16
I think Quentin was living off the books, like I did back in Los Angeles. It was the only way to explain the difference between the run-down neighborhood he lived in and the inside of the one-bedroom apartment that apparently was his. It looked better inside than out, furnished almost as I’d imagined, with a black leather couch and a glass coffee table on the warped wooden floor, and on the coffee table a razor blade and a few telltale whitish grains to attest to Quentin’s bad habits. There was a table with two straight-backed chairs in the dining area, under a hanging lamp, and a forty-inch TV stood on a black, nearly empty bookcase along the wall. Other than that, the room was spartan and unadorned, unless you counted, at the moment, Quentin Corelli himself on the floor, hands and feet lashed with telephone cord and a narrow leather belt, respectively. There was a trickle of blood that ran from his left nostril to his upper lip, but it had stopped flowing on its own. I hadn’t stanched it. I didn’t particularly want to touch him. I didn’t fear him, but I didn’t want to touch him.
Now he was awake and looking at me, and it was clear he still didn’t recognize the stranger with the bruise on her cheek.
Serena came out of the bedroom. “We’re alone,” she said.
Quentin looked from me to her, back to me, and got it. “You,” he said. “F*cking A.”
“Hi, Quentin,” I said. “Seems like old times, doesn’t it?” Like Gualala, where I’d gotten the drop on him once before.
His shoulders jerked as, for about ten seconds, he tried to get his hands free. Then, frustrated, he sank back down on the floor. I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t start yelling. Anyone near enough to hear would call the cops, and people like Quentin didn’t do cops.
I said, “Did you think I wouldn’t figure it out and come visit you?”
This is where, if he were innocent, Quentin should have said, Figure what out? He didn’t, and that made me smile. I said, “Where is she, Quentin?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, bitch.”
I picked up his coat, a good-quality leather jacket, from the couch. It was the only item he’d taken off; otherwise he was still crisply dressed in his work clothes—charcoal trousers, white shirt with a fine gray stripe, square-toed black leather shoes. He hadn’t even gotten blood on his shirt. Yet.
His coat yielded a cell phone and a key ring; I already had the gun he’d dropped in our brief fight.
“Glock makes a nice gun,” I said, holding it up. “I hope you wore gloves when you loaded it. It’d be a really bad thing if I walked out of here with this gun and later I shot someone with it and your prints were on the casings, eh?” I paused. “I guess you know how I know that.”
Quentin’s golden eyes flickered briefly with an emotion I was pretty sure was malicious pleasure. Even in his precarious current situation, he was happy I was so badly jammed up.
I toed him in the ribs, not hard.
“Pay attention, Q,” I said. “The more immediate point here is that both I and my associate are heavily armed”—I nodded to Serena, who was sitting on the spine of the couch, with Quentin’s discarded coat, wallet, and cell at her feet—“and you’re not.”
He looked at Serena and said to me, “What is it with you and Mexicans? Can’t you get any white people to hang out with you?”
Serena didn’t say anything, not rising to the bait. I sat on my heels and put the muzzle of the Glock against his face. “I got no love for you, you know that,” I said. “But I’ve got bigger things to do than mess with you, so if you just answer one question for me, you’re gonna be home free. Here it is, for the washer-dryer set and a chance at the bonus round: Who’d you sell my ID and gun to?”
“F*ck you, bitch.”
I’d figured it wouldn’t be that easy. Time for Plan B. “Hand me his phone,” I told Serena.
She did, and I brought up the call log. “Look at this,” I told Quentin conversationally. “Missed calls, received calls, dialed calls. What am I gonna find in here, Q? Anything interesting?”
His face was stiff and angry, but that didn’t tell me much. I turned my attention back to the gray-green readout.
He should have deleted this stuff more often. His call log went back well over a week. I scrolled backward. I recognized the number for Skouras Shipping—“work” to Quentin—and also Joe Laska’s private cell, identified as “JL.” The other names and numbers meant nothing to me.
I kept scrolling back until I got to the window of time that interested me: Friday afternoon after three-thirty. Stepakoff’s death could have been no earlier than that, according to the SFPD’s timeline. Sometime in the hours afterward, the grifter had collected all her things and vacated the Eastman house. Around that time, I thought, she might have called Quentin. If he’d given her the ID papers and the gun both, then maybe he would be her go-to guy, the one she’d call when the plan went to hell and she was looking down at the body of a dead cop.
That afternoon, at 4:07 P.M., Quentin had missed a phone call from someone identified just by a nine-digit phone number, not by name. Seven minutes later that same person had called again, and Quentin had picked up.
I scrolled back. The other phone call from that number had come in on the next day, Saturday. Nothing since then.
I nudged my chin at Quentin. “Watch him,” I told Serena. “I’ll be back in a minute.” I didn’t want Quentin overhearing this conversation. Certainly I didn’t want him to be yelling in the background.
