“There’s no negotiating with them. There’s no moving them.” She scanned the room, as if noticing for the first time the print bedspread, the shitty pastel art. “This was all a mistake,” she said. “I have to go. I have to get my car and … and—”
“You’re not getting your car. It’s not safe to leave. The sniper is still out there. He was working with at least one other person. There might be others.”
“The guy. The one you killed. Did you see him? One eye was still open.…” Her bloodred lips pressed together to keep from trembling. “And you think there might be others?”
“Maybe.”
“Because a sniper isn’t enough?”
“I won’t let them lay a finger on you.”
“I’m not worried about a finger.” Then she did something completely unexpected. She laughed. A real laugh, too, that beautiful mouth even wider, half hidden behind a raised hand. A few strands of jet-black hair had fallen across her eyes, and she left them there. As quickly as her dark amusement had bubbled to the surface, it departed.
She sat again on the bed, and he settled back into the wooden chair.
“It broke my dad’s heart when I married that asshole,” she said. “He warned me that nothing good would come of it. Though I can’t say he expected this.”
“Your husband’s involved in this somehow?”
“My ex. And no.” She took a breath, held it a moment. “We were married five months. If it wasn’t so typical, I’d have the sense to be embarrassed. Adam Hamuel, a real-estate tycoon. Planned communities in Boca Raton, that kind of stuff. It kept him busy. The land deals, the building permits, the other women.” She ran her hand along the chintz bedspread. “So when he’d travel, I’d gamble. My dad taught me to play poker.” She wet her lips. “My mom died young, so dad taught me pretty much everything. How to throw a baseball. Drive stick. But cards, Dad was great at cards.”
“What’s his name?” Evan asked. “Your father.”
“Sam. Sam White.” She blinked back emotion. “Right before I got married, Dad moved to Vegas, so I’d visit him and I’d play and play. And for a brief time — five months — I had money. A different level of money, I mean. Adam always told me not to worry, that I couldn’t spend enough to make a dent in what he earned. And so I didn’t worry. I played in those backroom games, and I drank the free booze and pushed the markers. Stupid, right?”
“Not given what you knew at the time.”
She breathed for a bit. “One day at home, I found a leopard-print thong between the couch cushions, and then I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know anymore. I called him on it, and he left and filed the next day. I’d signed a big prenup, and he just turned off the tap. Everything’s tied up in family trusts, offshore accounts, all that kind of stuff. People can hide money where you’d never find it.”
Evan gave a little nod.
“So I have a big house in Brentwood that I can’t pay the heating bill on, let alone the mortgage, a shiny leased Jag that they’re gonna repossess any day, and a marker for two-point-one million I owe to some guy on the other end of a phone number or he’ll kill my dad.”
“What’s the phone number?” Evan asked.
She recited a direct-inward-dial number, like his, which he committed to memory.
“I don’t have anything,” she said. “I told them, but they don’t believe me. Look at my zip code. I wouldn’t believe me either.” She sank to the bed, blew the hair from her eyes. “It’s my fault. I made a stupid fucking mistake, and my dad’s paying for it. Maybe right now. Do you have any idea how that feels?”
The red glow of an elevator sign. Jack’s callused hand against Evan’s cheek. The sweet smell of sawdust cut with something else.
“Yes,” he said.
“I wish you hadn’t yanked me out of the way at the restaurant. I wish they’d just shot me and let my dad go.”
“Who’s to say they wouldn’t have shot you and then your dad?”
“Oh, just let me be a martyr for a second.”
“Tell me when you’re done.”
The faintest hint of amusement firmed those lips. “I’m done.”
“What can you tell me about this gambling circuit?”
“Like I said, not much. Texas Hold’em in basements of restaurants, rented suites, like that. There was security and dealers, but I never saw the face of anyone behind it all. Even the players, we used fake names. It was impossible to tell who was the house. They were smart enough not to leave a trail.”
“How’d they find you?”
“People find you in Vegas. I was at a table. They approached.”
“Just like that.”
“I make an impression when I play.”
He asked her to walk him through whatever specifics about locations she could remember. Then he asked, “How did you find out about the Japanese businessman they killed?”
“They sent a picture to my phone. It autodeleted a few seconds after I saw it.” She smoothed an invisible wrinkle from the bedspread next to her. “A few seconds was enough.”
“You said they skinned him. But we’re dealing with a sniper, maybe a team. Why the change in approach?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “It’s not exactly my field.”
Rising to go, he realized that he knew the answer to his question already. Given the size of Katrin’s loan and her failure to deliver the money promptly, they’d gone to the next level.
They’d brought in professionals.
14
Dream Come True
In a form-fitting dress, Candy McClure waited at the bus stop on Ventura Boulevard, duffel bag resting near the pointed toes of her thigh-high vinyl boots. Passing cars brought wolf calls, which she basked in along with the morning sun. A bus hissed to the curb, and a group of would-be gangstas unpacked from it. They shuffled past, all lowered trousers and top-buttoned flannel shirts. The leader, not unreasonably taking her for a hooker, pivoted to shake his hips in her direction. “Hey, Catwoman, wanna play with this?”
“Love to.” She reached out, grabbing his crotch through a baggy expanse of denim and squeezing. He made a noise like a whinny as she steered him around, depositing him on the bench next to her. She played him like an instrument, crushing at will, bringing forth various sounds as his friends circled in a sort of animal panic. When she released him, he rolled onto the sidewalk. She’d managed to squeeze out a few real tears to go with the inked ones tattooed at the corner of his eye.
Boys.
He struggled to his knees and then to a hunched approximation of standing.
“Thanks,” Candy said, checking that her press-on nails remained intact. “Good session.”
His friends conveyed him up the street.
A few minutes later, a rented Scion sedan pulled up, the window lowering. Crammed into the driver’s seat, Danny Slatcher hid behind mirrored aviators and a mustache imported from 1980. A larger vehicle would have suited him.
“’Bout time,” she said.
With a long arm, he reached across and flung open the passenger door. “Get in. And change. You look like a whore.”
And he looked like an insurance salesman. Which she supposed was the point.
“Wow,” she said, climbing in. “A crappy purple Scion. Like in the song.”
“What song?”
“Train,” she said. “‘50 Ways to Say Goodbye.’” A brown grocery bag in the footwell contained her cover outfit. As he drove, she pulled on the new clothes. “It’s about a guy making up outlandish ways his girlfriend died so he doesn’t have to—”