by Neil Mcmahon
“How dare you let me think you were dead, you son of a bitch,” she said.
Lex turned shakily back to Monks. “I can’t believe you brought her here.” His voice was dry and hoarse. “She can’t keep her mouth shut, that’s what started all this.”
Martine shook her head wearily. “I’m not the rat, Lex. I’ve already been through that once tonight. Believe it if you want, but it’s not true.” Her hand patted his cowboy boot. “I’m like your mommy. Safe to blame.”
Monks said, “Why don’t you ladies give Lex and me a minute alone?”
Lex watched Monks with hungry eyes, rolling up his sleeve. “You know the best description I ever heard of a strung-out junkie?” Lex said. “He’s on a street corner without a dime, the dealer’s across the street wanting five hundred dollars. The junkie will have the money by the time he gets across the street. It wasn’t that bad yet, but I was getting there.”
“I’m afraid this isn’t quite what you had in mind, Lex.” Monks took the envelope from his pocket and shook out one of the oxycodone tablets onto the RV’s table.
Lex glared at it in outrage, then turned the glare on Monks. “That is it?”
“It was safe and available,” Monks said. “Take it or leave it.”
Lex’s expression turned calculating. “How many of those have you got?”
“Four.”
“Let me have them.”
“Uh-uh,” Monks said. “They’ve got to last you.”
“Two, then,” Lex wheedled. “What are they, ten mg?”
“Yeah.”
“One’s not going to touch it, you know that. Come on.”
Monks decided wearily that there was no point in arguing. Lex, happy, would be a lot less trouble than Lex pissed off. He took another tablet out of the envelope and set it beside the first one.
Lex was on his feet now, moving with swift efficiency, the antithesis of the listless husk he had been a couple of minutes earlier. He yanked open a cupboard and found a heavy china coffee cup, then knelt and started crushing the tablets with it, grinding them carefully to dust.
“What are you doing?” Monks said.
Lex ignored him. With the concentration of a surgeon, he scraped the powder carefully into the cup, then added about a teaspoon of water from the sink. He stirred the mixture with a spoon, covered the cup with a tissue, and strained it into a saucer.
Finally he looked up again, fingers fumbling to undo his belt.
“How about a syringe?” he said.
Monks broke one out from the medical kit, and watched the needle slide into Lex’s raised vein. Lex’s face eased, pained features melting into a near smile, as if the drug inflated him briefly with borrowed life.
“It isn’t going to last long,” Lex murmured. “Leave the rest with me, in case you have to go out again.”
“I’ll give you the rest in four hours.”
Lex’s eyes opened, his gaze sharp now. “I’m going to be miserable in four hours. What am I supposed to do?” The tone was petulant: the demanding rich kid again. It hit Monks’s frayed nerves wrong.
“The same thing the rest of us are going to do,” Monks snapped. “Quit whining and take our chances.”
Monks walked back to the RV’s front. Stephanie and Martine were talking in low tones. They stopped when he appeared.
“I’m going to start making phone calls,” Monks said. “To the media and law enforcement agencies.”
He climbed down the RV’s steps into the night, then leaned back and pressed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes, seeing in his mind Gloria Sharpe’s bloodied hair—
Imagining it as Stephanie’s instead.
This was over. It was only a matter of time until the hidden killer at Aesir would track them down. The best course now was to make the story public, rely on government protection—and hope that evidence turned up to support it.
But their thin fabric of allegations remained unprovable, vulnerable to the power of big money to override and obscure. If that happened, it meant spending their lives in fear of a ruthless, hugely resourceful enemy.
Monks thought he felt the vehicle rock slightly, as if someone around the rear had shoved it. There were no cars parked nearby, no reason for pedestrians to come by here. Apprehensively, he walked around to the back.
The RV’s rear door was hanging open.
His gaze picked up something moving, perhaps a hundred yards away. It was a human figure, hurrying furtively across the parking lot toward the Great Highway:
Lex Rittenour, clutching his Gucci bag of cash in both arms, looking for all the world like Mr. Toad of Toad Hall escaping with his ball and chain.
