No More Birthdays (Carol Ann Baker Crime)

by Pelzer,Lissa

  ‘You’ve got whiskey in the back, don’t you, partner? Let’s stay put till Charlene calls back with the address. There’s no point driving a mile down the road just to turn around and come back the other way.’

  Lilly opened the door.

  ‘Hey, where you going?’

  ‘What’s it to you? I’m just getting a little fresh air.’

  He was shifting in his seat. Something other than his foot was bothering him. She looked up and saw another car coming down the road. Gary turned around, turned back, his hand covering his mouth. Lilly squinted into the distance. There were no sirens on, but it was the shape of a patrol car, that same boxy frame with something on the top. She went for the pug gun in her pocket. Panicking now.

  ‘Ho ho ho.’ Gary pressed his closed hands between his legs.

  ‘Stay down,’ she said. ‘We’re taking a break, okay?’

  ‘Looks like the cops. Doesn’t it look like cops?’

  She couldn’t think fast enough. They should drive off. They should head into the corn. They should bundle Gary into the trunk and hit him with a tire iron to keep him quiet, but there wasn’t time to do any of that.

  Lilly stared at the shape, wavy in the heat but coming closer. In this light, everything looked that same indeterminable shade of gray, but sure enough this time there were lights on top.

  ‘Get rid of the gun!’ Bobby shouted. ‘Damn it. Throw it away.’ He turned back to Gary. ‘The deal between us stays. We just found you, your were carjacked, she’ll leak that story and Cassandra gets a date.’

  Gary smirked. ‘Cassandra isn’t getting a date with Terence old man! You scared him off. He wants nothing to do with her while you’re her pimp!’

  ‘Lilly, the gun!’

  But her hand stayed clasped tightly around the little pug. The trigger felt as easy under her finger as the wheel on a disposable lighter.

  Gary was straightening himself up, acting like TV cameras were going to be waiting for him to say something about the event.

  But Lilly was squinting hard. She could see something he couldn’t. She pressed the words out of her constricted chest. ‘It’s not the cops,’ she said and it wasn’t. As the car came closer, she could see what it was. It was a cab, a plain old cab with a taxi sign on top.

  ‘You wish.’

  ‘It’s not the cops,’ Lilly said a little easier.

  Now Gary showed his teeth and a great big dollop of sweat rolled down his temple and hit his t-shirt. That’s when she got it. He really was expecting the cops. She pressed her hands against the dash.

  ‘Drive Bobby! Start the car. Go.’

  ‘You’re right, It’s not the cops…’

  ‘It will be! He told that girl something over the phone.’

  Bobby was bewildered, straining out the windscreen. ‘It’s a taxicab.’

  ‘Just go will you.’

  ‘It’s turning,’ he said and he hadn’t even started the engine.

  Lilly saw it too. The cab was swerving to make a turn, but it wasn’t turning. It was pulling up on the other side of the road, a taxi cab with the driver on one side and Davis on the other.

  Bobby turned and snarled at her. ‘You weren’t kidding about the note, huh!’

  But there was no time to put him right. The taxicab slid to a stop and Davis was up and out, hanging onto the car door. She had on her mirrored sunglasses. She was a cop again.

  ‘Carol Ann Baker!’ she shouted. ‘This is Detective Sargent Davis of the Miami-Dade Police. I need you to step out of the vehicle.’

  ‘Why don’t you drive?’ she screamed. ‘Why don’t you drive?’

  ‘Darling. Where the hell do you want me to drive to?

  ‘Carol Ann! I need you to step out of the car and walk across the road to me.’

  ‘Just anywhere, Bobby. Go!’

  ‘She’s a police officer. There’s nothing I can do.’

  ‘She’s a police officer who had to take a cab to get here. She’s not going to chase you!’

  ‘I don’t know. She looks like she might.’ Gary leaned forward and took the cigarettes from between them. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked and Lilly reached back and snatched it out of his mouth.

  ‘You called Davis?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I called my assistant. Just like you told me to. But she’s not a dumb kid from Miami Beach. She can put two and two together.’ He held up his phone. ‘And my GPS is on, obviously.’

