This game was far from over and wouldn’t be over until Ridgeway was dead. Killing Jesse was a start, but the truth was, Jesse was just a tool. It was Ridgeway who was calling all the shots and I couldn’t let myself disintegrate before I got to him. In the meantime, I needed to do something I could be sure of. Something to take control.
So I did two things. First I took the money out of the briefcase and packed it into my duffel bag, refilling the case with hand towels and toiletries from the Hilton until the weight felt right. Then I pulled on the stiletto-heeled designer boots.
When Malloy returned, I stood by the bed, facing the door. Hip cocked, smiling. I was naked except for the boots. My lips were slick with the cheap red lipstick. Even with the short hair, I knew I looked damn good. I looked like a woman.
“Lalo,” I said. “Come here.”
Malloy cautiously set his grocery bag down on the little table, pushing the door shut behind him.
“Angela” he said, but I didn’t let him finish.
I could feel him fighting himself, trying to hold back and stay cool but I knew it couldn’t last. After all, I am a professional. I broke through his resistance as easily as he had taken down that thug in Vegas.
The raw lust that sprang free from behind that wall of stoic resistance was intoxicating. I needed it like other people need air and I filled myself up with it, gorged myself on it as he lifted me off my feet, holding me breathless against him and then tossing me down onto the rickety bed. He came down after me, heavy and eager, big hands all over me just like I wanted. But when I reached down to unzip his trousers, the wall was back as he suddenly dodged me, rolling away to one side.
“Angel,” he said again. “I...”
I tried to kiss him again, but he wouldn’t let me. His face was flushed pink, his eyes narrow.
“Look, Angel,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
I had a sudden chilly fear that he would turn out to be the kind of guy who can’t get past the porn star thing. The kind of guy who’s turned off by the sheer number of priors. But my instinct told me he wasn’t turned off in the slightest. His body was practically vibrating with leashed desire. I couldn’t imagine what was holding him back until he spoke.
“I...” he said, eyes cutting away from mine. “I’m not... built like those guys in your movies.”
It took everything I had not to burst out laughing. That’s what this was about? Macho tough guy Malloy was worried that his dick was too small to satisfy Angel Dare? I can’t tell you the number of times I’d heard those exact words or variations on that theme, but I never in a million years expected to hear it from Malloy.
I reached down and put my hand on what he had. He was no Thick Vic, but like most guys he was selling himself short.
“It doesn’t matter,” I told him.
Then I proved it.
After, we lay side by side, close but not touching. I can’t say that I felt like my old self. I didn’t think I’d ever really feel like that again, but I felt like a stronger and more focused version of whoever this new person was. Malloy got up and padded over to the table to get out another carton of cigarettes. He wasn’t some kind of Hollywood muscle boy, but he looked good naked.
“Maybe we should get the hell out of Dodge,” Malloy said, back half-turned as he tore open the carton.
“What do you mean?” I asked, leaning up on one elbow.
“I mean just say fuck it,” Malloy replied, shaking a cigarette loose from a new pack. “Go to Belize or something. I don’t know.”
“You want to run away with me, Lalo?” I asked, smiling just a little.
He shrugged and lit up the cigarette then came back over to the bed, lying back and throwing one thick arm up behind his head.
“Would that be so bad?” he asked.
Would it? He was a good lover. Earnest, quietly intense and focused on giving me pleasure. He was also apparently not into the kind of over-the-top theatrics that seem to be a given these days when everyone has gotten their idea of good sex from porn. Guys get with a porn star and they think that kind of shit is what we really want every day. Here’s a tip for you. We do the things we do in porn because they look good, not because they feel good. Anyone who’s ever done an airtight reverse cowgirl will tell you that, and I’m not just talking about the girls either. Luckily I didn’t have to explain any of this to Malloy. And more importantly, he didn’t try to snuggle. He just smoked and gave me space.
