Blood and Sand Page 13

“Smart thing to do when you’re obviously injured,” he says, wagging a finger at my face.

  “Shut up. I don’t know how Jones confirms kills, but guys like him usually have a method to prove to their clients that the target has been eliminated. He can’t do that with Polly. He probably figured something out with Hattie, but that’s half his fee, if the mob agreed to pay him anything for a job half-done, which they usually don’t. Word gets out about that. It gets out good and fast, and then you start seeing your business dry up. Those are solid, practical reasons for Jones to get ahead of this thing and go full Terminator on anybody who’s crossed paths with him while he’s been here. And I might believe that’s all there is to it, except I’ve gone a few rounds with him and I’m telling you, he’s made this personal.”

  “Because of you?”

  “Could be me. Could be Polly getting away, could be Gus tagging him.”

  “Wait.” Dane straightens from where he was leaning against the fridge. “You think Polly got away?”

  “No.”

  “You just said that.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, Fell, you did.”

  I try to mentally rewind. The effort zaps me somehow, and my knees go weak. My fingers loosen, I hear a crack and a splash, and next thing I know, I’m sitting in a chair with Dane crouched in front of me, holding my head in his hands and saying, “Beth! Beth, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I sag into his touch for a second, then bat his hands away. “Back off, I don’t have time for this.”

  He stands and presses me into the chair. “Make time.”

  I don’t want to do it, but he’s leaving me no choice. I pull the punch; it’s maybe a quarter of what I’ve got, force-wise. Dane cups his balls, doubling over.

  “You know better than to hold me down,” I say. “You know better than anyone.”

  I hop up, re-energized by guilt and righteousness in equal measure. I leave the break room, and a gurney passes me, bound for the elevator with a body bag on it. I follow.

  The coroner’s assistants look me over in the elevator, but they hold their questions. I’m shadowing them to see how it goes, the path from crime scene to coroner’s van — how hard it is to hitch a ride, how much flak you get for coming along. The elevator doors open, I continue in their wake, and neither of them says a word.

  Outside by their van, though, a new development: the press has arrived. I scan through the skirt suits and find her right away. Tina Taylor has chosen a magenta ensemble that makes her look like a radioactive jungle bird. She sees me and starts cawing questions with the rest of the phalanx — it’s small, but it’s right in the path of the gurney — and she’s making sure to signal her cameraman to keep his lens clear of my destructive hands.

  “And it’s not even Christmas,” I mutter to myself, getting in front of the bodybag and diving in, on the pretense of clearing the coroner’s assistants a path. I remember Hector’s innocent comments from Tina’s segment last night and how they almost got him killed. I keep my head down and watch for the heels Tina’s wearing.

  There are a lot of good reasons I wear these boots. For one, kick-starting a motorcycle in anything else makes the job a lot harder. But also on the list is the fact that feet are so eminently breakable. Especially when you’re sporting cheap magenta pumps.

  I aim, I feign a stumble, I stomp. Tina’s wail is sweet, sweet music, but I make sure to look up as if startled, give her a quick glance of innocent concern, and continue my good samaritan act of helping load Doris. The guys even thank me as they shut the van’s doors.

  I make definite note that they both go up front. Makes sense. It’s not an ambulance; there’s nobody to treat in the back.

  “You cunt!” Tina’s screaming. “You broke my — you broke my —”

  I look around like, Whomever could she be talking to?, and hightail it for the parking lot. I’ve got my keys ready and my mind filling with all the questions I’ll need Lacy to answer, when the sedan next to my bike opens its driver’s side door.

  Laughlin tries to look intimidating, planting his walking cast and standing without crutches.

  “They let you drive with that thing?” I say.

  “Get in.”

  “I find missing kids for a living. You really think I’m falling for that one?”

  His eyes jump to the reporters. Mine do, too, and it strikes me as funny but unsurprising that nobody seems particularly concerned about Tina, who’s sat down on the concrete to rock back and forth on her body ass.

  When I turn back to Laughlin, he’s different. There’s some kind of miserable surrender in the way he bounces his keys in his hand. He tosses them to me, and I catch.

