Jail Coach

by Hillary Bell Locke

  God, I love this woman.

  “That tells us how. My question was why.”

  “I noticed someone creepy checking out my office yesterday.”

  Eight to one she was lying. But even a one-in-eight chance of Chaladian casing Rachel was something I couldn’t blow off. I shrugged.

  “Okay. You’re here.”

  “Sorry about interrupting. It looks like it was about to get interesting.”

  Ladasha swiveled her head toward Engeleiter.

  “Does she think we’re here to do him?”

  “No, she doesn’t.” I answered the question. “She’s pretending to think that.”

  I thought I read “fuck you, Jay” forming on Rachel’s lips. It turned out that she had a different f-word in mind.

  “Fair enough. I probably deserve that.”

  “Okay.” Proxy finally moved from her position by the door into the middle of the room. “We were having a confidential discussion, and we were just coming to the most sensitive part of it.”

  “So I guess the polite thing for me to do would be to go down to the bar for an hour or so.” Rachel took another hit on the Virginia Slim. “But I’m guessing that your discussion involves the creepy guy who was stalking me, so I think I have some skin in the game.”

  I expected Proxy to give that one a close-but-no-cigar. She surprised me.

  “Describe the creepy guy.”

  “About my height. Dark eyes. Not overweight. Solid build, but not a brick shithouse or anything. Somewhere in his forties. And bald as a cue ball.”

  Proxy showed me one of the better poker faces I’ve ever seen.

  “All right Jay’s call, but as far as I’m concerned, you can stay.”

  Rachel helped herself to the bed, digging out two of the pillows to prop against the headboard and rest her back and head on. I nodded at Ladasha.

  “As you were saying.”

  “What Trina be doin’. That what y’all want to know?”

  “Yep.”

  “She say she an’ this guy has this thing goin’ on. Pretty slick shit. The guy would spot a young, minor league athlete—baseball, hockey, didn’t make no difference. Some kid maybe gonna’ make millions down the road. Trina would get him in the sack with her and do him. Tell him, ‘Don’ worry ’bout no rubber, I’m on the pill.’ This goes on two, three times. Then she’d come runnin’ to him, bawlin’ like how she be pregnant, what am I gonna do, all that shit. An’ of course he’s like, okay let’s get you an abortion, you know? An then she’s like, ‘I can’t have no abortion, that’s against my religion. You got to pay child support.’ Now, see, child support, that’s some percent of whatever this guy happen to be makin’. So right now it ain’t nothin’, but five years from now, that’s maybe some percent of a million bucks, you know? An’ he’s thinkin’, ‘Shit, baby, I be fucked.’”

  “I hope they didn’t think they were coming up with anything new.” Engeleiter sipped her drink. “That was in the grifter’s handbook before I was born.”

  “I don’ know nothin’ ’bout that. Anyhow, then Trina’s man, he’d come into the picture. She call him Stan the Armenian. He’s all, ‘Look, you just write us a check for fifty thousand, sixty thousand, we’ll call it even. So they’d go back an’ forth for awhile. Finally, the kid’s agent scrapes up whatever he can, they sign some papers, and everything be cool. Then Trina get herself an abortion, you know, an’ they be ready to start again.”

  Ladasha paused. I happened to look from her face to Rachel’s. The look in their eyes was oddly similar, kind of fatalistic and defiant at the same time.

  “So, anyhow, they do this two times an’ make a nice little pile. I mean, shit, nice work, you know?”

  “Nice work for Stan the Armenian,” Engeleiter muttered.

  “Then she go for the third time around. Got theirselves a prime target. Nineteen-year old baseball player in, like, Double-A or somethin’, an’ the Astros are real high on him. Trina gets herself knocked up an’ the whole routine, you know? Except this kid’s agent is one hard-nosed motherfucker. The back an’ forth drags on an’ on. They finally get theirselves a nice, big check, but by the time they get it Trina is more than six months along.”

  “So that complicates the abortion, I guess,” Proxy said.

  “Oh, she got an abortion all right. Stan found this place in Kansas that would do it. But that baby in Trina’s belly, she be too tough to die from any damn abortion. She come out alive an’ kicking, baby.”

  “Luci.” I thought I’d whispered that, but I apparently whispered it loud enough for Ladasha to hear.

  “Thass right. She name that little girl Lucinda, and she call her Lucky Luci. Say she gonna keep her. Not just that, but she say she out of the racket. She through with that shit.”

  ”Stan the Armenian doesn’t like it.” Proxy started connecting the dots out loud. “He claimed paternity to try to pressure Thompson into staying with the scam. She isn’t sure who the father is. Maybe Stan really is the guy. She gets Luci to gramps so that he can hide her in Mexico. Then she does seven months in the Harris County slammer and three tours in Iraq rather than give her up.”

  “That be about the size of it, I guess.”

  My eye strayed over to Rachel on the bed. She was hugging herself, chin down on her chest, shaking and starting to sob silently. If Ladasha or Engeleiter noticed, they pretended not to. They stood up, Engelieter first and Ladasha a half-second behind her.

