by Jodi Compton
“No, but there’s a good chance,” I said. “Think about it: If Brittany gets arrested, she’ll implicate him as a co-conspirator, both before and after the fact. That can carry a sentence as stiff as the original offense, which in this case is murder.” I let that sink in. “Quentin will tell Brittany that they need to kill me because the one thing that’ll close the Eastman-Stepakoff case with a certainty is if I turn up dead. The confession by suicide—it’s a classic.”
“How would he get your handwriting on a confession note?”
“You’re thinking way too elegant. Quentin’s idea of subtlety will be to walk me into an abandoned building, stick a gun under my chin, pull the trigger, and spray-paint the words I’m sorry on the wall.” Then I said, “Besides, he said he was going to kill me. He doesn’t mean someday years from now, when I’ve dropped my guard. He’s not a chess grand master. He wants to settle accounts now.” Then I played my trump card: “¿Cómo vivimos?”
She stared straight ahead, through the windshield.
“Serena. ¿Cómo vivimos?”
“Ad limina fortunarum,” she said, capitulating, underscoring her frustration by grinding her cigarette harder than necessary into the pullout ashtray.
It was our old affirmation, in Spanish and Latin. How do we live? To the limits of our fate.
Then Serena blinked, and for a moment her face looked so sad I thought she might cry. Now, that really was crazy.
She shook it off and said, “What if he flies?”
“He’ll drive. He’ll need a car once he gets down there.” I didn’t add that he wouldn’t rent a car, either, because he wouldn’t want to leave telltale blood or hairs in the trunk of a rental car.
“How’s he going to drive if we’ve got his car keys?”
“Hopefully he’s got a spare to the car,” I said. “But just in case, you need to tiptoe back and drop the keys somewhere near his front door.”
“Like we dropped them by accident?”
“Yeah. He won’t figure it out. The guy’s not the world’s deepest thinker, like I said.”
This part of the plan would have been easier if I were dealing with Joe Laska. I wouldn’t have to wonder if Laska had a spare key to his car. He would, and he’d remember exactly where he kept it. Quentin couldn’t be counted on to be that organized.
I held the smoke from the last of my cigarette in my lungs, then exhaled and squashed it in the ashtray. Then I took out Quentin’s cell phone. I’d taken it from his house because it would be useful to read whatever text messages Brittany might send him, at least until he got in touch with her and told her not to use that phone number anymore.
“Call that Laska guy,” Serena said. “I’m going to walk over to the car, make sure there’s a release in the trunk. Give me the keys.”
When she’d gone, I took out Quentin’s phone, scrolled to Joe Laska’s number, pressed “Options,” pressed “Call Number.” He picked up on the third ring. “What’s going on?” he said.
“This isn’t Quentin. It’s Hailey Cain,” I said.
“Last year’s girl,” Laska said, his voice mild and unsurprised. “What can I do for you?”
“Your man Corelli, the fellatio enthusiast, is in a closet in his apartment, tied up. I don’t think he’s going to get free by himself, so you’d better send someone to help him.”
“Your resourcefulness never fails to amaze me.”
“I’d love to play the banter-between-adversaries game,” I said, “but I’m short on time. Let me ask you one thing: Last year did Quentin keep my finger as a trophy?”
“What?” he said. “No, I dropped the finger down a sewer grate, because it would have been just like Quentin to keep it, even though it linked him to a violent felony.”
“Why do you even keep that guy on the payroll? He’s a loose cannon, and I’ve punked him twice now.”
“Maybe you should have killed him.”
“Nice talk, especially from his friend and employer.”
“Let’s just say employer,” Laska said. “Quentin’s a bad guy to have angry with you, especially if you’re a woman. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Why do you care what happens to me?”
“I don’t.”
Serena betrayed her nerves only by lighting up her second cigarette in five minutes as she and I crossed the street. Otherwise her face was set, cool. I didn’t have to catch my reflection anywhere to know that mine was, too.