  “Get in,” he says again, and obeys his own advice, bending and collapsing behind the wheel.

  I do, marveling at my own actions. But whatever else I am — and I am a lot — I’ve always been curious.

  The car is a boxy Buick, plenty of room for Laughlin’s height. I feel like a midget in the passenger seat.

  “I called around,” he says, squinting out the windshield. “You usually play nice with the police. If you ice out anybody on the reg, it’s the feds.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “I talked to some people,” he says. “They told me you’re the best. The best there is at this.”

  “You tried to flatter me yesterday. It didn’t work, remember?”

  “But I’d only talked to a couple of people yesterday. After that, I talked to a lot more.” He licks his thumb and rubs at a coffee stain on the dash. “They say you never quit. You go and go and go ’til you find them. You drive yourself into the ground.” He’s driving his thumb into the stain, though the stain is now gone. “Is that the secret?”

  “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. Why wouldn’t you step down from lead?”

  He shifts, reaching. I’ve got my hand on my knife before I see he’s taking out his wallet. He flaps it open and pulls out a photo, handing it to me.

  “She was three,” he says. He doesn’t say any more than that, and I don’t need him to. She’s got red hair in pigtails. Purple overalls, pink Keds. One of those smiles that’s all baby fat and goofy happiness.

  “Did you get him?” I say, handing the picture back.

  “Not in time.” Laughlin puts it away, clearing his throat. “We’ve been sidelined. Internal Affairs has us jumping through hoops, so Polly’s case is going to another precinct. Meaning those guys are gonna be playing catch-up.” He pockets his wallet. He sees my hand drift to my knife pocket again as he does, and he smiles like this is reassuring. “Is there any chance she’s alive?”

  I poker-face him. “If that’s really your kid and she really died, I’m sorry. But if you want to know my secret, a big piece of it is this: I don’t trust every person who tells me a sad story. You made my job harder when I first got here. You’re keeping me from doing my job right now. My job is to hunt like they’re alive and kicking until I find out otherwise or I drop dead myself. And as you said, besides the FBI — who, fun fact, lost our only two suspects last night — I’m now on my own. So is there anything else you need to ask?”

  He nods bleakly. “What do you need from me?”

  “Stay out of my way.” I set his keys on the armrest and get out, bee-lining for my bike and then the street.

  Cool move. Giving me the keys, giving me control. Cool move, also, to give me a story like that and a cute photo to go with it. It’s the kind of thing I could check with a phone call, so while I’m not picking up my pompoms and becoming Team Laughlin this very minute, I’m going to have to assume he’s telling at least a dimension of the truth. It would explain his investment, his dickish territoriality, and his smarmy attempts to win me over when it became clear he was being sidelined. Maybe he thought I’d take him on as a temporary partner.

  I’m still laughing at that as I walk into UCLA Medical, where I find out from Lacy’s intern that Doris’s autopsy is already underway.<
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  I know the hospital’s locker room well enough. There’s a washer and dryer for doctors doing overnights, so I throw my clothes in before I shower — minus my jacket, which I take in the shower with me and hang on the hook with my towel. And it’s in the shower, doing the workaday business of soaping sand out of my hair and blood out of my wounds, that I try to get honest with myself. I’ve had two cases in seven years as a freelancer where I didn’t find the kid dead or alive. Both of them were thrown in the ocean, one in St. Kitts and one near Mumbai. In both instances, the perp had access to a boat and motored out to a deep depth with heavy tides before throwing the body overboard.

  A missing person is always somewhere. There’s not a hole in the space-time continuum that they slip through. If they’re not being held, they turn up, and if they were being held but now they’re not, they’re dead at least ninety-nine percent of the time.

  I get out, wrap up in a towel. In the mirror by the lockers, I take stock of my body’s condition. I’ve got swelling and brand new colors cropping up everywhere. The cut on my lip is pretty rough, and there’s another above my eyebrow. I don’t remember getting hit there, but for the speed Jones was using, that sounds about right. I disinfect what I can, getting stared at by a woman in scrubs who comes in to change.

