But, Jacob understood, there was no toy quite so entertaining as a real-life victim tied to a chair and twisting away from Benzo’s Taser. Unlike the screams of his video-game victims, the prostitutes’ false squeaks of pleasure, or the admiration of those who crowded his yachts each weekend, Neina’s fear had been real, and Benzo was always chasing the real. Jacob smiled. It felt good to understand his target. It made the takedown all the more satisfying.
Chapter 23
Jacob lifted his gun and fired a bullet into the television screen. The suppressor’s thunk was overshadowed by the thunderous blast and crack of the screen, the dramatic sparks and white flash of light that heralded its end. For a moment Benzo sat stunned on the couch, staring at the smoking hole in the screen before him—convinced perhaps that the machine had simply exploded on its own—before some extrasensory awareness alerted him to Jacob’s presence behind him. He leaped off the couch and stared wide-eyed at the intruder.
No recognition. Jacob shook his head in disgust. Sure, he probably looked different, alert, dressed, and ready for the hunt as he was now, unlike how Benzo had last seen him—gagged, bound, and helpless in his Dodgers T-shirt and boxer shorts, covered in his own blood and sweat. But more likely, Benzo didn’t recognize him because his life was a constant parade of people who didn’t matter—salespeople, bartenders, gardeners, cleaners, chauffeurs, and masseurs. Benzo looked at the gun, and all his muscles tensed, a whole-body reflex that in anyone else would have been terror but in Benzo was chemical rage.
“Dude, what the fu—?”
Jacob lifted the gun and fired at the wall beside Benzo’s head. It had been years since he’d done any marksman’s training, but his old self was returning. The bullet whizzed past the boy’s ear, close enough for him to hear it. He cowered but recovered quickly.
“Okay, okay, okay!” Benzo said, hands up, his posture bending to Jacob’s will but his eyes speaking of a mind that was boiling with anger. “Who are you? What do you want? Is this about my dad?”
“Look closely at me,” Jacob said. “Think hard.”
Benzo’s breath quickened. “Oh, dude…Oh, shit. You’re that Palos Verdes guy. The guy with the family.”
“That’s me.” Jacob’s fury almost choked off his words.
“Look.” Benzo gave a short laugh to try to soften the seriousness of the situation. He swallowed hard. “There’s no need to go all John Wick on our asses.”
Jacob held his pistol in one hand and used the other to pull a long, thin black rod from its holster on the back of his belt. He gave the cattle prod trigger a demonstrative pull and watched Benzo’s eyes twitch as the end of the device sizzled and snapped with light. Jacob could almost feel Benzo’s heart sink.
“Man, it was nothing personal,” Benzo said. “At least not for me. I didn’t pick you. Someone else did. I don’t even know what it was about. For me it was all just a game, okay? Just a bit of fun. No one got hurt, right?”
Jacob fired a bullet into Benzo’s thigh. The boy was tough. He screamed but didn’t fall. Jacob watched the boy clutching his limb with a detached sense of admiration.
The pain seemed to give him courage. Benzo grabbed a lamp from the table by the couch and flung it in Jacob’s direction, using the distraction to make a limping run for the glass doors that looked out onto the yard. Jacob followed at a walk, stepping around the blood trail Benzo was leaving on the marble tiles. He fired again and hit Benzo in the calf just as the boy reached the glass doors, which Jacob had jammed shut with a stone from the garden. Benzo beat on the glass with his fist, but the doors and windows to the garden were triple-paned, installed after neighbors had complained about Benzo’s late-night guitar sessions in the huge, empty house. Beyond, in the dimly lit garden, one of the escorts was resting with her head hanging back over the hot-tub rim as the other chatted on her phone, staring into her champagne glass.
Benzo sank by the doors, his legs useless. “There’s fifty thousand dollars in a safe upstairs,” he said.
Jacob zapped the cattle prod trigger again and smiled. “You like electricity, huh, Benzo?” he asked.
