Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot

by Jodi Compton

  Tess tilted her head slightly. “You think it’s too great a logical leap? If this were only about your identity papers, I’d say maybe it was just a crime of convenience. The use of your gun, the failure to pick up the casing at the scene … It was simply logical to me that there was an aspect of this that was about you personally. Don’t you think?”

  I shrugged. “Seemed egotistical to assume that.”

  “But maybe it’s not. Laska did say that one of his guys was ‘personally bothered’ by you.”

  “Quentin Corelli. He was one of the other two guys in the projection booth.” I played with a strand of newly brown hair, thinking. “He was making it kind of personal. We had a little history, from up in Gualala, where I took Nidia away from him.”

  “So that’s not anything new, that this guy didn’t like you.”

  “No,” I said. “He has a grudge, and he was in the tunnel in Mexico, which would have allowed him to steal my identity papers.” I lifted a shoulder. “I have to start somewhere. I might as well make that my working theory, that he’s the one who sold my papers and gun to some female con artist. If he isn’t, maybe he’ll know who is.”

  “You can’t go to San Francisco alone and brace one of Joe Laska’s men. You don’t even know where he is.”

  “Laska said that he saw Quentin regularly,” I pointed out. “And Laska took over your father’s businesses. It sounds like he doesn’t just see Quentin, he also signs his paychecks.”

  Tess’s face had darkened. She stood up. “This is insanity. The last time you opposed these men, you nearly got killed. If it weren’t for me, you’d be dead now.”

  “I know,” I agreed. “Have I said thanks recently? Thanks.”

  “Don’t be flippant. You know what I’m saying.”

  “Actually, I don’t,” I said. “You just helped me change my appearance. You knew I wasn’t going to the police and that I was planning to go back out in the world and straighten this out. Where’d you get off that train?”

  Tess looked away, out the window. She said, “I knew you were going to do something typically risky, but I didn’t think you were planning something suicidal.”

  “Nothing’s planned just yet,” I said. “I’m still thinking through my options.” I moved closer, put a hand on her shoulder. “If I go get my gym bag and walk out your front door, are you going to call the police? Tell them what I look like now, that I’m traveling on foot in the vicinity of Westwood?”

  Tess shook her head silently.

  “Then I hate to be a pest,” I said, “but can you give me a lift?”

  9

  A half hour later, I was safely on the other side of the locked door of my Crenshaw place. Tess and I had carefully cruised past the building and then around the back, scoping up and down the street for anything that looked like police activity. Nothing had struck me as suspicious.

  Just before getting out of the little Crossfire, I’d leaned back in the open door and said, “I already owed you before this, Tess, and now I’m in twice as deep.” I’d looked away, into the sun, and then back down at her. “I pay my debts. I’ll pay this one, too.”

  I’d expected her to say something characteristically generous, like, Just come back alive, but she’d assessed me with serious gray eyes and simply nodded.

  Tess hadn’t been fooled by my little “Nothing’s planned just yet” speech. I was going to San Francisco, because there were two people up there I needed to see, for vastly different reasons. One was Quentin Corelli, who had tortured me for Laska last year and would have been happy to kill me. The other was Jack Foreman, an Associated Press reporter, who had liked me and, I hoped, still believed in me.

  The sky was clearing fast, and I shaded my eyes against the sun as I waited at the edge of the parking lot for a family returning from church to cross to their first-floor apartment. They were in the kind of Easter finery you didn’t see much anymore, not in California: Mom in a wide-brimmed hat, father and son in clean-lined summer-weight suits, the little girl in a blue lace dress with a skirt splayed wide by an under-layer of tulle.

  When they’d passed without seeing me, I climbed the stairs to my second-floor place, unlocked the door, and went inside.

  My apartment always greeted me with the sort of spare quietness you felt when you’d been away for weeks. I wasn’t there enough to make the kind of welcoming, personal messes that reminded you of what you’d been doing before you went out, nor had I put any effort into making the place look like it was mine. Here it was now, an unloved and unlovely place, with worn-out lime green carpeting, a heavyset Zenith TV, my few books on cheap secondhand shelves.

