Play Nice

by Gemma Halliday

  “How?” Anna asked.

  “On any given day there are hundreds of winners of small amounts—twenty dollars here, fifty dollars there. Combinations of three or four winning numbers can often result in smaller payouts. For any payout less than six hundred dollars, you can take your ticket directly to the store it was purchased at for payment, bypassing the state lotto offices.”

  “And stringent security,” she said, nodding. It was a good plan. There was just one flaw. “But you have to have the actual winning ticket to take in, right?”

  Dade nodded. “And I will.”

  Even as he said it, Dade switched screens, pulling up a graphics program with a facsimile of a California SuperLotto ticket already loaded. Juggling between his sequence of numbers and the graphic, he quickly imputed a series of numbers onto the ticket.

  “You’ve done this before,” Anna said, more a statement than a question.

  “It’s not a way to get rich, but there have been times in the past when I’ve needed cash without a traceable trail. These will get run through the state lotto machines. As long as the numbers and the bar code on the ticket match the one in the machine, no one’s going to look too closely. The clerks are working for minimum wage, and the store owners all get compensated by the lotto anyway, so no one really cares. As long as the machine spits it back as a winner, that’s all that matters.”

  “Clever,” Anna admitted, wishing she’d thought of it. She watched as Dade’s screen of numbers generated a bar code. He quickly transferred it onto the ticket face.

  “They teach you that trick in the military?” Anna asked.

  “No,” answered without looking up. “Juvie.”

  Anna paused. “You’ve been in jail?”

  “Juvie,” he corrected. “Whole different ball game. Record expunged when I was eighteen.”

  “So what did you do to end up in juvie?”

  He shrugged. “Truancy, vandalism. Usual rebellious teenager stuff, but I had to take it to extremes, you know?”

  No, she didn’t. She didn’t know the first thing about “usual teenager” things. But she nodded anyway as she watched him hit a button that whirred the printer to life, spitting out a perfect copy of a winning lotto ticket.

  He held it up to the light. “A little on the pale side, but it’ll do.” He turned to her. “Let’s go win the lottery.”

  * * *

  Anna waited in the car, listening to Lenny munch on dog chow in the backseat as she watched through the front window of the convenience store on the corner of 19th and Sanchez. Dade stood in line behind a young guy in droopy jeans, his fake winning ticket in hand. She stuck a fingernail in her mouth and chewed, a nervous habit she hadn’t indulged in in years. She wasn’t sure about this idea. Granted Dade had told her the ticket he’d made up was only worth a hundred dollars, hardly enough to hit anyone’s radar, but it was still stealing. From the government. Putting money back into that system would be trickier than taking it out. That is, if Dade really had any intention of ever paying it back.

  She couldn’t get a handle on him. Clearly he was dangerous, well trained, not to be messed with. But he didn’t seem to have a temper or kill indiscriminately. In fact, she could almost understand why he did what he did. A killer with a social conscience, maybe? Yet, here he was stealing. And not for the first time, it sounded like.

  So was he a good guy or a bad guy? Friend or foe?

  She wasn’t sure. All she knew for certain was that she sorely wished she’d been able to grab ammo for her Glock from her duffel before they’d fled the motel last night. Riding around with a guy like Dade would feel a lot more comfortable if she were armed with more than one bullet.

  Anna watched as the guy in the sagging jeans left the store, and Dade stepped up to the counter. He exchanged a few words with the clerk, handing over the forged ticket. The man took it, turned his back to Dade, inserting the ticket into a machine behind the counter.

  Anna held her breath, waiting, ears straining for the sound of sirens coming to take him away.

  Instead, the clerk stepped away from the machine, opened the cash register, and counted five twenty-dollar bills out into Dade’s hand. She watched Dade flash the guy a smile and thank him before exiting the store.

  He jogged up to the car and slid into the drivers’ side.

  “Got it?” Anna asked.

  Dade nodded. “Piece of cake.”

