Mary studied the back of the building. There was only one story, and next to the back door were several bright-red gas cans.
The sound of wheels spinning and an engine roaring reached Mary’s ears. She ran back to the front of the building and saw a small, red Hyundai barrel onto the dirt alley, the baseball cap-wearing driver not even looking back at her.
Let me get the boss, Mary thought. Yeah, at 100 mph.
She dashed to her car, flung herself inside, and followed the Hyundai, now totally obscured by the cloud of dust.
It was a thoroughly unpleasant experience, driving way too fast with visibility about two feet in front of you. Mary thought of her high-school driver’s ed teacher: a notorious drunk who used to fall asleep during the students’ test drives.
Even he would have disapproved of her decision to race forward at a ridiculously fast rate of speed, totally blind.
She burst from the dust cloud and swerved onto LaBrea, throwing the car to the right side of the road. She nearly collided with a guy in an Audi convertible, who shot her the bird.
Yeah, fuck you too, pal.
Mary had no way of knowing if her fleeing landscaper had turned right onto LaBrea, but she figured it was a safe bet. Turning left would have required crossing traffic, and if he’d tried that, she probably would have heard the sound of metal on metal.
As it was, she floored it and soon saw smoke at an intersection ahead.
She reached it in seconds and immediately spotted the red Hyundai, now with a crumpled front end and the driver’s door open, hanging askew.
Mary drove up onto the grass media, shut off her car, and walked to the Hyundai.
It was empty.
The driver of the other vehicle, a Nissan pickup truck, was on his cell phone. He looked at Mary, and he was visibly pissed.
“Which way did he go?” Mary asked.
The guy pointed to the right, into a small shopping center with a hardware store and a Trader Joe’s.
“If you find him tell him he’s an asshole,” the truck owner said.
“Happy to pass that along,” she said.
Mary got back into her car, negotiated her way through the intersection, and turned into the mall’s parking lot.
“Shit,” she said. The mall was simply a few storefronts, with a second set of stores behind the main entrance.
She pulled into an empty space and thought about it. She got out, searched through all of the stores and the adjoining parking lots with no luck.
She heard sirens probably on the way to the accident back at LaBrea.
The jackass had gotten away.
Mary imagined taking a weedwhacker to the pissant’s face.
21
Twenty-one
Mary walked into her office to find a man with short, bleached-blond hair, an expensive suit, and the obvious bulge of a gun in a shoulder holster sitting in the client’s chair across from her desk. She often thought of how common it is for men with a bulge from their shoulder holster to lack a bulge in their crotch region.
“Hello Ms. Cooper, I’m — “ the man started to say.
“Breaking and entering?” Mary responded, cutting him off.
She left the door open and had her cell phone in her hand.
“Shall we call 911 together?” she said. “Or just put it on speaker?”
He held his hands out in mock surrender.
“Whoa, whoa, the door was unlocked, so I just took a seat. I swear,” he said. His voice was deep with a rough edge, and his teeth were a brilliant white, obviously capped.
“So you break, you enter, and you lie,” Mary said. “I never leave a door unlocked. Try again.”
Again with the hands.
“Let me just explain why I’m here,” he said. Mary noted the diamond-encrusted Rolex on his wrist, the expensive suit, the well-coiffed hair. Not exactly the typical burglar/rapist.
She walked around her desk and plopped into her desk chair, then snatched a bottle of Point Beer from the little fridge under her desk. She didn’t offer her uninvited guest a beverage.
“Go ahead,” she said.
“My name is Derek Jarvis,” he said, his voice now smooth and cultured. He had left in just a hint of a rasp to let you know if things got uncomfortable, he could change his demeanor to match.
“I work private security for various people around LA, including celebrities,” he said.
Mary took a pull from her beer, glanced down at her desk. There was a Victoria’s Secret catalog sitting there in all its black-lace glory. Good Lord. She needed to have magazines like Soldiers of Fortune and Hair Trigger Shooters Illustrated. They would do a better job of setting the tone for her guests, both the invited and uninvited kind.
“Am I boring you, Ms. Cooper?” Jarvis said.
“I’m not paying enough attention to actually be bored,” Mary said, visibly stifling a yawn.
Damn, she loved this beer. Had it imported all the way from northern Wisconsin. It was expensive but well worth it.
Mary could drink to that.
“Then I’ll be as brief as possible,” Jarvis said.
“Better late than never.”
“You’ve been investigating the disappearance of a girl named Nina Ramirez.”
Mary put the beer on her desk and looked at Mr. Derek Jarvis.
“Ah, now I see I have your attention,” he said.
“Yeah, but it’s not a good kind of attention,” Mary said. “It’s like when you notice one too many carpenter ants, so you go ahead and destroy them all.”
Jarvis nodded in complete, totally false agreement.
“My client is also interested in locating Nina Ramirez,” he said.
“And who is this client?”
“I’m not at liberty to divulge my employer’s identity.”
“The good news is you are at full liberty to leave my office,” Mary said. She tipped the bottle toward the door. “Please exercise that freedom, pronto.”
Mary drained the rest of her beer in one long pull.
“I was hoping we could cooperate on the investigation,” Jarvis said. “My involvement could benefit you in more ways than one.”
This time, he flashed a smile that truly made Mary cringe.
She thought about his offer for a nanosecond, at the most. The guy didn’t know shit. And he certainly didn’t know that Mary’s client was now deceased. Unless that was what had prompted his visit.
In any event, she knew that if this guy wasn’t even willing to say what his client’s name was, he certainly wasn’t going to give her any other kind of information.
He was fishing. Plain and simple.
“I believe sharing is overrated,” Mary said. “Both personally and professionally. Just ask my exes.”
The man reached inside his suit jacket, and for just a moment, Mary considered going for her.45. When Jarvis pulled out a checkbook, she was glad she hadn’t shot him.
“We are willing to pay for your cooperation,” he said.
Mary spent more than a nanosecond on this one. A blank check always intrigued her. They were so beautiful. Works of art, in fact, just waiting for her signature.
But the mere thought of linking herself to this guy, Derek Jarvis, gave her a bad feeling. Like sticking your hand in the garbage disposal, with that feeling that it could suddenly turn on and your hand would resemble a pulled-pork sandwich.
Mary put her empty beer bottle in the recycling bin and stood.
“As much as I appreciate the offer,” she said. “I’m going to have to pass. I’m a lone wolf. An alpha female, as it were. I work alone. Teammates slow me down. There’s no ‘we’ in Mary. I think you get the idea.”