Assume Nothing (7 page)

The little man told him his name: Guillermo Leal.

‘Were you the one who gave the police a description of my friend?’ Ruben asked in Spanish, already knowing the answer.

‘No,’ Guillermo Leal said, shaking his head.

Ruben leaned in close to study his hard, impassive face for a moment, just to make sure his instincts were correct, and decided he believed him. The
alcahuete
he had come here to find was one of the four dead men on the floor.

‘
Bueno
,’ Ruben said, patting the little man on the back. He looked around the shop, searching for something, and eventually his eyes locked on to to a hulking green machine several feet away. It was a drill press of some kind, fitted with a bit the size and length of a hatchet handle. Ruben took Leal by the elbow and gently guided him toward the press, the three gunmen trailing behind. ‘Come,’ he said.

When they reached the machine, Ruben asked the little man which of his two hands he used the most. Leal gestured with his right, hesitantly, because he knew, like the other three men watching, what was coming.

At Ruben’s signal, one of the soldiers – Poeto, his personal bodyguard – started the press running and waited, hand on the wheel that would lower the whirring drill bit down toward the machine’s table.

‘I have left you alive so you can honor me with a favor,’ Ruben told Leal. ‘When we are gone, I want you to show your left hand to anyone you think may be talking to the police about my family’s business. To warn them what could happen. Do you understand?’

Leal nodded. Tears welled in his eyes, but he made no move to wipe them away.

Later, after the deed was done, Ruben sat in the back seat of the car as Poeto drove him and the other Lizama soldiers away, and marveled at little Guillermo Leal’s courage. He had accepted the punishment they had seen fit to visit upon him without complaint, honoring them with silent capitulation and nothing more. Ruben wondered how many other men could have done as well, and the thought brought his mind around to Ben Clarke and Clarke’s three friends in America. In Leal’s place, waiting for the terrible pain to come, how would such pampered
nenes de mamá
have behaved? Like men or like children?

Ruben thought he could guess. He didn’t take Clarke for a coward, per se, but he knew the
Americano
was far more flash than substance, and what little he had seen of Cross, Baumhower, and Sinnott had not impressed him. Still, the evidence of their joint success seemed to speak for itself; whatever their short-comings in the way of real balls, Clarke and his Class Act partners clearly knew how to make money, and that in itself made them useful to Ruben. Because he loved Los Angeles – the parties, the women, the movie stars – and with the help of Clarke and his friends, he hoped to someday become a real player there. Not simply Jorge Lizama’s youngest son, who made the A-list now by virtue of his father’s drugs and grisly reputation, but a bright young man who had learned the filmmaking game and mastered it. Ruben didn’t want to buy or terrorize his way to stardom in Hollywood – he actually wanted to earn it – and doing business with Ben Clarke and company was his idea of a first step toward that end.

If it turned out to be a false step – if trusting Clarke to launder $250,000 of Lizama family money proved to be a foolish mistake – Clarke would pay for it with his life. Later today,
La Aguja
would fly out to Los Angeles and spend the whole weekend partying.

After that, he would go see Ben Clarke and find out what kind of man the big white boy was compared to brave, little, one-handed Guillermo Leal.

Aside from the Orvis Andrews surveillance, Reddick had several other assignments for the City Attorney’s office on his plate. One of them involved a woman named Gina Delgadillo, a thirty-six-year-old mother of three who was suing the city of Los Angeles to the tune of thirteen million dollars. Delgadillo was claiming she’d been seriously injured at Angel’s Gate Park in San Pedro six weeks earlier when a pair of clowning maintenance workers had backed a small utility truck into her. As in the Orvis Andrews case, Reddick was supposed to determine if her injuries were as extensive as Delgadillo’s attorneys would, given the chance, lead a jury to believe.