It’s not like I had anything left in L.A. either. Didi was dead. Daring Angels was dead. Angel Dare was dead, or the next best thing. Up until that minute, I hadn’t given any thought to anything but revenge. Could there really be some new kind of life for me now? Some way to start over?
Maybe, I thought, I really should quit while I was ahead. I had one hundred and eighty grand of Ridgeway’s cash as payback for what he put me through. Couldn’t I call it even and disappear? Me and Malloy. Why not?
I knew perfectly well why not. Because as long as that bastard Ridgeway was alive, I would never be at peace. I couldn’t let it go. Maybe I should have, but I couldn’t.
“No,” I said. “I can’t go anywhere until that son of a bitch gets what’s coming to him. I just can’t, Lalo.”
“Getting to Ridgeway isn’t gonna be easy,” Malloy said. “It may be impossible. It’s not unlikely that he’ll get to you first. Guys like him almost never get what’s coming to them.”
“I understand,” I said. “But I have to keep trying. It’s all I’ve got left.”
Malloy nodded, smoked and said nothing. After a minute or two passed, he spoke.
“After my wife left me and took Paloma back to Santa Fe,” he said. “I didn’t date anyone for a long time. I mean sure, I fucked around, but I never let any women get to me. I was drinking back then and didn’t give much of a damn about anything. Then I met someone. She was a pro, you know? A call girl, but she never took a dime from me. Her name was Carla. She was from El Salvador. Long legs. Beautiful. Guys would line up to be with her.”
I didn’t say anything.
“One of her customers killed her,” he said. “Strangled her.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth and touched his lips with his thumb. “We knew who did it but we couldn’t make it stick. He walked.”
I turned to look at him. He didn’t look back at me. His gaze stayed fixed on the water-stained ceiling.
“The guy was this low-rent Hollywood sleazebag,” Malloy continued. “But he was connected. He had good lawyers. Carla, she was just another dead call girl. She didn’t matter, and so the guy walked.”
He took a long drag on the cigarette.
“It took three years, but I got to the guy,” Malloy said. “I took him out to the desert and made him sorry for what he did. Then I killed him.”
Malloy’s cigarette was burned down almost to the filter. He crushed it out in the cheap glass ashtray on the built-in nightstand.
“For those three years,” he said. “I couldn’t think about anything else. Planning to kill that guy ate up every second I was awake and all my dreams too. I had nothing else. I made stupid mistakes on the job. Nearly got myself killed. All because I couldn’t think about anything but how I was going to get that guy. For Carla.” He got out another cigarette and lit up. “The drinking got out of hand. I lost my badge. I deserved it, too. I was a fuck-up and I knew it, but I just couldn’t stop. It was like being in love, you know. Only hate.”
Man, did I know. That was exactly how I had felt about Jesse. I still felt that way about Ridgeway. If you would have told me how much I had in common with someone like Malloy two weeks before, I would have laughed. Now I felt like he was the one person on earth who understood what I was going through.
“When it was over,” he continued, “when I’d watched that fucker take his last breath, I realized I didn’t feel any different. I didn’t miss her any less. I’d devoted my whole life to getting that guy and once it was done, I didn’t know what to do
with myself. I thought it would be this great victory but it wasn’t.” He turned to me. “I guess I’m just trying to say that revenge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. That’s all.”
I sat up and tried to run my fingers through hair that wasn’t there anymore. I knew he was right. I wanted to run away with him and find some new kind of person to be. To start over someplace where no one had ever heard of Angel Dare. I wanted that, but I knew I wasn’t going to have it.
“I know you’re right,” I said. “I do. But I can’t walk away until this is done. Maybe after...”
I trailed off, unable to finish. I don’t think either of us really believed in after anymore.
Malloy looked away. He seemed to be wrestling with something big, trying to find words that just wouldn’t come. In the end he just said, “Okay, Angel. If that’s how you want it.”
“I’ll show you how I want it,” I said.