“We’ve gotta do this fast and casual,” I said. “Once we’ve started, don’t scope around for anyone who could see us. Be as casual as if you were unloading groceries from the trunk. Don’t act guilty.”
“I know,” she said, stepping up onto the sidewalk.
It would have been much better if Quentin kept his car in a garage, but at least the long side driveway, shielded by two-story buildings on each flank, was nearly as good as a carport.
We walked down the alley and reached the car.
“What if there’s already a body in there?” Serena asked, and we both started laughing.
“Shut up,” I said. “Turn around, look around real casually. You see anyone?”
So far it hadn’t really mattered if one of Quentin’s neighbors saw us; all they would have seen were two young women entering and leaving Mr. Corelli’s place. But if anyone saw me climbing into the trunk of his car and Serena closing it, that’d be too strange to ignore.
I slid the key into the lock and opened the trunk, looked underneath for a release, and saw it, glow-in-the-dark yellow-white plastic tag on a cord. Good.
Beyond that was a mostly clean space, except for a tangle of jumper cables, a gallon of antifreeze, and a set of golf clubs.
“Golf clubs?” Serena said, echoing my own thought: Quentin Corelli golfs?
I said, “Maybe he’s on the executive track for thugs.” Then, “Come on, we’d better do this before someone comes along.”
She lifted out the golf clubs and pushed the jumper cables to the side. Gingerly I climbed in and edged all the way to the back, where the body of the car, not the trunk lid, overhung the storage space. It was a generous, deep trunk. Thank God not every car maker in America went for fuel economy. I’d slid Quentin’s cell phone into my pocket, switched off, and now I took out the Browning, to hold it in front of me. Quentin wouldn’t pack elaborately—he wasn’t going on vacation—so I hoped that what little he took with him he’d throw into the cabin space of the car. If he did open the trunk, I was hoping he’d just toss his bag in without really looking, the way an angry and distracted guy would.
If those two plans failed, though, I’d have only a short time in which to defend myself. I needed the gun ready.
“Come on,” I told Serena. “Cover me up.”
She leaned in, holding the blanket she’d taken from her own car in her hands, then stopped. She said, “I don’t like doing this, as if you’re a body already. It feels like seeing the future.”
I knew that Serena believed in past lives; she had never suggested before that she believed in premonitions. I made light of it. “Think about him,” I said. “Think how stupid he’s gonna look, racing down the freeway to catch someone who’s only four feet away.”
She nodded, but not with a lot of conviction.
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
She arranged the dark brown blanket around me, and then I felt her push the bag of golf clubs back against me, leaving space for Quentin to easily toss in a bag. Then she said, “Tú estás en mi corazón, Insula.”
“Semper in corde meo,” I said.
Serena closed the lid, and I flinched as the pressure differential pushed against my eardrums.
19
This is your life: You were your parents’ only child, the light of your father’s world before he died much too young. You wanted to honor his memory, and to do so ran a gauntlet of challenges to get into one of the nation’s most elite institutions, the United States Military Academy. You’d spent the first eighteen year
s of your life mostly in places where trash blew up against fences and no one cared, so you decided that you’d live the rest only in the cleanest, brightest places, with people who made you better just to be around them.
And now, at not yet twenty-five years old, this is you: in the trunk of a car with an unregistered gun in your hands. When you get where you’re going, someone might try to kill you. Or you might have to kill someone.
I don’t know where I was when I started thinking about these things. Soledad maybe, King City. The confinement was making me stiff, sore, hungry, and increasingly reflective. That wasn’t a label you could often hang on me, but being in the dark, alone, with absolutely no distractions, that probably counts as special circumstances.
Things had worked out about as I’d hoped. I’d been in the trunk a little over an hour when I’d heard Quentin’s fast, angry footsteps on the pavement. He’d opened and slammed a passenger-side door—throwing in his bag, I assumed—and then the driver’s-side door. He did not open the trunk. My hands, on the Browning, had relaxed.
