In the end, I couldn’t take the sleeping pills after all. I just sat there staring at the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on the Sominex label, wondering what would happen if bad guys with guns showed up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t wake up.
Eventually, morning came instead of bad guys. That was the thing about mornings. No matter how fucked up your life got, how deep and black your despair, how sure you were that you just couldn’t take another second of this shit, morning just kept on coming. Over and over. Morning didn’t give a damn about your little drama.
Morning brought Malloy from his bedroom lair again, just like the day before. He looked the same as ever. I showered while he made coffee and read the paper. Ozzy and fucking Harriet. If you squinted, it all seemed almost normal. Except for the part about me being an ex-porn star dressed up like a boy, wanted by the cops and on the run from the psycho ringleader of some kind of prostitution slavery racket who’d tried to have me killed once and wanted to finish the job. Noon seemed to take forever to show up.
When it was finally time to head over to the mall in Sherman Oaks and see if Lia would be there at the hour specified in her note to Zandora, I quickly wrapped my tits and waist and put in the blue contacts. It had been so nice to just relax without all those sweaty uncomfortable mummy bandages. As we were headed out the door, I decided at the last minute to wash out my new blue cup, wrap it in my last two t-shirts and stick it in the duffel bag with the little robot and the boots. I couldn’t shake this powerful need to keep my meager possessions with me at all times. Of course, I could get into serious trouble for bringing a loaded gun to the mall, but hey, at this point that was the least of the reasons why I might be arrested. I didn’t worry all that much about it.
18.
What can I say about the Sherman Oaks Fashion Square mall? You’ve been to any mall in America, you don’t need me to describe the place. Stores. Shoppers. The American consumer dream all spread out and waiting, available for a price. Everything your sheep-like heart has been trained to desire. I hate malls. They’re like strip clubs for women. All tease and sparkle and the empty promise that if you just drop enough cash, somehow you’ll be fulfilled. The slick, shameless, never-ending hustle of a shopping mall makes places like Eye Candy look downright charitable by comparison. When I need to buy stuff, I’d much rather shop online. That way I don’t have to battle my way through all those lonely, desperate, retail-therapy junkies. Nothing more depressing than watching these skinny, manic women digging their own graves with a credit card while their bored husbands furtively eye my assets, trying to figure out if I really am Angel Dare or just look like her. The only kind of store I really love to browse in is a hardware store. I’m a compulsive fixer-upper, always on the lookout for new things for my house. At least I used to be. I have no idea what I am now.
Our destination was the food court and at that weekday lunch hour it was packed with cubicle drones wearing sensible shoes and laminated IDs around their necks. The ring of fast food options represented all the usual franchise suspects. Chinese, Italian, American, Middle Eastern. Ostensible variety that was really all the same school lunch food under different-flavored sauces.
Still, as much as I might hate malls, you had to admit Lia had made a smart choice for a meeting place. It was public, patrolled by security guards and packed with potential witnesses. I wondered how a girl who was essentially a captive sex slave from another country knew about this mall, but remembering her note claiming to have gotten one guy to “like her like a girlfriend” made me remember her expensive hair and nails. Her fancy heels. I pictured her working on her erstwhile beau to take her shopping. Batting her eyelashes and talking of lingerie and sexy shoes and all the while taking mental notes, memorizing everything. That girls had brains, I’d give her that. Brains and balls.
Malloy wanted us to move through the mall separately. Close but not obviously together.
“That way,” Malloy told me as he had parked the car up on a high, nearly deserted level of the parking structure, “if I get recognized, you won’t. We don’t know if your pal from Vegas got the note or information about its contents out of Zandora before we showed up or not. No point taking unnecessary chances.”
I opened the make-up mirror inside the visor on the passenger side and snuck a quick glance at the reflected image of that blond guy, Daniel. Imagining I was someone else made mirrors less of an ordeal.
The fading bruises around my eyes made the new blue contacts look lurid and too bright. The white tape had peeled off my nose in the shower that morning but some black sticky adhesive gunk was left behind and I couldn’t get it off because it hurt to scrub too hard. I ran a hand over the bleachy yellow buzz cut. I wouldn’t recognize me.
We left the car and headed down into the mall. I tailed Malloy past the Gap, past the Body Shop, threading through the lunchtime crowd in his wake until we reached the abovementioned food court.
I stationed myself by a smoothie stand where I had a decent view of the whole court and several exits. Every skinny blonde that passed made my heart twist under my ribs but none of them were Lia. Noon came and went without incident.
I watched Malloy lingering by the Sbarro and then without meeting my eyes he made a tight little gesture with his chin toward the stairs that led up to a second-level seating area. Unsure if he meant for me to follow him or not, I watched him head up, out of sight. Then, less than ten seconds later, he was heading back down. I could read the tension under his casual stroll and I wasn’t all that surprised when I spotted the weasel, my pal from Vegas, coming down the steps behind him.
I turned away, pretending to study the smoothie menu while watching Malloy out of the corner of my eye. He walked right past me and went into the bookstore on my left. I had no idea what he was doing. Apparently, neither did the weasel, but he followed Malloy into the store anyway.
I knew nothing could happen here in the mall, in full view of the security guards and all these civilians, but I also figured the weasel would follow us up through the parking structure and in that big hollow empty space it would be a whole different story.
Malloy and I had agreed that if anything went wrong in the mall, I was supposed to get the hell out and catch a bus back to his place. He had given me a spare key and when he’d slipped it into my hip pocket, I’d felt almost like we were dating or something. I had spent more solid back-to-back time with Malloy than with anyone else since I’d moved out of my parents’ house back in Chicago, yet we were not sleeping together. It felt so strange, unnatural somehow.
Watching Malloy browsing through the bookstore like there wasn’t a homicidal scumbag following him around, I wondered if now wasn’t a good time to bug out. Before I could decide one way or the other, I saw Malloy stumble and bump into the weasel, slapping his shoulder and smiling in that same dumb, friendly manner he had when he went into Eye Candy. I watched with baffled amazement, squinting and trying to figure out what the hell he was doing.
After his collision with the weasel, Malloy made his roundabout way out of the store. When the weasel followed, the shoplifting alarm went off.
Security guards immediately confronted the weasel and, after much protest from him, one of the guards pulled a small gilt-edged gift book from his jacket pocket. Some cheesy little thing full of uplifting quotes and photos of kittens, the kind of thing that you get as a gift from your grandmother and never read. Chicken Soup for the Homicidal Scumbag’s Soul.