‘Oh. Hey, Perry. Yeah, I’ve got it,’ Blake said, his voice devoid of all enthusiasm. ‘But here’s the thing . . .’
‘Blake, I’m kind of in a hurry here. I just need you to give me the guy’s address right now and email me anything else you might have, ASAP.’
‘I’d like to do that, Perry, but I don’t know if I should. Something about this just doesn’t seem kosher to me. I’ve been trying to reach Iris to ask her about it, but—’
‘Iris? Iris has nothing to do with this, what the hell are you trying to call
her
for?’ Cross wanted desperately to scream into the phone – this mindless jackass was going to get him fucking killed! – but he knew he didn’t dare. If Blake hung up on him before giving up Reddick’s address, Ruben might not give Cross another chance to call the asshole back.
‘I just want to be sure she’s OK with my doing this for you, that’s all,’ Blake said. ‘No offense, man, but I get the feeling there’s more going on here than you’re telling me.’
‘You’re right. There is. And as soon as I get a chance to breathe, I’ll tell you all about it. But right now, Frank, all I can tell you is, I need you to give me the man’s address and email me whatever else you’ve got on him,
this second
, or so help me God, brother, me and Iris both are gonna be in a world of hurt. A
world
of fucking hurt.’
‘Then this does involve Iris. She’s in some kind of trouble?’
‘Frank, for Chrissake! I’m begging you!’
Cross began to weep, Ruben and the big man behind the Yukon’s wheel staring at him, as Iris’s brother-in-law took forever to make up his mind.
‘OK. Fuck it,’ Blake said at last. ‘I’ll do it. But if I find out later you’ve been punking me, man, I’m not gonna be happy.’
‘I know that name. “Joe Reddick.” Why the hell do I know that name?’
Lerner and Winn were riding a crowded elevator down from Cross’s office and Lerner was talking as if they were the only two people in the car. He kept saying the same thing, more or less, over and over again, and it was starting to get on his partner’s nerves.
Winn didn’t respond to him, however, until the car emptied out into the lobby and they were standing at some remove from anyone else, waiting for another elevator to take them down to the building’s parking lot. ‘He couldn’t be somebody you busted once? Or a person of interest in a case you caught?’
Lerner shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. At least, I don’t remember him as a bad guy. It’s something else.’
‘What else is there? If you don’t know him from the Job, and you didn’t meet him through Sandy . . .’
Sandy was Lerner’s wife. He shook his head again, totally baffled. ‘I dunno.’
‘Tell you what. Why don’t we wait ’til we get to the car and see what the computer turns up. Maybe you’ll figure it out then.’
‘You think he’s in the system?’
‘If he isn’t, it sure sounds like he ought to be. He tells the girl upstairs he wants to see Cross about a burglary at the home of one of his partners over the weekend, only minutes after she takes a call from the police regarding a similar break-in at Cross’s place this morning. What, you think that’s just a coincidence?’
‘No. I don’t,’ Lerner conceded. ‘But—’
‘First thing we’re gonna do when we get to the car is check to see if there are any open warrants on Mr Reddick. Then we’re gonna look for an open ticket on either of the break-ins the girl described.’
‘And if we find one?’
‘If we find one, we’re gonna run Reddick down and ask him a few more questions. Starting with why he lied to us about his interest in Cross and ending with how he knew there’d been a burglary at the home of this guy – “Baumhower,” was it? – if he wasn’t the one who committed it.’
Lerner nodded. ‘OK. I like it. Assuming . . .’
‘Assuming any of this turns out to have something to do with Gillis Rainey and the case we’re supposed to be working.’
‘Yeah. Asuming that,’ Lerner said, just as a parking lot elevator opened its doors for them and Winn stepped inside.
THIRTY-ONE
R
eddick knew he’d walked into a trap the moment he passed through the door. Nobody put his lights out this time, as Ben Clarke had at Dana’s three days earlier, but a similar, unpleasant surprise was waiting for him, nonetheless.
The first sign of trouble was Iris, sitting in a chair in his living room, still bound and gagged exactly as he’d left her. Other signs quickly followed: two men standing on either side of Iris, one of them Perry Cross, the other a stranger – dark-skinned and wild-eyed, smiling like Reddick was an answer to a prayer. And then there was a third man, Hispanic like Cross’s friend but larger, a suited hulk stepping in from Reddick’s right to jam a gun to the side of his head the second he entered the house.
