He had pressed on fueled by the faint hope that speed and the element of surprise could even the odds against him, but any chance of that had been lost this morning at Cross’s condo, where everything that could have gone wrong did. Now Cross and his friends knew he was gunning for them and would use every tool at their disposal to flee, defend themselves, or worst of all, go on the offensive.
There was nothing supernatural about wealth, but its range was always unpredictable; it could set things in motion or stop them cold, in places near and far, big and small. Judges’ chambers, corporate offices, police headquarters, military bases, crackhouse motels – wealth could infiltrate them all, and leave its mark behind. It wasn’t paranoia to think so; it was just facing facts. The right phone call from Sinnott’s father, or a golf buddy of Clarke’s, and Reddick could be in the crosshairs of a scope within an hour. The game had changed, it was that simple, and trying to play it alone the rest of the way seemed to Reddick like a surefire recipe for defeat.
He needed help.
Figuring out what kind of help he needed, and to whom he could turn to ask for it, wasn’t going to be easy. He didn’t want to involve anyone he was close to and few people had the skill set or pedigree the job was likely to require. Who could he ask to risk their life on his behalf, and what could he offer them in return?
Throughout the drive north back to Los Angeles late Sunday afternoon, Reddick put his mind to work on the problem and came up with a list of possibilities.
It was a very
short
list.
‘Iris, baby, are you OK? Did he hurt you?’
‘Cut the bullshit, Perry. You don’t care if he hurt me or not and we both know it. If you did, our names would be all over the news by now.’
Iris could hear Perry breathing on the other end of the line.
‘If you’re asking why I didn’t call the police—’
‘I’m not asking you anything. I only called because I need my things. My wallet and my keys.’
‘Hold on a minute. Are you saying Reddick let you go? You’re safe?’
‘Safe is a relative term. I’m free and physically unharmed, if that’s what you’re asking. But I need my ID and my car keys, and you’ve got them both.’
‘Sure, sure. Where are you? I’ll come get you right now. We can talk and I can explain what the hell happened this morning. I mean, you must be wondering, right?’
‘I don’t want to hear any explanations. I just want my things. And I don’t want you to pick me up, either. Frankly, Perry, I don’t feel safe being alone with you right now, so I was going to suggest we meet somewhere in public. The food court in Farmer’s Market, say in forty minutes?’
Cross snickered. ‘Are you kidding? You’re afraid of being alone with
me
? That fucking wackjob Reddick’s the one who put a gun to your head and dragged you off, not me!’
‘Is that his name? Reddick?’
‘What the hell did he say to you? He’s crazy, Iris, I told you that. Whatever it was that’s got you acting like this, it was a lie. A goddamn lie!’
‘Fine. If you don’t want to come—’
‘OK, OK. Take it easy, shit. Where will you be in the food court?’
‘In the west patio, near the ice cream place. “Gill’s,” I think it’s called. My car’s still parked on the street outside your condo. You can use my keys to drive it up so I won’t have to come get it later.’
‘But I’m not at home right now, I’m at Ben’s. It would take me at least an hour to get the car and then drive it out to West LA.’
‘So I’ll give you an hour. But that’s all. Just one hour.’
‘And then how will I get back to my place?’
‘I don’t know. Take a taxi, maybe? You stole seventy-five hundred dollars from me only three days ago. You should be good for the fare.’
Cross was in the process of stammering a rejoinder when she hung up.
‘Well?’ Sinnott asked, as Cross angrily snapped the lid closed on his cell phone.
‘You heard it. She wants me to bring her car and her wallet to her at the fucking Farmer’s Market in an hour.’
‘Then Reddick just let her go?’
‘So she says. Or, maybe, so Reddick would have us believe.’
Following his inference, Sinnott’s face, incredibly, grew paler still.
They were sitting in the living room of Clarke’s Culver City home, where they could watch for any unwanted visitors through the big picture window that faced the street. It was a few minutes past four o’clock. Clarke was upstairs in the bedroom asleep, a snoring giant dosed to oblivion with prescription painkillers. Cross had a drink in his hand, his first of the day, and Sinnott was nursing his third just since they’d arrived, counting on alcohol to do for his fear what Clarke’s meds had done for his pain. His Beretta lay out in the open on the arm of his chair; the right one, near his gun hand.
