17
“I’m feeling a lot better,” I said meekly.
I was sitting in Quentin’s bathroom with my back against the hard curved ceramic of the tub. My arms rested on my knees, my knuckles skinned. Cold water dripped down my spine, water that Serena had squeezed from a wet hand towel down the back of my shirt. Oddly enough, it did have a calming effect.
Serena, unimpressed with my claim to be recovered, was leaning against the closed bathroom door. On her wrist I could see the marks from where I’d fought her attempt to pull me off Quentin. I hadn’t drawn blood, though I had broken skin—there were long pink lines edged with torn white skin where my short, blunt fingernails had clawed at her. On my shoulders, the tendony midpoint between neck and shoulder, I could feel where I’d have light bruises from how hard she’d initially grabbed me.
“Sorry,” I told her, maybe not for the first time. Like I said, a few minutes were a blur, lost to me.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” she said flatly. “He’s a waste of oxygen. But he wasn’t going to tell us nothing from a f*cking coma.”
“Well,” I said, “he’ll talk to us now.”
But Serena’s next words surprised me. “I don’t think he will.”
I gave her a quizzical glance.
“I know his type. He’s had beatings before. That’s part of what he gets paid for, not folding at the first threat of a little pain. Plus,” she said, “now he’s seen you lose it. Yeah, you got in a few licks, but you lost it. He’s gonna keep jerking you around.” She lifted her weight from the door and came to sit on her heels in front of me. “Give me my cigarettes back, okay?”
I handed over both the matches and the cigarettes. She tapped one out of the pack and then struck a match and lit up. As I watched, she inhaled until the cigarette’s end glowed, then exhaled smoke, then handed the cigarette to me.
“Come on,” she said, standing. “We’re gonna get it outta him. But you’ve got to give me the lead on this.”
“Meaning what?” I said, getting up from the floor.
“Meaning I’m going to do what we’ve gotta do to get it out of him,” she said.
“Yeah, but how?”
“Just trust me.”
I’d tried, I really had, to shed the way of thinking that West Point had trained into me. But now my first thought was that an officer never turns his or her back on what his or her troops are doing. Deniability, one of my COs at West Point had said, was a cowardly term for a cowardly age.
Serena read my mind. “Hailey,” she said, “don’t be thinking what you’re thinking. Not now.”
“What am I thinking?”
“Duty and honor,” she said.
“Give me another chance. I can get it out of him,” I said.
“No, you can’t. And if you did, you couldn’t live with yourself.” The cigarette was still smoldering in her hand. “Come on, Hailey. What do you think you brought me along for? Just to pump the gas and buy the food so you could stay out of sight? You knew this mission might come down to something like this, something I can do and sleep at night afterward and you couldn’t.”
Serena opened the bathroom door. I followed, still holding the cigarette she’d given me.
Quentin eyed us both sourly as we came back into the living room, but he said nothing.
Serena nodded toward the table. “Get a chair over here, and let’s get him up in it.”
“You touch me again, you’re gonna die, bitch,” Quentin said. I ignored him and pulled one of the straight-backed chairs into the center of the room. Avoiding his angry eyes, not looking at the red pre-bruise marks on his face that I’d made, I grabbed him by the collar, Serena grabbed his hips, and together we wrestled him up into the chair. He was quieter than you might expect for someone in his situation, and he didn’t put up a fight, but I understood why: ego. Even if some of his neighbors were at home at midday, he wasn’t about to scream for help like some civilian. He didn’t want help from upstanding normal people, and he certainly didn’t want cops. Quentin was waiting for us to make a mistake—like weak, stupid females inevitably would—and then he’d make us pay.
But for now Serena had found extra electrical cords and a few of Quentin’s belts, and she was tying his ankles to the chair legs, then strapping him to the chair.
He looked up at me. “You hit like a girl,” he said. “I’ve been hit harder by interesting ideas.”
“Hold that thought, Q,” Serena said, straightening up. She went into the kitchen, then the bedroom. We heard her rummaging noisily. Her disembodied voice, from the bedroom: “Gross.”
“What?”
“I found the porn.”
