“Shit,” Baby said. “But I know it’s not in my bathroom. At least I think it’s not.”
“Where are the others?”
“There’re two on the ground floor. We can’t go down there now.” As though to confirm her words, they heard a crash from the lower floor as one of the gang members smashed through something, a bookcase or cabinet. “There’s one on the roof, next to the pool. And my dad’s bedroom is on the next floor down.”
Baby ran to the door, slipped silently out into the bedroom. Ashton followed closely behind her, marveling at her fearlessness. She peeked out into the hall and crept down the staircase before even glancing back to make sure he was behind her.
She’s one of those girls, Ashton thought. The ones who just assume you’ll follow. The ones who walked ahead of him into parties like they hadn’t arrived in the same limo. The ones who tossed their handbags at him at the airport and expected him to catch. He was following Baby as though on a string. He was so distracted by his self-reflections that he didn’t even see the cartel guy with a cast on his hand and a gun tattoo on his face turn into the second-floor hall as Ashton reached the lower landing.
Ashton and Gunmouth faced each other, the cartel henchman so stunned he didn’t even lift the enormous shiny silver gun he carried at his hip.
“Hey!” the man said, raising the hand strapped tightly into a dirty fiberglass cast. Ashton leaped across the hall and threw himself into the bedroom with Baby, slamming the door shut.
“They’re here!” Gunmouth shouted from beyond the door. “Ellos están aquí!”
Chapter 105
A hospital is a busy place. At every hour of the day and night people sit in seats in hallways drinking coffee, crying, talking, chewing their nails, waiting for news. Orderlies mop floors, delivery people transport flowers, as nurses and doctors rush back and forth. Overhead, announcements are made in gentle tones, while machines bleep and screech and click in every room in every hallway.
So when I walked in to find the hospital seemingly empty, a sense of unreality gripped me, made me pause. The speakers nestled into the ceiling of the big foyer were playing a repetitive, high-pitched whoop sound. People had dropped bags and other belongings as they ran—a coffee spilled here, a teddy bear discarded there, telltale signs of panic. On a seat in front of the admissions desk, a cell phone was ringing, and the sound of another chimed from the bathrooms to my left. I followed the empty hall until I found two police officers, who swiveled and pointed their guns at me.
“Get down! Get down! Get down!”
“She’s with me.” Summerly appeared beside me, a troupe of officers at his side. He was trying to strap a bulletproof vest to his thick chest. “I told you to wait outside.”
“You did,” I said.
“But you’re here. Which means somebody let you out or you ripped my car open like a sardine can.”
“I’m sure it’s fixable,” I lied. The detective’s car door had collapsed under my boot by the fourth kick. I had been squatting about 350 pounds for months. It never stood a chance. “Where are they?”
“We think they’re in the cafeteria, in a seating area above it,” he said, then shook his head, catching himself sharing details of the operation with me. “But look, this is not your scene.”
“I want to help.”
“I know you do.” He nodded tersely. “You’re that kind of person. I get it. But, Rhonda, you don’t just get to pick and choose which situations to insert yourself into.”
“Yeah, I do,” I said. “And I’ve picked this one because there’s a teenage girl up there who needs help, and that’s what I do and I’m good at it. And I’m not just inserting myself into this situation. I’m barging in. Because I’m good at that too.”
I shoved past him, waiting to hear him order his officers after me. But those words didn’t come. When I turned and looked after a few seconds, I realized Detective Dave Summerly was beside me, marching toward the double doors at the end of the hall that led into the cafeteria.
“You’re crazy,” he said. I thought I saw a flicker of a smile at the corner of his lips. “Damn crazy woman.”
Chapter 106
Ashton threw himself against the door. The handle rattled, and after a few seconds a thump came against the wood as Gunmouth heaved himself against the opposite side of the door. Baby joined Ashton, throwing all her weight against their side. After a few moments of silence, they heard a click.
“Get down!” Baby shouted.
