“I had to see you,” she said.
“Well, you came to the right place. I don’t seem to be going anywhere soon.”
“I have to talk to you. Can we do that?”
He abandoned the flippancy. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I talk to you?”
“Because your boss told you not to?”
Mickey went to shake his head, but with the pain didn’t get far. “He didn’t exactly tell me not to. He just said it would be dumb.”
“Why? Does he say I killed Dominic too?”
“He says he’s keeping an open mind. But he does believe the cops are thinking that way. So Tam and I ought to watch out too.”
“Mickey.” She reached out and rested her hand on his arm. “I swear to you. I didn’t have anything to do with that. Or with Nancy Neshek either. I promise.”
“All right.”
“Please tell me you believe me.”
Mickey drew in a breath. Here, indeed, was the crux. He didn’t need to consciously recall the many discussions he’d had with Tamara in the wake of the boyfriend who’d betrayed her and Wyatt Hunt and everyone else he’d known. Those conversations were by now part of his DNA. Even Mickey had considered Craig a good guy, possibly a future brother-in-law, and a fine choice at that.
And now here Mickey was, in an analogous situation with a woman for whom he had an attraction that was-no other word for it-dangerous. And still, knowing everything he did, he was thinking about committing in the same way his sister had committed.
More than thinking about it.
Almost without conscious volition, he found himself answering her. “I do believe you,” he said. “You didn’t kill anybody.”
At his words, her eyes teared up and she put her head down, resting it against the side of the bed. Her shoulders rose and fell a couple of times before she looked up at him again. “How can I ever thank you?”
“Don’t worry about that. The big question is what are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have any idea. That’s why I came here. To ask you. I think they’re going to arrest me. I can’t let myself get arrested, Mickey. I really can’t.”
“You think they’re that close?”
She nodded. “I don’t know what they need, but they asked me if I had any plans to travel outside the Bay Area anytime soon. If you want my opinion, I think I’m their main suspect.” She moved her chair closer in to the bed, and now spoke in a near whisper. “I didn’t go in to work today. I didn’t want them to know where to find me.”
“You think they’d arrest you down there? At Morton’s?”
“Why not? That’s where they questioned me the first time.”
Mickey hesitated, following the inexorable logic of what must have been true. “So you’re out of your room too?” he asked.
She didn’t seem surprised at the question. “I grabbed some stuff as soon as they left and threw it in my car.”
“So where are you going to go from here?”
“Mickey”-she hesitated-“I don’t have anyplace to go. My brother’s the only family I’ve got, and I know they’d look for me at his place. I’d just been sitting out by the beach until I heard from Tamara. Then finally I decided I needed to come in here. To ask you to help me.”
In spite of himself, Mickey’s chest heaved as a bitter laugh began, then stopped with the clutch of his broken ribs. Wincing, he moved his right hand over to cover them.
“Mickey?”
“I’m okay, I’m okay.” He puffed out a quick breath, then another. “Just enjoying the humor in you thinking I could help you. Especially how I am right now.”
“But I know you can.”
He closed his eyes and took a beat to think. She wanted him to help her, was begging him to help her. She was not who they thought she was, and he might be her only hope left. Opening his eyes, he met her gaze. “Look, Alicia,” he said. “This is a little town. How long do you think you can hide from them if they really want to find you? A couple of days? A week? A month? And do you really think that doing that will make it better for you when they do find you? Even if you could avoid them for a little while, you’d just be making it worse.”
“I don’t care if it’s days or a week, Mickey. I need some time. And they need some time to look at other suspects.”
“So you were parked all day out at the beach?”
“Right.”
“You don’t think they’ve got the plates on your car?”
“I don’t know.” Then, realizing the obvious, “They would, wouldn’t they?”
“You can bet on it. You might as well have gone in to work. You’re in that car, they got you.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
“Have you used your cell phone?”
“Sure. To call work and say I was sick. Then your house, and then when Tamara called me back. And then Ian, just to let him know where I was.”
Slowly, now, slowly, against the pain, Mickey shook his head. “You can’t use your cell phone, Alicia. They can locate you by that.”
“They can?”
A small smile. “It’s a rough environment for fugitives out there.”
“But I’m not a fugitive. I’m not under arrest. Not yet, anyway.” She brought her hands up to her forehead, rubbed it, brought her hands back down. “They’re just not looking in the right places, Mickey. They can’t be. They’ve got to be missing something. This was what we talked about when we first got together, you remember? You were going to investigate the murder, now murders, and not let them land, finally, on me. You remember that, don’t you? That’s what this was all about, right? Was I making all that up?”
The details still fresh in his mind, Mickey experienced again the rush of those moments when he’d determined that his plan could resuscitate the dying Hunt Club while at the same time give him an opportunity to get to know this woman. This remarkable woman. This woman with whom he could see himself.
Well, he’d done the Hunt Club part. It had its new clients and its reward billings. His efforts had, at least for the time being, even brought his sister back from the edge of anorexia, returned to her some of her sense of self-worth. All that was left was in some respects, the personal respects, the most important part.
