She’s tanned, solid, hard-muscled, grinning with disdain. He calls her what he thinks she is—“Gimme those, you freakin’ dyke”—and he reaches to take back one of the briefcases. She executes a Roller-Derby maneuver, digs the rubber toe stop of one skate into the pavement, balancing on her left leg like a ballerina, and kicks him in the balls with her other skate.
Jimmy buckles at the hips, at the knees, and folds down to the ground, making a sound like a thin stream of air escaping a valve under extreme pressure. Although his eyes blur with tears, he sees Alika drop her Seventh-Day Adventist pamphlets and reach into the satchel at her feet, where she stowed a pistol. Gunfire will draw cops, but he wants Alika to shoot the dyke anyway.
What happens instead is that the Roller-Derby queen spins in a full circle, maybe twice, swinging one of the briefcases as if it’s a discus and she’s going to throw it, except that she slams it into Alika’s head, knocking her to the ground, unconscious.
And the crazy bitch is off, from the park walkway across the grass, onto the public sidewalk along Ocean Avenue, to the corner and into the street at the crosswalk. She gets a horn blast from a Honda coming out of the side street and turning south on Ocean, but the light is with her as she skates away, carrying the briefcases.
26
* * *
JANE HAD HOPED that Jimmy would pull no tricks, that he would give the briefcases to Nona and walk away. But she had prepared for the likelihood that, after she had saved him from prison, he would prefer to pay her back with a kick in the head. These cyberspace cowboys thought of themselves as masters of the universe, and they resented being one-upped.
She had been in the park from eight o’clock till ten, studying the regulars, from the ragged panhandlers to the fitness fanatics. Her years of experience in the Critical Incident Response Group had given her the tools to analyze the candidates for an improvised crew of her own; and a ready supply of cash made it possible to induce them to help her.
She didn’t like using people this way. They didn’t mind being used, but their willingness didn’t excuse her. Something could go wrong. Someone could be hurt, crippled, killed. But like everyone else, she had priorities. Her priority was her son. She would use anyone to keep him safe and to keep herself alive for him.
At 10:15, an hour and forty-five minutes before her rendezvous with Jimmy, she had been in her car at a meter on the farther side of Ocean Avenue from the park, scanning with binoculars for anything unusual, when the train of SUVs appeared northbound and curbed at intervals between Santa Monica Boulevard and California Avenue. Occupants of the vehicles convened briefly around a hulk who looked as if he had stepped out of a Marvel movie, and then they dispersed.
Maybe they weren’t Jimmy Radburn’s people, but they were of the type. If they were with Jimmy, Jane was not surprised that they would think being almost two hours early ensured they were in place before she showed up. Evil is unimaginative and lazy.
Now, after the dustup involving Jimmy and the pamphleteer, both briefcases in her possession, Nona skated into the street, and Jane winced when the Honda nearly clipped the woman. She flew across Ocean Avenue, glided up the curb cutout at the corner, climbed the six front steps by toe-walking in her skates, all so fast that Jane barely got the door open in time to admit her to the hotel lobby.
The doorman-valet on the portico looked astonished, and his astonishment increased when from a jacket pocket Jane withdrew a length of chain and a padlock that she bought earlier at a hardware store. She chained together the long vertical handles on the glass doors and padlocked them, so that the hotel could not be entered.
In Nona’s wake, the traffic light had changed; and three guys were trying to cross Ocean—one of them the hulk—slowed by the need to dodge impatient motorists.
Brakes squealed and one of the three was knocked off his feet.
Nona had skated past Jane, across the terrazzo floor, past the entrance to the elegant Art Deco bar, into the elevator alcove. When Jane got there, the lift doors were gliding open.
They boarded the car and pushed the button marked GARAGE.
“That rocked,” Nona declared.
“Sorry it got hairy.”
“More hair, more fun.”
“Was Barney hurt?”
“Nah. That old guy’s tougher than he looks.”
When the doors slid shut and the car started down, Jane thumbed the STOP button. They halted between floors.
She reached into an inner jacket pocket and withdrew a folded heavy-duty forty-five-gallon green-plastic trash bag and handed it to Nona.
As the skater shook open the bag, Jane checked the contents of the briefcases. Printouts packaged in clear, sealed plastic bags.
“I thought it might be money,” Nona said as she sat on the floor of the car to pull off her skates.
The lining of the briefcases probably concealed sophisticated transponders, allowing them to be tracked. Dumping the contents into the trash bag, Jane said, “Sorry to disappoint. I never said money.”
“Don’t keep apologizing. It’s been a boring week till now.”
Jane jabbed the STOP button again. As the car continued to the garage, she knotted the trash bag with its Smart Tie closure.
Nona was first into the hotel garage, carrying her skates, the wheels clicking together, the bearings tick-tick-ticking.
Pausing only to push 7 on the floor-selection panel, lugging the trash bag, Jane hurried out of the elevator.
The valet-only garage smelled of automotive lubricants and the lime in the concrete and the lingering exhaust fumes of the most recent car to have been ferried in or out. Low ceiling. Inadequate lighting that allowed lurking shadows. Walls with water stains like huge distorted faces and twisted ghostly figures. She thought, Tomb, catacombs.
They had been moving fast. But maybe not fast enough.
27
* * *
CROSSING OCEAN AVENUE against the light, Zahid is knocked down but not run over by a blue Lexus. Sprawled on the pavement, he waves Kipp and Angelina on toward the hotel, saying, “Go, go, I’m okay.”
Kipp doesn’t need to be encouraged onward, doesn’t care whether Zahid is okay or not, has no intention of stopping to administer first aid. The trap they intended to spring has instead been sprung on them, and a situation gone wrong needs to be made right. They are in a business where business always comes before personnel, with none of that romantic hokum from crime and mafia movies, none of that sentimental shit about family and honor among thieves. In this digital age, people are data troves; their primary value is whatever useful information they have that you need. At the moment, Zahid has no data they need; he has crashed.
When Kipp reaches the hotel, the doorman is standing in front of the entrance, peering into the lobby. Kipp shoves him aside and grabs a handle and discovers that the doors won’t open.
For the most part, Kipp Garner is a practical entrepreneur with an orderly approach to life’s problems. He isn’t a screamer, nor is he given to violent outrage when he does not get his way. He enjoys occasionally beating someone into submission and leaving him with one kind of damage or another that will ensure the guy always fears him, but his targets are strangers met in bars or chanced upon in lonely circumstances. When responsible operation of one of his businesses requires him to kill someone he knows, he performs the task efficiently, with little emotion.
Kipp has engaged in much self-analysis during his thirty-six years, and he knows that his one weakness as a person, his one true fault, is that he cannot control his temper when a woman insults or in some way gets the better of him. Happily, most women sense this about him on first encounter and tread softly in his presence.