“Yeah,” Ashton said. “It’s dead.”
“How long after he took you did you disable it? Could he have gotten all your contacts? Your videos?”
Ashton didn’t answer.
“The guy doesn’t know who we are,” Vera said. Her voice sliced through the growing tension like a knife through butter. She hung an arm over the back of Ashton’s chair—let them see she thought it was no big deal. “He knows who Ashton is.”
The crew considered this.
“He grabbed you outside the Playhouse, right? You said he was waiting for you there,” Vera said.
“Yeah.” Ashton nodded.
“So he’s been watching you onstage,” Vera reasoned. “He sounds like some creep kiddy fiddler looking for a fresh young boy to play around with. He probably came snooping around a few months back, saw you doing the Romeo soliloquy or whatever the hell, and got a boner, thought he’d wait for you after class. Give you what children deserve.”
“That makes sense,” Benzo said.
“I don’t know,” Ashton said. “I feel like it was connected to the game. Like someone figured it out.”
“That’s because you’ve been thinking we’ll be found out since we started the Midnight Crew.” Vera shook her head. “You feel guilty and you want to get caught. Funny, you weren’t feeling so guilty when we hit your drunk uncle’s house to teach him a lesson about smacking your aunt around. I seem to remember you enjoying that one very much. You were guilt-free.”
Vera’s coffee came. Penny shut the menu in disgust and flung it on the floor. The waitress darted back and scooped it up.
“Completely pedestrian,” she snapped at the waitress. “Ginger granola? Who designed this menu? Are you serious? Is Raoul back there?”
“Raoul’s off today,” the waitress said. “Our resident chef this morning is—”
“Let’s go.” Penny stood. “We might as well go to Burger King at this rate.”
“Please don’t go.” The waitress fluttered about the table. “Take a moment to decide what you’d like, and I’m sure we can accommodate your preferences.”
Penny smiled as the waitress scrambled away. Penny had been a waitress for a week once. Her mother had wanted her to experience a “real job” as punishment for Penny ramming her birthday Mercedes into a tree because she’d wanted a Jaguar instead. Penny had hated waitresses ever since.
“This guy, whoever he is, he isn’t the threat,” Vera said. “Ashton is. It’s what Ash did that could get us all killed.”
Chapter 20
“What are you talking about?” Benzo leaned in.
“Ashton blabbed to a private investigator that he was abducted. He went crying to some—”
“I took it back,” Ashton blurted. “I told them I was lying. They’re not gonna—”
“Never interrupt me,” Vera snapped. She felt the gaze of nearby diners on her. “Never. Ever. Interrupt me.”
The crew turned to Ashton. He hunkered down, sulking.
“What did you say to these people?” Penny asked.
“I didn’t tell them about the Midnight Crew,” Ashton said.
“You better not have,” Benzo snarled, his nostrils flaring.
“It was stupid,” Vera said. “I’m not even sure ‘stupid’ cuts it. It was moronic. It was dangerous.”
“I made like it was a prank. It’s not going to go any further.”
“Do you understand?” Vera said. “If the cops find out about what we’ve been doing with the Midnight Crew game, we’re all doing time. People like that hate rich kids from the hills. They’ll make a circus of the whole thing. They’ll put us in jail. Real jail. With actual criminals. How long do you think you’d survive in prison, Ash?”
“I know I’d be fine.” Benzo flexed his pecs.
“Whoever the guy who grabbed you was, he wasn’t one of our victims,” Vera continued. “We’ve never hit anyone who wasn’t a coward or a loser, and we’ve never really done anything bad enough to make people want to find us. We give them a scare, that’s all. Make them realize the kind of pathetic, mindless, blessed lives they’re living. We do them a favor. Because we’re nice people.”
Sean snickered. He was watching the waitress pour his water. A drip splashed on the tablecloth. He leaned over to Benzo and murmured, “If my entire working life revolved around serving people and I couldn’t figure out how to pour a fucking glass of water properly, I’d hurl myself out a window.”
