I nodded.
Shortie kept his eyes on my face for one more agonizing beat, then slipped his glasses back on, apparently satisfied.
I felt every muscle in my body sigh in relief as he walked back to his car. Goon Number One held the back door open for Shortie, then got in the backseat himself as Goon Number Two got behind the wheel.
Adrenaline-laced sweat dripped down my back, but I stayed rooted to the spot as I watched them do a three-point turn and drive back down the dirt road. What do you know, I was good at undercover work after all. No dead bodies. No angry mobsters. Not even a cranky cop to muddy the waters. I felt glee rising up in the back of my throat as I pictured the look on Ramirez’s face when I handed him the proof that would crack his case wide open. Not so girly now, huh?
I squelched the urge to jump for joy, lest the Men in Black see me victory dancing in the rearview mirror. Instead, I waited until their taillights disappeared down the road, then waved in Felix’s general direction.
I could have sworn I saw the flash of his camera lens in response against the dark night sky.
But that was the last thing I saw.
A crack of thunder exploded inside my head and the desert landscape instantly folded in on itself as the ground rushed up to meet me.
Then everything went black.
Chapter Nineteen
Once when I was in college at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, I went out with a group of my friends after spring finals. Linda, who was majoring in film production and had just landed a job with Dream-Works, suggested we go to the Golden Gate Club to celebrate. She insisted news like a DreamWorks job called for Apple Pie shots. This sounded like a great idea to me considering a) I’d just spent the last three nights staying up until two A.M. writing essays about the difference between a kitten and stiletto heels, and b) who didn’t like pie? That is, until I realized that Apple Pie shots consisted of schnapps, followed by vodka, followed by more schnapps. I’d like to say I had a wild night to remember. Only I couldn’t. Remember it, that is. The last clear memory I had of that night was showing some guy named Snake how I could touch the tip of my nose with the tip of my tongue.
I woke up the next morning with stale gym socks breath, sandpaper tongue, and Tommy Lee drumming a pounding beat between my ears. It was the Brangelina of headaches, the Mt. Everest of headaches, the worst aching-eyes, throbbing-temples, ringing-ears, pounding-head, so-bad-you-want-to-throw-yourself-in-front-of-a-bus-just-to-stop-the-pain headache to end all headaches.
And this was worse.
I groaned, the pressure of a sixteen-wheeler pulsating through my brain with every breath I took. My mouth felt scratchier than polyester pants in August and my eyes ached like they’d been glued shut. I slowly did a mental check of my person, wiggling first my toes then fingers. All ten of each seemed to be functioning. Though, as I moved on to wriggling my hands, I noticed they didn’t have quite the range of motion I was used to. Mostly because they were bound together. I rubbed my wrists together and something sharp and plastic bit into them. Ditto my ankles. I wiggled my butt, feeling a hard, cold floor beneath me.
I gingerly opened one eye then the other. It was dark and I continued the painful practice of blinking, trying to bring the shadows into focus. It looked like I was in some sort of storeroom. Cardboard boxes were stacked along the walls and a couple of empty wardrobe racks sat off to one side. I could hear a steady thump, thump, thump of music from somewhere just beyond the plaster walls, echoing through my head, where I felt a serious goose egg trying to take hold.
“Hello?” I called out. Okay, I should say tried to call out. It was more like a pathetic little squeak, my throat drier than my mother’s elbows in January. And, I realized, useless. Over the music no one could hear me anyway unless they were in the same room.
As I sat there, immobile, slowly letting my eyes adjust to the darkness, I tried to remember how I got here. Or, for that matter, where here even was. Had I passed out? Fainted? Had one too many dessert-themed shots again?
I looked down at my bound feet, clad in five-inch patent leather platforms. Then in a flash it all came back to me. The Drag Queen Chic look, the Men in Black, the warehouse in the desert.
The ground meeting my face.
Someone had whacked me on the head! I hated it when people did that. Just when I’d thought everything had gone so well, too. I’d passed as Larry, the Marsuccis had their money—everyone should have been happy. I just hoped Felix had gotten a shot of the creep who’d hit me.
Felix!