As the time wore on, I tried to imagine everyone I knew, where they were and what they were doing. Serena was easiest: She was on the road, maybe a little ahead of us. She’d had to return to the hotel for our things, but then Quentin had had to wait for whoever Laska sent to come and untie him, and then he’d had to throw at least a few things into a bag for his trip, so I was guessing Serena had gotten on the road a bit ahead of us. CJ was hardest: Was he still in Africa, or had he come back to the States by now? Was he alone or with friends? I couldn’t know.
My mother, Julianne, was living in San Diego now. With a man; there’s always a man. She and I hadn’t been in contact for months. Not an estrangement per se. Just very little in common.
My real family, as I sometimes thought of them, were CJ’s parents, sister, and brothers. Julianne and I had moved in with her sister Angeline and brother-in-law Porter, and their big, ramshackle house outside Lompoc was for me, after a lifetime of Army posts, my first real family home, with a sprawling yard and the smell of baking clinging to the kitchen wallpaper and arguments about who was spending too much time in the bathroom.
Angeline and Porter had since sold that place and were living in Washoe County in Nevada. Porter was retired, though Angeline, a homemaker, was still earning extra money the way she always had, giving piano lessons and selling flowers from her garden at a farmers’ market. Their children, the brood of four they’d transplanted from West Virginia, had all stayed behind in Southern California. Moira, their daughter, was a teacher now. Both Constantine and Virgil, CJ’s brothers, had inherited their father’s gift with machines and worked as mechanics.
Magnus Ford was probably at work, among the people who knew his face and found the sight of the Shadow Man unexceptional.
That brought me to Joel Kelleher. Was he still in San Francisco or back in Los Angeles already? Or en route? He could be driving on the 101 like Quentin and Serena, or he could be overhead, studying his notes and diagrams on a short flight back to Los Angeles.
I’d screwed up with him. He’d revealed a bit of himself to me—the thing he’d said about fear, about feeling like the only one who was hiding it. Even though it was just the Ambien that had brought his defenses down, I felt like I’d mangled my answer, that generic, useless line about everyone feeling afraid sometimes. I wished I’d said something better, though I wasn’t sure exactly what that would have been.
Joel probably would have envied me my severely blunted capacity for fear; Serena had already implied that she did. And as insensitive as their attitude might have seemed—I mean, my lack of fear came at a very high price, which I would pay sometime in the not-too-far-off future—I understood it. Because who really wanted to feel afraid? Who, being freed from fear, would deliberately re-create its smothering demands? A severely compromised ability to feel fear had been of obvious advantage when I’d been a bike messenger in San Francisco, where couriers are paid on commission, and speed and traffic-law breaking mean more runs a day and higher tips from satisfied customers.
And later, in the gang life? Don’t get me started.
But deep down, part of me envied Serena, and now Joel, too. People like them, who felt fear and acted anyway, they could know they were brave. I couldn’t say the same.
20
Another liability that comes from not feeling fear properly: It’s too easy to fall asleep when no sane person would. Like in the trunk of a car.
Now I’d lost what little sense of time, and therefore distance, I’d had. I’d come fully awake with a memory of hearing and feeling the car door slam, shaking the sedan’s body. The engine was off, and Quentin’s footsteps were receding outside. I groped for the Browning in the darkness; it had slipped from my hands. Then I raised my head and tried to listen for the sounds around me.
Was this a pit stop, or had we arrived? If it was the former, I couldn’t afford to open the trunk. People might see me, among them Quentin, if he was merely paying a gas-station clerk in one of those glass booths. And once I opened the trunk, that was it. I couldn’t simply flag down a passerby to do what Serena had done, close the trunk for me. Excuse me, sir, could you just give me a hand with this? Thanks, that’s perfect.
I slid my hand into my pocket and delicately withdrew Quentin’s cell phone, brought it to life. The screen threw off its greenish light, and then the digital display came on. The time was three minutes to nine p.m.