Four bullets smashed through the door, a fragment of a second after Ashton had hit the carpet. He barely managed to keep the door shut as the man in the hall threw himself against it again. Baby ran to a bedside table and shoved it sideways against the door. Ashton dragged over the dresser.
“Dar la vuelta al lado!”
“They’re going around the side!” Baby cried. “Go, Ashton!”
Ashton dove into the bathroom, throwing open the doors of the cabinet beneath the sink. Deodorant cans, cologne bottles, face cloths, soap packets.
Nothing else.
“It’s not here!” As he rose and turned, he knocked the wooden facade at the bottom of the cabinet with his toe. It tilted inward, one corner popping out. He wrenched the wood away, then shoved his hand into the dark space and felt fabric.
He dragged the bag out from beneath the vanity and ran into the bedroom in time to hear gunshots. He saw Baby cowering against the pile of furniture they had shoved against the door as bullets pierced the wood above the makeshift barricade.
“Come on! Come on!” He grabbed her hand. They shoved open the bedroom’s large window together. Beneath part of it was a huge bougainvillea bush, dense with razor-sharp thorns. Ashton looked down the side of the house and saw Martin Vegas and two of his guys clambering over the small fence separating the back half of the property from the front.
“I can’t do it,” Baby said. She gripped his hand, backing toward the door of the bedroom, where the man with the gun tattoo was shouldering through the door, splintering it slowly, the furniture barricade shifting on the carpet with every shove.
“I’ve got you,” Ashton said. He gathered her up and helped her climb onto the window casing.
They closed their eyes, held hands, and jumped.
Chapter 107
Jacob and Vera were alone together in the wide mezzanine seating area perched above the cafeteria. Vera knew this was the place where one of them would die. She could smell it, like an approaching storm, the smell of a coming force that would sweep the earth and carry one of them away with it. Inevitable, unstoppable. Jacob had come through the double doors from the hallway and now stood between the tables and scattered chairs. As she’d hoped, he put his gun down on the nearest tabletop and smiled at her.
She wanted it to be equal. The end. Two killers coming together, discovering which of them was the strongest using only their hands. There had been enough playing around with weapons, enough chasing and running away. Vera gripped the bullet hole in her arm, gave it a final squeeze, and let it go. She would bleed while they battled. So would he. Their blood would mark the floor beneath them, the tables, the walls. When they were done, the cafeteria would look like a bear pit.
“You’ve been doing this a while, haven’t you?” she said. “You’re not just some dad who’s pissed. There were others before Benzo and Sean and Penny.”
“Plenty of others,” he said. “I’ve been doing it since before you were born.”
“What are the chances?” Vera asked. She laughed and felt blood dribble on her lip. “We choose some asshole from a shopping mall parking lot and he turns out to be a real psycho.”
“We’re more common than people think,” he said, and they both smiled. Because they had recognized the thing in each other that made them different. Not something extra but a lack of something. They were empty people.
She went to him. He grabbed her throat and squeezed, and for a moment he had total control, until she kicked the wound she�
��d given him earlier, almost as if she had planned it, ground her heel into the glass cut in his thigh while she grabbed at his head. They wrestled, knocked over a table, smashed plates and glasses onto the floor. She reached for a weapon, something, all thoughts of fighting it out with him bare-handed abandoned as Jacob continued to grip her throat, her brain crying out for air.
Then he slipped.
There must have been something on the floor. Coffee, it smelled like. His leg slid out, and Vera’s feet touched the floor for the first time in seconds—long, terrifying seconds. She felt her adversary falling, and she went with it. They crashed into the glass barrier of the mezzanine, shattering a pane of it. Vera dug her heels into the floor, pushing Jacob out over the edge as he gripped the floor with his bloody hands, glass grinding under his palms.
Vera pulled herself to her feet, stood above him. He’d been so frightening. So powerful. And now he was just an old man hanging from a ledge by his gnarled, bloody fingers. She lifted her boot and placed it gently on top of his knuckles as Jacob’s wide eyes looked up at her.