  Anna felt relief flood her system as Dade started the car, pulling back out of the lot and heading north toward Market.

  “So where are we going now?” she asked.

  Dade stared out the front window as he drove. “Shelli was clearly the leak in your life. The question is, who does she work for?”

  Anna nodded. “Unfortunately, she knows we’re looking for her. And she’s probably deep in hiding by now. There’s no way we’re going to find her.”

  “I agree. But the postcards in her place,” Dade said. “If the locations were meeting points of some sort, I’d be curious to know who she was meeting.”

  “Fisherman’s Wharf, Ghirardelli Square, and Coit Tower,” Anna repeated from memory.

  Dade nodded. “I say we visit Coit Tower first. Least busy, most likely someone noticed her. Possibly noticed who she was meeting.”

  “Agreed.”

  Coit Tower sat atop Telegraph Hill looking over the eastern side of San Francisco. Dade found a spot to park on the street two blocks from the tower and got out of the car, surveying the area slowly. Anna did the same, scanning the street for anything out of the ordinary. No sign of Shelli’s jet black hair, no sign of the Roadster from the night before, no flash of silver muzzles pointed her way. Still, the solid length of her Glock at her side was reassuring.

  As they approached the tower, the crowd was nothing like Pier 39 had been, though there were still a fair amount of people filtering in and out of the historical sight. A small circular building sat at the bottom of the architectural marvel, housing a gift shop. Dade approached the man behind the counter, asking if he’d seen anyone matching Shelli’s description lately. Unfortunately, the man only spoke broken English, shaking his head in the negative at Dade’s request. Dade bought tickets from the man for the both of them to ride to the top of the tower. Anna scanned the faces of each person enjoying the wall murals as they waited for the antique elevator ride to the top.

  Coit Tower was built in 1933 by Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a tomboy who had been saved as a child from a terrible fire by city firefighters. She had then dedicated her life to those same firefighters, often riding along in her petticoats on the engines. When she died, she commissioned the tower as a dedication to those who served in San Francisco.

  At least, that was the history that the docent riding the elevator with them recited. It wasn’t until the doors opened and the crowd dispersed onto the viewing areas that Dade got a chance to question the woman alone about having seen Shelli. No, she hadn’t noticed anyone fitting the description—either with long red hair or short black hair. Dade thanked her, moving on to a security guard near the railing.

  Anna wandered to one of the tall windows along the tower’s perimeter and stared out at the vast array of buildings before her. The City looked like a doll’s village, the tiny rooftops and miniature trees jutting up from sloping hillsides. She took a moment to take in the scenery, awed by the sheer volume of people packed so densely into one square of earth. The perfect place to hide.

  “No one’s seen her,” Dade said, coming up behind her. “If this was a meet point, it must have been quick, because no one remembers Shelli. Let’s try another spot.”

  As reluctant as she was to leave the moment of serenity, Anna knew he was right, following his lead as he turned back to the elevators.

  Half an hour later they were parked at a garage on Beach, adjacent to Ghirardelli Square. Mingling scents of coffee and chocolate hit Anna’s nostrils as they approached the first gift shop. Again, Anna let Dade do the talking, questioning the woman behind
the counter. No, she hadn’t seen Shelli either. Or if she had, Shelli’s face had blended in with the hundreds of visitors the square saw every day.

  He did a repeat at the next two shops along the street, coming up with exactly the same answers.

  Anna was about to give up hope when they stopped a street vendor selling popcorn. He was an older man, Italian, if Anna had to guess, with a weathered face and unnaturally dark hair from a box.

  “Excuse me,” Dade said.

  The man looked up. “Popcorn?”

  Dade shook his head. “Actually, we were wondering if you’d seen a friend of ours come through here.” He gave the man a quick description of Shelli.

  He squinted up at Dade, then shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t remember seeing her here today.”

  “What about on a different day? Has she been through here at all recently?”

  The man shrugged. “Sorry, I see a lot of faces. They don’t all stick, you know?”

  Dade nodded. It had been a long shot anyway. “I understand.”