Benzo gave a heavy chuckle.
Sean continued watching the waitress for a moment, calculating, measuring. “Can I make you a deal?” he asked her eventually.
“Excuse me, sir?” The waitress looked around the table as if for help.
“What’s your name, honey?” Sean asked.
“Janice.”
“Janice, I want to get you out of here,” he said.
Vera smiled despite herself. She liked Sean’s little amusements.
“You can’t do this job. It’s not for you,” he continued.
“Leave her alone.” Ashton rolled his eyes.
“The deal is this,” Sean said, taking the waitress’s wrist. “Get under the table right now and blow me. Right now. In front of everyone. Do that, and I’ll give you a million dollars.”
“Sir, I can’t do that.” The waitress laughed uncomfortably.
“He’s serious,” Penny said. “You know who my brother is, right? We’re Michael Jay Hanley’s kids. Our dad is the most powerful guy in this city. Sean’s good for it.”
“He’s doesn’t mean it,” Ashton told Janice. “He’s just messing with you. Sean’s gay.”
“I gave the same deal to a bartender at Freeze last week. She quit her job right that minute.” Sean pulled out his phone, tapped through to his bank account. “Here. See? That’s my transaction right there to her account. Give me your details, and I’ll transfer it the moment you’re done.”
He unzipped his fly under the table. Janice looked around at the dozens of patrons all around them, her manager at the end of the room, checking in new guests. Vera watched the waitress’s mind ticking over. Calculating. The job. Her dignity. The money. The life-changing, destiny-altering money. A few seconds of humiliation for all that cash.
The waitress sunk down uncertainly. Everyone at the table except Ashton erupted into laughter when her knees hit the carpet. The waitress got back up and rushed away. The manager of the restaurant looked over at them but didn’t respond to the incident. In a few moments, they had all forgotten about it.
“What about that kid last time?” Penny yawned. “She got pretty sick.”
“She shouldn’t have been there,” Vera said. “She was supposed to be at a sleepover.”
“Is she okay?” Ashton asked. “Did you che—”
“She’s fine,” Vera said. “I checked.”
“But maybe—”
“It’s not the sniveling old guy,” Vera insisted. “No one could have found us that fast. It’s not anyone we’ve ever hit. We’re fine.”
She took a notebook out of her bag and set it on the table.
“Now pay attention,” she said. “Because we’re hitting our next target tonight.”
Chapter 21
The house in Manhattan Beach sat on the esplanade, a towering four-story white mass that blazed proudly in the sun. The single strip of concrete separating it from the scorching beach, called the Strand, was toured by Rollerbladers and dog walkers and looky-loos peering into the luxurious homes, while narrow streets between the lines of grand houses funneled families with towels down toward the glittering water.
“This is not Earl’s house,” I said as we idled on the street.
“It isn’t?” Baby raised her eyebrows at me.
“No,” I said. “This is not the house of a former accountant, former taxidermy salesman, now-deceased gumshoe with an office above a crab shack.”
“Well, I think I’d know where I live.” Baby snorted. “Turn here. Park in the garage.”
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Baby had a small device in hand that was opening the double garage door, and I parked beside a black Maserati.
I wanted to scream at Baby that everything I’d seen that day was telling me Earl Bird had been a bad, bad man. Not only bad but also likely a dangerous, corrupt criminal. But I reminded myself that she was a kid who’d only just lost her father and who was now trying desperately to stop me from changing anything else about her existence. Trying to radically adjust her perception of our father probably wasn’t a good idea at the moment.
We passed through a door in the back of the garage and walked into the first floor of the house. It looked like there’d been a massive party held here last night: beer bottles and red plastic cups on every surface, overflowing ashtrays on the arm of every sofa. Greasy pizza boxes were stacked on the landing of the stairs, and discarded clothes were piled in the corners of the rooms or hung off pieces of furniture. But the layer of dust over everything told me this hadn’t happened overnight—this kind of filth was the result of months of neglect.