  ‘Carol Ann Baker.’ Davis called out again, her voice just as steady as if she were reading a sermon. ‘The state police are on their way here right now.’ She was holding up her phone, a little wire going from the bottom to her ear as she listened in to the radio. ‘You’ve got to hand yourself over to me, to my custody. After they turn up there’s nothing – you understand me – nothing I can do for you.’

  Bobby grabbed her wrist. ‘Don’t go there Lilly. Don’t listen to her. This is nothing. A shot to the foot, it’s classic accident. We’ll explain it away.’

  ‘I’m not calling it an accident, not if she’s not keeping her side of the bargain and it looks like she’s not, or can’t.’

  ‘Shut up you fool,’ Bobby snarled. ‘Lilly. It’ll be okay. Let the local cops take you in and don’t say a word of anything if Davis shows up.’

  ‘Carol Ann. Can you hear me?’

  Lilly pushed her hands against her head. She tried to think clearly, but there was nothing except static flying around the car.

  ‘If you get arrested here in this state,’ Davis shouted. ‘There’ll be no one offering you plea bargains. There’ll be no mitigating circumstances. You’re an adult and you’ve kidnaped a man. They’ll do you for assault, aggravated kidnapping and then Georgia will take you when Ohio is done!’

  ‘Oh my,’ Gary said. ‘What did you do in Georgia? Georgia’s a bad state to fuck up in.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything in Georgia! Davis is right. I have mitigating circumstances.’ She stared at Bobby, but his mouth was turning down like he was going to throw up.

  ‘You want to use me like that? Then you’re a goddam fool. You think saying I gave you money to go to that man’s rooms is going to get you off for murder. Lilly! He was a judge for God’s sake.’

  ‘Murder!’ She screamed, ‘I didn’t fucking kill him! You did!’ She pressed the pug gun into his shoulder. ‘Take some responsibility for something for once in your life. You killed him because of the way he treated me because you didn’t want me treated like that, I get it and I know I should be respectful of it, but you killed him!’

  ‘Darling…’ Bobby was staring into her eyes. ‘I never killed that man.’

  And she saw what he meant, the body of an old man, his stomach distended out and his head caved in, his arm bent back at the elbow. She didn’t know how she could have seen that image, maybe they had shown it on the news, but they hadn’t. Maybe a photo had been leaked online but she hadn’t searched. She knew better than to look it up online.

  ‘You did that.’ She clenched her fists and felt her fingernails burrowing into the skin as her hand circled the grip of the gun. ‘You came and finished him off. Davis knows that. Davis said they had two sets of prints on the murder weapon. She wants me to testify against you so I won’t get a custodial sentence.’

  Bobby closed his eyes and let the gun burrow into him again and again. ‘Two sets of prints,’ he murmured. ‘His and yours… I never touched anything in that room. I saw him there, I saw him there and closed the door!’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘If that was your plan, to hand yourself in and get leniency, you need to know, there’s not a shred of me in that room Lilly, not a shred.’

  The car went silent. Somewhere in the distance she could hear the sirens, traveling on the calm, late afternoon air.

  ‘You know you were underage,’ Davis shouted out, ‘This time last year.’ Her voice was getting hoarse from shouting. ‘Sixteen just turned seventeen. A juvenile in the eyes of the law!’

  ‘Sevente
en?’ Gary said. ‘You told me you were eighteen.’

  ‘I am. I mean I was! I’m nineteen… today.’

  And it all began to make sense, Davis telling her it would be okay – of course, it would have been if she were underage. And Bobby running away and not wanting to see her or let her work again and Cassandra, well Cassandra just acting like Cassandra.

  She turned to Bobby. ‘What am I going to do? Tell me what to do.’

  ‘I’d say you’re fucked,’ Gary said. ‘But I’ll be counting my blessings tonight. Looks like it could have been a lot worse.’

  ‘You damn fool. Can’t you keep your mouth shut for one moment!’

  ‘A judge.’ Gary shook his head.

  ‘I’m coming over there!’ Davis called. ‘Get out of the car.’ And she stepped away from the cab door.