It was a cheap ploy, nothing but fleshy distraction from all the things I didn’t want to think about. Our hearts weren’t really in it. But we went through the motions anyway, just to have something to do. When it was done, I could feel exhaustion catching up with me. I tried to count the hours since I had last slept, but fell asleep counting.
I slept for what felt like forever and then came awake suddenly to the sound of pounding on the door. I was groggy and stupid but adrenaline quickly got my body clothed and upright. Standing, I realized two things at once. Malloy was gone. So was the briefcase.
29.
I didn’t have time to feel angry or betrayed because I was too busy feeling like I was living my last ten seconds on this earth. I grabbed my duffel off the carpet and bolted into the bathroom. The Mickey Mouse lock on the bathroom door was a joke, but it might buy me an extra ten seconds, which at that point felt like doubling my lifespan. Standing in that shitty little bathroom, I was determined not to die there. I looked up at the tiny window and thought of Lia. I wondered if I would have the balls to throw myself in front of a bus if it came down to that.
Whoever had been banging on the door was in now, and had started on the bathroom door. I had no idea if they were cops or crooks and didn’t care to find out which. The bathroom window didn’t want to open more than a few inches, so I yanked down the shower curtain and wrapped it around my fist. It took more than one punch but eventually the thick, grimy glass gave way. I tossed the duffel ahead of me, hoping with irrational desperation that my blue coffee cup wouldn’t break. I didn’t even feel the jagged glass clawing at me as I squeezed through the window frame.
I had completely forgotten that I fell asleep in the spike-heeled boots until I hit the concrete. One slender, six-hundred-dollar heel snapped off and I felt my ankle twist, sending a jolt of pain up my leg. I looked both ways down the trash-strewn alley. I knew I couldn’t run on a broken heel, so before I could give it too much thought, I opened a big rusty dumpster, tossed my duffel in and dove in after it, pulling the lid down tight.
Visceral memories of my trash bag dress sank nails into my stomach as I pulled rancid, leaking garbage bags over myself, tucking my head down and silently praying for the first time since the first grade.
I heard men’s voices and running footsteps on the concrete. Then nothing.
My ankle throbbed. My head hurt. The smell was unbearable even with my t-shirt pulled up over my nose. As the adrenaline slowly ebbed away, I struggled to wrap my brain around what Malloy had done.
I had told myself again and again not to trust him, not to be a dependent little damsel in distress, but it had been way too easy to let him drive. Now that he had fucked off and left me, I felt this invisible wound that drained my resolve and replaced it with dull, hopeless anger. On the surface, my feminine ego was bruised, knowing that my bedroom blackbelt hadn’t been enough to make him stay. But underneath was so much more. I’d thought he was my friend. I’d thought that meant something. I should have known better.
I waited in the dumpster way longer than I really had to, just to be sure, and even then I could feel myself cringing as I eased the lid open, ready for a bullet.
There was no one in the alley. At least that’s what I thought at first. When I set my uneven boots on the ground, I noticed that a shape I had initially mistaken for a pile of trash was really a man. When I saw a glint of silver hair beneath the dirty crimson, I felt my stomach twist. I knew it was Malloy.
I wanted to go the other way and never look back, but I had to be sure. I limped over to where he lay, face down in an oily puddle. I was grateful for his position because there was a small neat hole in the back of his head. I’m no ballistics expert, but even I know that the little hole is where the bullet went in. There would be a much bigger, much uglier hole on the other side, where the bullet came out. The other side would be his face. I didn’t need to see that.
A few feet away from him was the open briefcase. The towels and toiletries that I had used to fill it up while Malloy was getting cigarettes were scattered down the alley as if the briefcase had been opened, thrown down and kicked over to the wall. I didn’t know why I had put the money in my duffel bag the night before. Maybe I’d had some sense of what might happen. I wondered if Malloy had decided to skate with the money after I refused to blow town with him, or if he had been planning on taking the money from day one and only asked me to come with him because he got soft after he got a taste of me. I wondered if he’d seen the towels before he died.