Benzo’s lip twisted in a sneer. “You come over here, old man, and I’m going to snap you in half like a twig.”
Jacob walked forward, gripping the cattle prod hard in his hand.
Chapter 24
Baby didn’t speak to me the whole way to Torrance. I tried to explain my perspective a couple more times, but she just sat there with her bony arms folded, staring straight ahead, her mouth locked in a pout. Her phone was bleeping incessantly in her handbag—her followers, I assumed, wanting to know whether she’d made it onto the plane. This was just a challenge, I assured myself. Baby wasn’t distinctly different from any troubled teenager I’d dealt with before. She had the same wants, needs, fears. I just had to find a way in. I tried a different approach as we pulled into the all-hours storage yard emblazoned with a big green giraffe.
“Why would a kid lie about being abducted?” I wondered aloud, inviting anyone who might be within earshot to chip in.
“He said it was a prank.”
“Weird prank,” I said.
“I know Ash from school. He and I had like a…” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Somebody told me that he liked me, but I wasn’t interested at the time. He was really short.”
“That doesn’t sound shallow at all, Baby.”
“I’m talking epic short. Like Tom Cruise short.”
“Ah, you know who Tom Cruise is.” I breathed a sigh of relief. “So you’re not irredeemable. Ashton said Dad came through for you two? What was that about?”
“Oh, man, it was so stupid.” Baby snorted. “We were all partying down on the beach, and Dad came down to hang out with us for a while. Me and some of the kids had blow. The cops showed up and wanted to frisk us, but Dad slipped them a couple of bucks and told them to hit the road.”
“How old were you then?”
“Like, thirteen maybe?”
“So our dad bribed some cops to help you get away with snorting cocaine at age thirteen.” I glanced over at her. “Am I hearing you correctly?”
“He was doing it too.” She shrugged. “This is Los Angeles, okay? You’re not in Chicago anymore.”
“I’m from Colorado.”
“I don’t know why Ash lied about not being abducted or whatever-whatever,” Baby grumbled. “Seems to me like he was scared out of his mind. If I had to put money on it, I’d say he was abducted but he didn’t want you to know.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not trustworthy.”
“What? How could he tell that just by looking at me?”
“You send mixed messages.” She gestured to me. “The hair and the rock band T-shirt and the tattoos say Look at me, but everything else says you hate yourself and don’t want to be looked at.”
“What’s everything else?”
Baby didn’t answer.
“My weight?” I laughed. “You think I hate myself because I’m fat? Is that what you’re saying?”
Baby shrugged again. “I don’t know why you care about Ash anyway.” She huffed. “You’re not taking the case. You’re here to mother me to death, not solve mysteries. Maybe Ash didn’t really want anyone to go looking for the guy. Not the cops. Not you and me.”
“Why not?” I asked, feeling tired.
“Maybe he was looking for Dad because sometimes Dad would smack a guy around if you asked him to. You know. Like sometimes people would come hire Dad not just to find a guy but to find a guy and break his nose,” she said.
I massaged my brow, tired and torn between the desire to know more about my dad’s life as a thug for hire and the instinct that the less I knew the better.
“Or maybe the guy’s got something on Ash that Ash doesn’t want the cops to know,” Baby said.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know—what do I look like? A psychic?” She rolled her eyes.
“Well, you were doing all ri
ght on some things. You’re a terrible psychologist, but you noticed the drag marks on Ashton’s shoes,” I said. “You’ve got instincts. Observational skills. I like bouncing ideas off you. You’re smart.”
“Stop buttering me up,” she snapped. “I’m not a piece of toast.”
I laughed. My dad had always said that when I was a kid, whenever he caught me sucking up to him for treats, attention, money. Hearing the big man’s words coming out of Baby’s mouth tickled me.
My father’s storage unit was number 66. I unlocked the door, bracing for more mysterious bags of cash or a bigger cache of weapons than the one I’d found at his office—perhaps racks of neatly arranged knives and swords, big guns in cases stacked against the walls. I was ready for a host of other surprises—illegal exotic animals, stolen gold bars, bomb-making materials.
