Hideout, p.1
Hideout, page 1
Also by Louisa Luna
The Janes (An Alice Vega Novel)
Two Girls Down (An Alice Vega Novel)
Serious as a Heart Attack
Crooked
Brave New Girl
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Louisa Luna
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Cover photograph © Olivia Bee / Trunk Archive
Cover design by John A. Fontana
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Luna, Louisa, author.
Title: Hideout : an Alice Vega novel / Louisa Luna.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2022] | Series: An Alice Vega novel
Identifiers: LCCN 2021049253 | ISBN 9780385545532 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385545549 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3612.U53 H53 2022 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20211201
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049253
Ebook ISBN 9780385545549
ep_prh_6.0_139403815_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Also by Louisa Luna
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For my father,
author of the original Hideout,
who told us stories about the player who ran the other way
1
Zeb Williams kicked the turf with the tip of his cleat and thought about what was underneath. The field used to be real green, but the school switched it to the Brillo Pad when Zeb got to UC Berkeley in ’81. He thought that was lousy, since he’d mostly learned the game on grass. But he also had experience with dirt, mud, pavement. He’d gone down on a lot of sidewalks growing up, face smashed into the curb. The Italians would make fun of his bruises but shut right up when they saw how good he was with a ball. Soccer wasn’t his thing; basketball sometimes, but what he was really good at was any game when he had to throw and catch across a field. He started playing football at Riordan in the city when the coaches discovered he could also kick. Even cross-country his freshman year. On top of the rest, it turned out he could run, too.
He took a deep breath in through his nose and wished the field was natural so he could smell it a little bit. Right then it would’ve made him feel like he was in the right place, about to kick an extra point.
“You ready, Two?” said Bear Thomas, the holder, jogging in place while the last seconds of the time-out ticked.
The joke on Bear was always “Hey, Bear, what would you do if your mama named you Bruin?” Or “Duck,” or “Trojan.” And then, when they really wanted to piss him off: “She should’ve named you Cardinal after all.”
Now, though, no one was joking, and Bear was jacked up; Zeb watched him hit his palm against the side of his helmet, still dancing around in his spot.
Zeb raised his head about an inch but cast his eyes up higher, toward the stands, and suddenly he could hear all the people. Sixty-five thousand, they told him. That’s what they were expecting. It always surprised him, the sound that that many people made. Most of the time, it was one continuous noise that hushed and rose to a shriek, over and over, like a fighter jet flying back and forth.
Carmen was up there somewhere. She seemed too refined for cheering. Although, since they started dating, she’d told him it was hard for her to watch the games because she got so nervous about the outcome. Apparently, she’d never cared that much before.
He smiled behind his face mask, thinking about her. He liked her because she was so honest. Other girls only talked about what they thought he wanted to hear: game stats; odds; recruiting news. Or they’d do their best not to care less, too preoccupied by modern dance or politics or whatever they studied. It would not have occurred to Carmen to pretend to be cool. She would be just fine in life.
Which brought him back: what was underneath the turf? He’d heard it was a thin layer of rubber below the Brillo. Below that, gravel. Below that, concrete. Below that, dirt. Below that, below that…
The time-out was done. Bear clapped his hands once.
“Go,” he said to Zeb, then squatted, waiting for the snap.
Zeb nodded, glancing up at the board. 6–6. 4th quarter. 7 seconds. The Stanford kicker was already in the doghouse for missing his extra point, all the love from the fans dried up the second the ball sailed just past the left goalpost. Could be me, thought Zeb. Could be any of us at any time.
He shook out his hands and his feet and then kept a little bend in his knees, left foot in front of the right, torso leaning forward.
Buck Reinhart snapped the ball, and Bear caught it, set it upright, and held his right arm out like he always did, like he was balancing the ball with the power of his mind.
Zeb waited. On the clock it took less than a second, but time on the field was different. Sometimes he felt like it might be a new year out in the world by the time the game was finally over.
He stepped forward—left, right, left—but instead of kicking with his right, he leaned down all the way and grabbed the ball with one hand, gave Bear a shove with the other. Bear tumbled to the ground in shock.
Zeb looked down at the ball tucked nice and snug in his forearm, then back up at the clock. 4 seconds now. He didn’t have much time at all.
He turned around and started to run, headed for Stanford’s end zone.
He heard Bear yelling as he chased him; Bear had been a corner in high school, too, so he was fast, but not as fast as Zeb. He could see the Cal defense coming for him off the sidelines: Jimmy Moffat the tackle, Roger Swain the outside linebacker, flags falling at their feet. If they caught him they’d crush him—hitting the turf wasn’t like hitting the grass. It would be Jasper Alley in the city all over again, with the Italians piled on top of him, all of them giddy with the game, laughing away how much it hurt.
