“Repair work. Yeah. That’s a good way to put it. Fixing things.”
“Cars,” she prompted.
“Problems,” he said. “People got problems, I fix
’em
. Until today I always got it done. Today everything went to shit.”
“People understand when you make a mistake.”
“I dunno. With some people, it’s all about results. You get the results, or you don’t. And if you don’t ...”
“If you don’t?”
He showed her a crooked smile. “You’re screwed, blued, and tattooed.”
“You’ve already got the tattoo.”
“Yeah, you’re right about that, Sandi from Mission Viejo.” He looked her over.
“How old are you?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m twenty-six. You gotta be, what, thirty?”
At least he’d underestimated. “Something like that. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t usually go for older women.”
She reminded herself of all the reasons why she couldn’t splash her drink in his face. “You don’t?”
“Nah. Guys who’re into that—they got, like, a mother complex, you know?”
“I’m
not
old enough to be your mother.”
“Yeah, I know. You got a nice body, too. Work out, I bet.”
“Every day.”
“I can tell. You get all buff, and you come to dumps like this to meet guys like me.”
“Pretty much.”
“Scary hobby.”
“I guess I need a certain amount of stimulation to stay interested in things. You know what I mean?”
“Not really.”
“I need the rush. I need to put it on the line sometimes. You ever feel like that?”
Dylan got it. He nodded, his grinning mouth flecked with suds. “Baby, all the time.”
“What gives you a rush?”
“You tell me first. Tell me what turns you on.”
“Places like this.”
“This?” He snorted. “This is a shit hole.”
“That’s why I like it. It’s not safe.”
“No, it ain’t.” He showed her a wolfish leer. “Getting less safe all the time.”
She managed to hold eye contact without barfing. “That’s why I’m liking it better all the time. So what’s
your
poison?”
“What I did today,” he said slowly.
He got off on killing. Great. “What did you do today?” she asked with bland innocence.
He shook his head, remembering that the topic was off-limits. “Nothing.”
“So you won’t share?”
He cast around for something safe to say. “I like to ride. Got a Harley Low Rider.”
“That’s a good bike.”
“Better’n good.” He stared into the depths of the mirror. “Way I got her customized, she’s a thing of fucking beauty. Sweeter’n a woman, for sure.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do. Woman’s good for a couple hours, tops. My bike can go all night long.”
“You ride all night?”
“Sometimes. When I can’t sleep, I take her out on the freeway or down to the coast highway and fly, fly, fly.”
“Sounds like fun.”
He turned to her. “You ever ride a Harley?”
“Can’t say I have.”
He got off the barstool and drained his beer. “Come on, then. You want adventure, I got the ticket.”
26
He gave her his helmet and rode without one, and she clung to his back as he cut through the streets to the freeway and howled up the on-ramp, whipping from lane to lane, everything blurred and spinning in a rush of speed and noise. The engine roared, throbbing like a racing heart, and the wind blew into her face while his sleeveless jacket beat against her throat, and the tattoo on his neck strobed in the passing headlights. She held on tightly to him, knowing that if she let go, she would be blown out of her seat and smashed on the road. He was drunk and angry and reckless, driving like a madman, and Abby was aware of the danger but accepted it without fear. She wasn’t going to die in a drunk driving accident; it would be too mundane.
He flew south on the freeway, exiting with a scream of tires. On South Standard Avenue, he pulled into the parking lot of a dingy apartment building and killed the engine.
“Come on in,” he said. They were the first words he’d spoken in nearly an hour. He led her up a flight of bowed wooden steps and unlocked his door.
Everything was proceeding as planned. Once inside his apartment, she would ask for a drink. He would pour glasses for both of them. While he was distracted, she would lace his beverage with one of the little white pills in her purse. The pills were Rohypnol, sometimes known as the date rape drug—a medication illegal in the US, but obtainable by those with connections. The newer version of the drug turned blue when it dissolved, making it harder to conceal in liquids, but Abby’s stash was the original variety, which dissolved clear.
The sedative would take effect within twenty minutes, knocking him out. The trick would be to keep him talking until the narcotic had spread through his bloodstream, but that was no big problem. If there was one thing Abby was good at, it was talk.
She would have to be careful, of course. During the ride she’d shifted her hold on his waist once or twice. She’d felt the handgun in the side pocket of his jacket.
She followed him in. He flipped a wall switch that turned on a pair of lamps flanking a futon. The apartment was sparsely furnished, dirty, and old. There were the usual accoutrements. A TV with what looked like a bootleg cable hookup. A stereo system that no doubt bothered the neighbors when it was cranked up to top volume, but the neighbors, of course, would be too intimidated to complain. A card table and folding chairs that served as a dinette set.