My only hope. He must have seen the whole thing. Maybe he followed me. Maybe he was, at this very moment, corralling the troops to break in and rescue me…
A fantasy that was cut short as I heard a groan from the other side of the room.
“Uhn. Bloody ’ell.”
Great. So much for my rescue.
“Is that you?” I asked, squinting through the darkness.
“Maddie?”
“Yeah. What happened?”
He groaned again and I heard movement, then another “bloody hell,” as he realized that, like me, he was bound. “I don’t know. The last thing I remember, I was popping off a shot of those Italian blokes taking your bag and now here I am.” He paused, groaning again. “With a hell of a headache.”
On the upside, at least he had gotten the shots of the Marsuccis.
“Where’s your camera now?” I asked.
He groaned again, this one louder and sadder. “No clue.”
So much for the upside.
I leaned my head back (carefully, to avoid the goose egg) and felt tears prick the backs of my eyes. Ramirez was right. I was an idiot for not staying in L.A. when I had the chance. Mobsters, goons, Mafiosos—what did I know about these kind of people? Nothing. Less than nothing. Negative nothing. So nothing that I’d flubbed the one chance of proving Monaldo’s connection to the Mob and gotten myself and Felix both kidnapped in the process. Not only that, but I had a feeling that when whoever was responsible for the goose eggs came back, they weren’t just going to cut our bonds and let us go. I had a feeling my last moments on earth were going to be dressed as a fifty-something drag queen.
But do you want to know what the worst part was? The worst part was I was going to die without ever having sex with Ramirez! This thought was so depressing that tears escaped my eyes, rolling down my cheeks in big fat droplets.
“Are you crying?” Felix asked from across the room.
“N-n-n-no,” I sobbed.
He shifted on the floor. “Er…there, there. It’s going to be all right,” he said awkwardly.
“N-n-no it’s not!” I wailed. “You’re just saying that to m-m-make me feel better.”
“It’s not really working very well, is it?”
I sniffed, doing a sob slash hiccup thing. “We’re going to die and it’s all my fault!”
“No, no,” Felix said. He shimmied across the floor like an inverted inchworm until he was sitting beside me. “Look, this is as much my fault as it is yours. I should have been watching you better. I was too focused on my lens to notice anything else. It’s my fault we’re here.”
I sniffed again. “You’re right. It’s your fault.”
“Well, you didn’t have to agree with me quite so quickly.”
I looked up to find Felix doing one of his self-deprecating grins again. Maybe it was the darkness, or maybe the impending death, but it seemed just a fraction more charming this time.
“So,” he said quickly, “any guesses where we are?”
I looked around the room again. “A storeroom of some sort.”
“The warehouse?”
I shook my head. Then regretted it as the pounding between my ears went into double time. “I don’t think so.” My eyes had adjusted to the windowless room and I could make out faint writing on the side of one of the cardboard boxes nearest me. Budweiser.
“The club!” I cried. “We’re at the Victoria.”
Felix nodded beside
me, putting it together at the same time. “Someone must have followed us from here. They must have seen you drop me off.”
“Monaldo.” I felt my previous tears quickly turning into anger. That guy was really starting to piss me off. First he gets me arrested, then whacks me over the head. Who did he think he was? I was suddenly wishing Mom had stunned him a little harder when she had the chance.
I was about to let out a string of curses aimed at the creepy little weasel, when the sounds of someone outside the room froze me in place. Felix heard it too, going stiff beside me as our eyes riveted to the door on the far side of the room.
“If this is the end,” Felix whispered beside me, “I’m sorry I pasted your head on Pamela Anderson’s body.”
“And I’m sorry I broke your nose,” I whispered back.
“Apology accepted.”
I held my breath as the door swung open, the sudden light from the hallway momentarily blinding me. I blinked, squinting at the huge form silhouetted in the doorway.
The door slammed shut behind him and overhead fluorescent lights flickered to life. Again I felt my pupils contracting harshly as I blinked at the man, now bathed in greenish flickering light. Unibrow. And he wasn’t happy. The hairy caterpillar hovered over his eyes in a menacing line as his beady eyes bore into me. Only that wasn’t the scary part. The scary part was the gun he had pointed at my V-neck top.
