Phantom Instinct (9780698157132) (9 page)

T
he wind lifted damp strands of hair from Harper's neck. She focused on the trash can a hundred yards up the beach and ran, pumping her arms. Her lungs burned. The whitecapped ocean was gilded in the afternoon light. The sand churning under her feet was hot. On Pacific Coast Highway, traffic slurred past. She tried to pick up her pace, but her legs felt like wool. She slogged to the trash can and stopped, wheezing.

The Santa Monica Pier glittered in the surf spray. The sun shone on surfers and sunbathers and palm trees. She hated it all right now.

She spit onto the sand. “Dammit.”

She had thought running after work would clear her head. But bent over, hands on her knees, she only felt her fears confirmed: She had blown it. Cajoling Aiden into going with her to Sorenstam had been a disaster. And she had exposed herself to whatever winds were rising.

Distantly, a vehicle door slammed shut. A moment later, a dog loped up to her, tags rattling, a beautiful black mutt that gazed up at her as though beguiled. She heard a whistle.

“Cobey, sit.”

She straightened. Aiden was walking toward her across the sand.

She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “My boss told you where to find me? Turnabout, I guess.”

He walked up. “I followed you along the road for half a mile. You didn't watch your back.”

The sun glared from his shades. The wind smelled of salt.

“I'll be more careful,” she said. “Are you here to talk about seeing Zero that night at Xenon?”

“Forget Xenon. I'm here because I can't stand being lied to.”

She dropped her hands to her sides. “I didn't lie to you.”

“Bullshit. You weren't Eddie Azerov's victim. You were his accomplice.”

A bright hum rose in her ears. His face was flat with anger, his shirt blowing against his frame. An urge to disappear overcame her. Drive north to the desert, up the eastern side of the Sierras. Vanish into the backcountry.

She had thought Los Angeles would be the backcountry. She came here to hide in plain sight among nine million people in L.A. County. Aiden's hands hung open, but tense, as though ready to curl into fists.

She was well and truly hosed.

“My juvenile record was sealed when I turned eighteen,” she said.

“You and Zero had a hell of a run, until you crashed a getaway car. Is that why you didn't tell me earlier? Because you botched the escape?”

The humming in her ears rose to a roar. The light took on a searchlight gleam. Sorenstam had managed to dig it all up.

Why had she thought her history could be kept secret? Records were records. They might be sealed, but they never evaporated, any more than memories or pain.

Say something. Say the right thing.
The gleaming light seemed to turn her numb.

“Eddie Azerov is a nightmare. He's . . .”

“Sssuu . . .”

Azerov's voice, hissing and hot, filled her mind. His flat eyes, his tiny teeth, the way he cocked his head as he leaned in and whispered threats in her ear.

“You think I wanted to spill everything about him fifteen minutes after I met you? No way. And to hear you give me information that he was involved—”

“Stop it. Whatever you're trying to pull, just stop it.”

She nearly raised her hand to slap him. Ten years earlier, she would have. “I'm not pulling anything. Why would I do that?”

“That's the jackpot question. You want the sheriff's department to provide you with official cover for something? You're out to get Azerov and think you can worm his whereabouts out of the department? Barricading yourself against some attack that's in the wind?”

“I'm trying to convince the department that the third shooter exists and is back.”

“Then you're going to have to convince me.”

His eyes were hidden by the sunglasses, his face clenched with some cool bitterness. Sorenstam had planted a seed of suspicion, and it was growing twisted roots. Harper felt she was on the edge of something very bad. It was circling. She had only a little time to get out from under it, or her last chance to come out of this the right way would be gone for good.

“You want to know the truth? I'll tell you. And Sorenstam can dig up the court records and rip open everything that was supposed to be confidential. You can corroborate everything I'm going to tell you. But—”

“No
but
s.”

“But you have to tell me everything about your traumatic brain injury. The issue with misidentifying people. Straight up.”

“I have.”

“Now I call bullshit.”

“Stop deflecting. You tell me the whole story, and I will damn well verify every syllable you speak.”

They faced each other, neither moving back. The dog stood at Aiden's side.

He glanced at the ocean. “Sorenstam's wrong. I did see the shooter's tattoo at Xenon that night.”

“You saw Zero.”

“I am one hundred percent positive.” He looked back at her. “My vision is screwed up. Not my memory of that night. I saw him.”

The crash of the surf cut through the humming in her ears.

“Then we have a huge problem. Because as far as bad times go, Eddie Azerov is only the advance guard.” The breeze chilled her skin. “Something's coming.”

W
hat's coming?” Aiden said.

The searchlight sun turned the ocean and sky a flat white. Harper breathed. “Them.”

He eyed her from behind his sunglasses. “Azerov?”

“And the guy who holds his leash.”

“Start talking.”

“Walk with me.”

She couldn't let the words pour out and stay standing in them. Nodding at the cliffs above Pacific Coast Highway, she headed for the pedestrian bridge that crossed the road. Aiden clipped a leash to the dog's collar and followed.

“I didn't join the crew for kicks. China Lake's isolated but not that bad,” she said.

“So why? Your daddy ignored you and your momma was cruel?”

“Dad died when I was a kid. China Lake's a naval air weapons testing facility. They blow stuff up in the desert, and one day, things went wrong.” She climbed the steps to the bridge. “Mom drank.”

Aiden didn't look at her. “And you became a bartender.”

“I also joined the Navy. I wasn't afraid I was duplicating their lives.”

Still, she could see her mother staring blankly out the kitchen window, as though watching for her father's ghost. She could hear Lila's monotone.
“Stop spying and get Mom a beer. And don't make me drink alone. Get yourself one.”

Harper didn't. She was twelve.

Now she climbed toward Ocean Avenue, eyes forward. “And I learned early how to cut people off.”

