South by Southeast (41 page)

Then I was running.

Nelson flung his car door open. He didn't want to shoot me, but he could tackle me from behind. Nelson's footsteps closed behind me, conditioned and quick. Nelson was fast; his breath huffed across the back of my neck as we ran between the crowded lanes. I darted to the shadowy sidewalk.

Nelson brushed my back as I changed direction, trying to grab a handful of my clothes. I pushed off from him, and he stumbled long enough for me to get out of his reach. An empty garbage can crashed behind me, tangling him.

“You're lying to me, I'll kill you myself. You're lying to me, your life is over, you sonofabitch!” Nelson shouted, his voice receding.

I ducked around a corner and was gone.

I left the
ampm
more than a mile from where I'd begun, with a new throwaway cell phone and enough minutes to last the rest of the night. Or my probable life span. Whichever ended first. I found a mom-
and-pop doughnut shop, took a booth in the rear, and kept my face away from the door and windows. A patrol car sped by with sirens fussing, but I paid no attention.

I hate to break a promise, but I dialed the number I'd sworn never to dial again. Once, we'd worked together to find a missing child because it felt like the right thing to do. But we'd lost track of right and wrong.

I expected to leave a message or have to wait for a return call. Instead, she picked up in the middle of the first ring. She had been waiting for me.

“Where you been, baby?”

Her voice was like tickling fingernails, unearthing buried images of her skin. I hesitated to call her Marsha out loud; her name was another of her lies. I had no name for her—no polite ones, anyway. I glanced around me to make sure no one was listening.

“He has April,” I said.

Marsha didn't waste my time asking who had April. Working with Marsha was the closest I'd come to sharing a mind. “He made contact?”

“A note under her welcome mat. Says I have to exchange a life for a life. Police aren't an option. I got a note before the madam died, but I hadn't put it together. It says to meet him at the tar pits at midnight. No cops.”

The shop manager came with the cup of coffee I'd asked for absently when I first skulked in. I waved him thanks.

“Why is this my business?” Marsha said.

“I said it's April.”

“I heard you, precious. But L.A.'s nowhere in my job description.”

I'd seen Marsha run two illegal domestic operations, so that excuse was feeble. My emotions were too dead for anger. I rested my head on my hand, blocking my face from the woman making her way toward the rear restroom. I pinched the room's light from
my eyes. “I need help with this one,” I said. “I wouldn't call if I had any other way.”

Marsha didn't answer. I was lucky she hadn't hung up on me, considering the names I'd called her the last time we'd been in a room together. Her long silence made me nervous.

“What do you want from me?” I said. “Name it.”

“The next time I call you, pick up the damn phone,” Marsha said.

When I last worked with Marsha, she'd asked me to seduce a Hong Kong businessman's wife, learn family secrets in bed, and report everything I saw and heard. A woman had fallen in love with me, and her husband had hired a gang to kill me. I'd promised myself I would never owe Marsha another favor. But it was a brave new world.

“Tell me the truth,” I said. “Do you think she's dead?”

I dreaded the answer, but I had to hear someone tell me, one way or the other.

“I'm not a profiler,” Marsha said, “but I doubt it. Your madam ran prostitutes, so she's a bonus. Your dad . . . well, you know better than I do.” So much for condolences.

Reluctantly, I took my mind back to the Fontainebleu's stairwell. Escobar had lost time when he stopped running to tell me he hadn't wanted to kill Dad. Almost an apology.

“He didn't seem to get off on it,” I said.

“Killing civilians probably offends his self-image. April's not what he's looking for. From what I've seen, it goes back to his sister. The mother dies on the journey, his sister turns to prostitution, shames her parents' memory. Yada yada. He's not killing prostitutes just because they're convenient—he has a vendetta. They violate some kind of code. He has more leverage over you if April is alive, or you think she is. My money says she's probably not dead. Yet.”

Marsha had been studying Escobar, apparently. Maybe that was what she had called to tell me. It sounded too good to believe,
but if Marsha was stringing me along, I'd asked for it. My shirt stopped squeezing my chest.

“I need this,” I said. “I love her.”

I could almost see Marsha rolling her eyes.

“You stepped in it deep this time, Ten,” she said. “Sometimes the cavalry doesn't ride in, lover. Sorry about your father. “

Hearing Marsha say she was sorry made Dad's death fresh, and I felt dizzy with images of Dad's bloodstained shirt, the faces of the women Escobar had killed in terror and pain, April's dimpled smile. Even if April wasn't dead, she was suffering. I remembered Escobar yanking Brittany's hair on the set, and I held the edge of my tabletop, resisting an urge to smash my coffee mug against the wall. If Marsha couldn't help me, April might be as good as dead. She had to know that, too.

“He's going to kill her, and he wants me to see it,” I said, just in case she didn't understand. “He'll make me watch. Then he'll do his best to kill me, too.”

Prostitution angle aside, Esocbar had killed Mother to get to me, not to punish her. Would it matter to Escobar that April had never sold her body?

“Not tonight, Ten. Some professional advice?” Marsha said. “I hope you're not set on dying for this girl. Needless to say, that would be a tragic waste. So think it over.”

“There's nothing to think over.”

