Blood and Sand Read online

  I reach over and rip off the tape in one quick movement.

  “Storage garage,” he says. “Off the 605. Kennel in the corner.”

  I nod, doing a great impersonation of chill, and bury my knife in his knee.

  Gus yowls. Again, moving too much, choking himself, bending his legs hard so he can get air. Only now one of them’s been stabbed, so y’know, that’s a wrinkle.

  I pull out the knife. “Try again.”

  “That’s where she is! That’s where she —” He coughs, pulling his feet higher behind his back. The knee sprays in a lazy way, and Gus groans. “That’s where I put her, I swear.”

  “Are you telling me that the feds didn’t question you about this? I found the kid you’re talking about, Gus. It wasn’t Polly. It was Lani.”

  “What?” Gus has the nerve to look hurt. “No. No, it wasn’t.”

  I unzip a pocket, taking out a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a rag. Shows what Lacy knows: I do sanitize my knife ever time I use it. “I’m not going to argue with you. I am going to stab you in the other knee if you don’t start cooperating.”

  “I am! I am cooperating!”

  I hold up a finger. Gus goes silent. “Good,” I say, “that’s better. That’s you following directions. I’m going to give you some very simple directions to follow right now. And you’re going to follow them exactly or I might miss the next time I aim for your knee. I might go a tad high, understand?”

  He nods with total, abject agreement.

  “Tell me what happened that night. Start with parking by the church. Don’t leave anything out, but don’t waste my time either.” I tap the clean knife on the trunk lid. “You can do this, Gus. I believe in you.”

  He speaks in the fast, stilted manner of a schoolboy called on in class. Which definitely would be how you would speak if the teacher were pop-quizzing you at knifepoint. “Okay. Okay, uh — we parked by the church. Doris gave — Lani, right? Doris gave Lani a doll to play with, so she was back there doing that. Doris was nervous. I said there wasn’t nothing to be nervous about — all she had to do was go inside and sleep once we were done. Oh, and she had to call the kid in sick to school the next day. However many days it took for the check to come, she had to call the school, right? So I’m telling her that, and the — y’know, the other guy drives up.”

  Gus blinks sweat out of his eyes. “He didn’t talk. He never talks. He didn’t even talk when he put me in here. I said I’d do whatever, I said just tell me what you want me to do. But he didn’t say anything.”

  I think of when Jones talked to me. How his voice was barely there, a raspy memory of words. “You’re getting off-topic, Gus.”

  “Sorry. Sorry, yeah, okay. I, uh — I get out of the van, cuz I know this guy gives Doris the willies. He met us at the office the day before. Doris was —”

  I tap my knife on the lid again.

  “Right, okay. That night. I get out of the van, and he doesn’t say anything. He just starts out ahead of me. I didn’t like that — y’know, cuz this is my idea and my building and everything. I get the back door open, and he goes ahead then, too. I tell him while we’re going upstairs, I say, ‘Hey, listen, the locks stick. I gotta handle the door.’ He lets me go ahead, but I can tell he doesn’t want to. I can tell he thinks I’ll screw up or something. That gets me nervous, is the thing. That’s why I couldn’t get the lock — that and Hattie probably messed with it. She was always messing with stuff when I didn’t have time to come fix it. So y’know, that’s why she woke up. I don’t know why she went so nuts, coming at me like that. It was practically self-defense then, y’know? I shot her twice. I lied to you about that before, but — but yeah, I didn’t have a choice, right? It wouldn’t have been that big of a deal, I was ready to finish it, everything would have worked out fine. Except this asshole they sent me jumps in there, like I’m hogging the spotlight or something. The guy with that stupid hat, he jumps in, and —”

  “Where’d you shoot him?”

  “Huh? Couldn’t tell. Hey, could you at least loosen this up? Around my neck? It’s hard to talk.”

  “But you’re doing so well.”