Lex had made it into Golden Gate Park past the old windmill and heading toward the golf course, when Monks and Martine caught up with him in the van. Monks slowed to creep alongside, while she leaned out the passenger window.
“Lex, have you gone nuts?” she hissed. “There could be muggers in here.”
Lex hurried doggedly along, clutching the suitcase. “You just leave me alone,” he panted. “I’m looking out for Lex from now on.”
“When haven’t I looked out for you? I did not tell anybody you were going to make that announcement, goddammit!”
“Don’t pretend you cared about me. You always just wanted me to be what you wanted.”
Martine slapped the van’s windowsill in exasperation. “Name one time when I did that.”
“What about Cindy Parmelou?”
“What about her?”
“You sabotaged the relationship.”
“Lex, you were in ninth grade.”
“I was in love with her.”
“In lust, is more like it.” She turned and explained to Monks, “Cindy had three kids by the time she was eighteen, all by different fathers.” She spun back to Lex. “Yeah, okay, I said a few things to her. You never had a chance there anyway, she only hung out with losers.”
“Oh, so now it’s sweet talk,” Lex said grimly.
Martine threw her head back, rolling her eyes. “Just think, a little thrashing around in the backseat, and you’d have spent the next twenty years dodging child support payments instead of getting rich and famous.”
Lex clamped his jaw shut and stomped along, eyes straight ahead. The van was moving at a crawl, blocking the right-hand lane of traffic. Irritated drivers behind were sounding their horns, then cutting around it, some holding out upraised middle fingers.
“I thought you trusted me!” Monks yelled, leaning across Martine.
“That was before.”
“Before what?”
“Before you let me down. No help finding out who tried to kill me and no drugs.”
“Let you down?” Monks said, outraged. “You ungrateful bastard, I’ve been out there getting stomped while you’ve been lying around doing dope!”
They were passing one of the small lakes, getting into the neighborhood of the buffalo pen. Monks thought seriously about jumping out and trying to wrestle Lex inside, but that was fraught with peril. He was cannily staying in plain, well-lit view, and like Popeye infused with the spinach of narcotics, he could probably give Monks a pretty good fight.
“Lex, get in,” Martine said. “Where do you think you’re going to go?”
Lex hesitated. She reached back and got the van’s side door open. Monks was poised to breathe a silent prayer of thanks.
Then, with a speed Monks would not have believed, Lex bounded through a hedge and disappeared.
Monks cut the van into the curb, jumped out amid more blaring horns, and ran after him. He forced his way through the scratchy brush, but all he faced on the other side was an empty expanse of darkness, with nothing moving except leaves twitching in the breeze. In less than thirty seconds, Lex had completely disappeared.
Monks turned and trudged back to the van, numb with the realization that Lex Rittenour’s testimony—by far the strongest link in their chain—was gone.
They drove silently back
to the RV. Monks climbed in and met Stephanie’s questioning look with a shake of his head, like a doctor snuffing the hope of someone waiting to learn if a loved one had survived an operation. He dragged out his own grip and stuffed into it the rest of the cash that Lex Rittenour had given him earlier: twenty-some thousand dollars.
“There’s a hotel about a mile down the Great Highway,” he said, handing the grip to Stephanie. “Don’t use your real names, and don’t let this bag out of your sight. I’ll call you soon.”
“Get rid of the women and pull the wagons into a circle?” Martine said coolly, with raised eyebrows and folded arms.
“Don’t worry,” Monks said. “You’re going to have plenty of chance to fight.”
He hugged Stephanie and then Martine, an embrace that lingered just long enough to affirm that something had begun between them—if circumstances had not already ended it.
Monks got out. The RV pulled cautiously away, with Stephanie driving—the new guardian of the Precious Blood of Saint Lex, still hidden inside Monks’s grip. At least it would prove that Lex Rittenour had been the John Smith in the emergency room, and lend weight to the rest of the story.