He was out at the park where the accident had taken place late Friday afternoon, interviewing one of the maintenance men who’d allegedly caused it, when he received a text from Dana on his cell phone. A text from his wife wasn’t particularly unusual, but after their lunch earlier in the day, he hadn’t expected to hear from her again any time soon, and this was the first time he could remember Dana resorting to a text without first attempting to reach him in person. Her message was short and maddeningly ominous:

His immediate thought was that something must have happened to Jake. It didn’t make sense, her texting him about something as grave as that, but Reddick couldn’t imagine what else such a dire message could mean. He tried to get his wife on the phone and only got her voicemail. He tried twice, left a crazed demand for a call back after the second attempt, and then thought to reply to Dana’s text with one of his own:

His text went unanswered. He waited two minutes, then ran to his car and started for his old home.

He was furious by the time he arrived, having almost convinced himself his panic would prove to be unwarranted. Dana was blowing a non-life-threatening situation way the hell out of proportion and had sent him a message far more cryptic and mysterious than necessary. And she still wasn’t answering the phone. She had to know what he would think, the conclusions he would jump to. If this turned out to be no big deal . . .

Throughout the drive out to Glendale, he had been tempted to call the police, demand they send a car out to precede him, but now he was glad that he hadn’t. The normalcy he saw outside his old home seemed to prove what an embarrassing overreaction that would have been. There were no ambulances, no squad cars, no crowds of neighbors milling about on the sidewalk out front; instead, there was only silence and tranquility, and Dana’s Volvo parked with perfect precision in the driveway. Not halfway in and skewed to one side or the other, the way someone rushing home in hysterics might have parked it, but straight in toward the garage.

Reddick allowed only the merest wave of relief to wash over him, then rushed to the front door.

Dana answered on his first ring of the bell. Still dressed for work, she looked ashen, like someone who’d just witnessed her own death. There was no sign of Jake anywhere.

‘Jesus. What the hell’s going on?’ Reddick asked, stepping inside.

Someone standing behind the door hit him at the base of his skull with something anvil-hard and dropped him face first on the floor. His hold on consciousness lasted only long enough for him to hear Dana shriek his name, and then his ground-level view of the world was swallowed up in black.

The first thing Reddick saw when he came to was Dana, stretched out on the couch above him, bound and gagged with duct tape. She was blinking at him furiously, eyes brimming with tears.

He immediately recognized that he, too, was bound in a similar fashion, tape binding his ankles together and his wrists behind his back, a long strip wound completely around his head to cover his mouth. He was still on the floor, on his back, but he’d been moved away from the door to the center of the living room, which was dark now, suggesting he’d been out for some time.

‘I’m gonna make this quick,’ he heard someone behind him say.

Reddick turned to one side, head throbbing, to see a big man standing several feet away, a dark ski mask covering his head, a knife approaching the size of a small machete clutched tightly in one gloved hand.

‘I got your kid tied up in the bedroom,’ the guy said. ‘If you wanna keep him alive . . .’

Reddick didn’t hear the words that followed. His vision blurred and his head filled with a deafening static, all the air rushing out of his lungs at once.

Reddick began to scream, the tape around his mouth barely containing the full intensity of his terror and rage. His eyes rolled up toward the top of his head and his body convulsed, every muscle pulled as taut as a violin string.

The man in the mask just stood there and watched, stunned, as Dana’s sobbing grew to a fever pitch.

‘What the fuck?’ the big man said.

He walked over to Reddick and kicked him hard in the midsection, once, twice. ‘Hey. Hey! Shut the fuck up and listen to what I’m telling you, asshole!’

But Reddick was beyond his reach. Something inside him gave way and the room flared white, before darkness engulfed him again like the wings of death itself.

‘I don’t know what your problem is, buddy, but you better get over it fast.’

The man in the mask was looming over him, breathing straight into his face. Everything else was as it had been before: Reddick on the floor, Dana on the couch. He had no idea how long he’d been out.

‘Now, I’m gonna try to explain things to you one more time, and if you freak out on me again, your little boy’s dead. Understand? Nod your head if you understand.’