“Does that go for dealing drugs?” Aiden said.

“I never dealt.”

“Didn't keep you from working as a courier.”

Abruptly, the date palms, beachfront apartments, the manicured lawns blooming with jasmine and hydrangeas, looked like a cardboard front—a Potemkin promise of freedom from the life she had fought to escape. A hot stone heated inside her.

What was the point in telling him?
I hate drugs because my mom mixed booze with pills and larceny.
It would come off like a sob story—liquor stores where Lila slipped a pint flask of whiskey into Harper's jacket. Being nudged down the aisle at Walgreens to shoplift Excedrin because Mom had a hangover but no money. At the health clinic, being told,
“Just grab it from his desk. I'll keep the doctor talking in the hall and you take the prescription pad.”

She stopped walking. “I can warn you about what we're dealing with, or you can keep up the verbal beatdown. Your choice.”

Aiden shortened his grip on Cobey's leash and peered at the ocean. On the horizon, a haze blurred water into air.

“There's a real threat. It doesn't come from me,” she said.

Finally, he looked at her. “Then from who?”

“His name is Maddox.”

“First name?”

“Travis.”

“Is he in the system? Have an arrest record?”

“Yes.”

He took out his phone. “He ran the crew?”

“His dad did. Roland Maddox, better known as Rowdy.”

He keyed his phone. “You may be a redneck if . . .”

“He'd been a pro wrestler. It was his ring name.” Her voice was a scythe. “You can call him Fagin.”

He looked up. “How did he turn you into the Artful Dodger?”

“Mom moved in with him. They called it a common law marriage. That started it.” She nodded at his phone. “Taking notes?”

“Mind like a steel sieve. I'm searching for Travis's arrest record.”

She resumed walking toward Ocean Avenue. “Maddox was a balls-to-the-wall crook. He got Mom to ferry stolen property out of China Lake to L.A., then make the return run carrying cash or bricks of dope.”

“You knew?” Aiden said.

“Just that sometimes Mom left while I was at school. Sometimes, she arranged for me to sleep over at a friend's, then didn't come home for two days.”

Nobody ever invited her back to their house a second time. Eventually, when Lila left, Harper locked herself in her bedroom at Rowdy's half-built mansion in the desert south of town.

Aiden said, “The car wreck.”

She eyed him.

“Sorenstam's thorough,” he said.

Like a flamethrower was thorough. The familiar script lay at the back of her throat, ready to recite.
The car crashed on Highway 14, south of China Lake. I ran it off the blacktop into a ditch. I didn't have a driver's license. A trucker stopped and called the highway patrol. They found the bricks of weed in the trunk.

“You were ferrying dope to Maddox,” Aiden said.

“The dope was on its way to him.”

He turned to her. “I have nothing but time. So stop holding back. What's the real story? Eddie Azerov was driving but split before the flashing lights turned up?”

Her cheeks heated. What could she lose at this point by admitting how much she had lied?

“It was my mom.”

He looked at her.

“She fell asleep at the wheel. Woke up when we barreled into the ditch.”

“Your mom ran and left you there,” he said.

“I had a concussion and needed stitches. She said the trucker would get help.”

His expression turned skeptical. “How come she didn't take the dope?”

“She loaded probably a dozen bricks in my backpack before she ran. She didn't have time to grab the last two.”

“And she reminded you that you were a minor, while she couldn't afford to face charges for, what, the third time?”

“Fifth.” Harper's face was burning, heat pouring from her palms.

“Pretty damned vicious,” Aiden said.

It was the first sympathetic remark he'd made since he arrived. She'd take it.

“We wrecked near an abandoned factory. She headed cross-country and hunkered down there. She said she'd be watching—like she was a guardian angel. But . . .”

Calm down.
It was old news—a scar, not a scab. She could put a flame against the story and it shouldn't hurt. She held her hand out to the dog. Cobey padded silently, his black coat rippling in the sunlight.

“The wreck isn't what matters. It's what happened afterward,” she said. “Zero and Travis Maddox found me. Travis told me I was going to start working for Rowdy. That if I didn't, he'd anonymously call the cops and tell them Lila was at the wheel. My mom would go to prison, and the water would just be over my head.”

Travis had slowly circled her. Zero poked at the stitches in her scalp, his breath brushing her neck.
“Make your life simple. Do what we tell you.”

Aiden took off his sunglasses. His expression was pained. Somehow it softened him.

“So they inducted me into their crew,” she said. “Commercial burglaries. Auto theft. Household B and E. Phishing schemes—e-mails tricking people into revealing their credit card numbers and PINs. An ATM cash-and-dash with stolen debit card data.”

Aiden said, “You didn't have anybody to talk to? A teacher, a minister?”

“First rule of an addict's household: Say nothing. Ever. Besides, when you resisted, Rowdy got his belt.”

Rowdy, six-two and juiced.
“Disobedient bitch . . .”

They crossed Ocean and walked to Caffé Nero, where she worked part-time. She stopped on the sidewalk. The dog stood at her side, panting.

“Rowdy left welts, but nothing else. He had us kids to do the dirty work. We were the ones who left fingerprints.”

“How many kids?”

“Including Travis, seven or eight.”

He held up his phone. “This him?”

The sun glared from the screen. The mug shot was everything she remembered about Travis Maddox: sullen eyes and a caustic teenage stare.

She nodded. Aiden continued to hold up the phone, as if brandishing a crucifix at a vampire. His voice was low.

“What happened to Susannah?”

The noise of traffic brushed over her. After a long moment, she said, “She's gone.”

Aiden continued to brandish the phone, waiting for more than that.

She nodded at the photo. “Because of him. Susannah's gone,” she said. “I got rid of her.”