Instead, the storage unit seemed completely empty. I switched on the light. In the center of the ceiling was a hook, and from the hook hung a thin chain. On the chain was another key. I pulled it down. There was no label, no tag.
“Goddamnit,” I said.
“Chill.” Baby yawned. “It’s just a key. We can go now.”
“This isn’t good,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because the key to this unit was hidden,” I said. “I found it tucked away among Dad’s stuff in his office.”
“So?”
“So Dad didn’t want anyone to find that key. But on the off chance that someone did, he’s got another unmarked key waiting here. Whatever he’s hiding, in order to find it you’d have to find the first key to get all the way here, then figure out what this key is for to get all the way there. It’s like a puzzle.”
Baby yawned again. “Pretty stupid puzzle.”
“Whatever this key unlocks, it can’t be good,” I said.
“Can we stop and get nuggets on the way there?” she whined.
“We don’t even know where ‘there’ is,” I said.
“Well, obviously it’s in the desert. Just go back and check out the navigation system to Dad’s car, see where he’s been lately. Try to find something, like, desert-y, I guess.”
“How do you know it’s in the desert?” I asked.
She pointed to the floor, shuffled her sneakers on the concrete. There was a fine layer of orange sand scattered in a path from the door of the unit to the light, leading to the key in the center of the room. Baby let out a resigned sigh.
“He brought it in on his shoes,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
“It’s all about the shoes, this stuff,” she said.
“Spoken like someone who’s been running a successful detective agency for a decade, not a fifteen-year-old kid whose dad let her hang out with him on the job a couple of times.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I’m just quick,” Baby said as she walked back out of the unit. “If you’re gonna keep hanging out with me, you better keep up, lady.”
Chapter 25
The desert was alive at night. Our headlights picked up a dozen creeping, crawling, and slithering things as we rolled down a long dirt track between low mountains, an hour and a half out of San Bernardino. A rattlesnake crossed our path, skimming over the sand to the side of the road. I was drowsy and filled with dread at the idea of more surprises from my father’s ghost but spurred on by a desire to see all the demons exorcised before I slept. Baby was wide-awake in the passenger seat, her face lit by her phone screen as her thumbs danced over the glass.
In a shallow valley ringed by Joshua trees, a rusty shipping container sat lit by moonlight. I checked the navigation system we’d taken from my father’s car and saw that the last route visited led directly to where we now sat.
I reached over and opened the glove box in front of Baby, taking out the Magnum revolver I’d confiscated from my father’s office.
“Look,” I said. “Technically I’m wading into hazy legal territory here. This is not my gun. It’s not registered to me. Given the circumstances, I’m not even sure it’s Dad’s gun, but I—”
As I was speaking, Baby pulled a .25 Baby Browning pistol with a pink pearl-lite grip out of her handbag.
“This isn’t registered to me either,” she said.
I just sat there with my mouth open. She flicked the safety off the gun with an expert motion of her hand. I took the weapon from her carefully, flicked the safety back on, and unloaded it, popping the round from the chamber. I slipped the magazine into my pocket and the gun into the glove box.
“Hey, I—”
“Just don’t,” I said.
She threw her hands up and huffed a huge sigh.
We both exited the car. The desert air was warm and heavy. Baby might have been one of the toughest kids I had ever met, but as we neared the storage container, she closed the gap between us until she was right on my tail, her eyes big and round in the night. She grabbed my arm as I fit Dad’s key into a giant padlock on the front of the container.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“Listen!”
From inside the container came a long, regular grinding noise.
The sound of snoring.
Chapter 26
I unlocked the container and threw open the door. A thin man on a narrow bunk snapped awake, sat upright. The movement rattled a long chain that ran from his ankle to a D ring bolted to the floor of the container. He mussed his shaggy brown hair and shook himself into consciousness.
“What? What? What is it? What time is it?” he stammered.