Chapter 108
Ashton and Baby hit the ground hard, the duffel bag buffering them from the nasty thorns of the bougainvillea, but there was a moment of blackness as Ashton struggled to maintain consciousness after his head smacked the ground. Ringing, white lights, muffled voices. A few seconds passed before the flaming, tearing, screaming pain. Then Baby dragged him up, Ashton’s feet pounding the pavement crookedly as they sprinted for the front of the house.
He was wide-awake now, hearing the hum of the garage door opening remotely—Baby’s doing. He sucked air into his lungs as he ducked under the rising door and then jumped into the Maserati beside her. She squeezed her eyes shut as she turned the key in the engine, then when the car started, she paused to blow out a terrified breath and threw the car into reverse.
The still-moving garage door scraped along the length of the roof as they backed out and turned into the street. The tires screeched, and the back window collapsed in a shower of glass shards as bullets zinged off the frame of the car.
“Hold on,” Baby said as she slammed her foot down on the accelerator.
Chapter 109
“Wait!” I cried.
Vera looked at me. Beneath her, Jacob Kanular gripped wildly at the edge of the mezzanine with his free hand, broken glass making a good handhold on the floor impossible. Vera’s bright blond curls were red and black in parts, matted with blood. Unknown emotions crossed her face as she took in the sight of me and Dave Summerly standing at the edge of the huge dining area.
Officers began spreading out around the room with guns drawn, aiming where the other shooter hung, one hand now wrapped roughly around a barrier pole with the other wedged beneath Vera’s boot. A female officer was slowly climbing the open stairs leading to the mezzanine, on Vera’s right, her pistol drawn, blocking the girl’s exit on that side. But there was no one yet at Vera’s back, still leaving her an escape through the hallway doors behind her. I had to delay the girl until she was completely surrounded.
Vera stood watching me, stunned, but in mere seconds the shock dissolved, and I saw her calculating how to manage the new situation unfolding around her. My presence and what it meant. I put my hands up and stepped forward cautiously.
“Vera,” I said. “I—”
“Don’t even start.” Vera held up a finger. I saw a flash of something in her. Confident and cutting and sure of herself. A woman who could see the next ten moves I planned to make and didn’t have time for any of them. “Don’t say my name like you know me. You don’t know anything about me.”
“I don’t have to know you to know what this is,” I said, gesturing to her, the man beneath her, the cops falling into position around her.
“Oh, yeah? What is this?”
“This is a terrible situation that’s going to get an awful lot worse if we’re not careful. You’ve got time to think this through. Plenty of time.”
“No, I don’t.” Vera smiled, letting her eyes dart to Detective Summerly behind me. “And I’m not going to fall for your delaying tactics. We both know the door is closing. This is good-bye.”
“Vera,” I said, “I care about what happens here.”
She laughed hard, shuffling her feet, making Jacob grind his teeth as he instinctively kept clinging to the very edge of the mezzanine.
I felt Summerly’s hand on my shoulder, pushing me forward a little. “Keep at it,” he murmured. “You’re doing great.”
“I care about you, Vera,” I said.
“Are you kidding me?” She snorted. “You met me once!”
“Nope,” I said. I shook my head, and I meant it. “I’ve met you a thousand times before. You’re every kid I’ve ever walked into a courtroom with. You’re every boy and girl I’ve sat with in interview rooms, in bedrooms, in prison cells. I’ve met so many kids like you, Vera. Kids who found themselves in the kind of mess that can’t be gotten out of. This is a pretty good mess you’ve made—don’t get me wrong. Spectacular. But you can get out of it. All you have to do is take the help I’m offering you right now.”
Vera looked down at the man hanging from the mezzanine. I saw her weight shift so that she crushed his fingers harder. Jacob yowled, grabbed at the mezzanine’s barrier pole again with his other hand, slipped in the blood, and swung gently. Vera seemed to be considering her options.
The female cop to her right was five feet closer now, her gun leveled at Vera’s head. Vera had made her decision.
I didn’t expect what happened next.
