Chapter One
Sunset Boulevard was a blur of lights and noise, too many radios and car stereos, too many people talking and shouting and laughing. Kayla jammed her hands in the pockets of her denim jacket and wished all of it would just go away.
At midnight, it seemed like everyone was on the street, all the weird and lonely and "professional" residents of Los Angeles: the punks and the pretty boys in tight black leather, the women in brightly colored miniskirts, the dealers with too many gold chains beneath their open shirt collars. Ten feet away from where she stood, a nervous-looking blond man traded cash for a little ziplock bag with a bored-looking guy in a cowboy hat; both men stepped back into the shadows of the alley as a black-and-white LAPD patrol car glided past, like a silent shark prowling through the late night traffic.
Liane and Billy were twenty feet further up the sidewalk, gawking at leather jackets in a storefront window. She took her eyes off the panorama of the street around her, and joined them at the window. "Nice stuff," she commented, looking at a tailored leather jacket with metal studs. The price tag said $249 . . . but it might as well have been a million dollars, she still couldn't afford it.
She leaned against the cold metal bars over the glass and thought about stealing some aspirin. Just the same as every night for the last few months, it felt like someone was pounding on her skull with a hammer. The noise from the traffic only made it worse. "Guys, okay if we stop someplace for some more aspirin?"
"Another headache?" Billy asked.
"It's nothing," Kayla lied.
"You've been having headaches every day for weeks now," Liane said. "Maybe we should take you to a doctor. What if this is something serious?"
"It's nothing, guys. I'll get some aspirin, it'll go away. There's a QuickStart down the street, we can stop there."
A red convertible slowed on the street next to them, the man in the driver's seat calling out to them. "Hey, chickies, want to party?"
Billy glared at the driver until he shrugged and looked away. The convertible pulled away back into the traffic.
"We could've just let him buy us some dinner and drinks," Liane said softly. "Nothing more than that." Liane had a hungry look in her eyes, the way she stared wistfully after the fancy red convertible.
Kayla thought about the man, and that he had a hungry look in his eyes, too. A different kind of hunger.
Billy shook his head. "He'd want something for his money, wouldn't he? And then we'd end up in a situation like last weekend with you and Nick."
Liane, already pale under the streetlights with her white-blond hair and very fair skin, turned even paler. That had been an awful night, one that Kayla thought they wouldn't survive. Nick, a local "businessman," had been watching Liane for a few days. When Kayla and Billy were busy buying Cokes from a street vendor, Nick told Liane that he wanted her to work for him. Billy and Kayla weren't his style . . . Billy was too mean-looking, with that knife-scar on his chin and that cold blue-eyed "Don't mess with me" look, a trick that he said he'd learned from his old man, who was currently up for armed robbery in Folsom. Not at all like the pretty boys on Melrose Avenue. And Kayla, with her long brown hair and green eyes that were too big for her face, knew she just wasn't cute enough for the chickenhawks, either.
Liane, on the other hand, was drop-dead gorgeous, blond and with the face of an angel. And she attracted men like a magnet. Especially slimeballs like Nick.
Maybe Billy telling Nick to go sit and spin wasn't the best idea, she thought. Billy and Nick had screamed at each other for fifteen minutes. Nick had stormed away, and they were walking down the street two hours later when he and some friends had pulled up in Nick's blue Chevy, waving a pistol at them. It'd been a fast run through the back streets of Hollywood, with Nick screaming curses in two languages at them, until they'd managed to lose him by climbing over several fences and hiding in a gardening shed in someone's backyard.
But, even after a night like that, she knew that getting out of that latest foster home had been a good idea. The lady who ran the place was nice enough, but her husband was slime, and he'd already started hitting on Liane, not even two days after she arrived there. True, every straight guy with hormones tried to hit on Liane, she was just too pretty for her own good, but this place was a foster home. It was supposed to be safe. Especially for someone like Liane, who was just a little too quiet, too easily spooked by people yelling, and scared of crowds and people standing too close to her.
Liane was quiet and shy, and it had surprised Kayla that the blonde girl had been the one who'd first talked about running away, about how she, Billy, and Kayla could go out on their own. It had started out easily enough, stealing enough money to take the bus from Orange County to downtown L.A. From there, they went to Hollywood, mostly because Liane wanted to see the Chinese Theater. It was Kayla who'd spotted the abandoned office building across the street from Mann's Chinese, and now Suite 230 (formerly an insurance agency, by the stationery they'd found in a closet) was their new home.