Breaking the Rules

CHAPTER

TWENTY



FRIDAY, MAY 8, 2009

4:58 P.M.


She still had a full hour before it was time to meet Clarice, but Neesha headed over to the hamburger place early—being cautious as usual.

She walked from the bus station, where she’d used the bathroom to change into the same halter top that she’d worn the previous night.

She didn’t have a jacket, so she’d used one of the shirts Ben had given her to cover the sequins, because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself until she arrived at the private party.

It didn’t matter that she smelled of perspiration or worse—this was the last time she would ever wear this top. She would return here later and change back into a far less eye-catching shirt, then bring the clothes she’d borrowed back to Ben’s sister, along with money to clean or even just replace them.

She’d leave it in a bag outside the apartment door, wishing that she could—as Ben’s older brother suggested—write a note. Just to say thank you. And good luck.

But she didn’t know how to write in English, and there was a bus that left for L.A. at midnight, and she was determined to be on it, so she wouldn’t have time to knock and give them that message face-to-face.

The hamburger place where she’d first met Clarice was now in sight, and Neesha walked toward it with a sense of dread, despite knowing that she’d almost made it past the finish line.

* * *

Izzy needed coffee.

The bartender at D’Amato’s had told him there was a Starbucks just a few blocks away, on Paradise Road—which was also where Neesha had told Dan and Jenn that she could find “work.”

Eden knew exactly where it was. “It’s up on the left,” she directed him. “Across from the ‘Billions Served’ sign …?”

“I got it,” he said as he spotted the familiar logo. “Thanks.” He glanced at her as he signaled to make the turn into the lot. She’d been quiet ever since leaving D’Amato’s, and now she was gazing out the window with no small degree of intensity.

Looking for a Neesha in a haystack.

It wasn’t just a case of Eden wanting to be able to tell Ben that they’d spent some time searching. She honestly wanted to find the girl, and Izzy tried to imagine what it had been like, fifteen years old and in charge of getting her little brother and her sister’s kids to safety with a category-five hurricane bearing down on them.

She’d driven them out of their low-lying neighborhood in her brother-in-law’s car, or so she’d told him. Izzy suspected there was more to the story than she’d revealed.

And now was not the time to ask her about it. Since they’d left the club, she’d answered the few questions he’d asked in monosyllables. Did you have dinner? No. Are you hungry? No.

He had to wait for a group of businessmen—meetings over and ready to party—who were walking down the sidewalk before he pulled into the parking lot. For this part of town, at this time of late afternoon, both the Starbucks and the fast-food joints nearby were jumping—but mostly with traffic from cars.

The sidewalks were fairly empty. Compared with the teeming crowds out on the strip, this part of the city was a pedestrian ghost town.

“You want anything?” Izzy asked Eden as he put the car into park and double-checked that his wallet was still in his pocket.

She said, “No thanks,” as she turned to crane her head and get a look at another group of people coming out of the Mickey D’s. But it was a family, trying to get an affordable meal amid all of the vice and sin. They probably didn’t even realize that the skinny blonde in the microskirt, who’d walked past them in the parking lot, was a hooker.

Which was probably a good thing, because Dad, with his camera, might’ve tried to take her picture. As it was, the man took a second and then a third glance as she leaned in the passenger-side window of a pickup truck, to talk to the driver and simultaneously show the world a flash of candy-apple-red panties.

“Lock this door behind me,” Izzy ordered Eden, and left the car running, a/c blasting, as he got out. He waited for her to push the lock button, and when it clicked, he moved through the oppressive heat and went inside the Starbucks, where there was, of course, an interminably slow-moving line.


Neesha almost walked right into it.

She hadn’t been expecting it—although as soon as she saw it, she didn’t know why she hadn’t. It suddenly seemed so obvious that Clarice would have certain connections, and would make some inquiries about Neesha.

But there she was—Clarice—talking to one of the men—the bald one—who’d been searching for Neesha over at the mall. He was driving a blue pickup truck. And—God—climbing into the passenger’s seat beside him was Todd. It was clear he was there to help identify her—which she knew he could do quite easily.

He’d been one of her regular visitors through the years.

And it was then, upon seeing him, that Neesha made her second big mistake.

She stopped short instead of continuing to walk past, and it telegraphed her surprise, and made her stand out.

Although she was already standing out by being one of the very few people on the sidewalk.

And he saw her—Todd did. She saw him sit up and point directly at her, and she knew she had to run. But this part of town was unfamiliar to her, filled with massage parlors and empty lots with nowhere to hide, and she didn’t know where to go.

“Neesha!”