And now the person at the center of that was asking him if she was making all that up? Everything he’d promised her, had she just imagined that? Was it all merely a game for Mickey to toy with and then drop when it became inconvenient, difficult, even perilous? Was she, take away the self-serving rationalizations, just another pretty girl to him?
“Was I, Mickey?” she repeated. “Was I making all that up?”
He took his right hand off his ribs and laid it gently on her shoulder. “No,” he told her. “That’s still what this is about.”
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you.” She put her hand over his, then leaned over and kissed it. “So what are we going to do?”
Mickey, with some difficulty, pushed himself up on the bed. “First,” he said, “we’d better find where they hid my clothes.”
The clothes and valuables were hung in a plastic bag in the closet. Mickey’s bed was one in a three-bed room, but the one closest to the door. The other patients in the room had screens pulled around those beds, and the one in the middle had three visitors, chatting away. After she brought over the bag of Mickey’s clothes, Alicia went to the hallway door and stood in it, just inside the room.
Even moving slowly and with great care, it didn’t take Mickey more than two minutes to get on his underwear and pants. He couldn’t get his shirt over the cast, but thank God it had been a cold day and he had his jacket, which served. He called Alicia back to him and she helped him with his shoes, left untied. His socks were just too much trouble to even bother with. They went into his jacket pocket along with the shirt.
She took his good right arm and together they strolled out into the hallway.
The walk out of the hospital was challenging.
Dizziness made him come to a dead stop three times. Beyond that, even though it was his left arm that was broken, his left leg had evidently gotten banged up badly as well. Both his hip and his knee throbbed with every step and his ribs were worse-constant pinching pain that kept him from standing straight. Once they cleared the building itself, just walking unimpeded out the front entrance, they hit the drizzle and the biting wind. Alicia was wearing her jeans and hiking boots and a water-resistant ski jacket over a pullover sweater, and she pulled her left arm out of the sleeve and wrapped the jacket over Mickey’s shoulders, holding his right arm, pressing up tight against him.
Nevertheless, by the time they made it out to Alicia’s car at the very far end of the darkened parking lot, Mickey was shivering, his teeth actually chattering, a general pain now diffused by the shaking throughout his body. Alicia opened the front passenger side door and got him into the seat, then spun out of her heavy jacket and draped it over him, tucking it in around him. She ran around the car, got in, turned on the ignition, and set the heater to max.
“It’ll warm up in a minute,” she said. “Then we’ll jam the fan.”
Still shivering, his teeth audible in the close space, huddled down inside the blanket, Mickey could barely get out one word. “Good.”
Alicia revved the engine to speed the heating process, but kept her lights and the windshield wipers off. They were cocooned, the drizzle on the car’s windows preventing them from seeing much outside. In less than a minute, she reached down and turned the fan onto high, and feeling the vent, she nodded. “Better than outside already.”
Mickey, rocking almost imperceptibly back and forth, just shook his head.
Five minutes later, the car was warm enough that he didn’t need her jacket and she gently helped him get it unwrapped from around him. His shivering had stopped and with the surcease of movement, the pain had noticeably lessened everywhere but in his arm and ribs. “No phones,” he said. “In fact, turn it off completely.”
“But what if we have to call somebody?”
“We’ll borrow somebody’s, or find a pay phone. We really don’t want to use your cell. Starting now.”
“Okay.” She held down the button that turned her phone off. “I’m trusting you.”
“That’s a good idea.”
She looked over at him. “So what are we going to do now?”
“Good question,” he said. “Dancing’s definitely out, though.”
“Darn.”
“I know. It’s a disappointment. I’m a great dancer, actually. You ever go to the swing clubs?”
“Not enough. Drawback of working nights.”
“Well, when we get out of this, maybe some Monday or Tuesday.. .” He lapsed into a thoughtful silence.
And eventually Alicia broke it. “Mickey?”
“I’m thinking. You got any close girlfriends you can trust who live alone?”
She considered for a moment, then shook her head. “Not who live alone, no. I’m about the only one my age I know who does. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking you’re going to have to lie low somewhere where the cops won’t think to look for you, if it gets to that. Plus, we’ve got a car problem. This one might as well have a sign on it, so we’ve got to put it someplace where it can’t be seen.”
“But then we can’t use it.”
“That’s right.”
“So how do I get around?”
“Where do you have to go? That’s not close to your biggest problem.”
“Good point. But how do you get around, for that matter? You don’t have a car anymore either. Plus, you can barely walk.”
“There’s that too,” he said grimly. “You’ve got to give me a minute here.” He gently probed at his head.
“Are you hurting bad?” she asked.
He glanced over at her and tried a smile.
In the living room of her Nob Hill condominium, Gina Roake sipped her Oban and said, “You’ve got a half hour to cut that out completely, buster. I mean it.”
Wyatt Hunt, rubbing her feet on the ottoman between them, gave her a grin. “A half hour from now, I’m betting I’ll have moved on to other things.”
“Promises, promises.”
“You wait and see.”
