by Jeff Shelby
“Yes,” Ramon said. “From a distance, of course. But, you see, Mr. Costilla, he figured you were the guy to help us. Like he told you.”
I shifted on the bench and felt the gun press harder into my ribs.
Ramon nodded at the letter. “May I?”
I handed it to him. He read it quickly, then handed it back. “I guess I will only need the bag, unless there is anything else in there you need.”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to give up the money, but I knew the letter was more important. I wasn’t going to lose another battle with Ramon and his friend.
I felt the gun pull away from my body.
Ramon reached for the bag and slid his gun down to the bench between our bodies so it was hidden. “Mr. Costilla is grateful. He hopes that there are no hard feelings.”
I looked at Ramon. “He didn’t kill her, did he?”
Ramon shook his head sadly. “No, he did not, Mr. Braddock. He told you that. I can see why you wouldn’t believe him. But he didn’t.” He nodded at me. “Good-bye.” He tucked the bag under his arm, and he and the other guy disappeared out the door.
I sat there, my mind reeling. I heard a ringing in the distance as I stared at Kate’s letter in my hands. I looked at the words, not reading them, but wondering how things had gotten so bad for her.
The ringing intensified, and I looked up from the letter, irritated that some idiot didn’t realize his cell phone was ringing.
Then I realized I was the idiot.
I stuck the letter in my pocket and pulled out the phone. “Yeah?”
“We’ve gotta talk,” Randall Tower said.
I stood up, gripping the phone tighter. “Fucking right we do.”
“I need to talk to you,” he said, and I realized he was drunk.
“Where are you?” I asked, heading for the door. “Because I’m coming.”
“Meet me at the gliderport,” he said, his words running together. “We can fly away together.”
I hung up the phone and sprinted to my car.
59
As I weaved in and out of the evening traffic on I-5, I called Liz on my cell.
“Guess what I found?” I said, when she picked up.
“What?”
I told her about the money and the note.
“Do you have it with you?” she asked.
“The note, yeah. The money, no.”
“Where’s the money? In the locker?”
“No, Ramon has it.”
“Who the hell is Ramon?”
“Costilla’s sidekick.”
“Shit.”
I passed a slow-moving van on the right as I flew past Old Town and Presidio Park. “I know. Nothing I could do, though. But you need to see the note.”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “There’s something else you should know though.”
“What?”
“Charlotte Truman’s dead.”
My chest tightened. “What? How?”
“Not sure. After you talked to her, I called a friend in LAPD and asked him to notify me if her name popped up in anything unusual. He just called. They found her in her hotel room.” She paused. “A witness got a license plate leaving the hotel in a hurry.”
“They run it?”
“Yeah, it was rented out of Lindbergh Field. By Randall Tower.”
It was like I saw the punch coming but didn’t bother ducking. “What a fucking surprise that is.”
“Agreed. Where are you right now?”
“On the five, the La Jolla Parkway exit,” I said, trying to block Charlotte’s face from my mind.
“You going to see Carter?”
“No, I’m going to talk to Randall.”
The line buzzed for a moment, and I knew she wasn’t happy. “This isn’t for you to handle.”
“The fuck it isn’t,” I said. “I just got off the phone with the asshole.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know. He called me, said we had to meet. And I agreed.”
“You need to wait for me. Or Wellton,” she said. “He was on his way to Westwood to meet with the LA guys about Truman. I can call him on his cell.”
“Randall called me, Liz,” I said, gripping the steering wheel tighter. “I’m going to see him. And I’m not waiting. Come if you want, I don’t care. But I’m not waiting.”
“Where are you meeting?” she asked, the aggravation clear in her voice.
“He says he’s up at the gliderport.”
“Noah, don’t do anything until one of us gets there. You got it.”
“Bye,” I said and clicked off the phone.
It rang again five seconds later. I figured it was Liz again, but the caller ID on the phone showed a number I didn’t recognize. I punched the button. “Hello?”
“Dude,” Carter said. “I’m starving. Where’s my dinner?”
“Carter, I’m busy right now,” I said, swinging the Blazer over into the far right lane. “I can’t.”
“What’s going on?”
I told him what I’d found, what Liz found, and where I was headed.
“Wait for Liz,” he said. “If you tear him up, there’s gonna be nothing she can do.”
“The letter’s good enough,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” he said. “It doesn’t mean shit. Doesn’t mean he killed her.”
“She was afraid of him, Carter,” I yelled into the phone. “She was hiding the money. Charlotte Truman is dead. Ramon told me again that they didn’t kill Kate. I believe him.”
“You believe Costilla’s thug? Come on. You’re not thinking, Noah.”
I fired the phone at the passenger door. I took the La Jolla Village Drive exit and headed toward the Torrey Pines gliderport to find Randall Tower.
60
The gliderport lurked just south of the long fairways of the Torrey Pines Golf Course, a giant clearing amidst the thick trees and ultra-modern buildings of the biotech corridor along Torrey Pines Road. It was a magnificent takeoff spot for the crazies who were into hang gliding, a flat clifftop that abruptly disappeared and sent them shooting out over Black’s Beach, three hundred feet above the Pacific.