I wanted to feel sad, to mourn for this man who had rescued me and fucked me and betrayed me, but all I felt was a giddy, weightless sense of purpose. I felt streamlined, stripped down to fighting weight. I had absolutely nothing left. Nothing standing between me and Alan Ridgeway.
I retrieved Malloy’s keys from his pocket and crept around to the front of the Palmview, trying to grow eyes in the back of my head. No cops. No crooks. Nobody except a single scraggly tweaker pacing barefoot back and forth along the second floor breezeway, whispering intently to herself. I eased myself into Malloy’s car and locked the doors. The interior of his car still smelled like him and that hurt in a numb, abstract kind of way. I had to adjust the seat way forward to reach the pedals.
Pulling out of the parking lot, I had no idea where I was going. No solid plan, no clever scheme, nothing. I just drove.
I got on the 101 and drove west. Maybe Malloy had been right after all. Maybe the best thing to do really would be to get the hell out of Dodge. Keep on driving until I hit San Francisco and then get on a plane to anywhere. Leave all this madness behind.
But I couldn’t have done it then any more than I could have done it the night before. I had to get Ridgeway or die trying. That’s when I remembered Jesse’s cell phone.
I pulled off the freeway and into the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger. It only took a second of scrolling through the stored numbers to find one for Uncle Alan.
I spent the next hour opening and closing the little phone. I felt ashamed by how badly I wanted Malloy to be there, to light up a cigarette and squint and then let me know what we ought to do.
In the end, I went ahead speed-dialed the number.
“Christopher,” Ridgeway said as soon as he picked up. “Where the hell are you? I’ve just about had it with this blasé incompetence of yours. I ask you to take care of a single 115-pound bimbo and you can’t even do that right. I think we need to have a serious talk about your position in this organization.”
My heart was beating wildly in my chest. I could barely catch my breath to speak.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Jesse can’t come to the phone right now. Would you like to leave a message?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I could hear him smoking.
“Angel?” Ridgeway asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“How nice to hear from you,” he replied. “Where is that useless nephew of mine, anyway?”
“Never mind that,” I told him. “What you want to ask is where’s your money.”
�
�All right,” he said. “Where’s my money.”
“I have it right here,” I said. “If I give it back, then this business with you and me is done, right?”
“Now you’re finally being sensible,” he said. “All I ever wanted was what was rightfully mine.”
“Meet me in the lot behind 2372 Saco Street. You know the place, don’t you? It’s where your useless nephew didn’t kill me.”
“Right,” he said. “I know it.”
“Meet me there at midnight tonight,” I said. “Come alone.”
I ended the call and turned the phone off.
I sat there, gripping the wheel for what felt like forever. My whole body was shaking, my stomach roiling. Midnight? Why the fuck did I say midnight? That was sixteen hours away. I couldn’t imagine what the hell I was going to do with myself for sixteen hours.
The hours passed. I drove around. Bought food and didn’t eat it. Bought shoes and tossed the broken-heeled boots. Stared at the bland, familiar Valley mini-mall landscape. It wasn’t too late to blow town, but I didn’t. I waited until midnight.
My plan, such as it was, was a simple one. I was going to plug Ridgeway as soon as I saw him. I didn’t care if he had snipers secretly covering him. Let them shoot me after I shot him. At least the son of a bitch would beat me to hell.
Just before I got on the freeway to head downtown, I opened up the duffel bag on the seat beside me. My blue cup was broken into three pieces. The little robot was broken too, its smiling head and one arm detached from the dented body. My own little stack of cash was gone, probably still sitting on the nightstand at the Palmview where I’d left it. All I had left now was the Lakers t-shirt I didn’t want to wear because it reminded me of Lia, the gun I used to kill Jesse, and Ridgeway’s money. In a way that seemed weirdly fitting. I threw out the broken things in a 7-Eleven trashcan, traded my current garbage-stained t-shirt for the Lakers shirt and stuck the gun into the waistband of my jeans.
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