  Gus makes a put-upon sound and continues. “All right, all right. So — so the guy beats it outta there. He just takes off and leaves me with this whole mess to deal with and — y’know, I forgot about Polly. I forgot she was even in there. I’m trying to lift Hattie up out of the kitchen, and I hear this — she was crying. Under her bed. I didn’t wanna do it. I wasn’t supposed to have to do it, but the pro they gave me pussied out, y’know? So I go get her and pull her clear, and —” Gus takes a good look at me, searching for recrimination in my face. He sees none. “Listen, it wasn’t supposed to go down like this. It was supposed to be quick. They’re in their beds, it’s quick, it’s over, and the pro takes care of the bodies. Then the check comes, and everybody’s happy.”

  Everybody’s happy? “Where’d you shoot Polly?”

  “Chest somewhere.”

  “High or low?”

  “I don’t know. By this point, I’m kind of freaking out, okay? I’m gonna have to ditch these bodies all by myself, right? I thought Doris would help, but the second I throw Hattie in, she —”

  “Nope. You skipped ahead. You shot Polly. Then what?”

  “Sure. Okay, sure, I — I picked up Hattie. God, that bitch weighed a ton. I wrapped her in my coat first, to try and keep the floor clean, but it didn’t work. There was blood all the way down the hall and the stairs. Downstairs hall, too.”

  “Wait. Through all of this, it’s dead-quiet in the building? No tenants woke up to check what was happening?”

  “We had silencers. We kept it quiet. Plus, it’s a quiet building. I don’t rent out to young people. They cause a ruckus.”

  I rub my sore head. “Makes sense.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, so I get to the back door, and I get out, and I’m going for the van. Doris was saying something to the kid, so she was turned around. I guess I could’ve — look, like I said, that bitch was heavy. I had to kind of fall with her, y’know? I don’t know why the kid had to be right in the middle like that. It was part her fault, getting splashed. Then I’ve got Doris getting out the front and running. I’ve got this kid passing out and kind of — I don’t know — having some kind of fit in the back of my van. And I don’t have time to deal with any of it, right? There’s still Polly to take care of.”

  “Gus, I feel for you, I really do. But let’s stick to what happened.”

  “Fine, so — so, yeah, I go back, get Polly, I —”

  “Did you check her pulse?”

  “What? No, why would I? I get her back to the van and put her in with the other kid, who’s — y’know, she looked asleep, but she must’ve been faking it.”

  I don’t interrupt, as badly as I want to. It would be too easy to fill Gus’s account with information I want to hear, simply by asking the wrong question. If he’s saying what I think he’s saying . . . my feet are itching for a gas pedal, my mind cursing the easy morning I’ve had.

  “I needed to try and clean up the blood in the hall and the stairs. I did a pretty good job, too. I come back to the van, I get behind the wheel, and I figure Zuma. The tides there are crazy. I make the whole drive real slow, y’know, to keep any cops from pulling me over. And I get there, and I open up the back, and —” He wriggles. “Listen, cut the rope and I’ll tell you.”

  I set the knife under his eye and pierce the skin. A bright red tear trickles over his nose. “Cough it up or I’ll blind you.”

  “The girl wasn’t there,” he says, puffing a series of quick breaths. “The girl we got to be Polly — you said her name. Laurie, right? Laurie wasn’t there. Laurie was gone. But Polly, she was alive. She was breathing.”

  I bare my teeth at him. “And you did what?”

  “I left Hattie at Zuma, and I took Polly out to the desert. There’s a storage garage I use. That’s where I put her. I thought I could still — y’know, I could still fi
gure something out. If you got her out of there, then great, you’ve got her. You’ve got her, so you can let me go.”

  “Gus, are you fucking with me?”

  “No!”

  As much as I or any working stiff in law enforcement would like to believe to the contrary, we are not human lie detectors. The ones who think they are have very powerful biases that they listen to unquestioningly, and they mistake this for intuition. I’ve learned instead to tally up the facts, and the fact is, Gus has provided me with a wildly unflattering portrait of himself that mostly dovetails with what I already thought. But with one detail that’s got my brain trying to race ten steps ahead. I yank the reins on my brain and tell it: One thing at a time.

  “Bonus round,” I say. “Did Lani come here with a parent?”

  “Yeah, her mom.”

  “And where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then what’s her name?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  I flip the knife sideways, giving myself a clear path to his crotch.

  “I don’t know!” he screams, thrashing, his knee bleeding, his noose tightening. He coughs, arching his back, trying to give his voice some volume through his fight to breathe. “I don’t know. Doris knows. Doris booked it. She can tell you.”