  And Lilly watched as Bobby turned the key in the ignition, turning it like it was his old red truck not wanting to start up, not some new, tinny car and it squealed under the pressure. He pumped at the floor, stepped on the gas and hauled the car around. The wheels struggled for grip on the gravel road and Gary tried to grab for the back of her seat and missed.

  Davis scrambled, she was down on the ground as her feet slid out from under her, but up in a flash, running back towards the cab.

  ‘A fucking car chase?’ Gary said. His head wedged in the corner. ‘Are you kidding me? The cops are on their way!’

  But it wasn’t a chase. Bobby swung the Ford around again and was coming back towards the cab sat there with one wheel off the pavement. He put his foot right down. Lilly stretched her arms out to brace against the dash. Davis was just there, twenty foot from the cab, like a rabbit in the headlights, just staring at them when Lilly grabbed the wheel from Bobby and pulled it hard to the side. The whole car careered like a fairground ride, skidded and lurched and clipped the front driver’s end of the cab. Lilly saw the driver’s face, the horror and fear, right before the airbag exploded out from his wheel and her own face hit the dash.

  But they hadn’t hit Davis. Maybe the taxicab had, but they hadn’t. They bounced up. Lilly was back in her seat and felt Gary land against her headrest like a dead weight. They were over the ridge and down in the field, going all out through the four-foot green corn.

  ‘Are you fucking crazy? Let me out!’ Gary screamed, but Bobby kept going.

  Chapter 21

  Lilly pressed her hand to her head and felt the pain shoot up through her neck. They were going to hit a tree any second. She could feel it coming, the corn falling in front of them, but it was something else that got them, a log or a piece of the road. The undercarriage cried out in agony, but the car bounced up and they were on asphalt again, wheels turning out of sync with their speed and Bobby wrestling the wheel like a lunatic.

  They turned away from the street, down a dirt track going towards a farm. It looked half deserted, but Lilly knew better. She knew people who lived in places like that back home. A wooden house with the land around it all sold off or unworked, but there would still be people living there.

  ‘Not there,’ she said. ‘We can’t hide there.’

  ‘We can’t hide anywhere Miss Lilly,’ Bobby swerved again off down, across a field that hadn’t been ploughed or planted in years, just dry stalks and weeds. The car, American made, but not in the right decade, struggled over the packed, uneven earth. There were trees up ahead, maybe three miles off and he was straight lining it in that direction.

  ‘Okay, Okay. Enough is enough.’ Gary held up his hands. ‘What is this about, huh? What’s this got to do with me? Running away like this – you’re not going to get that money out of me now. You get that right?’

  Lilly turned around in her seat. ‘You trying to say that was the cops coming to find us to give us the cash? Drop the act.’

  ‘I’m just the fucking customer!’ He appealed to Bobby. ‘Let me out. I didn’t ask for any of this. I didn’t know I was getting involved in a kiddie porn ring, with a psycho bitch!’

  ‘Hold your horses, cowboy,’ Bobby said. ‘I’ll let you out. Let me find a place to dump your ass. I’m sick and tired of hearing you whine.’

  Lilly looked back over the fields. No one was coming for them, but the sirens were there, somewhere on the other side of the bridge, and they would come closer. Bobby was right. There wasn’t anywhere to hide. A crop of pines separated two dead fields. They pulled into the trees and slid to a halt. Dry ground covered in needles. Nobody moved.

  ‘This is it,’ Bobby said without turning around. ‘This is your stop.’

  Gary, who had been so eager to get out, now just sat there. ‘But this is…the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘Get out,’ Bobby said calmly.

  The door opened slowly and Gary pulled himself up. There wasn’t much there, just branches high above and needles on the ground. He was right. It was nowhere, but what did that matter with satellite navigation and cell phones. He could call his assistant. She’d send a car for him or a private VIP ambulance. Gary stumbled one step away from the car. He took another step. Lilly watched him, but couldn’t feel sorry for him. A gunshot wound to the foot, a small one at that. It would heal in a few days and then what? He’d have a story he’d be using for years about how he was kidnapped by these two lowlifes. He’d probably be telling people that she had tried to pick him up, how he’d outsmarted her. Maybe in five years’ time, she’d be in a jail somewhere in The South, getting it nightly from prison guards just like him and he’d be sitting in a restaurant still profiting from the event.