Reddick’s right hand instinctively flinched, his own weapon calling it to the waistband of his pants, but he stopped it cold even before the young guy with the grin said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. Please, don’t do that. We need to talk first.’
Ruben Lizama, Reddick thought. This had to be Ruben Lizama.
The big guy in the suit found Reddick’s .40, took it away from him without a word, then practically threw him to the center of the room.
The smaller Hispanic turned to Cross. ‘This is him? Joe Reddick?’
Cross nodded, flashing Reddick a little smile of his own. In the chair beside him, Iris whined into the gag over her mouth and squirmed, eyes begging Reddick’s forgiveness.
‘And I guess you must be the piece of shit known as Ruben Lizama,’ Reddick said.
The grin on Cross’s face fell away as the big man with the gun used it to club Reddick on the back of the head, dropping him to his knees.
‘You know about me?’ Still feigning good cheer, Ruben turned to Cross. ‘How does he know about me?’
‘I don’t know. I swear,’ Cross said. ‘Unless . . .’ He cast a glance in the direction of his former fiancée.
‘Don’t blame the lady, dickhead,’ Reddick said through clenched teeth. ‘If she’d wanted to sell you out, you think I would have had to leave her here all hogtied like that? She was trying to
help
your sorry ass.’
Ruben stepped forward to hover over him, no longer finding it necessary to smile. ‘Perry says you are a dangerous man. That you are responsible for the deaths of three of our friends. Ben Clarke, Andy Baumhower and . . .’ He turned back to Cross, seeking assistance.
‘Will Sinnott,’ Cross said.
‘Yes. Will Sinnott. Is this true?’
Reddick could hear the words but he wasn’t listening. His mind was on Dana and Jake, and how all the destruction he’d leveled against the earth over the last four days to protect them was about to prove thoroughly meaningless.
Off a raised eyebrow from Ruben, the giant with the gun kicked Reddick in the ribs from behind, taking the wind right out of him. He toppled forward at Ruben’s feet, hands barely bracing his fall before his face hit the floor. Iris was trying to scream now.
‘You will answer my questions, please,’ Ruben said.
His associate lifted Reddick back up by his hair, stuck his gun in Reddick’s right ear. Nothing about surrender appealed to Reddick, but any move he might make to save himself now would be suicide. Stringing this asshole Lizama along, biding his time until a greater opening for taking the offensive presented itself, seemed his only immediate option for survival, and he owed it to Dana and Jake to swallow his pride and take it.
‘Yeah, I wasted the fuckers,’ he said. ‘What else do you wanna know?’
‘There. Did I tell you?’ Cross said. ‘Kill the sonofabitch already!’
He was a bundle of nerves, rocking on the balls of his feet as if the floor beneath them were white hot. Reddick noticed for the first time the blood-soaked bandage on his left hand.
‘Man’s in a hurry to shut me up,’ Reddick said to Ruben. ‘I were you, I’d wonder why.’
‘Shut your fucking mouth!’ To Ruben, Cross said, ‘What is with all this talking? He’s admitted he killed Ben and the others. What more do you need to know?’
‘Let me see if I can guess what’s going on here,’ Reddick said, still addressing Ruben. ‘He told you I’ve got the money he owes you, or that I’m the reason he doesn’t. That right?’
‘I said—’ Cross took a step toward him, then froze when Ruben turned his head, let his eyes alone issue a warning to back off.
To Reddick, Ruben said, ‘Are you saying he’s lying to me?’
‘I’m saying he’s full of shit. I’ve got nothing to do with your money and never did. He and his friends didn’t have it to give you before any of us ever met.’
Unable to help himself, Cross lunged at him, lifting a leg to put a foot in his teeth. But Reddick, fully expecting the move, raised both arms to block the kick, then threw a short right hand into the younger man’s groin, able to put enough behind the blow, even on his knees, to drop him like a little girl.
As Cross rolled around on the floor, moaning, hands pinned between his legs, Ruben gazed down upon him and said, ‘You will tell me no more lies, Perry. Is it true, what he says? That he is not the reason you cannot pay me what I am owed?’