  “Was she here the same day you were?” the man asked.

  Dade paused. “Which day would that be?”

  “Last week. I remember seeing you here then.”

  Dade cocked his head to the side, then slowly said, “I wasn’t here last week.”

  The guy shook his head, soft jowls wobbling on either side of his chin. “No, no. Of course not. But you,” he said, pointing at Anna. “You were here.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Dade spun on Anna. “When were you here?”

  She could see whatever tentative bond of trust they’d forged rapidly disintegrating.

  “No,” she quickly said, shaking her head vehemently from side to side for emphasis. “I’ve never been here before, and certainly not last week.”

  The man looked from Dade to Anna. “I don’t wanna get in the middle of anything,” he said, “but I’m sure it was you.”

  “When?” Anna asked. “When was I here?”

  The man bit his lip. “’Bout three days ago, I’d say.”

  “What did I do?”

  The guy cocked his head at Anna.

  “Humor me, okay?” she said. “When I was here before, what did I do?”

  “I don’t know, shopped, ate. What do people do here?”

  “Was she with someone else?” Dade asked.

  The man shook his head. “Nope. Not as far as I saw.”

  “No one met her here?” Dade asked.

  Again, the man shook his head. “Not that I saw. She was alone as far as I could tell.”

  “Exactly what did she … what did I do?” Anna asked.

  The man shrugged his shoulders. “Walked around a bit. Stopped at the souvenir stand over there.” He pointed across the way at a store front filled with I ♥ SAN FRANCISCO T-shirts and postcards.

  “Did she buy anything?”

  He narrowed his eyes, as if trying to see the scene again. “Actually, yeah, she did. I think she bought a magazine. She sat on a bench over there by the coffee shop and read for a few minutes, then she left.”

  Anna felt Dade straighten beside her. He caught on the same detail she did. The magazine.

  The postcards hadn’t been telling Shelli where to meet someone, but to find something.

  It would have been the easiest thing for whoever was controlling her puppet strings to write instructions somewhere in the margins of a magazine, then slip it into the back of the rack, leaving it for Shelli to buy and read later. Clerks were trained to watch for people shoplifting, but no one in the store would have noticed someone leaving a magazine behind.

  “Do you still have the postcard?” Anna asked Dade.

  He nodded, pulling the stack from his back pocket. He handed the one for Ghirardelli Square to her.

  Anna read over the script again. “The magazine she bought. Do you remember what it was?” she asked the man.

  He shrugged. “One of those gossip magazines. People, maybe?”

  Anna stabbed her finger at a line on the postcard.

  You must come next time to check out the people.

  “There! The postcard was telling her what magazine to buy.”

  Dade nodded. “Her instructions were in the magazines.”

  “No wonder Shelli didn’t care about leaving the postcards behind. If she came disguised as me, there’d be no link between her and the drop spots, and there’s no information left at any of the points,” Anna said, disappointment welling inside her at losing their only lead.

  “So Shelli’s a dead end,” Dade said, voicing her thoughts as they walked back to his SUV.

  She nodded.

  “What about the guys at the motel last night? Did you get a good look at them?”

  She shrugged. “They were all in black. They got into an electric Roadster, that’s about all I could see from that far.”

  “License plate number?”

  “B 7. The rest of the numbers were covered in mud.” She tried to call up the image of the car. “But,” she said, suddenly feeling a little lift of hope, “there was a clean-air access sticker on the back of their car.”

  “Lots of cars have those,” Dade pointed out.

  Anna nodded. That was true enough. California traffic being what it was, diamond lanes had been constructed to encourage drivers to carpool. In the Bay Area, only cars carrying two or more persons were allowed in the diamond lanes during peak traffic hours. While the intention had been to help the flow of traffic, most Californians were so firmly in love with their cars that carpooling was tantamount to walking. So, instead of helping the flow of traffic, the diamond lanes pretty much guaranteed that as soon as 3:00 P.M. hit, the roads were gridlocked, all traffic fitting into the few remaining lanes.

