"Way to go," he says as she slips back into the traffic on Atlantic. "Just some punk interested in your car, and you have to turn it into an international incident. First you think some cop's following you because the car's a black Crown Vic. Then you notice that your radar detector isn't detecting a damn thing, so next you think… what? What did you think? The Mafia? Some hit man who's going to take us out in the middle of a busy highway?"
She doesn't blame Rudy for losing his temper with her, but she can't allow it. "Don't yell at me," she says.
"You know what? You're out of control. You're unsafe."
"This is about something else," she says, trying to sound sure of herself.
"You're damn right it is," he retorts. "It's about her. You let someone stay in your house and look what happens. You could be dead. She sure as hell should be dead. And something worse is going to happen if you don't get a grip."
"She was being stalked, Rudy. Don't make it my fault. It's not my fault."
"Stalked, you're damn right. She sure as hell was being stalked, and it sure as hell is your fault. If you would drive something like a Jeep… or drive the Hummer. We have company Hummers. Why don't you drive one of those once in a while? If you hadn't let her drive your damn Ferrari. Showing off, Miss Hollywood. Jesus. In your damn Ferrari."
"Don't get jealous. I hate…"
"I'm not jealous!" he yells.
"You've been acting jealous since we hired her."
"This isn't about your hiring her! Hired her to do what? She's going to protect our L.A. clients? What a joke! So you hired her to do what? To do what?"
"You can't talk to me like this," Lucy says quietly, and she is surprisingly calm, but she has no choice. If she fires back at him, then they'll really have a fight and he might do something terrible like quit.
"The won't be run out of my own life. I'll drive what I want and live where I want." She stares fiercely straight ahead, at the road, at the cars turning off on side streets and into parking places. "I'll be generous to whoever I want. She wasn't allowed to drive my black Ferrari. You know that. But she took it out and that's what started everything. He saw her, followed her, and then look what happens. It's nobody's fault. Not even hers. She didn't invite him to vandalize my car and follow her and try to kill her."
"Good. You live your life the way you want," Rudy replies. "And we'll just keep pulling into parking lots and maybe next time I'll beat up some innocent stranger who was just looking at your damn Ferrari. Hell, maybe I'll get to shoot someone. Or maybe I'll get shot. That would be even better, right? Me get shot over a stupid car."
"Calm down," Lucy says as she stops at a red light. "Please, calm down. I could have handled that better. I agree."
'Handled? I didn't notice you handling anything. You just reacted like an idiot."
"Rudy, stop it. Please." She doesn't want to get so angry with him that she makes a mistake. "You can't talk to me like this. You can't. Don't make me pull rank."
She turns left on A1A, driving slowly along the beach, and several teenaged boys almost fall off their bicycles as they turn around to stare at her car. Rudy shakes his head and shrugs, as if to say, I rest my case. But talk about the Ferrari is no longer about the Ferrari. For Lucy to change the way she lives is to allow him to win, and she thinks of the beast as a him. Henri called him a beast, and he is a male beast, Lucy believes that. She has no doubt of that. The hell with science, the hell with evidence, the hell with everything. She knows damn well the beast is a him.
Me is either a cocky beast or a stupid beast because he left two partial fingerprints on the glass-covered bedside table. He was stupid or careless to leave prints, or maybe he doesn't care. So far, the partial prints aren't matching up with any prints in any Automated Fingerprint Identification
he's never been arrested or his prints have never been taken for some other reason. Maybe he didn't care when he left three hairs on the bed, three black head hairs, and why should he care? Even when a case is high priority, mitochondrial DNA analysis can take thirty to ninety days. There is no certainty that the results will be worth a damn because there is no such thing as a centralized and statistically significant mitochondrial DNA database, and unlike the nuclear DNA of blood and tissue, the mitochondrial DNA of hair and bones isn't going to tattle on the perpetrator's gender. The evidence the beast left doesn't matter. It may never matter unless he becomes a suspect and direct comparisons can be made.
"All right. I'm rattled. I'm not myself. I'm letting it get to me," Lucy says, concentrating hard on her driving, worried that maybe she is losing control, that maybe Rudy is right. "What I did back there shouldn't have happened. Never. I'm too careful for that kind of shit."
"You are. She's not." Rudy's jaw is set stubbornly, his eyes blacked out by nonpolarized sunglasses that have a mirrored finish. Right now he refuses to give Lucy his eyes, and that bothers her.
"I thought we were talking about the Hispanic guy back there," Lucy replies.
"You know what I told you from day one," Rudy says. "The danger of someone living in your house. Someone using your car, your stuff. Someone flying solo in your airspace. Someone who doesn't know the same rules you and I do and sure as hell doesn't have our training. Or care about the same things we do, including us."
"Not everything in life should be about training," Lucy says, and it is easier to talk about training than whether someone you love really cares. It's easier talking about the Hispanic than Henri. "I should never have handled it like that back there, and I'm sorry."
"Maybe you've forgotten what life is really like," Rudy replies.
"Oh, please don't go into your Boy Scout Be Prepared shit," she snaps at him and speeds up, going north, getting close to the Hillsboro neighborhood where her salmon-colored stucco Mediterranean mansion overlooks an inlet that connects the Intracoastal Waterway to the ocean. "I don't think you can be objective. You can't even say her name. Someone-this and Someone-that."
"Ha! Objective? Ha! You should talk." His tone is dangerously approaching cruel. "That stupid bitch has ruined absolutely everything. And you didn't have a right to do that. You didn't have a right to drag me along for the ride. You didn't have a right."
"Rudy, we've got to stop fighting like this," Lucy says. "Why do we fight like this?" She looks at him. "Everything isn't ruined."
He doesn't answer her.
"Why do we fight like this? It's making me sick," she says.
They didn't used to fight. Now and then he sulked but he never turned on her until she opened the office in Los Angeles and recruited Henri from the LAPD. A deep horn blares out a warning that the drawbridge is about to go up, and Lucy downshifts and stops again, this time getting a thumbs-up from a man in a Corvette.
She smiles sadly and shakes her head. "Yeah, I can be stupid," she says. Genetic wiring, bad wiring. From my crazy Latino biological father. Hopefully, not from my mother, although it would be worse to be like her. Much worse."
Rudy says nothing, staring at the rising bridge giving way to a yacht.
"Let's don't fight," she says. "Everything isn't ruined. Come on." She reaches over and squeezes his hand. "A truce? Start all over? Do we need to call in Benton for hostage negotiation? Because you're not just my friend and partner these days. You're my hostage, and I guess I'm yours, right? Here because you need the job or at least want the job, and I need you. That's just the way it is."