‘Are you going to go?’ Sinnott asked.
Cross got to his feet. ‘Of course. We both are.’
‘Me? But Ben—’
‘Fuck Ben. He can take care of himself. I’m going out to Farmer’s Market and you’re going with me as backup.’
‘You think it’s a trap?’
‘I don’t know. But it’d be a lucky break for us if it is.’
‘How the hell do you figure that?’
‘Because that would mean Ben was right: Reddick’s come to us. If it’s a trap, he’s going to be there somewhere for you to find and take care of, like you should have done this morning. Won’t he?’
Cross glared at him, waiting for an argument. Sinnott just nodded his head and took another swig of his drink.
‘Christ, what a nightmare. Every time you think it can’t get any worse . . .’
‘Shut up, Will, and let’s go.’
‘Ruben will be here in five days to get his money, Andy’s dead, Ben’s a cripple, and we’re running around worried about fucking Reddick.’
Cross snatched the gun off Sinnott’s chair and aimed it at his left eye. ‘Shut the fuck up and get on your feet or I swear to God I’ll kill you myself!’
Sinnott stood up slowly, wobbly but unflinching. ‘You or Reddick. Today or tomorrow.’ He wrenched the gun from Cross’s limp hand. ‘What the fuck’s the difference?’
He made his way to the door and went out to the car, showing no signs of caring whether Cross was following or not.
TWENTY-TWO
T
he landmark Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles was a contradiction in time. Much of the 200-acre, ranch-style shopping and dining complex in the heart of the city’s Fairfax district still appeared as it had at its opening in 1934 – the white clapboard walls and green tiled roofs, the open patios crammed with folding chairs and umbrella-festooned tables, the lush green landscaping ringing its exterior. But counterpoint to all these things were intrusions of a less fanciful present: franchise coffee shops and ATM machines, menu boards that didn’t list a single item priced under a dollar, a trolley line in the parking lot that connected the market to the towering mega-mall adjacent.
Still, for all its incongruities, Farmer’s Market remained the popular social hub it had been almost from the beginning, when Angelenos were first moved to say about it, without the irony such a comical tagline would demand today: ‘Meet me at Third and Fairfax.’ It was quaint and comfortable, and it bustled and hummed with a heavy, multicultural crowd, day or night.
It was the crowd and the open layout of the place Iris was thinking about when she chose the market as the site for her rendezvous with Cross. She wanted lots of people around and a dozen different points of exit to choose from should she feel the need to bolt, and this location offered her both, even this late on a Sunday afternoon.
Waiting for Cross at a table in a corner of the agreed-upon west patio, she went over her reasons for suggesting this meeting for what felt like the hundredth time, and again had to wonder if they weren’t the work of a woman who’d lost her mind. She did indeed need her keys, car, and wallet, and she sure as hell wasn’t going alone to Cross’s place to get them, but that was just a pretense. After six hours of holding back, she had finally decided to call the police, unable to go on refusing to do so simply because a wild man with a gun had asked her not to, and she couldn’t bring herself to make the call until she’d talked to Cross. She felt she owed him that much.
Her kidnapper this morning – Cross had called him ‘Reddick’ – had accused Cross of being nothing less than a murderer, a suspicion she herself had been living with for over twenty-four hours, and she was reluctant to bring the authorities down upon Cross without giving him a chance to answer such a serious charge to her face. Maybe he could convince her that he had played no major role in either the killing of Gillis Rainey or Ben Clarke’s alleged assault upon Reddick’s family. Ben was both a thug and a pea-brained asshole, Iris had always despised him with a passion, so it wasn’t hard for her to imagine him being solely responsible for both offenses. If Cross could persuade her that such was the case, she might be willing to do nothing, at least for a while. But if he couldn’t – if all his words of self-defense rang hollow and false – she could call the police almost gladly, her conscience clear. Still conflicted about Reddick, perhaps, but ready to let her ex-fiancé suffer whatever consequences came his way.