The girl smiled sweetly. A little sadly. Like she was giving in.
“Okay.” Vera nodded. She lifted her boot and eased back a step. I watched her raise her hands. “I’ll take the help.”
I rushed forward. The female cop did too. Behind me, I heard Summerly’s footsteps as we all ran toward the falling man who had let go.
For an instant, we completely forgot about Vera.
It was exactly what she’d planned.
Chapter 110
I reached Jacob first. I fell as he fell, clipping me with his weight. We both sprawled on the floor, with him draped over my thighs. I grabbed his uninjured hand. It was wet, slippery. I leaned sideways and dragged myself out from under him. It was the only thing that saved my life. Because Vera had backed up not to escape but to grab a gun from somewhere behind her. She first fired into the shoulder of the female cop on her right but immediately then leaned over the edge of the mezzanine and fired at the man I held by the hand. I’m sure she wasn’t bothered about also maybe killing me in the process.
She fired twice. The first bullet whizzed between our heads and pounded into the linoleum floor. The second shot was on target. I heard it zip past my ear, a sound like paper tearing. And then I saw his head buck, and a hole appear out of nowhere in his flat, wide forehead. I felt the mist of his blood on my cheeks and chin.
Jacob’s body went limp. I heard footsteps running, officers coming to assist the female officer on the stairs, quickly carry her out, as Jacob slipped away, his hand seeming to grip mine for a long time before his eyes rolled upward. I hung my head over him, too scared to look up in case Vera decided to fire again.
I heard doors swinging open and shut as she ran through them. The footsteps of officers in pursuit. But I knew there was no point in running after her. I had seen in Vera’s falsely sweet and innocent smile the confidence of a girl with a plan. I’d thought it was relief that I had given her, a sense that she was going to be taken care of now, that I would help unpick the tangled web she was so hopelessly coiled up in. But it was just the grin of a spider watching the last group of insects step into its trap, safe and secured, exactly where she wanted them.
When I dragged myself to my feet, I was alone. The cafeteria sprawled around me, signs of the violence that had occurred here only minutes before written in the broken glass and blood and spilled drinks on the floor. In the yawning space beneath the mezzanine, the killer named Jaco
b Kanular stared up at me, unseeing. I felt the failure of being unable to save him, or Vera, reach deep inside me, into my bones, and carve its mark.
Chapter 111
They fled. Baby gripped the wheel and Ashton hung on to his seat belt with gritted teeth as Baby took the car through the streets, blasting through red lights, cars honking and swerving in their rearview mirror. On the corner of Manhattan Beach Boulevard and Aviation, a minibus driver jerked the wheel and careened across the intersection into a lamppost to avoid their path. A man flipping and twirling a lime-green sign advertising two for one Baja fish tacos dove into a bush at the sight of the two teenagers speeding toward the sidewalk. The Maserati missed the curb by mere inches as Baby corrected and got them back on the right path.
It was only on the 110 heading north that she finally eased off the accelerator. Ashton unclenched his jaw with difficulty. In silence they rode, glancing now and then at the rearview mirror.
“I think we lost them,” Ashton said.
“Don’t jinx it,” Baby said.
Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. The road behind them emptied, then refilled with cars. None of them were mirrored chrome or violent purple or any other bright shade of the drug dealer rainbow. None of the cartel guys seemed to be following them.
“I think we lost them,” Ashton repeated. The teens looked at each other. Ashton felt laughs ripple up his throat, and then suddenly they both were laughing hard, swiping at tears, banging their fists on the dashboard, and whooping. He realized for the first time that he was drenched in sweat, his body cooling from the adrenaline.
“Well? Get the bag, man. Show me the goddamn money,” Baby said.
“Show me the moneyyyyyy!” Ashton cried.
“Show! Me! The moneyyyyyy!” Baby crowed, blasting the horn. Ashton dragged the bag into his lap and pulled out a wad of bills as thick as a block of cheddar cheese. He ripped the elastic band from the stack and threw it up, letting the cash rain down all over the two of them in the car.
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