  “Are you okay?” she says.

  “Roller derby. Can’t get enough.”

  I get dressed and walk in on Lacy’s autopsy. She’s weighing the liver, reading the kilograms into the microphone. I prop up onto a clean table and watch, thinking I could have voiced my suspicions to Dane or Fussy or somebody that Jones wasn’t going to let this matter lie — then maybe Doris wouldn’t be getting her organs inventoried right now. But they wouldn’t have listened, and anyway, I gave her the best chance I could by putting her in FBI custody rather than that ratty police precinct.

  Lacy switches off the mic when she’s done, stretching her neck and telling me, “You look like death.”

  “I got in a fight.”

  Lacy sighs on her way to the sink. “Anything I should take a look at?”

  “No, but if you’ve got an ice pack, I’ll be your friend forever.”

  She dries her hands, goes to a freezer and tosses me one. I sneak it under my shirt. My eyes widen involuntarily when I apply it.

  “Beth —”

  “Tell me about Doris.”

  “She was shot in her sleep,” Lacy says, with a gentleness that’s unnerving. “The two to the chest preceded the one to her head but only by seconds. The body had no time to react at all. If Hattie’s death had a polar opposite, this is it. Are we friends?”

  That brings me up short. “Yeah. Of course we’re friends.”

  “It hurts me. Seeing my friend in pain. No, let me finish — it hurts me seeing you not take care of yourself. So I’m asking you, for me, come upstairs and get an exam.”

  I slide off the table. “When I’m done. You know that. Then you can fix me up all you want.”

  “It’ll take half an hour.”

  “No, it won’t. You know that, too. They’ll want x-rays, they’ll want a head CT, and then they’ll want to admit me. We’ve been here before.”

  “Yes,” Lacy says. “Yes, we have, and I don’t want to be here again.”

  “Do you have any tape?” I tap the ice pack. My temper is well under control.

  Lacy’s isn’t. “Beth, for God’s sake, you’re going to get killed one of these days!”

  I leave. I take the stairs up two floors, pick an empty room at random, and steal some tape from a cart. It’s not the first time Lacy’s delivered that rant when I’ve slunk in looking like a survivor of mortal combat. I’ve thought of trying to reason with her, but my reasons aren’t comforting. A walk through my psyche has made more than one therapist take off running, and I can’t think of why Lacy would be different. Dane gets me more than anyone ever has, but it’s not a good thing. I see how afraid he is of me, deep down, in the place where he really does understand.

  This ice is awesome. It makes such a difference when it’s genuinely cold. I get it nice and stuck on, then I start walking for my bike again, with one eye on the time.

  Chapter 19

  Jones didn’t steal Gus from federal custody so they could have lunch and a spa day. I’ve seen too much injustice to put any stock in karma, but it does make me undeniably happy, thinking what Jones might do him. I’m polishing off a hot dog in front of the hospital as I dial Nico.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “So I don’t want an earful about this, but I planted the tick.”

  I hear his excitement anyway. It’s a static charge in the phone. “I’ll run the program.”

  The tick is a tracking device Nico invented. When he showed it to me I told him, in no uncertain terms, that I was not Bond and he was not Q and he should not be fabricating tech. I think my exact words were, “The stakes of my investigations are too high to be testing new shit in the field.” But he was so crestfallen, and the bug was — honestly — so damn cool that I agreed to carry one and maybe, someday, we’d give it a shot.

  Nico made an effort to explain it to me, but I stopped him when he lapsed into MIT-speak. That’s where he’s getting a dual Bachelor’s in Applied Robotics and Biomedical Engineering, and that’s why the tick is almost microscopically small, with an adhesive that somehow blends into any skin tone once applied. I put it on the back of Gus’s neck while I was threatening to knife his eyeball in the interrogation room. I thought the odds were slim that the mob would spring him, but I also thought Jones might be crazy enough to try.

  “It’s working! It’s working!”

  I hold the phone away from my ear. “Where am I going?”

  “The municipal wrecking yard. Sorry. I never promised it would take you glamorous places.” He’s giddy.