I ran the numbers. We’d left San Francisco a little after three, and if Quentin had driven around eighty miles an hour—he was probably a leadfoot—the timeline worked out. I was inclined to think we’d arrived in Los Angeles.
After perhaps ten minutes of listening and hearing nothing, I pushed the blanket off and edged toward the front of the trunk, my gun still in one hand. My neck was so stiff that I knew when I rolled it, it would crackle like broken glass. This would be a very bad time for Quentin to catch me. After lying still in a cramped space for nearly six hours, I didn’t think I could run at all; I’d hardly be able to walk. But I reached out in the dark, found the trunk release, and pulled. There was a dull metal popping sound as the trunk gave way and the interior light came on. Shit. If the car was parked facing the building where Quentin was, and he looked out the window … I cupped my free hand over the little clear glass bulb. In the dimness that followed, I saw a sliver of dark blue ambience, the nighttime world outside.
Go on and do this.
I pushed the trunk lid up farther, raised myself up and out, and dropped to the concrete below, crouching so that the body of the car sheltered me.
Quentin’s car was parked in the driveway of a one-story house on a quiet residential street. There was a large shade tree overhanging the lawn and a light glowing behind one large window. The other homes on the street were dark, their occupants likely asleep.
I scanned the wider area, getting my bearings. We were in the hills somewhere; I could see their black silhouette above the roofline across the street. While this was clearly a quiet suburban area, there was enough diversity in the sizes and shapes of the houses that I sensed this was an older neighborhood—the homes didn’t have the high-end uniformity of a luxury subdivision. There were paved sidewalks along the street, but no streetlights. The air was faintly scented with bougainvillea.
I wanted to go closer to the house, all the way up to the window. Although the shutters behind the glass were closed, at point-blank range there’d be narrow gaps that would provide me a glimpse of the people inside. I was maybe twenty yards away from the woman who’d ruined my name. I wanted pretty badly to see her.
But I couldn’t afford it. There were ornamental shrubs in front of every window, and they’d rustle if I pushed them aside to get up close. Under normal circumstances the inhabitants of a house might not be expected to hear it. When most people go into their houses, the world outside becomes a distant abstraction; they’re watching TV, talking to family, oblivious to anything else. But if Brittany
was inside, with Quentin, both of them were aware of the possibility that I’d show up. That was the whole reason behind Quentin’s arrival. They’d be more alert than most people to stray noises.
Would the backyard afford a better view? Possibly. A lot of people kept the windows on their backyard open at night when they closed the blinds in front. But again that meant navigating unknown territory. Was there a dog? More bushes to shove through? Better not to risk it.
I wasn’t scared, but I was careful. What was the point of the hours I’d just spent cooped up in Quentin’s trunk if I recklessly got myself caught? I needed to confirm that Brittany was here and then tell Ford where she was.
And then what? It wasn’t enough for an arrest that I’d seen a woman who could pass for me, associating with the guy who only I knew had stolen my gun. Ford would need more.
Balked, I paced the edge of the property. There was a tall tree in the yard, with wide-spreading branches, and at the boundary line was an oversize oleander bush, or maybe two that had grown together in a shaggy mass. I knew about oleander bushes; they were everywhere in California, famous for being fabulously poisonous but also extremely popular as decorative bushes. When we were kids, CJ and I used to hide ourselves in the mostly hollow center of the oleander on his parents’ property, hanging out in the shade and privacy it gave us. This bush, now, might serve a similar purpose, a hiding place where I could watch the people close by.
While I was considering all this, the light in the living-room window went out.
I walked over to the mailbox and opened it. But it was empty. I’d thought if the house’s residents hadn’t collected their mail, I’d at least have a name to give Ford, maybe one he could link to Brittany’s past.
Just then the front yard was bathed in light from the floodlight over the garage door, and I sprinted for the shelter of the oleander bush. I pushed my way in through the dense branches and crouched down, my hand resting on my holstered gun.