  “Doris is dead. You tell me.”

  “I don’t know. I’ll swear on whatever you want, I don’t know.”

  I tap the knife on my thigh, thinking. The information would be in Lani’s file, the one Doris destroyed. “How many days did you tell Mom you’d need her?”

  “Five,” Gus says. “We told her five days.”

  “And she wasn’t supposed to contact her own daughter for five days?”

  “We said she’d be too busy. We said she needed to focus, y’know? For the auditions? She liked Doris. They all liked Doris.”

  It still amazes me sometimes, the power of ignorance. And, as I stare at Gus, the banality of evil — how uninteresting it is most of the time, how pedestrian and pathetic, how unreflective and stunningly unaware. Often, at the most basic level, it’s a failure to take responsibility. It’s the consciousness that doesn’t want to grow up because then it would have to hold itself accountable. I’d love to pretend this tendency is confined to criminals, but it’s not; it’s everywhere. It’s far more prevalent than its opposite: people who have matured, who think about whom they’re hurting, who take ownership of their sins.

  It’s a lot harder to live that way. It’s a lot of pain and a lot of apologies.

  “Gus, I’m sorry about this,” I say, standing, “but if you look at it from my point of view, you’re another missing kid waiting to happen.” I pull the hospital tape from my pocket and tear off a fat strip.

  “No! No, hey, you can’t —”

  “You’ll add to my workload, understand? You’re extra hassle.”

  “No — hey, listen! Listen, maybe we can figure out where Doris put Laurie’s mom. We can put our heads together and —”

  I mash the tape on, wiping my hand when I’m done. I decide that’s not enough and break out the hand sanitizer. “Her name’s Lani, Gus. Lani, not Laurie. And she’s a lot tougher than she looks. If I had the lotto jackpot, I’d bet every damn dollar that she’s going to bounce back and move on and have a life that’s got its share of sleepless nights and a pretty severe fear of tight spaces. But she’ll work something out.” I flip my knife closed and wag the handle at his knee. “Whereas you? Your blood’s going to get a lot of junkyard animals very hot and bothered. I hope they make your dick an appetizer.”

  He’s screaming through the tape. I decode the vowel sounds: “You can’t leave me here!”

  Actions speak louder than words. I slam the trunk.

  Loud, frantic “Mmmm!”’s follow me out of the wrecking yard. I hardly hear them. I’m thinking of the clothes Lani was wearing when I pulled her out of that dog cage — pajamas that could have been any color, so soaked were they in Hattie’s blood. I’m thinking of what Polly probably wore to bed and how similar it might look if it were also soaked in blood. I’m thinking of Gus, Gus who can’t keep their names straight, let alone tell them apart by appearance.

  Gus went back inside the apartment building after depositing Polly in the van.

  What if Polly regained consciousness, seeing a bloody girl who looked exactly like her?

  What if she panicked? What if she picked a direction and ran?

  I’m thinking of going back to her neighborhood, picking a direction and starting to search, but whenever my mind starts trending that way, I stop it fast unless there is absolutely no alternative. All I’d have to do is pick the wrong direction, and any chance Polly had would be lost. This is assuming, of course, that she still has a chance, that the wound wasn’t fatal, that the ensuing shock wasn’t fatal, that two days with a foreign object in her body haven’t already resulted in a fatal case of sepsis — but screw it, I’m assuming all of the above. I’m breaking into a run, recalling the last couple of turns to my bike, feeling the impact of the ground ring all the way up through my bruises and ignoring it, all of it. Because about this much, at least, Laughlin was right.

  I never quit. That is the secret.

  Chapter 20

  A bluetooth doesn’t make it any brighter of an idea to be conducting a phone call while driving a motorcycle. I have to shout over the engine. Nico’s got a program to speed-hack numerous hospitals at once. We use it a lot. He checks every pediatric unit in LA to see if there’ve been any fresh Jane Does. It’s doubtful — Polly’s been front-page news for two days now; no way the police wouldn’t make the connection the second a hospital staff member called to tell them a wounded blond nine-year-old had rolled in — but you have to try the simplest solutions first. When that’s a no-go, I tell him to roll up his sleeves and start combing hotel registries.