  “Settle down. We’ll see if it’s there, then we’ll celebrate.”

  “Okay. Okay, sure. Hit me back when you’re close. I’ll lead you straight to it.”

  The day is sunny and perfect. My head aches and my body hurts all over, but I’d bet any amount of money that Gus is worse off, and let’s face it, that’s kinda neat.

  The wrecking yard isn’t fenced. It’s too vast for that. Here lie the casualties of impatient Los Angeles drivers, their overloaded freeway system, and texting. It’s an insane, infinite mass of motor vehicles that have been stacked, tangled, flipped and crunched into a maze of metal and glass. I don’t even attempt to take the bike in there; I’d pop a tire before I made it twenty feet. I pocket my keys and dial.

  “You’re a quarter-mile away,” Nico says, barely containing his excitement. “Straight ahead, left when I tell you.”

  I walk toward the grate of a brown Cadillac with a squirrel on the steering wheel inside. “It’s a wrecking yard, buddy. There are cars piled everywhere. I’ll do my best, but ‘straight ahead’ in here is a relative term.”

  “Okay, cool.”

  “How’s school?” I ask.

  “Good. I’ve got finals next week. Take a left.”

  I turn, looking up at a tower of trucks and sub-compacts that doesn’t strike me as being terribly stable. “Are they manageable, or will you be cramming?”

  “Orgo’s killing me.”

  “Naturally. That’s what it’s for.”

  “You’re veering right. You need to go left.”

  “Can’t. There are about seventeen SUV’s in my way.”

  “Okay, next left you can take. Hey, is this about that girl who won the lottery?”

  “Nico, what’s the rule?”

  “Don’t ask.” He says it by rote. He should; I’ve told him enough.

  “How’s Ginger?” Ginger’s been Nico’s girlfriend since freshman year. I did a background check on her. She’s clean.

  “Freaking out. Orgo’s killing her, too. Okay, straight ahead, straight ahead!”

  I do a very snaking, meandering version of this instruction, finally kicking a loose headlight out of my path and stan
ding over the trunk of a totaled Prius.

  “Is it there?”

  “Hang on.” The second I say that, a flurry of grunts and knocks begins inside the trunk. I cradle the phone with my neck and take out my lock picks. “How’s your mom? Is the diet helping?” Nico’s mom has lupus. She’s trying an anti-inflammatory diet to lessen symptoms.

  “A little, yeah. She says she has more energy.”

  I pop the lid. Gus’s dirt-brown eyes stare up at me with stupid hope. His mouth is taped. His legs are bound behind him, as are his hands, and both legs and hands are tied to a noose around his neck, which pulls tighter whenever he struggles.

  “Is it there?” Nico’s most likely assuming I stuck the tick on the fender of a car just to test him.

  “Put it this way,” I say. “You’re getting a raise.”

  “Wooo!”

  I hang up, giving the bumper a shove to see if it’ll take my weight. It does, so I sit, propping a foot by the license plate and setting my chin on my knee, cutely. “Hi, Gus.”

  The exact content of what he might be shouting is hampered by the tape over his mouth, turning his pleas into several long strings of letter m’s. I look around at various cars with their rear ends caved in, waiting for him to quiet down. Eventually, his struggles pull the noose taut around his neck, and he gurgles, trying to be still so he can breathe.

  “Gus, I’ve got a problem.” I take out my knife and play with it, butterflying it open and closed. Gus’s eyes, rolling for lack of oxygen, fight to stay open so he watch. “As I sit here, I see that you too have a problem. I’m holding the solution to your problem in my hand. I keep it very sharp; it would take one swipe over these cables to free you. The reason I haven’t done it yet is because Polly is still missing. I want to know where she is. I want a specific, unhesitating answer when I take this tape off your mouth, or I will leave you in here for the rats or stray cats or whatever vermin can burrow their way into this trunk to eat the flesh off your body while you try not to strangle yourself. Does that sound like something you can give me? That answer?”

  He nods as frantically as he can without making the cable cut deeper into his neck.