  It wasn’t fair, but it was the way it was.

  ‘Hey Gary,’ she said out of the window. ‘You got any cash on you? I’m going to need some cash.’

  ‘Go to Hell.’ He turned around.

  She pushed the door open. ‘I’m not joking.’

  ‘Lilly…’ Bobby’s voice died in the hush of the trees.

  Gary went in his pocket. ‘If you wanted it so bad, you should have taken it on Friday night.’ He threw his wallet her way. It landed on the ground in front and she stooped to pick it up, watching his feet as she did. It was heavy, but it was the leather that made it so. Inside there was a single fifty.

  ‘My father gave me that wallet for my twenty-first birthday. It’s Italian leather, from Milan. I hope you like it.’

  ‘Is your father dead?’ she asked.

  He looked at her sideways. ‘No.’

  ‘Then he can buy you another. I want your phone too and your watch.’

  ‘What watch?’ He held up a bare wrist.

  ‘It’s in your pocket. You took it off when you thought you were going to get to fuck me.’

  He shook his head, as if she were the pathetic one robbing him blind, but threw it over.

  ‘Phone.’

  ‘Sorry, no can do, I need my phone.’

  ‘I’ll call your assistant. I’ll tell her where you are.’

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Allow me the common courtesy of keeping my phone on me to know I’m going to get picked up. Even if I did call the cops from here, what am I going to tell them? Shit, they were here five minutes ago. Be reasonable.’

  ‘You can say which direction we went in.’ She held her hand out.

  And he shook his head and began patting himself down. It was like a mime artist. First the front pockets, then the back, then his legs where he didn’t have pockets. ‘I’ve dropped it. I lost it when we hit that car.’

  Lilly turned around. The back door was still open. She went over.

  ‘It went out the window!’ Gary shouted.

  She bent down into the back. His sunglasses had fallen on the floor too and she picked them up. She didn’t recognize the brand, but they were nice looking. The phone was under the seat too, still glowing like he was talking to someone. She reached in and pressed the screen, hung up on Charlene, imagined a skinny blonde in Los Angeles gasping as the line went dead. She would think the worst. Girls like that always did. As the call died, the screen behind showed. It was GPS. He
’d turned it on when he called Charlene and it was still on now. Lilly pressed cancel and that screen died too.

  ‘Wow. That would have made it real easy. You really didn’t want to give us a fighting chance.’

  ‘Why would I? People like you have got to learn that their actions have consequences, not just for themselves. I mean for their victims! If you killed a man, you better be willing to look his wife and kids in the eye.’

  ‘And what if you don’t kill your victims? What if you just hurt them really bad? What’s the payment for that?’

  Gary squinted trying to catch her meaning. ‘So what are you going to do? Shoot me in the other foot? Shoot me in the balls?’ His voice wavered. ‘No, you’re a bitch. You’ll shoot me in the back as I walk away?’ And he lifted his foot sluggishly, went to turn, but Lilly already had the pug up in the air.

  ‘No,’ she said and working her thumb, she let off one shot. It was like throwing a pebble into an oil drum. It was hard to tell where it hit if it hit. Then a spray of blood came out from his neck, nothing more than a bug hitting a windscreen. He coughed and the spray came again, bigger this time. Now his throat began to run and wet his t-shirt around the neck. He put one hand out to steady himself on thin air and the other grasped at his collar, trying in vain to stop the blood as it ran down his arm, coming in rivers now, like the trace of a vein on the outside of his body, stopping at his elbow and dropping onto the ground beneath. He fell to his knees. She lifted the gun again.

  ‘No.’ Bobby’s hand grasped at the pug gun, enclosing around hers. He was squeezing it, but she wouldn’t let go. ‘He’s dead,’ Bobby said.

  ‘No, he’s not!’

  ‘Believe me, darling. He will be. If you leave him here long enough.’

  ‘What do you know?’ She turned on him. ‘How many people have you killed?’

  Bobby pulled away. ‘Give me that gun.’

  And she watched his jaw tighten.

  ‘I think we’re even, aren’t we, at one all?’

  ‘What’s wrong with you? Think of the God damn consequences for once!’