His teammates weren’t laughing. They were screaming his name, at first Roger Swain shouting, “Wrong way, Two, wrong way!” It had happened before, players getting disoriented after a sack and charging for the wrong end of the field, but when Zeb didn’t stop or slow down, Roger and the rest seemed to realize this wasn’t a mistake.
The sound from the crowd had taken on a sky-high pitch—to Zeb they sounded like the spaceship’s laser from War of the Worlds when it fried up the priest. Only louder.
Thirty, twenty, ten.
Some of the Stanford band and cheerleaders stood scattered in the end zone, confused, sipping cans of beer, tossing pom-poms into the air carelessly.
Zeb spotted a narrow route between a cheerleader and a guy holding a trombone and accelerated, lighter with each step. That was one thing he could say for the turf—it didn’t cling to the cleats like grass and dirt did, gave him a spring when he landed on the balls of his feet.
He barreled into the end zone, the screech of the crowd higher and louder than before, the refs’ whistles shrieking. People began to jump down from the stands onto the field, dropping over the wall.
Zeb threw the ball backward over his shoulder, knowing it would be impossible for his teammates to resist catching it, like bridesmaids with a bouquet, even though the game was over now.
He pumped his arms, free of the ball, heading for the passage he’d scoped out, but then the trombone player moved, the hand slide sticking right into Zeb’s path.
Zeb crashed into the musician’s shoulder and knocked the instrument out of his hand but kept heading for the exit. He caught a whiff of a cheerleader’s hairspray—strong, like rubbing alcohol. He heard the clash of his teammates against the band and the cheerleaders, the thumps of them hitting the ground. He didn’t look back but imagined them all tangled, some laughing, others peeling themselves off the turf to keep up the chase.
Into the corridor, and instead of making a right to the locker room, he ran straight into the parking lot and slowed down for a few seconds to hop on one foot and then the other, pulling off his cleats and tossing them to the ground. He stripped off his jersey and threw it up in the air as he gained speed, heading for the edge of the lot, still hearing the collective shriek of the crowd. He thought about running to Piedmont Avenue, where he might be able to bl end in with the kids, or running a little farther, to Carmen’s sorority, to wait for her. He thought about running all the way to the interstate, figured it was about three miles. He thought about running across the Bay Bridge to the city, back to Jasper Alley, where he grew up, and maybe when he got there he’d get to see all the kids he grew up with, and maybe they wouldn’t have changed at all, still ten or eleven or twelve years old, still cracking crude jokes and chugging Coke from the bottle, wrapping their old footballs with masking tape to stop the air leaks. Maybe they’d be right on the corner where he left them, and when he finally made it there, they’d see him running toward them and say, “Where ya been, Zeb?”
* * *
—
San Francisco was not Alice Vega’s favorite town, on account of the weather. She preferred the heat straight up, never ran the a/c in her own house in the Sacramento Valley except during the most brutal of heat waves; otherwise, it was windows open. At home she typically walked around in yoga shorts and a tank top, but for work, every day, including today, she wore black—pants, shirt, jacket, boots. A Springfield pistol in a shoulder holster over the shirt, under the jacket. She’d worn the straps as tightly as she could stand it for so many years, just shy of cutting off circulation, that there was now an outline on her skin of the holster pocket, a collection of pink lines like an architect’s sketch on her ribs, just south of her left breast.
Work brought her to a lot of places she didn’t care for. She stood on the front steps of a big yellow house in Pacific Heights and pressed the doorbell, the glass front door wide behind a decorative iron frame. She heard the two-tone echo inside and figured it might be a minute. Lots of stairs. She turned around and looked at the street, empty and quiet for a Saturday. It was noon, fifty-five degrees, and the sun was out but muted, some wisps of fog hanging in the air.
A young tan man came to the door, bald with a black beard and glasses, wearing a mustard shirt and white pants that appeared oversized and expensive. He opened the door; the glass hummed as it shook on the frame.
“Ms. Vega?” he said, tentative.
“Yes,” said Vega. “Mr. Fohl?”
“No, no, I’m Samuel. The Fohls’ assistant,” he said, embarrassed to correct her. “Come in, please.”
Vega stepped into a large hall roughly the size of her whole house. There was a black-and-white-checkered parquet floor, and an ornate carved wooden ceiling. A tiled wall fountain burbled quietly in the corner.
