“Focus, Pudge. Focus.”
“Anyway. This guy slipped me a fifty and said to heckle this Brent Cooper guy. So I did. That Cooper guy was an asshole. He just went crazy saying all kinds of nasty shit.”
“What did the guy look like? The guy who told you to do this?”
“He was an old guy, I don’t know. You’ve been in the club, it’s dark.”
“We’ll come back to that. So he told you to heckle Brent, then what?”
“Then I was supposed to act like I wanted to fight him and sort of nod toward the alley.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. But I didn’t go out there! I got scared and took off.”
“Smart move.”
“Look, I had nothing to do with all that. It was supposed to be a joke, I didn’t know the guy was going to get killed.”
“Let’s go back to the old guy.”
“Oh my God,” he said.
Mary felt him jerk. “What?”
“There he is.” Mary began to look across the street where the guy’s eyes were looking, but she never finished her scan.
The fat man’s head snapped back against the brick wall and Mary felt a gush of warmth on her hand. Blood and brain matter poured from the back of his head. He slumped against her as another bullet hit him in the chest. Shards of brick bit into Mary’s neck as a bullet exploded next to her ear. She tried to push against the fat man but as his body sagged to the sidewalk, it took her with it. She found herself trapped beneath him, struggling to get free.
She looked over his shoulder across the street. An old man in a turquoise blue windbreaker stood just behind a tree, his gun blocked from view. She saw him step to the right, saw the gun with the attached silencer.
Mary held her arm up and over the big man, then fired a quick shot at the old guy across the street.
Mary got one leg beneath her and pushed upward, heaved with all of her strength, and rolled the huge man over. She was able to squirm out from underneath him.
Across the street, the old man’s gun spat again and glass from the art studio’s window showered down upon her. She had no choice. She got to her feet, crouched, and then dove over the art studio’s display shelf into the showroom itself. The dolphin woman sculpture exploded and pieces of metal, paper mache, and wire rained down on Mary’s back. The head and shoulders of the sculpture were still intact, so she took cover behind them and fired at the old man. She steadied her hand and reeled off shot after shot, emptying her entire clip in a matter of seconds.
Mary’s ears rang and the smell of gunpowder assaulted her senses. She ducked back down and thumbed the magazine release, grabbed her spare from her coat pocket, slammed it in, then wiped her bloody hand off on a piece of curtain that had been shot off the window.
Bullets exploded around her.
Mary waited out the last of the explosions then rolled and popped up just over the display platform. The blue windbreaker caught her eye. He’d moved two trees over and was slapping another clip into his gun.
She let out a breath, and waited for him to step away from the tree.
He did.
Mary fired twice fast. The double tap.
The man went down in a heap.
Mary vaulted over the display platform and onto the sidewalk, nearly slipping on the concrete’s coating of glass and blood. She raced across the street, her gun held out in front of her just in case the old shooter was playing possum.
But once she got to him, stood over him and looked at the blood gushing from his mouth, she knew it was no act.
“Who are you?” she said.
A weird sucking sound came from his chest and his mouth opened.
“Aaauegh,” he said and then his eyes went still. Pink bubbles came out of his nose.
“Huh, is that an Arabic name?” Mary said.
Sirens sounded in the distance.
Mary reached into his coat pocket, nothing but more clips. Her hands shook slightly and her legs felt weak. Her breath was shallow and for a moment she thought she would faint.
Mary searched him and found a slim wallet in his pocket. She flipped it open to his California driver’s license.
Noah Baxter.
She’d never heard of him.
Chapter Thirty
LAPD’s finest arrived and Mary surrendered her weapon and submitted to a search. They put her in the back of a squad car while the patrol cops wandered around, waiting for the detectives and crime scene technicians to show up.
Mary sniffed. The car smelled vaguely of vomit. Maybe it was the cop’s cologne. Eau de regurgitation.
Probably some drunk on his way to the tank had tossed his Chips Ahoys back here. The patrol cops were in charge of cleaning their own vehicles if something like that happened, Mary knew. This had obviously been cleaned by a man. Most guys she knew, the only way they could clean something was with a Swiffer.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the flash of some fish-belly white skin. Mary turned just as Jake and the Shark got out of their detective’s car.
“Fun has officially arrived,” Mary said under her breath. She looked at the Shark and the way she assumed instant command of the scene. But God she was pale. The ME guys might mistake her for the corpse.
Mary shivered. It wasn’t the first time she had killed someone. But it wasn’t easy. She forced it from her mind, but suddenly a chill would shoot down her spine and her stomach would do flip flops.
A couple of the uniforms were talking to the pair of detectives, gesturing and pointing with their hands and occasionally looking over at the patrol car.
“Yeah, hi,” Mary said, watching the Shark. “Go to hell, uh-huh, hello,” she said. Mary felt off-kilter. She’d just shot and killed an old man, for God’s sake. The adrenaline had worn off and now she just felt tired and cranky. She pictured her bed back in her apartment. She wanted to curl up inside the warm blankets and not come out for a few months.
Mary saw the tall, pale woman nod toward the car and immediately one of the patrol cops turned and walked toward her. Jake shot her a look as if to say, “There’s nothing I can do right now.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mary said under her breath again, just as the patrol cop opened up the driver’s door and got behind the wheel.
“Did someone puke in here or is your gym bag in the trunk?” Mary said.
The cop put the car in gear and ignored her. They drove away from the scene and Mary instantly felt a touch better.
“I mean, jeez, it smells like a French whore with a purse full of gorgonzola,” she said.
The cop looked over his shoulder at her. “I’m taking you downtown,” he said.
“Downtown? Oh, that’s lovely. We can do some shopping…go get a pedicure-”
“Ma’am, I hope you realize how serious this is.”
When they pulled up at a stoplight, he looked up at the rearview mirror. Mary saw that he was a young guy. Probably the lowest ranking of anyone at the scene. He looked a little green around the gills. Maybe he’d never seen a dead person before. He’d probably looked at both the big guy and the old man. Neither one of them looked very good.
Mary had seen more than her fair share. She should probably be more sensitive to the poor kid.
“Serious,” Mary said. “Yes. Very serious. So how do you like Sergeant Davies? Did you know she’s made out of wax?”
The young cop ignored her and guided the patrol car smoothly onto the I-10 freeway.
“Never mind,” Mary said, once they’d settled into a lane. “Sergeant Davies. What do you think of her?