A teenage girl in a bikini lay sleeping on a couch in the first room we entered, the coffee table in front of her dominated by a huge glass bong.
“Who is that?” I asked, pointing.
“Some girl,” Baby said.
“You don’t know her?”
“I told you, I invited a bunch of kids from the beach over when Dad died,” Baby said. “Some of them are still here.”
“I thought you meant friends, not random kids from the beach,” I said. I went and roused the girl. “Hey. Hey. Excuse me? Honey, you’ve got to go.”
“You can’t kick her out,” Baby snapped at me. “This is my house. My guests can stay as long as they like.”
“You don’t know these people.”
“So?” Baby said. A boy with black dreadlocks wandered into the room from what looked like the kitchen. He let his bloodshot eyes drift over us and kept walking without a word.
“I’m going to go pack for Milan,” Baby said, turning to go.
“Baby.” I grabbed her wrist. “You are not going to Milan.”
“It’s so funny that—”
“I’m serious,” I said. “Listen, I get it. I totally get where you’re coming from here, okay? Your dad is gone, and some woman who’s only been in your life for five minutes starts bossing you around. You’ve had all the independence you’ve ever wanted, and now a stranger thinks she can walk in and change that instead of trusting you, like your father trusted you, to take care of yourself.”
Baby glared at me.
“But you have to see where I’m coming from too,” I said. “Dad created this situation, and it doesn’t matter how stupid or selfish it is—this is the situation we’re in and we’ve got to deal with it. And it’s going to take more than a few hours to do that. You can’t run off to Milan before we’ve straightened all this out.”
Baby grabbed a beer bottle from a table nearby and flung it at the wall beside us. It shattered, startling the girl on the couch and two other girls I hadn’t noticed earlier, sleeping on blankets by the windows.
She pointed at the wall now dripping with beer. “Give me my credit card and get out of my face or next time that’ll be your head.”
“Baby, I’ve been visiting teenagers in juvenile detention since before you were born,” I said. “If you think having a beer bottle thrown at me is the worst threat I’ve ever faced, you’re dreaming. You’re not getting the card. You’re not going to Milan. End. Of. Discussion.”
She stormed off. I did the same, internally raging at my father for having done this to us, and at myself for doing a terrible job of handling Baby so far. I didn’t get her. She wasn’t responding to sympathy, humor, or stern directives. I worried that eventually I would run out of my usual grab bag of strategies for dealing with teenagers in peril. It didn’t make sense to me that I couldn’t level with or relate to my own sister.
I reminded myself that now wasn’t the time to panic or decide I’d failed. After all, I’d known her only a couple of hours. Baby and I would grow to understand each other eventually.
I went back into the garage and popped the trunk of my car, then hefted the duffel bag of cash out. I carried it upstairs and found my father’s bedroom on the second floor. I could tell it was his room from all the cigar stink. In the en suite bathroom, I knelt and gave the block of wood under the cabinet doors an experimental push. It tilted out from its housing and toppled over.
Creature of habit, my father, just like me.
When I was a little kid, maybe six, I discovered my father’s hidey-hole in our home in Watkins. I walked in on him grunting and sweating, his body bent and his arm shoved deep into the small space under the vanity in my parents’ bathroom. I thought for a moment he was fixing a plumbing problem, as I had seen workmen do around the house, but catching my father doing manual labor was as bewildering as if he had been in there training a monkey to do backflips. Then I saw him pull out a small jewelry case from the hidden space and place it on the floor by his knees. That’s when he noticed me standing there and snapped with sudden, shocked rage. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Nothing!” I cowered. “What are you doing?”
“None of your business, kid.” He grabbed his knees, his face reddened and puffy. “What in the world has your mother been teaching you that you think it’s okay to go creeping around people’s personal business? You’re so nosy! Goddamnit!”
He shoved the case into his back pocket, and I hung around guiltily in the bedroom while he recovered.
“You still here? What are you, my supervisor? You gotta watch everything I do around here?”