“Oh, my God,” I said. I walked into the container, completely forgetting Baby or the possible presence of hidden dangers as the situation unfolded in front of me. Along the side of the container opposite the man and his bunk, a long row of tables had been assembled behind transparent sheeting attached to the ceiling and floor. The tables were littered with huge steel canisters, glass flasks, beakers, tubes, and a series of machines I didn’t recognize, which squatted under the tables among a mess of cords and wires.
Everything not in that section of the container was devoted to the man on the bunk: his pile of soiled clothes, his miniature refrigerator, a thrumming portable air conditioner with a tube running out of a small hole in the wall, a small lamp by the bed casting everything in shadow. I looked up and saw a camera haphazardly bolted to the ceiling just inside the door, its red light blaring in the dimness.
“What is this, Rhonda?” Baby asked. “Is this like…a sex dungeon?”
“It’s a meth lab,” I said. “Although a sex dungeon might have actually been preferable.” I went to the man on the bunk. “Sir? I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Are you okay?”
“What’s happening?” His bloodshot eyes followed me as I came to unlock his chain. “Are we moving?”
“You’re moving the hell out of here,” I said. I prayed silently that the key that unlocked the padlock on the door fit the one on his ankle chain. It did.
“Who are you ladies?” the man said. I was surprised when he didn’t bolt from the container as soon as the chain hit the floor.
“I’m…” I paused, thought about giving a fake name, but realized there would be no point after I revealed the whole situation to the police. “I’m Rhonda Bird. My father—”
“Is Earl.” The man nodded. “You look just like him.”
He stood and started gathering his dirty clothes into a backpack. I looked at Baby, who shrugged. The man wasn’t acting like someone who’d been held prisoner and forced to cook meth for an unknown period of time in a stinky shipping container in the middle of the desert. He stuffed a stack of paperbacks into the bag, then glanced around, hands on hips, to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything important, like he was leaving a hotel room after a comfortable stay. “Can you tell me the date?” he asked.
“Ah, sure, it’s…” I looked at my watch. “It’s the fifteenth?”
“Oh, yes!” He laughed, pumping a fist. “Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Five days to go.”
“Until what?”
“Until the Miffy’s Tornado Tower of Doom chocolate shake promotion is over,” he said. “They only do it once a year. Could I trouble you to drop me at the Miffy’s in San Bernardino? They’ll still be open. They’re twenty-four hours.”
He strolled out of the container, leaving Baby and me staring after him in bewilderment.
Chapter 27
The man was sitting in the back seat of my car, staring straight ahead, when I emerged from the container. Baby was sitting in the front seat, playing with her phone. I stood on the dirt road and watched them, trying to decide if all this was some kind of dream. I had switched off all the electricity to the meth lab to ensure nothing exploded before the police could process the whole thing as a crime scene. Under the table in the lab section I’d found about six kilos of crystal meth, which I’d wrapped in a sheet and bundled into the back of the car while Baby was clicking away on Instagram. I’d add it to Dad’s bathroom hidey-hole later.
“He’s delirious,” Baby told me as I slid into the driver’s seat. “The guy says he’s been in the container for about three weeks. But he hasn’t stopped talking about that stupid chocolate shake the whole time we’ve been sitting here.”
“What’s your name, sir?” I asked, starting the car. “Can you tell me how you got into that container?”
“I’m Dr. Perry Tuddy,” he said, watching the container disappear out the back window of the car. “Your father put me there.”
“Bullshit!” Baby held up a hand. “Dad isn’t a goddamn meth dealer who locks people up in the desert. This guy is crazy. Let’s just dump him outside a hospital and go home. A new show I want to watch just dropped on Netflix.”
“The Miffy’s in San Bernardino would be much appreciated,” Dr. Tuddy reminded me.
“Look, Dr. Tuddy, if I’m honest, you’re not acting like someone who’s just been freed from a pretty hellish situation,” I ventured. “Should you lie down maybe? Baby, there’s a water bottle on the floor at your feet.”
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