“What’s the G stand for?”
“Good.”
“Anyone ever write a song about you?”
“Not yet.”
Bing laughed again. “Well we can still be friends, Nathan. But it’s gonna cost you an extra five K.”
Cava did the math. The package went for forty-two hundred, not 5K. The king wanted to steal another eight hundred dollars.
“What if we’re talking cash,” he said.
“Then we’re friends again, Nathan. Real good friends. Let’s do the deal while everybody’s watching. Let’s show ’em the cash.”
Unloading the Hummer had become more than just another L.A. media nightmare. It had been painful. The back-and-forth bullshit lasted for more than an hour, so long that the shake in his hands was visible now. Even the king had mentioned it when the cameras shut down.
Cava exited the Financial Services office and followed the salesman out to his Hummer so he could collect his things. He had paid the balance between the two cars in hundred-dollar bills. Although he regretted having to buy another car so soon, he could afford the additional expense. Between the cash he’d found buried in the Iraqi desert and the money he would receive from his three-part Hollywood deal, Cava would be set for life.
It would be a modest life. Not like the generals who said they were looking for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, the ones who always knew that they weren’t there and were really searching for the man’s cash. Not like his superior officers who were loading coffin after coffin with greenbacks by the millions and shipping them home with tears of joy dripping down their cheeks. But enough to lay on a beach somewhere. Enough to keep medicated and to spend the rest of his life trying to forget old memories and create new ones.
Coronaville.
Cava hit the door locks on his key ring and walked ahead of the salesman. As he emptied the glove box into his briefcase, he tried to ignore the smell of the leather seats. Tried not to look at the teched-out dashboard and stainless-steel gear shift. All the things he loved about the car. He reached over the passenger seat and cleared out the center compartment. He worked as quickly as he could, aware that his hands were shaking so hard he came off like a drunk. When he finished, he scanned the interior and spotted his Ray-Bans clipped to the sun visor. Slipping them over his eyes, he stepped back and handed the salesman his keys.
It felt more like a funeral than anything else. Watching the little guy in the cheap suit get behind the wheel of his baby and start her up. Listening to the machine purr. Facing the reality that his road-warrior days were over.
The salesman turned to him and laughed. “Hey, this thing’s got less than seven thousand miles. How come you unloaded it?”
He called it a thing. Cava bit his lip.
“Doctor’s orders,” he said. “High blood pressure. I’m tired of people flipping me the bird.”
The salesman laughed and shot him a look like he was crazy. Then Cava snapped shut the passenger door and watched the Hummer pull off into the bright sunlight. When it disappeared behind the building, he slipped off his shades, shouldered his briefcase, and trudged back into the building. The king was making another entrance, working that staircase again. This time the victim was a sixteen-year-old girl standing beside her father. They looked like innocents. Grifter bait mesmerized by all the lights and cameras. Cava felt sorry for them.
He checked his watch. His new wheels wouldn’t be ready for another fifteen minutes. When he glanced inside the waiting room and found it empty, he walked over to the couch in front of the TV, opened his briefcase, and fished out his daily planner. Paging through the week, he made an effort to settle down and focus on his medication schedule. He kept meticulous records because he had to. He had been on the Iraqi version of the zone diet ever since he hit the desert.
Xanax in the morning, Ambien CR at night, keeps a soldier boy from climbing out of his skin.
It was the war zone diet everybody followed because you were in real deep shit and on your own. No one could tell who the enemy was and no one could escape. When he was transferred to Eastern Europe, the pills were given just as freely, no questions asked. Just a wink and a smile with a shot of water for all the good work he was doing to save the fucking sand world.
It was Saturday, December 15. According to the notation in his planner, he had popped two milligrams of Xanax he didn’t remember taking at 6:00 a.m., along with a Boniva, the once-a-month solution to maintaining strong bones he had seen advertised so often on TV. If he went by the book he’d have to wait seven to eight hours before taking another Xanax. He spent a moment looking at his hands trembling before his eyes. Then he ripped open the side pocket in his briefcase and picked through his medications. When he found the bottle of Xanax, he shook a pill onto his palm, tossed it into his mouth, and swallowed it dry.
Sometimes just taking the pill made him feel right again. Sometimes half an hour went by before the drug kicked in. He gazed around the room. The TV was switched to CNN. As his mind began to loosen up, he started thinking about Fontaine again. Once the king gave him the keys to the SRX, Cava planned on making his maiden voyage a return trip to Beverly Hills. He needed to lock in the doctor’s weekend schedule and figure out how he was going to handle things with the girlfriend and those two bodyguards around. Something quiet that no one would notice for a while. And what about the witness? Now that he’d traded in his car, should he keep the witness on the back burner or amp up his pursuit?
He looked back at the TV. When he saw a photograph of the girl he’d murdered, his mind bolted to the surface. They were running the story on CNN, but the focus seemed to be on the detective investigating the case. A woman named Lena Gamble who worked out of the Robbery-Homicide Division and solved another case last year. Apparently she was trying to locate a witness to the murder. Someone who helped but hadn’t come forward.
Cava jotted Gamble’s name down as quickly as he could, mesmerized by the sight of her. He looked at her tangled hair. Her angular face and long body. Her hips hidden beneath her clothes. The video on the screen had been taken at night with a telephoto lens eight months ago during the wildfires. Gamble was exiting a crime scene with a shotgun in her hands. Her cheekbones glistened with fresh blood spatter. But it was the determination on her face, the smoke in her dusky-blue eyes that he found so captivating. When the report cut back to the present and ended with side-by-side photographs of the victim and her killer, he gazed at the blurred-out image of himself and realized that he wasn’t shaking anymore.
“That guy looks like a goddamn ghost,” a woman shouted.
Cava turned and found the woman sitting in a chair by the coffeemaker and donut tray. She was an older woman. The kind you see with a cigarette in her mouth working the slots in Vegas. He hadn’t heard her enter the room. She looked back at the TV and squinted through her glasses.
“I can’t tell who he is,” she went on. “But I’d bet the house he’s an ugly son-of-bitch.”
Cava gave her a long look, then started laughing. He was feeling good again. Right again. Thanking the gods of modern medicine.
“You got that right, lady. I’ll bet that guy’s ugly as sin. .”
17
Lena hit Rhodes’s speed-dial number on her cell as she pulled out of the lot. After two rings, he picked up.
“Where are you?” he said.
“Just leaving the bank. Did Barrera make it in?”
“No, but Klinger’s here.”
She shrugged it off. “I’ve got news,” she said. “Jane Doe made a fifty-thousand-dollar deposit six days before she was murdered.”
Rhodes didn’t say anything right away, but she could guess what he was thinking. Fifty thousand dollars was on the table. People had been killed for a lot less.