  In the bedroom I threw my gym bag on the bed, unzipped it, and took out the things I wouldn’t need: my fight clothes and mouth guard. Then I packed. I pried up the carpeting at the corner of the living room and retrieved my emergency fund, five hundred-dollar bills, to add to the six hundred I’d carried away from the fights. Then a change of clothes, the baby Glock and ankle holster, soap and toothbrush and toothpaste in a Ziploc bag, as well as the makeup Tess had given me to re-create the fake bruise at will. A mini-flashlight and a little digital camera: I wasn’t entirely sure I’d need those, but I was going to be doing some surveillance on Quentin, and they might come in handy.

  My cell phone, lying on the center of the bed, buzzed, and I reached over and picked it up. I’d had this phone only since January, after losing the last one in my confrontation with Skouras’s guys. I’d given the number to almost no one, which explained why I hadn’t already been flooded with calls from people saying, Hailey, have you seen the news, what the hell? I expected that this was Serena, wanting to know where I was and what was going on.

  Then I saw the number on the screen, and my heart stopped.

  CJ was calling me.

  Immediately, before he could speak, I said, “CJ, I didn’t do what they’re saying. I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do. Please believe me.”

  The voice that answered was male, and it was slow and calm and unhurried, like my cousin’s. But it was clearly older, with a rasp at the edges. “Miss Cain,” it said, “I’m sorry, I’m not your cousin Cletus. Please don’t hang up. You’re talking to one of probably two cops in America who don’t think you killed those people up in San Francisco.”

  “Who is this?”

  “My name is Magnus Ford.”

  The hair prickled on my arms and the back of my neck.

  He cleared his throat. “This must be confusing. The call registered as from your cousin’s phone because we got his account information from his cellular company and cloned a phone with his number.”

  “But how did you get my number?” I said. I had a cheap, pay-as-you-go phone and bought airtime cards at convenience stores. There shouldn’t have been account information for him to access.

  He said, “Before I answer that, Miss Cain, can I ask you one question? Are you missing a finger on your left hand?”

  That was the last thing I’d been expecting him to ask, and that was how I knew the question was important.

  “Yes,” I said. “Can I ask you how—”

  Then I stopped. I didn’t like this. My phone might not have had an airtime plan with account information for Ford to access, but it did have a GPS system. As long as it was activated, Ford could track me.

  “Miss Cain?”

  I said, “Give me your phone number and I’ll call you back.”

  10

  I’d left the Aprilia parked near the Slaughterhouse last night, thinking it too much a risk to be on the roads on something with a license number traceable to me. Now I wished I had it, as I slung my bag over my shoulder and locked my apartment behind me. The helmet would have been ideal to hide my features behind. Or I wished that I lived back east, where in early April the weather was probably still cold enough to justify hiding under a cap, behind a scarf. Instead I was in L.A., where the mercury was climbing steadily toward a hundred degrees at midday. I touched my fak
e bruise for reassurance as I headed down the sidewalk, much as I used to touch my birthmark out of self-consciousness in my younger years.

  A tall woman, addict-thin and with acne scars under her chestnut-colored skin, was doing some kind of personal business on the pay phone four blocks from my house, and she glared at me when I lingered too close, waiting for her to be finished. It was nearly fifteen minutes before she finally hung up and walked off without a backward glance at me.

  The handset of the phone was warm and almost slippery where she’d been holding it. Ford answered on the first ring. Instead of hello, he said, “I’m not trying to track you, Hailey.”

  He was showing me he’d known that any unidentified pay-phone number was going to be me. All right, you’re clever, we knew that, I thought. I also didn’t believe him and knew I couldn’t extend this conversation too long. Pay phones could be traced, too.

  “Are you there?” he said.

  “I’m here.”

