“Where are you going?”
“Pete’s taking us someplace. I don’t know where, but I have to get away from Gabe.”
Seemed like a good idea to me.
“Priscilla, about that call center—”
“Oh, that’s an awful place, like a slave camp. They have these stupid rules about what you can wear, khaki pants or skirts with big ugly black knit shirts that are made for men but the women have to wear them too. Then they’ve got a blond bitch that sits on a tall stool and yells at you if you even speak to the person next to you. I hated that bitch so bad I used to have dreams about her. She had a basket by her stool for people to put presents in. If you gave her a present, you didn’t get yelled at.”
She might have trouble speaking until she felt comfortable with you, but Priscilla was really good at it once she got going. She had got so heated up over the blond bitch, she’d stopped getting clothes out of the trunk.
She said, “Mr. Ferrelli used to come there to see Mr. Brossi. Not the one that was killed, the one with the birthmark.”
“Denton?”
“Uh-hunh. He was the only one besides Mr. Brossi that went in this private room where some special people worked. They were up to something in there. Mr. Brossi and Mr. Ferrelli would go in there and then come out looking like the cat that chewed the canary.”
“Swallowed the canary.”
“Whatever.”
“Who else was in there?”
“I never knew their names, but there were five or six of them. They had keys to the door, and nobody knew who they were working for. The rest of us worked in groups, like everybody taking a company’s orders or its customer service calls were all in one group. They had big signs hanging over us with the names of the companies we worked for. But that locked room didn’t have any signs anywhere.”
Priscilla replaced the rejected things in the trunk and closed the lid. “Everybody thought they were stealing IDs.”
An electric jolt shot up my spine.
Priscilla said, “People call in to order something, they give you their name and address and phone number. Then they give you their credit card number. Lots of times, if you ask them for their social security number, they’ll give that to you too. They don’t have to, but they don’t know that. Out on the regular floor, they watch you real close to make sure you don’t keep notes when you’re taking calls, but they record everything.”
The transmitter Paco wore under his shirt was beginning to make sense. One call center processes thousands of calls a day. If crucial identifying information was being recorded and stored, a small group of protected thieves could use it to steal a staggering amount of money. And if Leo Brossi and Denton Ferrelli found out Paco was an undercover cop, they would kill him.
“How long ago was this, Priscilla?”
“I quit that place two months ago. That blond bitch yelled at me one time too many, and I left. That’s when Pete got me the job with Josephine. She doesn’t pay as much as All-Call, but she treats me like I’m a human being, not like a dog.”
Most dogs get treated a lot better than most humans, but I let it pass.
A car door slammed downstairs, and heavy footsteps pounded up the staircase. Priscilla froze, and I did too, both of us looking toward the door as if it might blow open from the force of the anger in the steps. A fist hammered on the door, and a man’s voice yelled, “I know you’re in there, cunt!”
I didn’t know which one of us he meant, but nobody calls me that and gets away with it. In her crib by the door, the baby raised her head and began to cry. Priscilla ran on tiptoe to pick her up. She stood swaying back and forth with the baby against her thin chest, looking at me over the baby’s head with big frightened eyes.
A key scraped in the lock, and I shot Priscilla an astonished glare. He has a key? She looked embarrassed, as if it had just struck her that locking the door against somebody with a key wasn’t a good way to keep him out. I sprang to my feet and pulled the gun from my pocket, holding it down and behind me. The doorknob turned and the door rammed forward, pulling the night latch from its mooring as if it were a hair.
The man who stomped through the doorway was a lot younger than I’d expected, maybe not even twenty, with a body big and hard as a refrigerator, a near-shaved head, and beady blue eyes lit with the fevered determination of a shallow mind. The floppy stuffed toy dangling from one hand was an incongruous touch, like a flower tucked behind a rhino’s ear.
“What the fuck, Priscilla? What’s this cunt doing here?”
This time I knew for sure he meant me.
Priscilla began to cry, curving over the baby like a turtle shell protecting its soft part.
He pivoted toward her with one arm raised, and she cowered like a whipped dog.
I yelled, “Don’t you touch her!”
He whirled to glower at me. “Priscilla knows better than to argue with me. She’s going to go get in the truck and wait. And then you and me are gonna have a little talk, and I’ll show you what I do when cunts mess with my family.”
Okay, that was two times I was certain he meant me.
I raised my gun and took a shooter’s stance, feet spread, both arms straight out, the man’s chest in my sights.
I said, “Priscilla isn’t going anywhere with you, and you’re leaving now. You’re going out that door and you’re getting in your big tall pickup and you’re driving away.”
“Yeah? Who’s gonna make me?”
I moved the barrel of the gun a little bit, aimed at the staghorn fern in its mossy basket on the landing behind him, and fired a round that whizzed past his left ear. The plant exploded and bits of plant and moss struck the back of his neck.
I said, “That would be me.”
21
The cocky grin left Gabe’s face, and his little eyes darted right and left like a cornered rat.
“Listen, cunt—”
“Listen yourself, you muscle-bound Neanderthal. That’s the last time you’re calling me that.”
I moved the gun to sight his head. Priscilla screamed, the baby screamed, and Gabe Marks threw the stuffed toy at Priscilla and ran down the stairs. As scream echoes bounced around the silent room, a car door slammed downstairs and an engine roared out of the driveway.
Priscilla sobbed softly against the baby’s head. I backed up on wobbly legs and sat down on the bed. I laid the gun down beside me and put both hands on my thighs because there was a distinct possibility that I might fly apart, that my limbs might go shooting off like the thick fronds of the staghorn fern I’d shot. Adrenaline hit, and I began to shake.
A stern voice in my head said, Would you really have killed him?
The scary thing was that I didn’t know the answer. By some quirk of genetics, a particular coordination of eye, hand, timing, and instinctive skill, I am an excellent shot. At the Police Academy, I always won the top marksmanship awards. In any exercise with paper targets at a shooting range, I always laid all my bullets in the spots where I intended them to go: the middle of the forehead or the center of the heart. Everyone who has ever shot with me has been awed and amused by my skill with a gun. Awed because they can’t match it, and amused because I’m the least likely to ever actually kill anybody.
If there’s anything I’m sure of, it’s that we pay one way or another for everything we do, that every action brings a reaction. The way I see it, this means that killing somebody on purpose is bound to bring really bad things into your life. And yet I had almost blown a man away.
Not wholly because he was threatening Priscilla either, but because he’d called me a cunt.
It was another unpleasant discovery about myself.
Through the open door, we heard more footsteps coming up the stairs: light, quick steps. Pete appeared on the landing, taking in the demolished fern and the open door, his forehead creased with so much anxiety that his eyebrows were almost floating.