a pocket of crude oil in parts of LA County, but you’re more likely to find a scramble of stone-encased bones that would bring your construction dreams to a screaming halt. It takes forever to extract the fossil, and where there’s one, there’s usually another two or three hundred. So, to avoid all of that, most high-rises either have a separate structure, or in the case of the Brinkerhoff place, are dug down just a little bit and use the first one and a half floors as parking.

In her text during the standstill traffic, O’Byrne told me to use one of the visitor spots, having cleared it with the building long before I ever woke up. The code was unnecessarily complex, a long string of numbers followed by two pound signs, then another number and an asterisk. There was a call box next to the keypunch, and from the significant lack of paint on the Help button, I imagined the security desk got a lot of calls from the senior citizens living in the building. Thankfully the light turned green and I didn’t have to go through summoning Beelzebub on the punch pad again.

I don’t know what I was expecting. No, I knew exactly what I was expecting. It was difficult getting older sometimes, because at some point, there’d been a generational shift, and old people—especially Los Angeles’s seniors—didn’t follow the elderly person template we’d all been raised up on. Sure, there were still stereotypical grandmothers with a collection of crucifixes on their living room wall and a crystal dish of strawberry candies sitting on the coffee table someone made in their shop class fifty years before, but nobody apparently told the residents in this particular building, because as I drove through the long lines of cars, there wasn’t a land shark among them. Instead of aging Cadillacs and hard-finned Buicks, I counted at least seven exotic sports cars, five high-end Teslas connected to their charging units by thick umbilical cords, and six chrome-heavy Harleys. The rest of the offerings were slightly more practical—a lot of SUVs and a couple of Smart cars that should’ve been painted yellow and red like those pedal-powered plastic vehicles kids rode around in. I was happy to say Lisa never saw the inside of one of those, because as soon as she showed any interest in moving forward, I bought her a miniature red Ferrari to tear around in.

It was good being an uncle. I got to be cool and never the bad guy. Mike hated it, and for the most part, Maddy just shook her head and spent a lot of time in negotiations with her mini-me. I personally think Mike was just jealous because he’s too short to see over the dashboard of a real Ferrari.

I found the visitors’ parking easily enough, sliding the Rover into a spot next to a Mini Cooper. The parking levels were dead quiet, and only the hum of the elevators moving up and down pierced through the echoing silence. Whoever maintained the property was diligent about keeping the grounds pristine, because the floor was clean enough to eat off of and I made no noise as I walked toward the lit-up entrance door.

I had my fingers on the handle when I realized the parking levels were much more than just a place for the residents to leave their vehicles. I hadn’t seen the doors as I was driving, but they were clearly visible from my spot by the entrance. Set into the wall in front of two parking