But Skouras had something better than a truck: He owned a shipping line. What if the tunnel rats had taken Nidia to a port and onto one of the Skouras cargo ships? They could have sailed her right to San Francisco. That made a lot of sense.
Whatever the logistics of getting Nidia where she was going, Skouras would then have to have someplace fairly private to keep her. That was most likely a second home or a vacation home, which could be almost anywhere. Once they had her safely there, the rest would be easy. It wouldn’t take more than one guard to keep her in line, maybe a second to relieve the first one from time to time, and to keep him company. Other than that, Nidia would require only healthy food, some fresh air, maybe some prenatal vitamins, and-
I sat up. I’d been thinking, an occasional checkup from a doctor, but how were they going to work that? They couldn’t just take a kidnap victim into town to sit around in a doctor’s waiting room. I drummed my fingers against my thigh, thinking.
Like everyone else, I’d heard casual references in movies to “Mob doctors,” but those films were never quite clear on where those guys came from. They were just there, available at any hour of the night, corrupt and unconcerned about whom they worked for. Or they couldn’t have a conventional practice, because they’d never finished med school or been barred from practicing.
I thought about that a moment longer. Maybe I’d just found a way in.
twenty-five
An hour later, I was waiting at a bus shelter for a MUNI bus over to UCSF medical school. It was a little before six in the evening, the going-home hour, and several other people waited with me. Others moved around us in a thin but steady stream.
I wasn’t sure whether the medical library would be open to the general population, or exactly what data base or archives I needed to ask for, but if somehow I could find a listing of doctors who’d been barred from practicing medicine in San Francisco in the past several years, I might find doctors who would be open to an overture from Skouras.
My theory was that Skouras would feel most comfortable reaching out to a man. No matter how ruthless he was, I didn’t believe he’d ask a woman to help him use a powerless teenager as an incubator. So if I was right about that, it would narrow the field of candidates some. There weren’t as many men practicing obstetrics as there used to be; it was an area increasingly dominated by women. A male ob/gyn who’d been suspended or expelled from the profession: That just might be a narrow enough bottleneck that I could catch the right suspect there.
In addition, a doctor with a prescription-drug problem, once separated from his supply, might quickly need money. That’d be an extra incentive to get in bed with someone like Skouras.
I was theorizing wildly and I knew it. This kind of work was uncharted territory for me. Not to mention the fact that all of this depended on my initial premise being correct: that Nidia was pregnant with a Skouras baby. This bordered on pointless.
The bus was approaching, but now I was undecided. As the people around me began to move into boarding position, I stayed back and glanced away, then stepped directly into the path of a well-built, nicely dressed man, who happened to be the lead gunman from the tunnel, the one I’d called Babyface.
When he saw me, surprise rippled clearly across his face and his steps faltered. Then a mask of normalcy fell over his face. He was very good. All this took maybe two seconds.
The bus opened its doors with a pneumatic hiss, and a section of the Chronicle skated around my feet. As if nothing had happened, I turned my attention away from him and stepped up, onto the bus. I’d been distracted enough that I didn’t have the fare ready, and it took me a moment of rummaging in my messenger bag to find the coins inside.
I paid and moved down the aisle. Behind me, I heard someone else dropping coins into the fare box. I didn’t look back but kept going until I found a seat close to the back of the bus.
When I was seated and looked up, Babyface was standing over me.
“Hailey?” he said. “That’s your name, right? We met in Texas, remember?” He was looking at me with that same half-benign curiosity in his heavy-lidded eyes that he’d shown in the tunnel.
“Yeah,” I said. “Hailey Cain.”
I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know. Clearly, he and his guys had looked through the personal items they’d taken off me down in the tunnel.
“You mind if I sit down?” Without waiting for an answer, he slid down into the seat, forcing me to move over.
He was wearing a leather bomber jacket over a cream-colored shirt, dark trousers, good shoes, but no tie, no briefcase or PDA. It would have been hard to say what his line of work was or where he was coming from.
He said, “I wasn’t expecting to run into you here. I thought you lived, what, in Los Angeles?”
I understood where he’d gotten that idea: The driver’s license he and his guys took off me in Mexico had my old L.A. address on it. But we both knew the truth: Babyface hadn’t been expecting to run into me anywhere aboveground.
“I do,” I said. “I’m just up here for a few days.”
We were playing a game. I wasn’t sure what it was. But he hadn’t been shadowing me. I’d seen surprise clearly on his face, however briefly, when he first caught sight of me. Had he been shadowing me, intending to kill or even seriously question me, he would have waited to get me someplace private. I didn’t think Babyface had any idea of what I was doing in San Francisco. He’d seen me on the street, his curiosity was provoked, he’d followed me to satisfy it. This was plain-view reconnaissance, the kind you did with an enemy so inferior that you had no fear of it. That was how he saw me, as no threat.
That was how I wanted to keep it, then. Sometimes you have to swallow your pride and get away clean.
I spoke softly. “I don’t know what happened to Nidia, and I don’t care.” I hunched my shoulders slightly, trying to project fear. “All I want is to forget about it. Every night I feel guilty, wondering why I came home alive and she didn’t.”
“You don’t need to feel guilty about that,” he said. “You’re just a kid who got mixed up in something a lot bigger than you realized.”
I nodded and stared straight ahead, at the grab bar on the seat in front of me.
Babyface’s voice was almost kind as he said, “If you forget all about this, you’re going to live a long and happy life, Hailey.” He took my hand, squeezing it as if to comfort me.
I nodded again.
“Well, this is my stop.”
It wasn’t his stop. But now his curiosity was satisfied.
Babyface said, “One thing, though. One of my guys couldn’t get out of the way of your car in time.”
In my mind’s eye I saw the Mexican tunnel, how two men had been almost directly in my path as I floored the Impala’s gas pedal.
Babyface took my little finger between two of his and said, “He’s never going to walk right again.”
Then he did something quick and efficient with his hand, and I both heard and felt bone crack as he broke my little finger.
twenty-six
“I need to get out of the city,” I told Serena. “It’s gotten too hot up here.”
It was around ten in the evening. I was sitting on the bed, holding the cell phone in my uninjured hand. My broken finger was splinted to its neighbor, the left ring finger.