  “I’m being up front with you, because I meant what I said about thinking you might be innocent. That doesn’t mean I’m sure. It’s a working hypothesis.”

  “How’d you come up with it?” I asked.

  “You’ve been seen on several occasions in East Los Angeles, most recently the day after the Eastman and Stepakoff murders.”

  “By you?” I said. “Have we met and I don’t know it?”

  “No,” Ford said. “This was an associate of mine.”

  I am a goddamn idiot. “The blind guy in the park, Joe Keller,” I said. “He’s one of yours.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he’s obviously not blind.”

  He laughed, a short, rusty sound. “Are you kidding? Joel Kelleher was the best shooter in his academy class. Kid could hit the ten ring standing on a water-bed mattress.”

  That explained why he’d reacted so quickly to the prospect that I might reach for his sunglasses and try to look at his eyes. Even an experienced actor would have difficulty faking the sightless gaze of a blind person; a young cop would have known that it was beyond his skills.

  It also explained how Ford had gotten my cell number: I’d written it right on the skin of a police officer.

  “So it was your little joke,” I said. “Your ‘eyes’ in the field, faking blindness.”

  “Not a joke,” Ford said, “a tactic. Of course, we were looking for drug and gang activity—we never expected to net a suspect in a high-profile double homicide. But when the APB on you came in, Joel took one look at it and said, ‘I was just talking to her in the park this morning. Something’s not right here.’ He said he’d spoken to you on two prior occasions within less than two weeks. Then your fingerprints came over the wire, and Joel said, ‘This is screwy, too. There’s ten fingerprints here, but this girl has only nine fingers.’ I suggested maybe you were just one of those rare flukes, a dead ringer for someone else, but Joel said no. He’d seen your birthmark. And he said you’d told him that your name was Hailey.” He paused. “Of course, that doesn’t mean you weren’t dividing your time between San Francisco and L.A.”

  “I wasn’t,” I said. “Mr. Ford, if you’re serious about believing I’m innocent, try this: My DNA’s in the Pentagon’s battlefield registry. Ask the SF forensics guys if they found a single piece of DNA that matches mine. They won’t have.”

  “What about the thumbprint on the casing?”

  “It was a stolen gun,” I said. “I should go. I’ll call you again.”

  “No. No more game playing. You want my help, come in.”

  “I can’t. Not yet.”

  “Hailey, do you want some nervous rookie cop to smoke you on the street? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you stay out there.”

  I hung up and stood a moment, thinking.

  Magnus Ford, the Shadow Man, had a guy in the field doing his spying and his legwork. I needed someone like that on my side. I went to another pay phone and made a second call.

  “Hello?” Serena said, cautious as always when the readout on her cell said UNKNOWN CALLER.

  “It’s me,” I said, “and I can’t talk long. I think I know how I got set up. You want to ride on a mission with me?”

  “I’m in.”

  “Wait, you need to understand what I’m asking. Yeah, I need you, but I don’t like it. This could get dangerous. Remember last year?”

  “How could I forget that shit?”

  “This might come down to the same stuff: some surveillance, some lawbreaking, possibly a throwdown or two.”

  “I’m good with that,” she said. “Warchild and Insula, kicking ass again. It’ll be fun.”

  11

  Serena marveled at my new hair color and especially the bruise: “That shit is tight, prima.” She assumed I’d done it myself, and I didn’t explain to her about Tess. CJ and Tess were the only really sane people in my life, and I took care to protect them from all the others, who, like Serena, were by necessity a little crazy.

  She took me to where I’d parked the Aprilia and followed as I rode it to Chato’s chop shop for storage. I wasn’t happy about leaving it behind, but there’s a big difference between a sport bike and a roadster. My Aprilia had no panniers, no storage. Neither Serena nor I traveled heavy laden, but this was a mission. We needed to carry gear.

  By midafternoon, we were on the 101, heading north in her Chevy Caprice. I took the first shift driving. As I did, I told her what I’d learned and what I believed about it: that everything grew out of last year and my clash with Skouras’s men.