“I believe I will.” She sighed contentedly, leaned back, sipped her Scotch again. “So how close is our Inspector Juhle?”
“He’s waiting until the DNA work comes in on the semen. But even if he gets a hit, it’s still a long way to Tipperary. It all comes down to whether or not he fired her that morning.” He nodded appreciatively at her. “And if you’re paying attention, I believe that would be your influence at work on Juhle. It’s going to be a while before he makes an arrest again before he’s got the evidence.”
“Let’s hope. You’d think they’d teach that in cop school.”
“They do. Then they get out into the real world and need to make arrests. Especially when they know who did it, as in this case.”
Gina sighed. “And in so many others.”
“Well, yes. No argument there.”
“So they’re convinced it’s this woman Alicia?”
“I’d say yes.”
“What do you think?”
Hunt considered for a moment.
Roake softly kicked his hands. “It’s not a trick question. You don’t have to answer if it’s going to make you stop.”
“Apologies.” Hunt’s hands went back to work on her feet. “What do I think? I think it’s highly unlikely that both Ellen Como and Al Carter independently made up the story about her getting fired the day he gets killed. I think that happened.”
“What does she say?”
“She says not. But then again, she would, wouldn’t she?”
Roake shrugged.
“So then I think,” Hunt pressed, “that if that’s true, if Como fired her, then she had a damn good reason to kill him. Especially if they were intimate.”
“And the scarf establishes that?”
“Pretty much. If it’s his semen.”
Roake brought her Scotch to her lips. “Anybody ever see them together out of work? Maybe going into her place? Some motel? One of Sunset’s residential units?”
“I haven’t heard of that. At work, yeah, according to Ellen. But I don’t think Devin and Sarah have gotten around to asking neighbors, if that’s what you mean. Except, you know, you’re alone together in a limo four or five hours a day, I’m willing to lay odds a determined couple could get in a little nooky from time to time. And it does appear, in fact, that that’s what happened, doesn’t it?”
“Could have happened. If it was actually Como. Or Alicia, for that matter. Although it might have been neither.”
“Neither?”
“Neither. The driver-Carter, is it?-and his girlfriend, if any. Or one of the other young male drivers and somebody they were driving around on any given day.”
Hunt stopped rubbing her feet again and chuckled. “Roake, you are definitely in the right field, you know that?”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that your devious defense-lawyer mind just automatically sees all the ways you can rearrange and argue the facts so that the most obvious explanation gets lost in the shuffle.”
“Well, sometimes the most obvious explanation is wrong.”
“Most of the time, though, not.”
“Still. Enough to make the exercise worthwhile.”
“From what I’ve told you, don’t you think it’s likely Alicia?”
“I have no idea.” With a sigh, she pulled her legs back off the ottoman and sat up straighter in her chair. She put her glass of Oban down on the table next to her seat. “There is simply nothing I’ve heard that comes close to convicting her, Wyatt. If I were going to be exerting any energy here, I have to tell you I’m still liking Len Turner.”
“Who I had a nice chat with this morning, you know.”
Roake sucked in a quick breath, concern
suddenly obvious in her demeanor. “You didn’t do anything to make him feel threatened, I hope.”
“No. He was surrounded by his gang at Como’s memorial.”
“Do you know what, if anything, Juhle and Russo are doing about him?”
Hunt shook his head. “No. Not much, I don’t think.”
“Looking into his alibis, if any? Trying to get a feel for his financial records? Asking Ellen Como or anybody else about personnel or financial problems that might have come up recently between him and Como? Seeing if Turner has any kind of special relationship with any of the Battalion members?”
“All of those would be included under the general heading of ‘not much.’ What about the Battalion?”
“Nothing, specifically. And again, just rumors.”
“Why am I doubting that, Roake?”
She wilted under Hunt’s gaze. “All right,” she said. “Although it galls me if this is the way it has to get to Juhle and Russo. They should be looking in this direction already. If I didn’t think you needed to know so you’ll take Mr. Turner more seriously, I wouldn’t mention it.”
“Okay,” Hunt said casually. “That’s a good lead- in. What do you know?”
“I know and everybody knows that one of the Battalion’s visible roles is that for only twenty dollars, they hand out little signs you put in your window that your business supports the Sunset Youth Project. You’ve seen them all over the city, right?”
“Right. So?”
“So what most people don’t know is the percentage of contacted businesses of all types that support the SYP. You want to guess?”
“All businesses?”
“Right. Asian cleaners and restaurants, Hispanic mom and pops, Muslim shop owners, law offices, cigar stores, everybody. Take a stab.”
Hunt shrugged. “Forty percent.”
“Close,” Gina said. “A hundred percent.”
Hunt was silent for a long beat. “They’re selling protection,” he said.
“No, they couldn’t be,” Gina responded. “The city would surely bust them, would it not? Oh, except if they somehow had enough political influence to just let the practice remain a necessary evil, the cost of doing business here. The SYP is really doing a world of good for a lot of people, and that’s true. So businesses should be glad to pony up twenty bucks for such a good cause. Plus, they get the nice sign in the window.”
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