It seemed impossible, but someone was calling her name, and she spun to see Ben’s sister Eden, standing outside a car, not far from her, in a coffee-shop parking lot.

And her heart sank, because she was surrounded, because Eden was somehow part of this, too—this plan to capture her and take her back to hell.

They both had vehicles and she was on foot and Neesha knew it was over.

But she did the only thing she could do as Todd got out of the truck and jogged toward the street, and toward her—because God, he had a gun.

She ran.


“Neesha, wait!”

Eden looked frantically back toward the Starbucks, trying to find and signal to Izzy through the heavily tinted window as the little girl bolted down the street.

And oh, dear Lord, she wasn’t the only one who’d spotted the girl. A man who’d climbed out of a truck in the McDonald’s parking lot was already chasing her, and the truck itself was moving to follow and—

Holy crap, the truck was being driven by the man who’d shot at them at the mall, the man with the shaved head—the man that Eden and Izzy had seen asking questions at Greg’s house while they were staked out and waiting for Ivette.

As the bald man moved the truck toward the entrance of the fast-food driveway, Eden looked back at his friend who was following Neesha. She saw the flash of something metallic—a gun that the man was checking to make sure it was loaded—and she knew she couldn’t wait for Izzy.

She had to act.

She dove back into the rental car, slamming the door behind her as she scrambled over the parking brake and into the driver’s seat. The car was already running, so all she had to do was put it into reverse.

The parking lot and the sidewalk behind her were both clear, so Eden hit the gas.


Izzy stood on his place on line and did his best not to fall to his knees while weeping and shouting, Venti, venti, venti! For the love of God, all I want is a big-ass cup of coffee, while up at the counter a man who was actually wearing a sweater ordered some kind of complicated but completely caffeine-free drink—really, what was the point?—and then changed his mind about seven times.

“Oh, my God!” the girl behind the counter said, and Izzy was in total agreement.

Until he realized that she was looking past it’s-only-115-degrees-Fahrenheit-tonight-Mommy-where’s-my-sweater man and out the window at the parking lot, where a car was leaving plenty of rubber as its tires squealed and—

Damn, that was his car.

Eden was behind the wheel, driving like she was insane.

What the f*ck …?

As Izzy pushed past the crowd behind him and ran for the door, he caught a flash of her face as she threw the car into drive.

Whatever she was doing, she was aware and determined—not some victim of sudden sleepwalking or in the midst of some kind of weird seizure. She was also alone in the car—unless a carjacker had climbed in and was sitting on the floor so that Izzy couldn’t see him.

“Eden!” he shouted as he burst out into the heat of the evening, but she’d already finished backing up and had put the car into drive.

She forsook the traditional route of leaving via the entrance to the parking lot, and instead went for the most direct pathway to the street, which involved plowing over some tired-looking shrubbery and bouncing over the curb, muffler scraping and banging as she went.

The few pedestrians who were on the sidewalk scattered, as did the cars on the street—squealing to a stop or swerving to avoid her—and it was clear she was trying to avoid them all. Most of them.

One man, who was in the midst of jaywalking across the avenue, seemed to be her target, and shit, yeah, she was heading right toward him. But when he dove out of the way, scrambling back the way he’d come to take cover behind a parked car, she turned the wheel and hit the brakes, hard.

It didn’t stop her from sideswiping the car he was hiding behind, and the sound of metal on metal screamed in the oppressively hot afternoon air as she ground to a stop.

“Eden!” Izzy shouted again, and this time she looked toward him and—Jesus—kind of waved. It was a little yes, I see you over there, hang on just a sec acknowledgment as the man she’d nearly flattened scrambled to his feet. Whatever dude was trying to get to was on Izzy’s side of the street, but instead of attempting to cross again, he ran toward a truck that was poised and ready to take a left turn out of the McDonald’s parking lot.

And suddenly the entire situation clicked into sharp, understandable focus.

Because that truck—a shiny new blue Ford 4×4, no doubt stolen, with a mud-obscured Nevada front plate—was being driven by their old friend from the shopping mall, Baldy McShotMyCar.

Eden wasn’t being coerced by the world’s shortest carjacker. Nor was she insane.

Although maybe Izzy had to retract that last thought as, while he watched, she stepped on the gas and, with another shrieking metal-kissing-metal sound, separated the rental car from the parked vehicle.

Baldy had been blocked by a car whose driver had screeched to a halt to avoid the rampaging rental car. But now he took Eden’s lead and he drove on the sidewalk to get around it and onto the street. He stopped only briefly to let the man Eden had tried to flatten climb in, and it was then that Eden stepped on the gas.