I walked out Quentin’s front door and glanced around. No one else was visible nearby. I emerged from the entry cave and sat on the front steps, largely out of view of the street.
A gray cat sprang to the top of the fence alongside Quentin’s building. It gave me an insolent stare, decided I was no threat, moved on. I looked down at the phone, still registering the suspect phone number on the screen. I pressed the key with the green telephone receiver on it, and the screen flashed the message CALLING.
On the second ring, a woman’s voice answered. “Quentin? What’s up?” She sounded young. There was a little edge of caution in her voice; it wasn’t flirtatious.
I, though, took care to make my voice quick and light as I said, “Hi, sorry, this isn’t Quentin, I’m Jenny, from Joe Laska’s office. Who have I reached?”
I said all that in one breath, trying first to set her at ease with a name I thought would be familiar to her, Laska’s name, then not giving her time to think before making my officious request.
“This is Brittany,” she said. She sounded uncertain but not yet suspicious.
“Oh, good. Quentin asked me to call and ask you a question. He wants to know if you’ve gotten rid of everything that links you to—this is what he said—‘Hailey and Violet’?”
There was a long pause. As the seconds stretched out, I felt something hopeful rise in my chest.
She said, “Who did you say you were?”
“I’m Jenny, from Joe’s office.” I wanted to ask her if she was still in San Francisco or nearby, but that would clearly give this away as a fishing expedition.
She said, “I think I need to talk to Quentin personally.”
“I’ll have him call you,” I said.
“Why did he—”
I broke the connection but didn’t immediately go back inside. I stood up for a moment, breathing a little quicker than usual.
People who believed in astral projection sometimes referred to something called the “silver cord,” a line of energy that connected the unconscious body to the traveling spirit. Some said the same cord, faintly visible to the truly aware, connected people whose lives were deeply intertwined. For a brief moment, while I’d had her on the line, I’d almost felt that same thing, a nearly tactile connection. Our lives were linked because we’d briefly shared the same identity, and now we faced the same potential fate: a death sentence.
And for about twenty-eight seconds, according to the log on the screen of Quentin’s phone, I’d created a cord between us. I’d had her on the line, giving me information. It wasn’t Magnus Ford who’d done that or any of the cops in the Eastman-Stepakoff task force. It had been me.
Quentin’s phone rang in my hand, shaking me out of that reverie. Ignoring the phone, I went back inside.
“Guess who that is?” I told Quentin brightly, holding up the phone as the ringing continued. “Brittany’s very anxious to talk to you.” I moved closer, stood over his supine form. “I know her name and her cell number now. I know you were helping her with this. Tell me the rest and I’ll leave. You’ll never see me again.”
Quentin glared. “Oh, you’re definitely going to see me again. You’re gonna die screaming, bitch.”
I lifted a shoulder. “Last year you said I’d be dead by Christmas. What are we shooting for now? Easter’s over.” I watched his face. “So tell me what I need to know.”
He was silent.
I hadn’t expected this to be easy, but I sighed aloud for the sake of dramatics. “Quentin,” I said, as if weary, “you hate women. You know it, I know it, little girls on bicycles with sissy bars probably sense it when they ride past you on the street. Why protect this one chick? Just give her up and this doesn’t get messy. I’ll call Laska, and he’ll come and cut you loose. No harm done.”
Except to his ego, and to guys like Quentin, ego was a lot. Particularly when its bruises came at the hands of a female.
“Go to hell,” he said.
Since he’d woken up to find himself at the mercy of an old enemy, Quentin just hadn’t seemed as scared as I’d have hoped. Even now he was glaring, resentful, but it was a frustration with a sly edge. He was sure we wouldn’t really hurt him and, more than that, sure that we’d make a mistake and he’d get the upper hand soon enough.
“Serena,” I said, “can I have a cigarette?”
She dug them out, the pack of Marlboros and the lighter. I tapped one out of the pack, lit up, exhaled a cloud of start-up smoke. I held out the cigarette to Quentin but yanked it away when he tried to snap at my hand.
“I had that move scouted, didn’t I?” I said. “I know you, Quentin. And you probably think you know me. You think, because of last winter, that I’m hung up on doing the right thing, yeah? But that was then.” I took the cigarette in my right hand and then, watching his eyes, slowly stubbed it out against the stump on my left hand, where the nerves still hadn’t grown back.
“This is now,” I finished.
Quentin’s eyes showed white at the edges; for the first time, I had his full attention. I thought I’d reached him.
Then he said, “That’s not what I remember about last winter.” He smiled. “I remember you weren’t such hot shit then. You were down on your knees sucking on my crank like it was sugarcoated. You—”
I really don’t remember much about what happened next. I think I heard a sound inside my head, a faint crunch like when you bite into a particularly crisp apple, and then my vision swam red except for a narrow window through which I could see Quentin’s face and the knuckles of my own fists, white with fury.