I bit my lip, for once willing myself not to open my big mouth as Unibrow’s threatening gaze bounced between Felix and me.
But, apparently Felix felt no such compunction.
“Where’s my camera?” he demanded.
Unibrow narrowed his eyes at him. “We don’t like people that takes pictures.”
“I’m a member of the press,” Felix retaliated. “You can’t hold me here. I demand our release immediately.”
His eyes narrowed further. “We ain’t too fond of press either.”
Since Felix was only serving to piss off the man with the gun, I jumped in with a different tactic. “Please, please, please let us go?” I pleaded, throwing on the best innocent little girl face I could while being bound hand and foot amidst cases of longnecks. “Look, we don’t know anything. And we won’t tell anyone anything. Because we don’t know anything. Where are we? I don’t know. Who are you?” I shrugged. “I don’t know. See, I’m just a dumb blonde. I couldn’t give a description of anyone or anything to anybody.”
If it wasn’t effective at least my speech had entertainment value. Unibrow laughed, letting out a quick, dry cough. “I don’t think so. Monaldo was very specific about what to do with you.”
I gulped. “Um, so what are you going to do with us?” I squeaked out. Even though the gun leveled at my chest gave me a pretty good idea.
“Don’t worry,” he said, a twisted smile distorting his ugly features. “We’ll take care of you.”
Oh lordy. There was that phrase again.
“Like you took care of Bob Hostetler?” Felix piped up beside me.
Unibrow’s caterpillar hunkered down in a frown again. “Shut up!” he growled.
I nudged Felix in the ribs. Why was he dead set on antagonizing the man with the gun? Ix-nay on the urder-may.
“Or what about Hank?” Felix asked, not giving in. Even under threat of .38 special in the schnoz, he was all reporter.
“I didn’t do nothing to Hank,” Unibrow protested.
Felix smirked. “That, my hulking friend, is a double negative. You didn’t do nothing implies that nothing was not done, which means that the opposite of nothing, which is something, was, in fact, done by you. So, in essence, you just admitted that you did do something to Hank. Something quite nasty, I’d venture to guess.”
Unibrow hunched his caterpillar down in a perplexed stare. “Huh?”
“You see, it’s really a quite simple rule of grammar—”
“Shut up!” Unibrow growled again, shoving the tip of his gun against the white bandage covering Felix’s nose.
Felix snapped his mouth shut with a click.
“I’ve had enough of you,” Unibrow said, his voice low and scarier than a Wes Craven villain.
I heard my breath come out in deep ragged gasps as I held myself rigid against the wall. I heard the gun cock, the chamber loading. Oh god, he was going to shoot Felix!
Then, as if to prove me wrong, he added, “But ladies first.” He swung the barrel of the gun to the right, catching me squarely in the chest.
Oh god, he was going to shoot me!
I closed my eyes, feeling hot tears run down my cheeks again. Images of Mom, Faux Dad, Larry, and, oddly enough, Ramirez flickered through my head at lightning speed as I silently said a prayer to the saint of hopeless causes. Saint Jude. Funny that I should remember that now. But I did, with crystal clarity. I prayed with all the desperation of a woman who hadn’t been to Sunday mass in years, promising to give money to the poor, to volunteer with sick children, to stop having unholy thoughts every time I watched Ramirez walk across the room in his butt-hugging jeans. Anything! As long as the next sound I heard wasn’t the shout of a gun redecorating the sparse walls with my innards.
I waited, my breath hitched in my throat, my eyes clamped shut, my lips pursed into a thin white line.
Only the gun didn’t click. Instead, I heard the sound of glass breaking just outside the door.
I popped my eyes open. Unibrow had heard it too. He froze, his entire pea brain focused on listening to the commotion outside the door. Which was growing. Something thudded against the wall and I heard voices, all yelling incoherently. Unibrow took a step toward the door. Then paused, looking back at Felix and me, his one eyebrow hunching down in concentration. Apparently it was a big decision—shoot the blonde first or go break up the bar fight?