As to whether it might be doing anything more than that—working its protective power like a medieval relic as it passed from hand to hand—Monks confessed that he was losing his faith.
He got back into the plumber’s van and punched Larrabee’s cell number.
“We lost Lex,” Monks said into the phone.
“I finally found Trish,” Larrabee said. “It took me awhile, I had to hunt through a few bars.” His voice was tense with excitement, and Monks realized that something seemed to have turned up.
“Remember,” Larrabee said, “Gloria Sharpe didn’t have any medical training? We figured Ostrand hired her because she was willing to fuck him?”
Monks searched back through the jumble of information that had accrued over the past days.
“Vaguely,” he said.
“Well, Trish remembered something else. What Ostrand was looking for was somebody who spoke Korean. That’s why he hired Gloria. She’d been an army brat, raised there. She’d picked up the language.”
“Ostrand needed her as a translator?” Monks said.
“Yeah. Now think about those research women. A bunch of them getting pregnant by different men, and having two, three abortions a year. Authorities never hearing a word about it. How about a whorehouse? A Korean one?”
Monks slumped in his seat, letting his head fall back and his arms sag until his knuckles hit the floor, while a circuit of connections flashed in his brain.
The Hotel Inez. Run by Kwon, the ex-military pimp; the man who had sent the tampered-with Demerol to Lex Rittenour via Miss Lee.
Who had almost certainly been operating under instructions from someone at Aesir.
“Mrs. Hak will be working at Mercy’s emergency room,” Monks said. “I’ll meet you there.”
Wearing sunglasses and baseball cap pulled low, Monks walked into the lobby of his own emergency room at Mercy Hospital, and approached the desk where Mrs. Hak was sitting.
After a few seconds, she looked up with a polite smile. It changed to astonishment.
“You,” she said.
“We need your help again, Mrs. Hak,” Monks said quietly. “Whatever you have to do to get off work, do it. Tell them there’s a family emergency. I’ll be outside.”
He walked back outside to wait with Larrabee in the van. He realized that his gaze kept returning, of its own accord, to a particular spot on the sidewalk only a few yards away. Then, he remembered that that was where Lex Rittenour had lain dying while Miss Lee ran into the emergency room, just forty-eight hours ago.
Mrs. Hak came hurrying out to the van a couple of minutes later. She looked apprehensive, and Monks felt the kick of guilt at drawing her further in. But he handed her his cell phone.
“I need you to talk to Miss Lee, right now,” Monks said. “Ask her if any of Kwon’s girls got pregnant often.”
“Hah?” Mrs. Hak said, eyes widening.
“Not just an occasional accident. Again and again.”
Monks decided that there was no doubt in Mrs. Hak’s mind that he had gone insane. But she punched a phone number, then began speaking rapidly in Korean. There was a pause while Mrs. Hak listened to Miss Lee’s probably startled reply.
“She say yes,” Mrs. Hak said. “All girls take pill. Some not lucky.”
“Was there an American doctor who treated them?”
Mrs. Hak talked and listened again, then nodded. “Miss Lee never see him. Only hear about little bit. Girls not supposed to talk.”
“Are any of those girls still working there? Does she know their names?”
“Okay,” Mrs. Hak said, after another exchange. “She know three, four name right now. Think of more later.”
“Give me her address and tell her to stay there,” Monks said to Mrs. Hak. “You go back to work. We’ll get to her as soon as we can.”
23
Monks and Larrabee had traveled less than three blocks from the hospital when bright headlights flared behind them, along with the quick pulse of blue.
“I’ve got a bad feeling this isn’t coincidence,” Larrabee said. He pulled over. The lights pulled over too, staying behind.
A man’s voice spoke through a bullhorn: “Put your hands on the dash!”
Half-blinded by the glare, Monks could barely see crouched figures approaching, holding pistols in two-handed combat grips. He put his hands on the dash.
The van’s doors were yanked open. “Get out and put your hands on the vehicle,” the voice commanded.