  The exceptions to this were clean-air vehicles, electric cars and other certified super-low-emission vehicles. They could apply for a diamond access sticker which, once affixed to their bumper, allowed them access to carpool lanes even with a single driver, any time of day. In California, that was priceless.

  “My last employer had one,” Anna said. “It saved her half an hour on her morning commute. I remember she had to apply separately to the DMV in order to get the sticker.”

  Dade nodded. “So, whoever the owner of the Roadster is, they must be on file with the DMV.”

  She grinned. Bingo.

  * * *

  Anna walked up to the DMV’s registration counter. Behind it sat a woman in her mid-fifties, her hair sprayed into a fluffy bob that said she was making the most of her postmenopausal hair loss. “May I help you?” she asked as Anna approached.

  “I hope so. I’m Anna Smith,” she said, pulling out her ID. “I work for the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford,” she said, rattling off the info she’d looked up on Dade’s laptop on the way over. “We’re doing a study on the effectiveness of the clean-air sticker program on California highways.”

  The woman nodded, looking like she couldn’t care less. Clearly the only thing on her mind was how many minutes left until her next coffee break. “Yes?” she prodded.

  “I need to get a look at some of the applications for clean-air stickers.”

  “Okay, what dates do you need?” the woman asked.

  “Actually, I’m more interested in the make and model of the cars than dates. Is there some ways to look up applications based on that criteria?”

  The woman nodded. “Sure. What make?”

  “Tesla Roadster,” Anna told her. “All registered models in the city of San Francisco.”

  The woman nodded again, hitting a series of keys on her keyboard. A few moments later she said, “Just a minute. I’ll have a list printed out for you in the back.”

  She disappeared behind a wall of fabric partitions, and Anna counted off the seconds while she waited. The chance of anyone catching up to her here was slim. But the past twenty-four hours had put a constant feeling of paranoia in her that wasn’t dissipating any as she stood inside a government office.
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  Ten minutes later the woman finally returned with a sheaf of papers in hand. She passed them across the counter to Anna.

  “Here you go,” she said. “Anything else I can help you with?”

  Anna shook her head. “No, thank you. This is perfect.”

  Anna grabbed the printout and quickly made her way outside, where Dade still sat parked at the curb, the windows down in his SUV. Anna was surprised to see Lenny sitting on his lap, his tail wagging as Dade scratched him behind the ears.

  “Well?” Dade asked.

  “These are all the owners of Tesla Roadsters in the area with clean-air stickers.”

  Dade took the printout from her, scanning down the list of names. There were hundreds.

  “Let’s start narrowing them down,” he said.

  He opened the glove box, pulling out a pen, and immediately narrowed their search to only black vehicles. Next he scanned license plate numbers, homing in on only ones with a 7 and a B. Which left them with one car, registered to an Ace Industries, with an address near the marina.

  Dade put it into his GPS and twenty minutes later they were parked outside a warehouse situated along the Bay, just below the freeway overpass. It was an older building, originally painted white, though rust had long ago taken over as the predominant color. The building was two stories tall, squatting in the middle of an industrial area, with a corrugated roof and an abandoned forklift parked outside.

  “You think this is it?” Anna asked. Honestly, it didn’t look any different from dozens of other buildings along the water. And the Tesla Roadster was nowhere to be seen.

  But Dade nodded in the seat beside her, his eyes focusing on the far side of the warehouse. “I know it is.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Dade lifted a hand and pointed at the building. “Because Shelli just came out of the side door.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Anna watched a woman with long, chestnut brown hair emerge from a side door, then put a cell phone to her ear, speaking rapidly into the device. She’d changed her clothes since the airport yesterday, swapping her baggy sweatshirt for a fitted trench, along with the obvious addition of a wig, but as she turned her face toward the sun, Anna could clearly make out Shelli’s features—upturned nose, bright green eyes, and a smattering of freckles that gave her face a deceptively friendly appearance.