  “The mobster’s crew again?” Serena said. “We shoulda killed those pendejos when we had the chance.”

  Serena liked to talk like that, as if she were as bloodthirsty as the gangsters of legend. I didn’t know whether to believe it. There were a lot of years I hadn’t been a witness to her life, though as far as I’d heard, she hadn’t ever killed anyone.

  I told her that among the things I was going to need from her was partly boring stuff, like going into mini-marts to pay for food, so my notorious face could stay off security cameras. She nodded and didn’t complain.

  Our relationship was flexible like that. Normally she was in charge and I was her lieutenant. But now my future, maybe my life, was at risk, so this was my mission, and I’d lead it. Serena knew that. We’d been friends too long to let ego issues get in the way. We’d hashed that stuff out long ago.

  Then Serena said, “Hey, I got you some stuff. Extra cartridges for your piece and—” She dug in the black gym bag at her feet and came up with a small white pill bottle from which the label had largely worn off. She shook out part of the contents in her hand. Glancing over, I saw Dexedrines, Vicodins, Ambiens, as well as some plain orange-brown Advil tablets.

  She said, “You mentioned stakeouts—that’s what the Dex is for. The Ambien so we can sleep when we need to, between stakeouts. The Vicodin, who knows when that’ll be helpful?”

  “I’m not sure we should be traveling with this stuff.”

  She shrugged. “We’re both carrying unregistered weapons, you’re wanted for murder.…”

  “So why sweat the details?” I finished for her.

  A few hours later, we stopped in King City to eat. I didn’t want to risk going into a fast-food place, so Serena went to buy takeout we could eat in the car. When she was gone, I went to a pay phone outside a grocery store, turning the “bruised” side of my face toward the wall. The ugly mark in itself might draw attention I didn’t want.

  The phone rang three times before he answered. “This is Ford.”

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Hailey?”

  “There are some things I should add to our earlier conversation.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m going to give you the address of the apartment where I’ve been living in L.A. for the past four months,” I said. “If your techs dust for fingerprints there, they’ll find all of mine except the left little finger, the one I lost since I was fingerprinted for the Army’s data
base.” I paused. “That print is the only one that it’s possible the San Francisco techs could have found in the Eastman place.”

  He absorbed that. “You’re saying,” he said, “that someone could have your amputated finger and be using it to create a kind of biological forgery?”

  “I can’t rule it out.”

  It was a theory I’d come to unhappily, thinking about it on the drive north. Last year I’d thought Quentin was likely to be the “fetishist” who’d needed a trophy from the torture session. If he was, and he was also behind the sale of my identity papers and my gun … well, maybe he was both inventive enough and disturbed enough to think of it.

  “How’d you lose the finger?”

  “That’s a story for another time,” I said. “Let me give you the address to my apartment.”

  After I’d hung up, I wondered if I was being paranoid in warning Ford about a biological forgery, as he’d called it. It was a theory that echoed Tess’s question from earlier: How much of this was about me? The sale of the identity papers and even the gun I could write off as simple greed on Quentin’s part. But if they found my fingerprint in the Eastman house, that would be personal. Quentin would have to know he was setting me up to go to death row.

  I watched birds circle over the parking lot, looking for dropped french fries or bread crusts. The 101 was a cool roar not far off.

  Was I creating a bogeyman in my head, building up Quentin Corelli into a master criminal when he wasn’t? Adding up what I knew about him, it didn’t come to much: a little older than me, a foot soldier for Skouras and now for Joe Laska, good-looking in that golden brown Italian way, tightly wound, kinetic, foul-mouthed, misogynistic. He was a nasty piece of work, but I wasn’t sure he was capable of engineering a complicated frame-up. Neither did I know if his resentment of me burned that hot.

  I picked up the receiver of the pay phone again. There was a second call I wanted to make, and again I thought it would be safer from a pay phone whose number wouldn’t show up on caller ID.