“Better,” she said. “Maybe we’ll make it through the night.”
“You were about to tell me the truth.”
“Right. My friend John and I have been collecting a few dead presidents selling heroin to Brentwood and Beverly Hills assholes who like to impress their party guests with a special after-dinner treat.”
“Where do you get the product?”
“John has a friend who’s an army sergeant in—”
She stopped talking because I was shaking my head. “Goddamnit. You just can’t help yourself, can you?”
“What?” She pretended to be sincerely confused.
“Who’ll Stop the Rain? Michael Moriarty and Tuesday Weld, with Nick Nolte as the soldier. Not as good as the book. Get out of my cab. I’m finished.”
“No, baby,” she replied. “I’ll say when you’re finished.” I didn’t need much moonlight to see the huge gun she pulled from her bag. “I wouldn’t put too much faith in this cheap bandit shield.” She tapped the barrel of the gun against the plastic that separated us. “I mean, maybe it might stop a bullet, but... being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: do I feel lucky?”
“Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry,” I said, my mouth suddenly as dry as Clint’s delivery. What Nora was holding was a Smith & Wesson Magnum, all right. But it was a 500, bigger and badder than the one in the movie. Enough to take out the bandit shield, me, and the front of the cab.
“Relax, J.D.,” she said. “I got no reason to shoot you, long as you behave. In fact, I’m doing you a favor. If you drove out of here right now, with or without me, you’d be a dead man. The difference is: if we’re together when they find us, they’ll probably just shoot us both. But if I’m not with you, they’ll beat you to death trying to find out where you left me.”
“Why do they want you? Be straight with me, Nora. No more Yucatán pottery or drugs, huh?”
“My partner Jed and I... got into a situation back there.”
“What kind of situation?”
“That doesn’t matter now,” she said. “It happened. We pissed off the wrong guys, the kind who get real biblical when it comes to payback.”
“What happened to your partner?”
“He’s dead. That call I got was from some zombie, telling me he’d just shot Jed in the face. Like that’s supposed to freak me out. Fuck them.”
If she wasn’t freaked, she was either delusional or suicidal.
Two Escalades full of homicidal assholes out for revenge. Not exactly an everyday occurrence in Orange County. I knew of only one local who might have that kind of entourage, a former Vegas “businessman” who’d retired to the peace and quiet of Laguna Niguel.
“What did you and Jed do to get on the bad side of Caesar Berlucci?” I asked.
“Bad side?” She gave me a nasty smile. “Jed blew that fat wop right out of his Guccis.”
“He killed Berlucci? Why would anybody do something that stupid?”
She stopped smiling and tensed. For a second, I thought she was going to use that giant gun. Then she slumped again and I let out the breath I’d been holding.
“It’s what we were paid to do,” she said.
“Paid by whom?”
“Who the fuck knows? Or cares? The contract comes in. You do the job. Money is money.”
“It couldn’t have been easy, getting that close to the old man,” I said.
“Jed had a golden tongue. Talked us into the compound, won the old bastard over. We would’ve made it away clean, but Jed got greedy.” For a second her eyes sifted toward her big bag, then back at me.
“What went wrong?” I asked.
“Shit happens,” she said. “And now we got goombas on our ass.”
Yes we did. Two Escalades full, prowling around out there looking for a cab. They’d find out she hadn’t made it to the hotel. They would double back and go over the route again. Eventually they’d check out the park and find us.
When they did, Nora, with her ridiculous gigantic gun, which held only five rounds, assuming she hadn’t used one or two on Berlucci, would be of no real help. On the other hand, that ridiculous gigantic gun with its five or four or three bullets was more than enough to keep me trapped.
“Okay, what now?” I asked her, while trying to come up with my own answer.
“We wait until morning and people are going to work and there’ll be traffic and other cabs on the street. Then we head to L.A. And I pay you for your trouble. And we say goodbye, or...”
“Or what?”
“Or we keep going to Mexico and see how much fun we can get into. I’ve got... some money set aside back at the apartment.”
“We have a long night before we start thinking about fun,” I said.
“We could think about it a little.”
“Not with me up here and you back there.”
“Come on back. It’s nice and comfy.”
“What if we have to leave in a hurry?” I asked. “Be less dangerous to do our thinking up here.”
“Sometimes danger adds a little something, but I suppose you’re right.”
Nora had been so sloppy at her chosen profession that I hoped she might change her mind about the gun and put it away. But she kept it pointed in my direction while she got out of the car and joined me on the front seat.
She sat facing me, her back against the door.
She kicked off her sandals, drew her left leg up, and slid it forward until her toes found wiggle room between my back and the car seat. She rested her right leg across my thighs.
“Is the gun necessary?”
“For some reason, I think so,” she said. “But we can still fool around.”
“Not with a gun in my face. It’s much too distracting.”
“Then I guess we’ll just have to play the movie game instead,” Nora said.
“Fun’s better than games.”
“The gun stays.”
I shrugged. “Okay. Games. It’s a nice day for murder.”
“Cute,” Nora said. “But easy. James Cagney. Angels with Dirty Faces. Here’s one for you: I guess I’ve done murder. I won’t think about that now.”
“It’s the next line that’s the giveaway,” I replied. “I’ll think about it tomorrow. Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind.” I lowered my hand to her left leg and began rubbing it slowly. “Try this one. If you’re going to murder me... don’t make it look like something else.”
Nora frowned. Concentrating. I moved my hand another inch or so up her leg. She said, “I don’t know the quote.”
“The Naked Spur. Robert Ryan.”
“A Western? Shit, that’s not fair. I don’t know Westerns.” She was furious, aiming the weapon at my stomach with both hands. She was crazy enough to use it and, I had no doubt, she would eventually. Here. In L.A. or Mexico.
“I didn’t complain about Gone with the Wind,” I said softly.
“That’s cause you knew it,” she said, pouting. “Give me another and keep it on topic.”
I decided to ease the tension with something she was sure to recognize. “Have you ever done it in an elevator?”
She grinned. “Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.” Happy again, maybe picking up the sexy-psychotic vibe of that movie, she wiggled a little closer. She said, “Here’s one from the heart: It’s the first time I’ve tasted women. They’re rather good.”