  I took the wad of hundreds out of my shirt pocket, peeled off twenty, and handed them to Engeliter. She thumbed out five of those and handed them to Ladasha. Proxy followed the money changing hands with professional dispassion. I handed the unused thousand to her.

  “We’ll need a receipt,” she told Engeleiter.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  I’m not a sucker for chicks crying. Sometimes it’s real and sometimes it’s fake, but it never moves the ball, so my general policy is to get lost while it runs its course. But Rachel isn’t a weeper. Her standard pissed-off mode is ice queen, and Plan B is Psycho Bitch from Hell, which involves swearing and hitting and throwing things. So I figured something more than sisterly solidarity was behind the waterworks. I walked over and wrapped my arms around her.

  She reacted first by trying to fight me, like a kid throwing a temper tantrum. That lasted maybe five seconds. Then she sort of collapsed against my body and just let the sobs come.

  “Uh, okay, then.” Proxy started edging toward the door. “Maybe I can answer some emails and we can hook up again around ten.”

  “No way.” I looked up and made damn good and sure she saw my eyes. “We need to talk right away. All three of us. So just chill for about ten minutes.”

  Proxy didn’t chill. She sat back down at the worktable, took a minilegal pad out of a pocket in her computer bag, and started drawing on it. Proxy Shifcos working with pen and ink instead of on a computer—imagine that. Rachel cried. I held her. While I did, I thought about Lucky Luci, with her blond bangs and solemn eyes, being dumped into a D&C pail like sloppy garbage. I stopped thinking about that as fast as I could, because it wasn’t doing anything good for me.

  It took eight minutes instead of ten. After a lot of Kleenex dabbing, we managed to get three dry-eyed adults around the worktable.

  “I paid two-thousand dollars in tuition.” Proxy looked up from her chart. “Tell me what I learned.”

  “Thompson is off the table as long as Chaladian is in the picture.” I settled back in my chair. “Doesn’t make any difference how much money we throw at her. All Chaladian has to do is tell Luci that her mom tried to kill her in the womb, and he destroys Thompson’s relationship with her daughter. So, no way Thompson can perform without putting Luci at risk. Therefore, she doesn’t perform.”

  “Sounds right to me.” Proxy doodled a
t the top of her chart, without looking at it. “Option one is paying him off, which you’re against. So the question is, can we keep Trowbridge from imploding in jail without Thompson?”

  “Not without neutralizing Chaladian. He took a six-figure hit on Trowbridge’s indie-crap last picture. Trowbridge’s agent probably dissed him when he made noises about payback. So Thompson or no Thompson, Chaladian will keep trying to sabotage Trowbridge unless someone motivates him not to.”

  “Suppose we motivate him?”

  “Motivate him how?”

  “Make good his loss. I mean, what is it, four-hundred-thousand something?” Proxy said the number as if it were chump change. “Say we give him, what, a hundred thousand up front. That’s more than he figures to sweat out of Wells’ dad anytime soon. Then, if Trowbridge fulfills his contract, we pay off the rest.”

  Proxy turned her chart around so that I could read it. It had four columns:

  $

  Risk w/Thompson

  Risk w/out Thompson

  Exposure Value

  36MM

  1%

  2%

  360M/720M

  24MM

  10%

  30%

  2.4MM/7.2MM

  12MM

  20%

  40%

  2.4MM/4.8MM

  6MM

  15%

  25%

  900M/1.2MM

  0

  54%

  3%

  0/0

  100%

  100%

  $6.06MM/$13.9MM

  DISCOUNTED EXPOSURE VALUE:

  w/THOMPSON:

  $6,060,000

  w/out THOMPSON:

  $13,920,000

  “This is the way Quindel will analyze this issue,” she said. “I don’t know what risk percentages he’ll assume, but it almost doesn’t make any difference. The ‘with-Thompson’ percentages that I picked are a lot more conservative than the four-to-one shot you came up with, and even so it skews way toward payoff. If there’s even a ten percent chance of getting Thompson back on the job by throwing four hundred thousand at Chaladian, it’s a very good bet, because the difference in exposure value is twenty times higher.”

  “I get it. I can almost follow the math. But I’m sitting here telling you it’s not a ten percent chance. It’s zero percent.”

  “That’s exactly what you’re telling me, and I’m hearing you. But Quindel will say that you can’t be objective because you have a conflict of interest.”

  “That would be me.” Rachel socked my bicep with her fist. “I’m your conflict of interest. Call me ‘Connie’ for short.”

  “Meaning that I’ve got some macho male thing going on that makes me say we can’t reward Chaladian for threatening Rachel.”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  “Best case, the only way this could possibly work would be to go through Wellstein,” I said.

  “And you hit a brick wall when you tried to reach him.”

  I really should have told Proxy that I had another baited hook dangling in the Wellstein pool. But I didn’t. Instead I smiled at her.

  “Selling starts when the customer says no.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “Ukrainians have been killing Russians for practically as long as there have been Russians, Rachel. You can do this. It’s in your blood.”

  “Chaladian comes from Georgia.”