The sound of the man’s voice was like something out of a dream, muffled and undulating. The room before Reddick’s eyes kept blinking in and out as if illuminated by a light bulb threatening to die. Questions without answers clattered around inside his head, company for a single thought that refused to fall silent:
Not again. This can’t be happening to me again.

But Reddick understood. He didn’t know who this man was or why he was here, but he knew one thing with absolute, unshakable certainty: He had to hold on long enough to hear what the man in the mask had to say. The comfort and release of total madness beckoned; he had nothing but a whisper-thin thread of sanity left. But he either held on to that thread now, with all the power he possessed, or Jake, and probably Dana as well, were dead. It was as simple as that.

Reddick nodded his head.

‘Good,’ the man in the mask said, standing erect. ‘Here’s the deal. I need you to forget something. A car accident you had a few nights ago with a friend of mine. His name’s Baumhower. Remember?’

Reddick did, but he couldn’t believe it. This was all about that whimpering fool in the mini-van Sunday night?

‘I’m waiting for you to nod your head,’ the man in the mask said, nudging Reddick in the chest with the toe of his right shoe.

Reddick nodded again.

‘For reasons you don’t need to know, Mr Baumhower can’t have word of your accident go beyond you and him. So you’re gonna pretend it never happened, Reddick. You’re not gonna report it to your insurance company, the cops, no one. Ever. Do I have to tell you why?’

Reddick shook his head. The threat that this maniac would come back to harm his wife and son was implicit.

‘Well, just to be sure, I’m gonna tell you both anyway.’ The masked man walked over to where Dana lay, put his face an inch from her own and turned the blade of his knife to and fro, right in front of her nose. ‘You paying attention, sweetheart?’

Dana nodded, frantic.

‘Your boy over there breathes a word about the accident to anybody, you’re all dead. I’ll start with the kid and leave you for last. After you and I have some fun first, of course.’

Reddick could feel himself slipping away, becoming something more animal than human. Desperate as he was to remain silent, a low, rumbling moan began to roll through him like thunder.

‘Would you like that? You an’ me havin’ a little fun first?’ the man with the knife asked Dana.

And then Reddick was screaming again, helpless to do anything else. Images nine years old, of three corpses strewn about a bloodstained house in West Palm Beach, Florida, streamed through his mind in an endless loop, all he had left of a family he’d once loved the way he loved Dana and Jake today. The giant in the ski mask looked over to see him making a silly, futile effort to get to his feet, flopping around on the floor like a decapitated chicken. Without a word, he sauntered over and kicked Reddick under the chin, seemingly trying to take his head off.

Reddick fell on to his back and finally let go, blinking up at the ceiling spinning above him until the lights went out for good.

NINE

T
hey found Jake asleep in his bedroom. He’d been knocked out with chloroform, but was otherwise unharmed. Despite what their intruder had said to the contrary, he hadn’t even bothered to tie Jake up or gag him, one small favor for which they could be thankful. Had Jake awoken and found himself alone, trussed up and gagged like his parents, things could have been much worse. As it was they had to lie to him, tell him the big man in the mask who’d scared Mommy and covered his mouth with the funny smelling cloth was just a friend of Daddy’s playing a stupid game. He clearly found the story incredible, but he didn’t question it.

Naturally, Dana wanted to call the police. Had she done so when she had the chance, having been first to slip out of her bonds before Reddick had even regained consciousness, he would have had no say in the matter. But she’d waited until she was sure Jake was safe and Reddick was OK to go to the phone, and by then it was too late.

‘No police,’ Reddick said.

‘Joe . . .’

‘You heard me! We’re not calling the police!’

They sat in the dining room together, both of them shaking like heroin addicts in withdrawal, Jake back in their bedroom where they’d perched him in front of the TV. Dana was sure Reddick was either insane or suffering the effects of a concussion, possibly even both. Bruised and ashen-faced, he looked more like a dead man than a live one, and he wasn’t making sense. How could they not call the police?