I turned down the paved road that ended in a cul-de-sac. Access to the dirt road and parking area was chained off, a sign proclaiming the port closed after eight at night. A blue Ford Taurus was parked next to the sign.
I parked the Blazer behind the Taurus and got out. I blinked several times, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. I shivered into the cool wind that whipped up and off the cliff face, listening to the ocean roar in the distance.
I walked around the empty lot and down the narrow dirt road. I squinted into the night and barely made out a faint light up ahead where I knew the steep path down to Black’s began. As I got closer, I heard whistling.
Randall was seated on the dirt landing at the top of the stairs, beneath the signs proclaiming the danger of the cliffs and the unstable path, his back to the ocean. A dim, single bulb light barely illuminated the signs, a whistling Randall, about eight empty beer bottles, and one ominous-looking syringe. His light blue oxford was untucked, the left sleeve rolled up above the elbow, and his khakis were wrinkled and dirty at the knees. He didn’t seem to notice that just three feet to his left, the earth disappeared.
He was holding a bottle of Grey Goose in his hand, and he lifted it toward me as a greeting. “Hey, Mister Super Private Detective is here. Woohoo.”
“Yeah, I’m here,” I said, my jaw aching from the clench I’d placed it in since talking to him on the phone.
He made an exaggerated act of looking at his watch. “Well, it’s about time.” He wiggled the vodka bottle in the air. “Can I offer you a drink?”
I kicked the bottle out of his hand, and it went flying down the steep path, shattering somewhere down below. I grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him off the ground and to his feet.
“I don’t want a drink, asshole,” I said, jerking him closer so he could see my face. “And I
don’t want to share a needle, either. I want to know what you did to Kate.”
His head lolled to one side, no fear on his face, just drunken, strung-out comfort in his glazed-over eyes. “Come on, man. Noah. Buddy.” He smiled, his eyes half open. “Let’s have one last beer together.”
I spun him away from the stairs and threw him to the ground, his body hitting the dirt in front of the stairs like a bag of rocks.
He looked up at me, surprised, then pointed a finger at me. “You are so strong, man.”
The anger erupted inside my chest, and I jumped on him, driving my fist straight down on his nose. It collapsed like a stepped-on snail, and he screamed, his voice echoing out over the water into the dark.
“Listen to me,” I said, lowering my face next to his, my anger giving my voice an edge I didn’t know it had. “I know you killed Charlotte Truman, and you’re gonna tell me what you did to Kate. Or you are going over the side of this cliff and then I’m gonna come down and break everything that’s not already broken.”
“Charlotte,” he slurred. “I didn’t want to.”
“I wanna know about Kate.”
“You don’t understand,” he mumbled.
The blood from his nose looked purple in the dark. His eyes crossed as he tried to get a look at the damage in the middle of his face. He touched it with his hand, winced, and then clumsily tried to shove me off of him. I moved to the side, but kept a hand in the middle of his chest.
“Make me understand, Randall.”
He knocked my hand away and rolled over awkwardly, and I stood up with him.
He turned around to face me, staggering a bit to his left. The blood leaked down his face onto his shirt. He tried to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, but managed only to smear it onto his cheek.
“She made me do it,” he said, sounding as if his mouth was full of gravel.
The anger surged again in my chest. “What?”
He looked at the blood on the back of his hand, then at me. “She made me do it, you dumbass.”
I grabbed him again, spun him around, and pushed him back toward the top of the stairs and the edge of the cliff. He tried to push me away, but I didn’t let go. He twisted around, trying to look behind him as I marched him toward the edge.
“Don’t!” he said, his eyes moving wildly. “It’s not my fault!”
I stopped about a foot short from where the edge gave way to a long, nasty tumble, the ocean groaning at the bottom. “All of this is your fault. All of it. You let Kate go down for your mistake.” I jerked him toward me so we were chest to chest, my fists full of his shirt, pushed up under his chin. “And now you’re telling me Kate made you do all of it? It was her fault?”
He blinked several times, and the fear that had shaped his face was gone. He looked at me for a moment, his hands dropping to his sides, giving up.
“You still don’t get it,” he said, almost laughing.
Anger streaked through my body, and I shook him hard, our foreheads banging together. “You’re right! I don’t!” I jerked on the oxford again and the buttons that ran down the middle popped loose and I stumbled a couple of steps back, a piece of the cotton fabric clutched in my right hand.
We stood there for a moment, both of us breathing heavily, the wind whistling around us. I looked at him, blood running from his nose onto his now exposed chest.
There was something so familiar about him.
Then I looked at the piece of shirt in my hand.
And that’s when I finally figured it out.
“Don’t move,” a voice whispered in my ear, the cold barrel of a gun pressing into the back of my neck. “Don’t turn around until I tell you to.”
The voice should have startled me, but it didn’t. I knew, staring at Randall, what I had been missing all along. I had been lulled into looking in the other direction, not looking right where I should have been all along. As I stood there, the voice whispering in my ear, my gun pulled from my waistband, I couldn’t believe that I had missed it.