“It’s Tiffany,” said Samuel, catching Vega’s gaze.
Vega nodded, accepting the information as she would a ticket from a parking-lot payment machine.
“This way, please,” said Samuel, and led her to an adjoining room.
The ceiling was engraved wood in the new room as well, and there were two wine-red leather couches, not a crease on them, facing each other.
“What will you have to drink?” said Samuel, his hands clasped behind his back. “We have flat and sparkling water, or something stronger if you prefer.”
“No, thanks,” said Vega.
“Very good,” said Samuel. “Anton is wrapping something up. He’ll be with you shortly.”
He left the room. Vega let her eyes travel along the edges of the windowpane. Outside, there was a bush of papery purple flowers clipped into the shape of a box.
She examined the room now. There was a dark wood sideboard the length of the entire wall opposite her, a white vase holding an arrangement of black lacquered sticks on top of it. Behind that stretched a long rectangular mirror, the top pitched at an angle so it leaned forward, almost as if it were put there to capture the full-body reflection of whoever was sitting on the couch. Vega saw herself in the glass, the crooked black sticks crossing the image of her face.
“Ms. Vega,” said the man she’d come to see.
He rushed into the room, swung his arm back leading up to the handshake, as if to gain momentum. Vega stood and extended her hand, and their palms slapped together, so it was really more of a high-five. He held a folded sheet of paper in his other hand.
“Anton Fohl,” he said. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. I was on one of those calls….”
He trailed off and looked to Vega for approval, she guessed, expecting her to say, “Oh, it’s no trouble,” or “Please—just to sit in this delightfully appointed room has been pleasure enough,” but he had not, of course, ever met Vega and therefore didn’t know that she purposefully didn’t partake in small talk unless she was trying to glean information from a person, much the way someone would pull and pick the meat from the delicate bones of a steamed fish.
“Please,” he continued, gesturing for her to sit.
Vega sat, and Fohl sat on the opposite couch, so they were now about six or seven feet away from each other. Vega had not researched Fohl before meeting. She’d wanted to rely on her first impressions, and then piece the rest together later. Social media was great for that, but it was all through the filter of the screen through the filter of the author’s engineering, which was two screens too many for Vega. She trusted her own eyes.
Fohl was handsome, in his fifties, with walnut-colored hair, the gray woven throughout with a white streak above each ear, so precisely placed it seemed to have been dyed that way. His eyes were a saturated blue-green and by far the most noticeable features on his face, save the lone boyish dimple in his left cheek, visible only when he smiled.
“Can we get you something to drink?” said Fohl, glancing at Samuel, who hovered in the doorway.
“No, thanks,” said Vega.
“We’re good, Samuel, thank you,” said Fohl.
Samuel withdrew, and Fohl placed the sheet of paper on the cushion next to him. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.
“You must have had quite a drive,” he said. “Coming from where? Sacramento?”
“Not that far,” said Vega. “A little south of there, though.”
Fohl whistled, expressing gentle astonishment.
“Well, thank you for coming all this way to speak face-to-face,” he said.
Vega smiled and then stopped, waited for more.
Fohl nodded rhythmically, like a bobble-head dog on a dashboard.
“I, uh,” he said, then coughed into his fist. “This is not something I wanted to put in an e-mail. I wanted to speak in person, to meet you, first off, but also this is…” He paused and pursed his lips, as if conducting an executive search for the right word, but Vega had a feeling he already knew it. “…a different sort of case than you’re used to.”
He paused again—Vega presumed, to allow her time to digest the disclaimer, but she already had, and she thought that if Fohl knew about half the cases she took that didn’t make press coverage, he might rethink his assumptions.
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Fohl, holding his hands in front of him as if to stop her from getting him wrong any further. “It’s still a missing-person case. It’s just that it’s likely to be the biggest case of your career.”
Fohl winced at the magnitude of his own words, but seemed excited by what he was planning to say.
“My wife, Carmen, went to Cal for undergrad—her father and grandfather went there, but my family and I, well, we went to Stanford, so you can imagine how it went the first time she brought me home to meet the parents.”
He didn’t laugh, but his eyes grew small as he smiled knowingly. When Vega didn’t laugh along with him and just continued to stare, Fohl’s smile shrank, the dimple flattening on the plane of his cheek. He seemed thrown off his topic but picked it back up after a moment.
“We met, she and I, in the fall of ’85. Married three years later. Two beautiful daughters.”
Fohl paused.
“Now you’re thinking, Who’s the missing person?” he said.
Vega still didn’t speak but leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees, mirroring Fohl’s position.