Cross didn’t respond fast enough to suit him. Ruben kicked him in the buttocks, hard enough to bruise bone, screaming, ‘Answer me!’
‘Yes! Yes! We had a run of bad luck and suffered some . . . some unexpected losses.’ Cross sat up, glowered at Reddick. ‘But we could have raised your money anyway if not for him! We would have had it days ago if he hadn’t fucked things up!’
Reddick finally snapped, all his reasons for keeping still forgotten. He didn’t give a shit what Ruben Lizama thought about him, or what Lizama held him responsible for, but hearing Cross portray him as the villain in this nightmare, rather than the victim of it, was too great an insult to bear. It had all begun with Cross, not Ben Clarke or Andy Baumhower, and the little prick and his friends had probably cost Reddick what little hope he’d ever had of living a normal life with the second family he’d built from the ashes of his first one. Hell if Reddick was going to listen to him pass the fucking buck a second longer.
Paying no heed to the gun at his head, he leapt across the floor on his hands and knees and took Cross by the throat. Cross went white, eyes bulging out of his head, mouth agape as his windpipe clamped shut beneath Reddick’s iron grip. Reddick kept waiting for the big man behind him to put a bullet in his back, but the gunshot he was expecting never came. What came instead was a blow to the back of his head that filled his eyes with stars and loosened his hold on Cross’s throat before the job of killing him was done.
After that, Reddick went flailing down an all-too-familiar black hole of unconsciousness.
‘Why the fuck didn’t you shoot him?’ Cross screamed at Ruben’s man Poeto, the minute he had enough breath in his lungs to speak.
Reddick lay face down on the floor, drooling into the carpet. Iris, still listing to one side in the chair, was sobbing uncontrollably.
‘That is not the question you should be asking, Perry,’ Ruben said, opening his knife with a flourish. He reached down, grabbed Cross by the throat and yanked him to his feet. ‘The question you should be asking is, why the fuck don’t we shoot
you
?’
Cross didn’t have an answer. He had run out of things to say in his own defense. Ruben was going to kill him, that was finally a foregone conclusion thanks to Reddick, and it was almost a relief to hear him imply that he might simply ‘shoot’ Cross to death, rather than carve him up like a pig in a slaughterhouse.
Cross shook his head from side to side, too weak to offer anything more in the way of a plea for mercy. Laughably, his cell phone chose this moment to chime, a new email message coming in, and the sound of it almost passed beneath his level of consciousness . . . until it suddenly occurred to him who the sender might be, and what his message could contain.
He had found one more excuse for Ruben to spare his life, after all.
Detectives Winn and Lerner were caught in a traffic jam. Neither was surprised. The eastbound 10 leading into downtown was always a slog, almost never for any discernible reason, and today the backup was worse than usual, with cars limping to a brake-light crawl as far back as Western Avenue.
If they could have justified using their dash lights, they would have put them on just to see how many drivers ahead would notice and get out of their way. But they weren’t sure that the mission they were on constituted an emergency of that magnitude. They were on their way to Joe Reddick’s Echo Park address of record in the hope of finding him home, and how much of a danger he was to the general public they were sworn to protect was something they were still uncertain about.
They did, however, feel safe in assuming he was involved in the murder of at least one person, Perry Cross’s business partner Andrew Baumhower. The computer in the car had verified that someone had indeed broken into both Baumhower’s home two nights ago and Cross’s residence this morning, and Baumhower had apparently been killed during the commission of the former crime. As Reddick had used the Baumhower burglary as an excuse to seek a meeting with Cross at his office, it didn’t seem like much of a stretch to picture him being Baumhower’s killer. Especially in light of the fact that Reddick fit the description witnesses gave the police of the crazed home invasion robber who had broken into Cross’s place in Venice today.
And yet, this image of Reddick didn’t particularly jibe with his lack of a criminal record, for one thing, nor his personal backstory, for another. Because what Lerner finally remembered about the man, his memory refreshed by Googling his name on the in-car computer and scanning the old news stories that came up, was that Reddick may have never before played the
perpetrator
of a violent crime, but he sure as hell had played the
victim
. Big time.
‘Jesus,’ Winn had said after Lerner read one of the stories about Reddick’s experiences in Florida out loud to her.