And now, as the ocean roared down below us, I figured I was probably going to miss the rest of my life.
61
Emily Crier said, “Turn around slowly, Noah.”
I did as she said.
“You two having fun?” she asked, pointing my gun at me. She tucked her gun into the waistband at the front of her jeans. “Looks like it.”
I could only stare at her. Blond hair piled on top of her head. Black sweater and black jeans. Black sandals and black gloves. The blond hair was the only thing that made her stand out against the night.
Randall came up next to me, steadying himself against my shoulder. “I took care of Charlotte, Em. Like you wanted.”
Emily didn’t respond.
“And I didn’t tell Noah anything,” Randall said. “I swear.”
She looked at him. “That’s great to hear.”
She moved the gun from me to him and shot him twice in the chest, the shots echoing like cannon fire in the night.
Randall’s eyes widened, his mouth open in a large, silent circle. He stumbled backward, clutching at his chest.
She fired again, hitting him where his hands were clawing at the first two wounds on his chest.
He looked at her, confused, took two more steps backward, his legs giving way, and tumbled over the ragged edge, disappearing from sight down into the unwelcoming water below.
I stared at the empty spot where Randall had just been.
I turned to Emily.
“You were the other woman,” I said.
She laughed softly. “Brilliant.”
“Randall’s shirt,” I said, holding up the blue fabric in my hand. “That was the same shirt you had on when I came to your place the other night. It wasn’t your ex you were with. It was Randall.”
“I hope my parents weren’t paying you too much,” she said. She motioned with the gun to move. “Nice and easy, okay? Move under the light where I can see you.”
I dropped the piece of cloth and sidestepped slowly about fifteen feet to my right so that I was back under the dim light, next to the warning signs.
“Somebody’s gonna find Randall,” I said.
“I’ll be gone,” she said.
“They’ll find you.”
“No, they’ll think you did it. Came here all pissed off and shot him.” She smiled. “Your bullets, Noah.”
“How long were you with Randall?” I asked, now wondering if there was any way I was going to survive.
“Too long.”
“You love him?”
“Actually, yes, believe it or not. I loved him.”
I processed what I knew. “But he wouldn’t leave Kate.”
She let out an irritated sigh. “That’s right, Noah. He wouldn’t leave her. Little Kate won again.”
“Won again?”
She laughed. “Kate always won. Since we were kids. It got so damn old. Kate got everything she ever wanted.”
“I don’t think she wanted to die,” I said.
She laughed again. “No, you’re right about that.”
“You killed her because Randall wouldn’t leave her?”
She paused for a moment, as if she was considering what she was going to tell me. Then she gave a tiny shrug, like it didn’t matter one way or the other.
“If you wanna put it that way, I guess I did,” she said, rolling her eyes. “She decided to confront me before she went back home.”
“Confront?”
“She found out about me and Randall,” she said, smiling, her teeth biting into the darkness. “She listened to a message I’d left for him on his cell phone. A couple of weeks ago. She didn’t go to Randall with it. She blamed me, and I guess it took her that long to get up the nerve to call me on it.” She shook her head, clearly annoyed that her little sister was so weak. “So she called me up the night before she was supposed to go back to San Francisco, ranting and raving. I played dumb and offered to go down to the hotel to meet her th
at night. She was waiting for me in the parking lot, a little drunk and a little strung out. She started threatening me, telling me to stay away from Randall, and I had to make a decision. We were all alone.” She nodded, as if she were affirming her decision. “It wasn’t hard to do, and I felt better the second she stopped breathing.”
The way she spoke, the way she recounted killing her sister, came off like she was reciting a grocery list. I knew she’d have no problem killing me.
“But more than anything, I just got tired of coming in second,” she said, her eyes flashing. “Jesus, she even got out of the heroin thing.”
“You put the heroin in the car?”
“No, I had Randall do it,” she said, frowning. “That’s one of the things I made him do, as he started to tell you. I wasn’t touching that crap. But I knew she’d take the blame for him. Good little Kate.”
We stood there on the clifftop, the water crashing below us, the dark sky getting darker by the second. A realization hit me.
“You introduced Kate to heroin,” I said, staring at her.
Her frown shifted into a small smile. “That I did. She came to visit me my senior year at UCLA. A little weekend partying. Friend of a friend showed up with it. I never used it. But I wondered if she would.” The smile on her face darkened. “She did, and she was in love.”
I had family issues. Since I had never known my father, I guess it was just one issue-my mother. I wasn’t sure that I loved her, but I didn’t hate her, didn’t have the sick anger that would make me look for ways to destroy her.
“You see,” she said, shaking the gun at me, “Kate was always number one in our family. I was a distant second. Always. The only thing she ever did wrong was date you. I had to push her along, get a few more black marks on her record.”
I glanced around, letting her talk. There was nowhere to go.
“I figured when she hit the heroin, that was it,” she said. “Finally, she had done something that would make her look less than perfect. But, no. My parents…her parents…did everything possible to help her.”
“And you didn’t want to help her?” I asked her.
“I could’ve cared less,” she said. “So when Randall and I started sleeping together, I knew I could finally have something of hers.”