It wasn’t that long ago she had loved him without reservation. His lies alone had made it impossible for her to go on doing so, but she still cared for him enough to wish him no ill. She wanted his side of the story to relieve her of the notion that she had come within months of marrying a man she had never really known at all.
Cross and Sinnott were late getting to the market by several minutes. Cross had visited the market’s website on his smartphone before leaving Clarke’s home and found a layout of the complex, so he and Sinnott arrived with a detailed plan of attack firmly in place: where to park the cars, what individual entrance each would use to enter the food court, what position Sinnott would take inside that offered the clearest possible view of the west patio and all its surrounding points of access and egress.
Cross entered first, leaving Sinnott with instructions to lag behind for a minute or two. He scanned the milling crowd, as much looking for Reddick as Iris, and found the latter sitting at a table across the way, near an ice cream stand called ‘Gill’s,’ as promised. As near as he could tell, she was alone. He watched her for several seconds, testing her behavior for indications of conspiracy, and seeing none, started slowly toward her.
She saw him coming before he got there but didn’t smile. In fact, if he was able to detect anything in her reaction to seeing him, it was dread. Not a good sign.
He stood over her before taking a seat, said, ‘Are you alone?’
‘Of course. Who else—’ She stopped, catching on. ‘Oh. No. Reddick isn’t here.’
Cross sat down across from her, laid her wallet and keys on the table. ‘You’re sure he didn’t hurt you? He didn’t lay a hand on you at all?’
‘No. I’m fine.’ She reached out, grabbed her things. ‘Where did you park my car?’
‘I’ll walk you out and show you. After we’ve had a chance to talk.’
‘I told you, Perry. I’m not interested in hearing any more of your lies.’
‘Lies? What lies? You mean about the check?’
Iris didn’t answer him.
‘What did he tell you, Iris? Why are you acting like this?’
She looked around to make sure they couldn’t be overheard, then lowered her voice to say, ‘He told me you and your boys killed Gillis Rainey and threatened to do the same to his wife and child. That’s what he told me.’
‘That’s insane.’
‘Is it? I heard you and Will talking about Gillis in the playroom yesterday, just before I left. You said Andy had dumped his body in the LA River.’
Now it was Cross’s turn to fall silent. Will had been right: Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse . . .
‘We never laid a hand on Gillis. His death was an accident, I swear to you.’
‘What kind of accident?’
He could get up and just walk away without saying another word, but Cross knew that would only send Iris straight to the police. And she knew too much for him to let her do that now. ‘He owed us money. A lot of it, and he kept refusing to pay it back. So we grabbed him and told him we weren’t letting him go until he paid up. We were only trying to scare him, Iris.’
‘You kidnapped him?’
‘That would be the legal term for it, yes. But he was a fucking diabetic, can you believe that? I’d only heard him mention it once, I’d completely forgotten about it until we found him where we’d locked him up, dead, his mouth all frothed over like a goddamn dog, or something.’
Iris turned her eyes away from him, shaking her head from side to side. ‘Oh, Perry . . .’
‘It was a goddamn accident. An incredible stroke of bad luck. But to the police, it would have been murder. We’d have all ended up in prison for life. So we did what we had to do to protect ourselves. We had Andy get rid of the body.’ A small, sad smile crossed his face. ‘And naturally, the dumbshit made a complete mess of it.’
‘He ran into Reddick’s car trying to get away.’
‘Yes. Jesus, why bother with all these questions if you already know all the answers?’
‘Because I don’t know
why
, Perry. Why would you do these things? How could you?’
‘You haven’t been listening. Everything I’ve done I
had
to do.’
‘Including what you did to Reddick?’
‘That was Ben’s idea, not mine. And needless to say, it was a mistake. Reddick really is crazy you know. He murdered Andy in cold blood and tried to do the same to me, Will, and Ben. If anybody’s a murderer in all this, it’s him.’
‘If that were true, he would have killed me. Don’t you think?’
‘Look, I don’t want to argue with you. You can believe what you want to believe. But I need to know what you’re going to do. Have you called the police?’