  “We’re looking for a woman who arrived alone three days ago,” I shout. “You can try linking the reservation to Gus’s business credit card or maybe Doris’s personal, but I’m guessing they either used cash or they made the woman cover the hotel herself. You could also cross-reference with credit cards on file at the Joshua Lewis Talent Agency, but I doubt Doris left that info in tact.”

  “Any other parameters?”

  “Not really. Sorry. I know you’ve got finals, but —”

  “Forget that. I’m on it. Do you need anything else?”

  “Not right now. Thanks.”

  I’ve been trying to dismiss the prickles in my skin since I left the wrecking yard, but they’re not going away. I make peace with the fact that I’m being followed, and not by an amateur. There’s a car in my rearview that appears and disappears like a wave on one part of the ocean — if you stare long enough, it keeps coming back. It’s so far behind me that I’m tempted to dismiss it. Tailing someone is hard enough when you’re close; the more distance you add, the more impossible it gets. Especially if you’re doing what I’m doing, testing the tailer with random exits and on-ramps, taking streets with crushes of traffic that should shake even the most motivated shadow. Every time, the car shows up again: silver, clean, anonymous.

  I’m not amused. I should be running down a bunch of hopeless leads. It’s gotten to that point. If I’m right, and Polly saw Lani in the van and ran out of there with a bullet wound, then she’s as good as dead. There’s a reason the first thing I do is tour the place the kid vanished from. Most of the time, it’s their home; it’s the place they know best. They’ve staked out all the really sweet hiding spots, and Polly’s neighborhood has a million of them — defunct stores, shuttered restaurants, a lot of them with busted locks and a rotating cast of residents who want to do their drugs and mind their business. Another bundle curled up on a dark stairwell wouldn’t interest them, even if it were crying. Even if it stopped crying and started to smell.

  But what bothers me even worse is this: I’m not the only one thinking these thoughts. Jones is good at finding people. I’m bett
er. He knows it. He also knows that as marginally better as I might be at finding people, he surpasses me by at least that much in how good he is at killing them. So I’ve got a bad feeling he’s the guy glued to my six, certain I’ll lead him to Polly. Any effective move I make toward finding her, I’m also leading him to her.

  I punch the gas for Santa Monica. It’s 2:30 in the afternoon by the time I get there, but the pier is its own netherworld of timeless slacking. It could be midnight, could be ten a.m., could be a Saturday or a Tuesday or Thanksgiving Day. There’s always the gamers in the arcades, the drum circle on the dunes. There are the homeless with all their possessions, heavy coats ready for those cold SoCal nights. And there’s me, walking past a dumplings truck that’s calling my name, heading for a uniformed cop who’s chatting up a fisherman.

  Tuttle spots me and meets me halfway. “My God, are you all right?”

  “If you know who the mole is in your precinct, you need to tell me right now.”

  He laughs. “Good to see you, too.”

  “Is it you?” I say.

  “Let’s . . .” He tries to take my arm.

  I jerk it free. “Here. Now. Answer.”

  “No. No, it’s not me.” His feet go wider apart, his arms cross. Tuttle’s playing Bad Cop, and it looks all wrong on him. “Why the hell would you ask me that?”

  “Because you’ve been up my ass since I got here. You’ve been too friendly, too considerate.”

  “I’m a nice guy, remember?”

  “Guys are only that solicitous to women if they want to fuck them or fuck them over. Or both.”

  His eyes soften. “Who taught you that?”

  “Knock it off. Really, please. It’s like watching a golden retriever get left at home.”

  Tuttle wipes the sorrow off his face like I asked, but what replaces it is — well, I know what he’s going to say next. “I’ve never met anybody like you. I saw you walk in that first day, and it was like the lights went on.” If he were wearing a hat, he’d have it in hand. I’d love to interrupt him, or at least wipe off my expression of annoyed dismay, but he plows on. “I wanted to take you dancing. I wanted to make you smile. I wanted to bring you to a carnival so we could go on the Ferris wheel and I could kiss you at the top.” His cheeks are red on either side of the mustache. “I guess I came on too strong. I’m sorry for that. It won’t happen again.”