  “A Georgian is just a Russian with a suntan. Now work the pump and squeeze the trigger like I showed you.”

  She racked the pump on the Remington 870 twelve gauge back and then pushed it forward. Not the smoothest thing in the world, but it got the next shell into the chamber all right. Raised the shotgun to her right shoulder and acted like she was aiming it. If she actually had to use the thing in my apartment, of course, there wouldn’t be a hell of a lot of aiming going on before she pumped goose load into everything in front of her. But I didn’t want to discourage her. She pulled the trigger instead of squeezing it and flinched as she did it. Hard to blame her. That gun has a kick like homemade vodka. Naturally, her shot went way high.

  I choked back a crack about how we weren’t duck hunting. She’d never fired a gun before tonight. I had to cut her some slack.

  “Shit. I’m pathetic.”

  “It’ll come together. Do it again. Squeeze the trigger gently, and try to fire without jerking the barrel up.”

  She didn’t argue, didn’t cuss me out. Just started loading more shells into the magazine. A pump-action shotgun is practically an antique these days. Almost everyone uses automatics. But the problem with automatics is that you can fire them too damn fast. In your first actual combat situation you’re liable to empty your magazine into the ceiling before you know it.

  She focused again on the black-on-gray target rectangle thirty feet away. The shotgun roared. Bit of a flinch but not nearly as much, and a much smoother trigger squeeze. A respectable number of pellets actually peppered the target. Before I could even think about saying anything, she worked the pump back without taking the shotgun from her shoulder and squeezed off another shot. Then she did it again and again. She kept it up until she’d fired all five rounds. She’d shredded the target—and unless I missed my guess, she’d also done a pretty good number on her right shoulder.

  When she brought the gun down and turned to me, her face was radiant. Glowing. Not with happiness or satisfaction, or anyway not just with that. She was turned on. Period. Ready to go at it, right then and there.

  “Okay, let’s get back to the apartment.” I stretched out my right arm to invite her to hand the gun to me. “We still have some work to do.”

  Which was true. On the flight back from Houston Saturday morning, we’d talked the Chaladian situation through and agreed that for the time being she should move into the apartment with me. It was a lot easier to defend than the house. That would mean I’d be spending my nights in a sleeping bag on the living room floor for a while, but I’d rather do that than attend her funeral. So we’d killed that afternoon getting some of her stuff moved in, and then had our little Saturday night at the shooting range.

  I didn’t have any illusions about turning her into a self-defense machine by teaching her the bare basics of firing a shotgun. The point was to make her feel like she had some control, that she didn’t have to just sit there and wait for something to happen. Probably an illusion—but illusions can be useful things.

  On the same theory, I worked out a basic DefCon protocol with Rachel after we got back to the apartment. I had her practice picking the shotgun up from the coffee table, taking the safety off, and raising it to firing position. Then I loaded it, clicked the safety on, and set it on the table.

  “This stays here, right?”

  “Got it,” she said.

  I moved a floor lamp over to four feet from the door and turned it on high.

  “The lamp stays on at all times, right?”

  “Got it.”

  “If you hear someone trying to break in, every other light that’s on in this room goes off, you pick up the shotgun, stand right at the table, and get ready.”

  “Got it. What about the bedroom
window?”

  “It’s inch-thick thermal pane and can’t be opened. Besides, this is the fourth floor in an eight-floor building, with the fire escape at the far end. Unless Chaladian gets Spiderman on his side, I don’t see the window as much of a risk.”

  “Got it.” She nodded firmly.

  “Good.”

  I headed for the bedroom closet to dig out my sleeping bag. She didn’t say a word, but something made me stop and look over my shoulder. She was giving me one of her patented Rachel-looks—in this case, the one that meant I want it and I want it now.

  “Jay? This…stuff, this preparation, the gun and the rules and the getting ready. It excites me.”

  I turned around to face her directly. I put my fists on my hips. I think I saw a little flash of fear in her eyes, and I swear it looked like that “excited” her too.

  “I thought the problem you had with me was that I’m walking around with all this violence coiled up inside of me, like some kind of bomb ready to go off.”

  “No. That was bullshit from my therapist.”

  “That’s funny, because I didn’t hear it from your therapist. I heard it from you.”

  “I bought into it. But it wasn’t true. I knew you were a soldier when I married you. I knew you’d been in combat, I knew you’d killed people. I didn’t think you were a chorus boy or a dancing master. It’s complicated.”

  She shut up. She looked like she was trying to make more words come but couldn’t quite get it done. I didn’t know what to do, what to say, how to say it.

  I didn’t hug her. I put my hands on her shoulders. I tried to be tender about it, but I was probably a little rough. I could feel her muscles reflexively recoiling.

  “Look, Rache, you don’t have to flash guns to excite me. All you have to do is breathe. But whatever the problem is, we’ve gotta get it on the table and work it through. Or give up. All or nothing. I’m not going to share you with anyone. And I’m not doing any on-again/off-again crap. It’s all-in, all the time, or we cash in our chips. That’s the deal.”