Luckily, Unibrow was not the sharpest stiletto on the rack and chose option number two. Two lumbering strides and he was at the door, hand on knob. Only he never quite got the opportunity to turn it as the door came bursting off its hinges, slamming toward Unibrow like a battering ram was on the other side. Unibrow stumbled back before regaining his grip on the gun. He may have been slow witted, but years of Mafia experience had made him quick on the draw. Before I could yell out a shout of warning to our would-be rescuers, he had his hands around the trigger and was squeezing off shots that cracked against the doorjamb, sending splinters of wood flying into the air. Crack, crack, crack. He got off three shots in a row, before one really loud bang echoed from the doorway and Unibrow fell backwards, a bright red stain spreading across his chest.
I screamed. A long, loud, roller-coaster-worthy scream that echoed in my own ears even after I ran out of breath to sustain it. I looked from the toppled giant to the doorway, expecting to see police, the Feds, Ramirez, the LVMPD and good old Detective Sipowicz.
Instead I saw a smoking black LadySmith attached to the shaky hands of my best friend. Dana.
I think I screamed again. Only this time it was more like the second time you ride the roller coaster, when you realize that as long as your harness actually does hold you in, those dips and rolls are actually kind of fun.
Behind Dana the cause of the commotion came pouring into the room—the Nanny Goat bartender from FlyBoyz, a whole army of bikers in black leather, Mom and Mrs. Rosenblatt holding broken beer bottles out like weapons, Marco (cowering behind Nanny Goat), and a guy who looked like The Rock’s bigger brother. Rico.
He put a hand on Dana’s arm, lowering the Lady-Smith as she stared at the stain now seeping onto the concrete floor. Her eyes were as big as Maybelline compacts, her mouth dropped open into an “o” of surprise.
“Did I get him?” she asked, her voice cracking.
I nodded, tears of relief mingling with the tears of terror still staining my cheeks. “Yes, honey, you got him.”
Dana blinked, looking from the gun clutched in her white-knuckled grip to the big hole in Unibrow. She licked her lips. “Wow, Mac wasn’t kidding. This baby packs quite a punch.”
&
nbsp; Chapter Twenty
For once I was glad to hear that Marco hadn’t been able to keep his big mouth shut. After he’d left me, he’d gone down to the casino where he’d found Mrs. Rosenblatt at the Big Apple Bar. One comment on his fishy aura and Marco had broken down like a ’73 Pinto going up a steep hill. He’d told her all about my plan to play Larry (which Mrs. Rosenblatt had immediately said was not a good idea for a person with karma like mine). Then Mrs. Rosenblatt had tracked Mom down at the craps table and told her. Mom had nearly fainted (which cost her thirty-two dollars when she’d hit the table for support and the dealer had mistaken this for a bet on a hard eight), but once she’d recovered, Mom called Dana to see if she was with me. Obviously, she wasn’t. Dana had been on her way to the airport to pick up Rico who had surprised her by flying in to personally hand deliver her new LadySmith and “compare hardware.” (And I wasn’t entirely sure we were talking guns here.) Dana did a few “ohmigods,” then told Rico, who then called his friend the bartender who had then gathered the entire patronage of FlyBoyz.
Long story short (I know, too late), Unibrow hadn’t been the only one following us into the desert. Twenty minutes behind him had been Marco riding with Mom and Mrs. Rosenblatt in their rented Dodge minivan, Dana and Rico in the Mustang, and a whole slew of Harleys bringing up the rear. By the time they were traveling down Lone Hill Road, they passed a long, sleek Town Car speeding in the opposite direction. Dana had recognized it and, on instinct, followed him to the Victoria where her impeccable timing had just saved me from becoming fish food.
Once Rico pried the gun from her hands, Dana started alternating between crying and shaking, swearing she was never touching that thing again. And considering it was now evidence, it didn’t look like she’d have the opportunity anytime soon anyway. When the police finally did arrive, Dana’s hands were swabbed for gunshot residue, then she and Rico were escorted into one of the back rooms for questioning by Detective Sipowicz, though we were assured it was just a formality and that considering the circumstances no charges would be brought against them. Just in case, Mrs. Rosenblatt stood at the ready to call her dead second husband Carl’s law firm at the first sign of handcuffs or extraneous sodas.
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