A doorway led into a kitchen that looked small and carried the stale odor of grease even at a distance. There must be a bathroom somewhere, and there might be a bedroom too, unless the futon served as his bed.
“Nice place,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s a regular Taj Mahal.”
He showed her a crooked grin. “I’m going to fuck your lights out, you know that?”
“I kind of figured that was the idea,” she said mildly, and then he grabbed her.
It happened so fast she had no time to react. His big arms were around her waist, and he was crushing her against his chest, his mouth on hers, his tongue probing, while his hands slid to her buttocks and squeezed hard.
She broke away from the kiss, gasping. “Hey, let’s cool it, Dylan. Let’s—”
“Shut up.”
He pivoted sideways, carrying her with him, and she noticed for the first time how strong he was, strong enough to lift her off her feet and throw her down on the futon, and then he was on top of her, a huge, hungry smile on his face. But what she focused on was the scorpion, purple and swollen, clinging to the side of his neck. It repulsed her.
“You like adventure, bitch?” His hands were already working the button fly on his jeans. “You got a special one coming tonight.”
Her purse was on the floor, dropped when he tossed her on the futon, and out of reach.
“This isn’t the way I want it,” she said.
“Tough shit.”
“A girl likes a little foreplay—”
“I know what you like, and I got it right here, ten inches of it. I could be a fucking porn star. Give it a feel. Go on, feel me.”
Reluctantly she extended her arm beneath his belly and felt what he had down there, a grotesque, monstrous thing, like a length of rope uncoiling from the bristles of his crotch.
“It ain’t even waked up yet,” he said proudly. “You wait till it’s full grown.”
She was not anticipating that development with relish. Already she could feel it expanding with a stiff pressure that made her want to gag.
“Gonna do you good, woman,” Dylan whispered. “When I get done, you won’t never want no other man. They’re all pygmies compared to me.”
Pygmies, Abby thought, but mental giants.
She couldn’t allow this to go much further. There had been a few times in her career when she’d no choice but to do the nasty with a man she was investigating, but those cases had been rare, and none of those men, despite their assorted mental problems, had been anywhere near as disgusting as young Dylan, with his insect tattoo and his hoselike appendage.
Besides, the bastard had tried to kill her a few hours ago, and she was damned if she would help him get his rocks off now.
She let her hand slip a little lower, cupping his balls, caressing them to increase their sensitivity.
“That feels all right,” Dylan said.
“Yeah?” she whispered. “How does this feel?”
She made a fist, crushing his scrota. He blanched, breath whistling out of him in a gasp.
She released his crotch, and with both hands she grabbed him by the neck, digging her thumbs into the carotid sheaths. There was a nice medical term for this procedure—sanguineous strangulation, otherwise known as a blood choke. However you said it, it simply meant stopping the flow of blood to the brain.
Dylan’s face flushed. She wrapped her legs around him, pinning his arms to his sides so he couldn’t draw his weapon. Another second or two was all it would take.
His eyes rolled up in his head, and he nodded on her chest with a drawn-out grown as unconsciousness took him.
She disentangled herself from his slack limbs. “Sorry, Dylan,” she said. “Maybe next time.”
27
Dylan came back to himself slowly, with a pounding headache and a weak, hung-over feeling. His arms and legs were sore, and there was a dull ache in his neck. He opened his eyes and saw a white ceiling with cobwebs in the corners. It took him a moment to realize that he was in his own apartment, stretched on his back on the futon, and
she
was watching him.
Sandi from Mission Viejo.
She knelt before the futon, a gun in her hand. Instinctively he searched for his own weapon. Gone.
“What’s the matter, Dylan?” she asked. “Don’t you recognize your own gun when you see it?”
He focused on the pistol she was holding. His piece. The Glock 9mm he carried on the street.
“What the fuck is this?” he asked, his voice thick, his throat raw and scratchy. “You robbing me or something?”
“No, Dylan. I’m not robbing you.”
“What’d you do, knock me out?”
“Yes.”
“Shit.” He released a thin laugh. “Guess you really do like adventure, just like you said.”
“I’m not in this for adventure. There are things you need to tell me.”
“What kind of things?”
“About the Scorpions. About who arranged your assignment this afternoon. And where you stashed your gear afterward.”
His eyes narrowed. “You a cop?”
“No.”
“Some kind of P.I.?”
“Who I am isn’t important. I want you to start talking.”
“That’s not gonna happen.”
“Yes, it is. You’re going to answer every question I ask.”
“Or what? You’ll shoot me?”
“I’ll hurt you.”
He lifted his head, experiencing a brief wave of vertigo.
“Sandi from Mission Viejo, or whoever the fuck you are—you are in way out of your depth.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“Let me give you the best advice you’ll ever get. Walk away.”
“You’re the second person tonight to tell me that. I didn’t listen the first time. I’m not listening now.”