“Is that a present for Mommy?”
“Is what a present for Mommy?”
“The box.” I pointed at his pocket.
“Listen, kid.” He bent and pointed a finger in my face. “You tell your mommy about that box, or that little hole under the sink, and I’ll gut every toy you own and stuff a nice big pillow for myself with their insides. You understand?”
I’d waited for the little jewelry case to turn up at my mother’s birthday dinner or at Christmas. Month after month I’d waited, but it never showed up.
Now I bent all the way down and looked into the dusty darkness. It was clear items had been hidden in the space over time, but there was nothing there now. I could see shapes outlined in the dirt and grit but couldn’t tell what they had been.
I unzipped the bag and took one last look at the money. A few stacks of bills had slid around, revealing a key on a yellow plastic tag near the top of the pile. The label on the tag was for a storage facility in Torrance. Trepidation washed over me. Whatever Dad was keeping out in Torrance must be as secret and full of malignant potential as the hidden cash itself. I took the key, secured the money in the hidden compartment under the vanity, then walked into the hall and saw Baby on a balcony overlooking the beach.
“We’ve got to go,” I said.
“Where?” she asked. She swiped quickly at her face to hide her tears.
“Torrance,” I said. “I have a feeling Dad’s got more surprises in store for us.”
Chapter 22
Jacob moved like smoke. It was a skill he’d learned early in his time as a killer, when he’d been too raw and inexperienced to kill up close. He’d ventured silently into hotel rooms in Paris and London to replace pills in bathrooms with lethal capsules full of ricin powder or arsenic, leaving no trace of himself.
Feather-footed despite his size, he now wandered the second floor of Derek “Benzo” Benstein’s house in the dark, overhearing the young man’s voice echoing off the high ceilings as he talked loudly on the phone to a yacht broker in San Francisco.
“Well, that’s just too bad. I need it sooner than that,” he heard Benzo snarl. “I told you I wanted the forty footer with the double rain shower in the main bathroom. I’m throwing a party on Sunday, Doug, and I need the yacht in the marina by that morning for the caterers.”
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sp; Jacob wandered out onto the upstairs deck and stood in the shadows, looking over Benzo’s property. Two high-class escorts were sitting in the Jacuzzi, one playing with her phone, one yawning and braiding her wet hair. When Benzo returned from the phone call, the girls would be back “on,” would fawn and giggle over the eighteen-year-old homeowner, but for now they looked as bored and tired as if they were waiting for a late bus.
“L.A. Style starts shooting me at nine,” Benzo shouted down the phone. “So if the cover of next month’s issue has me standing on the pier with a captain’s hat on my head and my dick in my hand, I will personally come up there and kick your ass.” Jacob went to the second-floor railing and looked down into the foyer in time to see Benzo smash the phone, scattering the fragments on the marble tiles.
Roid rage, Jacob guessed. His workup of Benzo had revealed just how much maintenance the son of Los Angeles’s most successful film agent put into his appearance. Benzo’s calves, pecs, and six-pack were implants, and the young man had a standing appointment for flanks, belly, and buttocks liposuction twice a year to counteract the fat gained during his notorious weekend yacht parties. His lips and cheekbones were filled, and he was recovering from a recent brow shave. Jacob had crept through Benzo’s online bank accounts the way he was wandering through the boy’s house now, noting his purchases of creatine, beta-alanine, and conjugated linoleic acid to build muscle paired with Prozac and duloxetine to combat the effects of a mind filled with self-loathing. Benzo was a walking concoction of chemicals, bioplastics, and silicone.
Jacob snuck down the stairs and followed Benzo into the huge living room, standing just out of sight while Benzo flopped onto the big couch and flicked the huge television screen over to a paused point-of-view shooter game. The assassin watching from the doorway wasn’t surprised that Benzo had seemingly forgotten all about the hookers waiting for him in the hot tub. The girls were just another example of the toys available to Benzo wherever he went, machines in standby mode, waiting to be taken up again.
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