“Get to your mail, and I'll send you files on your guy. That's all I can do. Keep that phone with you, and keep it charged.” We conducted business through an encrypted email server. My phone was cheap. Since I couldn't go home or to April's, I would need an internet café with a computer to read her email.

“Files and phones don't help me,” I said. “This is about to go down, and I need someone I can trust at my back.”

During Marsha's pause, I thought I'd changed her mind.

“I'll send prayers,” Marsha said.

“Prayers?” Talk of prayers was so unlike Marsha that I wondered if she was twisting the knife. Or speaking in code.

“Don't scratch up that pretty face,” Marsha said, and clicked away.

The sudden silence emptied me, until thoughts of April's suffering filled me again.

I tried dialing April's cell-phone number. Again, it didn't ring before going to voice mail. She might have dropped her phone somewhere, or Escobar might have taken it. April might never hear her message, but I had to talk to her. Escobar might let her hear my voice.

“April, I'm coming, baby,” I said. I closed my eyes, imagining the two of us on the summit of Table Mountain in Cape Town, staring down at the beautiful basin. I imagined holding her hands. I tried to paint our sanctuary with my voice. “Just hang on a while longer. I'm coming. I'm so sorry I wasn't there. But I'm coming now. I'll be there soon.”

I wanted to say more, but I hadn't called only to talk to April. I breathed fast as the silent phone waited for my message to Escobar. My teeth hurt at the idea of him listening.

“Don't hurt her,” I said. “I'm doing what you asked. I'm coming alone.”

I had run out of lies.

I left too much money on the table and rose to my feet.

I walked into the cool night.

GUSTAVO ESCOBAR COMPOSED
himself, hands tight on his van's steering wheel. Anger had clouded his judgment, and he had almost killed the girl too soon. He had
seen
himself kill her, swinging his sledgehammer to her face once, twice, three times, a tantrum of killing.

Useless. Crude. Childish.

Thank goodness he had come to his senses before he pulled his van over to grab the hammer that lay across the seat beside him. His fingertips vibrated from the hammer's imaginary blows. He blew out his breath in slow, even streams to bring the night back into focus. He drove calmly past the predictable sequence of traffic lights. Stop, go, slow.

His plan was still intact. His perfect night awaited him.

The actor had not called in the police. At first, Escobar blamed himself for the police at the actor's house. The old whore runner's death so soon after the actor's visit had been bound to cast suspicion on him, and he had not corrected her when she called out Tennyson's name on tape. Ah, well. A small price to pay.

But when he heard the girl's address in the chatter on his police scanner, witnessed the sudden arrival of more police cars, Escobar had been certain the actor had disobeyed him. Ignored him. His
anger had crested, and he'd looked for a side street so he could pull over, open the cage, and crush her poisoned skull. He would have rolled her faceless corpse into the street within a block of her front door, a bloody testament to how badly the actor had failed her.

But that waste had been averted.

The actor had been desperate enough to run from police custody. Escobar had seen the foot chase with his own eyes as he watched, invisible, from his van only yards behind them.

Escobar had bought the van for cash in New Orleans during the cross-country drive he'd spent eating gas-station food and listening to radio reports about his monstrosity. Escobar had painted the cartoon poodle with a happily lolling red tongue and a logo for a fake company called Pet Hotel so garish that no one noticed him. He dared the world to see him, and yet no one did. A van wasn't quite as useful as his
Rosa,
not nearly secluded enough. Still, a van did the job.

Escobar craned his ears. Had the girl moaned? For four hours, her head had been covered in a pillowcase, and she had been bound and gagged in the oversized livestock cage he had been saving for her.

No—for the whore, Chela. He actually had been saving the cage for Tennyson's teenage slut.

“Are you awake now?” he called to her, just loudly enough to be heard over the engine as they secretly glided on the streets. She had been sleeping, so this was his first chance to explain her circumstances. She deserved to understand.

Some of the women he had dreamed with were screamers and weepers who soaked through their gags. Others were stone silent. Still others veered between states of loud and quiet, frantic and frozen. This new one was mostly silent except for an occasional soft moan, as if she had awakened in slight pain. She was polite even in her captivity.

Politeness had made her so easy.

So easy for him to roll his wheelchair and follow her to the grocery store's coffee counter to stage his accidental “spill” when they bumped together. When he wouldn't take money for dry cleaning, she'd given him that lovely smile. So polite. She hadn't wanted to let him buy her a latte, but she'd agreed when he insisted. Upon prodding, she had even let him roll with her cup across the room to add a dash of cream and sugar from the condiments tray.

And he'd added a dash of the other thing, too, from his pocket.
Night-night.

To her, he had been harmless, a charming old man who told stories of old Hollywood and pet owners who pampered their dogs to death. As in all good conversations, five minutes became ten, ten became twenty. They had still been talking when she followed him to his van, which was parked beside her car. The bright pink stood out from across the parking lot. What a coincidence, to both be moving in the same direction.

Then the gun. The look on her face. The rest was more or less the same with them all.

The girl stirred slightly, a tiny
clank
against the steel bars.

“I know what you're thinking,” he said. “How can this have happened to you? You never expected it. You're still dizzy from it. That's how I felt when my mother drowned.”