“You’re not listening, and I’m not talking. Sounds like a goddamned stalemate to me.”
“You’ll talk.”
“Just because you laid me out on this couch don’t mean you’ve made me your bitch. I know how to keep my mouth shut. Now why don’t you put that gun down and we’ll get back to that lovin’ feeling?”
“You’re an asshole,” she said, and she leaned forward and smacked him hard across the jaw with the butt of the gun. Pain startled him. He dropped back on the futon, clutching his mouth, which was suddenly full of warm fluid and splintered chips. Gagging, he rolled sideways and spit out the mess, staining the carpet with blood and broken teeth.
The pain was no big deal, but the teeth really bothered him. He had a nice smile, and now she’d fucked it up.
“Cunt,” he growled, the word coming out a little slurred.
She hit him again. This time she caught him on the nose, snapping his head sideways with a sharp crack and a spurt of blood and mucus.
“God
damn
it!” He held his nose while a shooting migraine worked its way deep into his forehead.
“Feeling talkative yet?”
He looked up at her. She wasn’t kneeling anymore. She had stood up and was leaning over him, the gun poised for another blow. He calculated the odds of lunging for it, snatching out of her hand. Even as he did, he saw her smile as if she had read his mind. The smile seemed to dare him to try it. He didn’t have the nerve.
“Who the fuck are you working for?” he said. His voice sounded funny in his ears, like it was echoing around inside his head.
“I don’t work for anybody. I’m a free agent.”
“Yeah, well, you ever need a job, you can get one. How’d you like to shake down guys who’re behind on their dues?” He started to laugh, he didn’t know why. It just seemed funny to him. “Hired muscle. All ninety-eight pounds of you.”
“I’m not in the mood for comedy, Dylan. I’m feeling very serious right now. I think you should start to feel the same.”
“It’s the old lady, right? The one in the valley. She must’ve hired you.”
“Nobody hired me. Tell me who arranged the hit. Who sent you to that address?”
“I think it was Santa Claus. He has this list, you know—who’s been naughty and nice. Guess the old lady was one of the naughty ones.”
She struck him again. The gun hooked him under the jaw and clacked his teeth together hard enough to rattle his head. Then she was bending in close with the muzzle of the gun pressed below the socket of his left eye.
“Who sent you?” she asked again.
Her face was inches from his. He stared into her brown eyes and saw something that scared him, something like craziness. All of a sudden he wasn’t so sure he would be getting out of this.
“You know I can’t talk about that,” he said, trying for the first time to sound reasonable. “They’ll kill me.”
“They’re not here right now. I am. Worry about me right now.”
“Lady, you got my attention. But you don’t know what they do to snitches.”
“I have a pretty good idea. Let me make it easier for you. Whoever hired you—does he work out of the repair shop?”
“How’d you even know about that?”
“Give me a name.”
Still he hesitated.
She pressed the gun deeper into his skin. “I’m going to find out eventually. When I do, they’ll assume you told me. So you’re up shit creek whether you say anything or not. If you talk, you get to live through tonight. If you don’t talk, then you die right now.”
Her eyes, blank and cold like the eyes of a shark, told him she wasn’t kidding.
“Shanker,” he whispered, feeling like Judas delivering his fatal kiss.
“He runs the shop?”
“Yeah it’s his outfit. Ron Shanker. He’s been a made man in the gang for—I don’t know, since before I was born.”
“How’d he get in touch with you?”
“Phone call.”
“This phone?” She gestured toward a phone on a table near the TV.
“No, he called my cell. Left a message.”
“And how did you call him back?”
“From here.”
“The landline?”
“Yeah.” Dylan licked his lips and tasted blood. “I don’t like to talk business over a cell. Too many ways the call can be intercepted. What difference does it make, anyway?”
“It’s called evidence, Dylan. Records of those phone calls will link you with Shanker. But Shanker didn’t decide to pull this job on his own. He was asked to do it. You know that, don’t you?”
“I don’t know shit about how it was set up. Shanker never tells us anything.”
“Do you know who Jack Reynolds is?”
Dylan knew. Everybody in the Scorpions had heard rumors about Jack Reynolds. He kept his face expressionless, or so he hoped. “Never heard of him.”
“He’s your congressman.”
“I don’t follow politics too much.”
“Reynolds is tight with your gang, isn’t he? He’s a player?”
“Telling you, I never heard—”
She drew back the gun, and although he hated himself for it, Dylan flinched. Flinched like a whipped dog. He couldn’t believe she’d reduced him to that.
“Tell the truth,” she said, and the terrible thing was that the words were spoken without anger, without any emotion all, as if she was feeling nothing and would feel nothing even if she battered his face into a bloody mask.