Monks did as he was told. A foot kicked at his ankles, separating his legs. Hands patted him up and down, finding and removing wallet, Beretta, and cell phone.
“Wrists behind you.”
For the first time in his life, Monks felt the cold bite of cuffs on his wrists, clicking tight enough to pinch his skin.
He could see better now. Larrabee had been cuffed too. His face was taut with anger. The car behind them was an SFPD black and white squad unit; the two blue-uniformed cops were athletic young men. One stood guard while the other talked on a phone.
The one with the phone returned it to his belt. He leaned into the squad car and turned off all the lights.
“Get in,” he ordered, opening a back door.
It was awkward climbing into a car with your hands cuffed behind your back, Monks discovered, and quickly uncomfortable. The radio had been turned off, but the engine was running and the heater on, adding to the claustrophobia. The street was quiet, with little passing traffic and no pedestrians. The two cops waited outside.
Monks and Larrabee waited too.
Ten to fifteen minutes passed before another car pulled up, an unmarked sedan with a plainclothes driver. There was one passenger in the backseat. As he got out, the car’s interior light gave a glimpse of him. He was white-haired and thick-bodied, Irish looking, wearing an overcoat and tie.
“That’s the man I saw after the shooting,” Monks said.
“Captain Mickey Hearne,” Larrabee said.
One of the uniforms came back to the squad car and opened the door, ordering them to get in the other car. Monks and Larrabee clambered awkwardly out and walked to where Hearne stood waiting.
Larrabee said, “How’s it going, Captain?”
Hearne turned a stare on him that was as hard a look as Monks had ever seen.
“I know you?” Hearne said.
“This is primed to blow up,” Larrabee said quietly. “There are people out there ready to do it if they don’t hear from us.”
Hearne turned and made a clawing gesture with one hand toward the uniformed cops. They faded back out of earshot.
“This isn’t your style, Captain,” Larrabee said. “Let us go. We’ll deal.”
“You used to be a cop,” Hearne said, staring at Larrabee again. His tone was blunt, accusing. “You shot an asshole, down by th
e Wharf. Years back.”
“Eighty-six.”
“The city treated you like shit.”
“It left an impression,” Larrabee agreed. The “asshole” was a vicious mugger who had preyed on tourists for months, often beating or slashing women after he had robbed them. Larrabee had shot him in the course of a running chase, but the mugger managed to ditch his pistol. It was never found, and defense attorneys established reasonable doubt as to his identity. Larrabee was suspended from the force, and quit in outrage, with only the satisfaction that his shot—considered by his fellow cops to be world-class, hitting a running target at night—had blown out the man’s spleen. There were no more of those muggings.
“You should have killed him,” Hearne said. “That was your mistake.”
“I found that out too late.”
Hearne kept the stare on him for seconds longer. Then he yanked open the car’s rear door. Monks and Larrabee got in. Hearne climbed into the front. The driver, also wearing plain clothes, pulled away from the curb and turned north.
“How’d you know where we were?” Larrabee said. “Just out of curiosity.”
“Don’t push it,” Hearne snapped.
Except for Hearne’s terse directions to the driver, no one spoke again.
They crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and stayed on 101 north for several miles, then exited toward Tiburon. The driver took the coast road down the Belvedere side of the peninsula, passing the misted lights of the secluded luxury houses overlooking Richardson Bay. The car slowed toward the peninsula’s end at an ornate black iron gate, manned by a security guard. He waved them through, talking on a phone.
The private road was lined with luxury cars and limos, many with drivers sitting inside or standing together, smoking and talking. The lights of a house came into view. It was huge, multileveled, faced with white stone that gave it a Mediterranean look. Figures moved inside and on the large balconies: scarlet-waistcoated waiters serving champagne from silver trays, men in dinner jackets and women in gowns, some sporting fur wraps. Their jewelry sparkled like tiny stars in the dense black night. Monks recognized it as the place where the video of Lex Rittenour had been made—and tonight, the scene of Aesir Corporation’s gala party to kick off tomorrow’s IPO.
