"Do you know any of these girls?" Alexa asked as she reached into her purse and handed over two packets of pictures from the party at the naval yard. Sandy spread them out on the white marble coffee table. She picked up a small antique magnifying glass with a carved ivory handle and examined each picture.
"I know one or two of these girls," she said, looking at them slowly, studying the shots, separating out the pictures of the two girls she knew. "Scarlet Mackenzie is the red-haired one. This one here this blonde changed her name from Gina Augustina to, what the hell was it… Avon Star. Used to have black hair. I think some of these others used to work with Madam Alex until Heidi took over the L. A. market. They all work the executive trade."
"What about the men? We know a lot of them are cops," Alexa said.
Sandy looked through the pictures again but shook her head. "To be honest with you, I'm not working much with LAPD anymore." She shoved the pictures of the two girls she knew toward Alexa, never once looking over at Shane. "I only know these two."
"These girls might know what's going on," Alexa said. "We need to find somebody who can help us, somebody who can tell us who took Chooch."
Sandy studied Alexa for a moment, then looked back at Shane. "I'm going to have to shut down this thing I'm doing for DEA. I'll tell 'em I need two days, that my brother got sick in Connecticut." She got up, moved to the phone, then punched in fourteen or more digits, which Shane knew was probably a number for a satellite beeper that the feds all used now.
After she finished, Sandy hung up and returned to the table. She sat down and looked at them, biting her lower lip. "Maybe I could convince Scarlet to duke me in with this crowd."
Duke me in, Shane thought. Sandy was even beginning to talk like a cop. It was definitely time for her to get out of the business.
"I could call Scarlet, say I just got out of a bad marriage and want to get back on the stroll. Nobody knows what I've been doing all these years. I haven't seen these two girls in ages."
Shane had to get out of there. He was starting to feel trapped. He got up abruptly. "Here's my beeper number," he said, giving Sandy one of his cards. "It's on all the time."
Alexa took out a pencil, wrote hers down, and handed it to Sandy.
"Okay," Sandy said. "I'll check back with you tomorrow. I should be able to get in touch with her by then. I'll set something up. If she knows anything that will help us get Chooch back, I'll find it."
"Good," Shane said.
They all walked to the front door. Sandy seemed cool and in control again. After she opened the door, she looked hard at him, and Shane knew he had to say something.
"I was trying to do you a favor when I took Chooch," he said. "It didn't work out, and I'm sorry."
What she said next was very strange. "You weren't doing me a favor, Shane, I was doing one for you."
He saw the dark, strange look again, and then her amber eyes opened for a moment and he was seeing her uncovered core… a self-loathing and sadness deeper than he could have ever imagined. Then the look was gone, replaced in a heartbeat by shrewd cunning and the cold gleam of sexuality. She closed the door, and he found himself looking at brown mahogany, the exact color of her eyes and almost as hard.
Chapter 40
IT WAS NOON, and they were back in Shane's borrowed Crown Vic. Alexa had turned on the police radio, and they were listening to staccato radio calls detailing the menu of violence and death, all of it described numerically in a flat monotone: "One X-ray twelve. A 415 at 2795 Slauson. Handle Code Two." Human carnage was a day-and-night routine.
"I don't know what the next move is," Alexa admitted.
Shane looked over at her. He knew what he was going to do, but it was a felony and he didn't think he should confide in her, for fear she'd hook him up on the spot.
But she was good, and she read the look in his eyes. "Let's hear what you're planning," she said suspiciously.
"You don't want any part of it. I'll drop you home."
"Lemme guess. You wanna go pick up Drucker or Kono or one of Ray's other hamsters… then go give them some S and J."
S and J stood for "sentence and judgment." Cops used to call it "holding court in the street." Either way, in this case it would be kidnapping and assault, both Class A felonies.
"Right idea, wrong guys," he said. "Kono and Drucker are small players; they may not even know what's really going on. I think they're just getting envelopes."
"It doesn't matter, 'cause we aren't going to kidnap and threaten anyone. That's a bonehead play." She stared hard at him in the dim light. He didn't look back. "Who, then?" she finally asked, her curiosity boiling over.
"You're gonna hate it." And then for some unknown reason, he told her.
After he had finished explaining his idea, she sat silently in the car for almost five minutes. The police radio underscored their separate thoughts, broadcasting misery while each of them pondered the personal cost if his dangerous plan went wrong.
Shane knew he had nothing more to lose. Any way he looked at it, odds were, he was headed to prison, where as a cop in the joint, he would last about as long as ice cream on a summer day.
Alexa, on the other hand, was only on the edge of this. She hadn't been put in play yet. Nobody except Sandy knew she'd been helping him. She could still go home and sit it out, saving her career and maybe her life.
He finally looked at her and saw those chips of blue staring out the front window, her brow furrowed in stubborn concentration, frustrated and confused like a fifth-grade algebra student.
For Shane, it was only about Chooch. It was his fault the boy was gone, and if he had to end his own life behind the secure perimeter of Vacaville State Prison, at least it would be for trying to put this mess right. Deep down he had formed a fraternal attachment to Chooch Sandoval. He couldn't exactly explain why, but it had happened.
Then he felt Alexa's weight shift on the seat beside him. He looked over at her. She had turned to face him.
"Okay," she said slowly, "I'm in."
???
The marina was strangely quiet for a Saturday afternoon. Shane thought the boat was a ketch or a yawl whatever the hell they called them when the second mast was taller than the first.
"Schooner," Alexa said, reading his thoughts perfectly. The stern of the fifty-five-foot sailboat carried the boat's name.
"Board and Cord cute name for a sailboat," she said.
He assumed she was thinking it stood for the wood of the hull and sail lines, so he set her straight. "It's a basketball expression. Means a bank shot off the backboard and through the net."
"Oh." She smiled. "In that case, he should have called it Cheap Shot."
They were parked in the lot next to the slips at D Dock in Marina del Rey, looking out the front window of the car at the boats tied up forty or fifty yards from them, baking in eighty-degree sunlight. Both were wearing drugstore baseball caps and wraparound sunglasses a minimal disguise.
"I heard he's down on this thing every weekend," Shane said, focusing a new pair of binoculars he'd found under the seat at the boat's portholes, looking for movement inside. "He's probably sleeping late."
Shane shifted his field of vision, concentrating on the yachts to either side of Mayweather's schooner. It appeared that most of the boats around the Board and Cord were empty.
"You sure you want to do this?" he asked. It was hard for him to believe she was about to risk her career and maybe even her freedom for Chooch Sandoval, whom she didn't even know. Of course, he had completely missed the point, so she set him straight.