“Okay, I hear things. Reynolds, you know, he used to be the D.A. around here, a long time ago, and I guess he got in with the Scorpions back then, and maybe he still uses us sometimes for some, you know, odd jobs, but nobody ever talks about it, not out in the open, I mean it’s not like we ever say his name...” He was talking too much. All of a sudden he couldn’t stop talking.
“The job you did this afternoon was for Reynolds.”
“I don’t know about that. I just don’t know. They don’t tell me shit like that.”
“Do you even know the name of the woman you were hired to kill?”
“Never gave me a name. Just an address.”
“Where’s the gun?”
“What?”
“The gun you shot up the house with.”
“Threw it away.”
“Not likely. It was an expensive piece. Too expensive to toss. Besides, you’re not smart enough to toss it.” The muzzle of her gun was teasing the orbit of his eye socket again. “Where is it?”
Dylan thought about telling her to fuck herself. She would probably shoot him, but hell, it would be quick, bullet in the eye, right through into the brain, lights out. Better than what he could expect from Shanker. Or from Reynolds, for Christ’s sake. Word was, that guy was a straight maniac. He could save himself a world of hurt just by telling this cocksucking bitch to go fuck off.
“In my bedroom,” he said. “Bureau. Top drawer.”
She almost smiled. “I’m surprised this shit hole has a bedroom.”
Unaccountably, Dylan was wounded. “You said it wasn’t such a bad place.”
“I lied. I do that a lot.”
“So you got Shanker’s name and the gun and, I guess, the phone records. I gave you everything you wanted, right?”
“You cooperated. Eventually.”
“So what happens now?”
“That’s good question, Dylan. That’s the first really intelligent thing you’ve said. What does happen now?” She hadn’t removed the gun from his face, and that was a bad sign. “I guess I’ll have to give all this helpful information and evidence to the authorities.”
“Yeah. Except you don’t work for no authorities, do you?”
“Sometimes they work for me—without knowing it.”
“So you’re gonna have me arrested, is that the plan?” At the moment, being arrested didn’t seem like such a bad deal.
“Well, that’s the thing. See, if you’re in custody, you’ll talk. I’ve already discovered that it’s not too hard to make you open up. I didn’t even have to break any of your fingers.” Her mouth stretched briefly into a grin that scared him. “You’ll tell them all about me. Which will put me right in the spotlight. I don’t like the spotlight, Dylan.”
He swallowed. “You don’t?”
“I’m very private person.”
He was thinking fast, or trying to think, but it was hard, because all at once his mind was crowded with thoughts, a million thoughts, memories of the jobs he’d done, the people he’d killed, the wet smack of his bullets in their flesh.
“Maybe,” he said, fighting to control the tremor in his voice, “maybe you can give me a couple hours to haul ass out of town. Then they won’t pick me up. They’ll get Shanker because of the phone numbers. But Shanker don’t know nothing about you, so he can’t blow your cover. That’ll work out. Work out for both of us.”
She seemed to consider it. Dylan allowed himself to feel a thrill of optimism. Then her eyes narrowed, and he knew she had never given it any thought.
“What makes you think I want things to work out for you?” she asked, her voice dangerously gentle.
Dylan was silent. He had no answer to that.
He was in trouble, real trouble, the worst trouble of his life. This woman was a hard case. She was crazy, and she could blow him the fuck away without thinking twice about it.
She removed the gun from his face, but he took no comfort from that fact. Her expression was unchanged, and the coldness in her eyes was deeper than before.
As he watched, she took a pillow from the futon and wrapped it around the gun. He knew what that was for. To muffle the shot. She didn’t want his neighbors to hear it. She wanted to kill him and get away clean.
The pillow made it fully real—what was about to happen to him. His heart shuddered with an electric jolt. He felt his hands trembling and willed them to stop, but they wouldn’t stop. His stomach was sour, his bowels dangerously loose.
He had always figured he would go down fighting. Die like a man. But he couldn’t seem to control his body anymore. He couldn’t even muster the physical coordination to get off the futon. He couldn’t do a damn thing.
“Hold on, okay?” he breathed. “Just hold on.”
“The world isn’t going to miss you, Dylan. I can pretty much guarantee that.”
“You don’t want to do this.”
“I think I do.” Her tone was flat, matter-of-fact.
“What I did in the Valley—it was a job, okay? Just a job.”
Her gaze drilled through him. He felt his pants getting wet and knew he had crapped in his shorts, and they would find him that way, and they would laugh.
“We’re both pros, you know?” He had to find a way to reach her. “I was doing a job. Like you.”
Something flickered beneath her surface calm. “I’m not like you.”
“Don’t do this. Please?” He heard the terrible whining quality in his voice, and it sickened him.
“Quiet, Dylan.”
“Don’t do it. God, please, don’t fucking kill me.”
“Quiet,” she said again, her voice so low as to be nearly inaudible. “Quiet now.”