Baldy saw her coming, saw her intention—she was going to ram him in a full demolition-derby move, but another car pulled forward, blocking his escape, and there was nothing he could do but try to back up, gears grinding in his haste.

Izzy was shouting—he heard himself shouting: “Eden, don’t, don’t, don’t!”

Because holy shit, the truck dwarfed the rental car. It was like watching Davey and Goliath—except, no, it was like watching all of the guys before Davey went up against Goliath; the guys that Goliath had effortlessly crushed. If anyone was going to get hurt here, it was going to be Eden.

But craphell! She didn’t hit her brakes, she just hit the truck—bam!—and damn it, the air bag should have gone off, but it didn’t.

The rental car bounced back, nearly crushing Izzy, who was running toward it. But he danced out of the way, and then he jerked at the door handle, but the f*cking thing was locked so he hammered on the window, praying that she was okay.

The truck was only barely dented, but their bags had deployed, which was more than just a pain in their asses, it was a rule changer. They were dead in the water, so to speak, because most new vehicles were designed with a kill switch that kicked in during an accident. It would have to be reset before they could drive away.

And yes, those were sirens wailing as police cars approached.

Eden opened the door for him just as Izzy heard what had to be one gunshot and then another—Holy f*ck! Baldy and his partner were using bullets to deflate the air bags that were pinning them into their seats.

But this was the same crazy-ass motherf*cker who’d unloaded his weapon at them at the mall, so Izzy reached across Eden and unfastened her seat belt, pulling her out and around to the back of the rental car, even as he shouted at her, “Are you out of your freaking mind?!” As punctuation, the crazy-ass motherf*cker took yet another shot at them, this time putting a hole in the windshield right where Eden’s head had been, seconds earlier.

And God, if the shooter came out of the truck and around the rental car, they were f*cked, because there was nowhere for them to go and Izzy wasn’t armed—he’d left Greg’s handgun back at the apartment—so he couldn’t fire back.

“Get under the car,” he ordered Eden, ready to do whatever he had to, to take those motherf*ckers down and out with his bare hands, in order to protect her.

She went, immediately, scooting herself along the pavement, as those sirens got louder and louder. But then he stopped her, because, sure enough, the first police car to make the scene was coming from behind them, lights flashing.

Eden saw it, too, and she gasped, “Thank you, Lord, thank you!” and “Are they running away? North?” At Izzy’s confused look she clarified, “Are the men with the guns heading north?”

He peeked over the back of the rental, where, sure enough, the bald man and his buddy were nowhere to be seen. They’d deserted the truck and lit out on foot and the only way they could have gone—without Izzy having spotted or been killed by them—was indeed north.

So he nodded, and she must’ve somehow known he was wondering why the hell it mattered so much to her that they’d gone in that direction, because she told him, “Neesha—they’re after her. She was here. I saw her! And she ran south!”

And as Izzy looked at Eden, as he looked into her beautiful eyes, into her face that was as drenched with sweat as his was and now smeared with grime from the dirty street, he realized that she’d put herself in mortal peril. She’d f*cking driven f*cking toward a man that she damn well knew had a f*cking weapon, all for the sake of some girl she’d met once.

One time.

Jesus H. Christ, for all they knew Neesha was a criminal, a liar, a thief, a con artist.

And Izzy’s head damn near exploded—he was so angry. At Neesha, at Eden, and at himself for being stupid enough to leave the keys in the car.

And his anger mixed badly with the intestine-freezing fear he’d felt over the past few endlessly long minutes as he’d stood there impotently and watched Eden fling herself into danger.

“God damn you,” he growled now. “Don’t you ever think before you do anything?”

She flinched as surely as if he’d struck her. And that pissed him off even more—the fact that she should look at him like that, as if he’d somehow wounded her, when mere moments ago she was unflinching as she’d gunned the gas, balls to the wall, as if she were freaking bulletproof and invincible.

She looked as if she were going to say something, but then the police shouted for them both to get down, facedown in the street, hands on their heads—because for all the cops knew they’d been the ones who’d fired the shots.

And realization dawned and Izzy could tell from the expression on Eden’s face that she hadn’t thought about the consequences of her actions.

He pushed her down into the perp position, as he assumed it himself, purposely turning his head away from her as he did so. Not only did he not want to hear whatever it was Eden was going to say, but he knew damn well that anything else that came out of his mouth right now was sure to be something he’d regret.

He just closed his eyes and waited for the impending joy of a body search and an ensuing police investigation.

All of which would be endured without coffee.

Although, truth be told? Jangling the way he was with adrenaline and anger, adding caffeine to his system at this point would’ve been overkill.