“I’ll take your word. I don’t want to see it.”
Quentin snorted.
Serena returned to the living room, carrying a red metal tool chest. She set it down on the floor and snapped it open. “Gangster toolbox,” she said, sifting through the items inside. “Lock picks, extra cartridges for the gun, handcuff key but no handcuffs—and what’s this?” She raised her face to Quentin’s and smiled. “You ever hear the expression ‘What goes around, comes around’? Time for you to pay for what you did to my friend last year.”
“Yeah? You gonna make me lick your greasy Mexican—”
She cut him off: “Right, I’m sure that was going to be a terribly demeaning racial comment, Q, but that’s not what I had in mind. Does this freshen up your memory?”
She lifted out a pair of heavy shears, much like the tin snips that Babyface had used to take off my finger in December.
He scowled. “You haven’t got the stones to take off a finger.”
Serena tilted her face up toward me. “You think that’s true, H? Maybe he’s right.” She moved around behind the chair, where Quentin’s fingers made a downward-splayed bouquet from his bound hands. “I actually think I do have the stones for that. And I could get into the whole eye-for-an-eye thing. But I’m feeling creative.” She walked back around to the front of the chair, sat on her heels, and pried off one of Quentin’s good leather shoes, then peeled off the sock underneath. His foot, exposed, looked reddish and vulnerable, toes compacted together from being inside the shoe.
Serena said, “You guys want to hear a fun fact about anatomy? Lots of people don’t know this, but the big toe is really important for balance. Once it’s cut off, you never really stand or walk right again. And if you lose both of them? Then things get just crazy. You balance like one of those goofy balloon people they put up outside grand openings of stores and shit.”
For the first time, there was uncertainty—maybe fear—in Quentin’s face. He said again, “You don’t have the stones.”
Serena shrugged. “Maybe not. Maybe I should start with a smaller toe, work my way up. I’m sure it’s easier the second time.”
Quentin tried to jerk his foot out of her reach, but it was tied by the ankle to the chair. Serena easily put her hand on the top of his foot, holding it down, and then wedged the two jaws of the shears around his third toe. Quentin breathed raggedly.
Serena, I thought, but kept myself from saying it. No weakness now.
Then her hand tightened on the shears, and the bones of her hand stood out slightly under the skin. She’s really, really going to do it—
“No!” Quentin’s voice was a howl. “Stop! I’ll tell you, you bitch! What the f*ck, I don’t care.”
Serena had withdrawn the shears, but blood was springing up where they had been; he’d truly stopped her at the last minute.
Her voice was cold. “Fine, but consider this a temporary reprieve. You start holding out on us, or if we think you’re lying about anything, that toe’s coming off.”
“I don’t got to protect her,” Quentin said. His face was flushed, and he was still looking down toward the toe he couldn’t see beneath his lap and knees.
“Her?” I said. “You mean Brittany?”
“I don’t owe her anything. She was just some chick I picked up in a bar and did a couple of times.” His voice was gaining conviction and bravado. Now he wanted to act like it was all his idea to tell me. Fine. Easier all around.
I stepped in as Serena sat back on her heels again. “What was her last name?”
“Mercier.”
“Which of my guns did you sell her? The Airweight or the SIG Sauer?”
“The SIG.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Tell me the rest. This girl’s more than some chick you ‘did a couple of times.’ She reached out to you for help after the cop died. Tell me who she is, how you came to sell my things to her, all of it.”
“It was like I said. I met her in a bar. She was just this chick up from L.A., looking for a rich guy to be her boyfriend and support her.” His voice and breathing were returning to normal. “I wasn’t about to do that shit, but we went home together. She’s a little younger than you. A lot hotter, too. We hooked up a couple of times. She liked to think of herself as a con artist. The stuff she did was just nickel-and-dime crap, like the broken-package scam or hanging around outside the bus station pretending she was trying to get out of town and away from an abusive boyfriend. Bleeding hearts fell for that crap a lot, gave her a lot of money for bus tickets she never bought.”
“And she could tell you were nonjudgmental about the way she lived.”
“I didn’t give a shit that she did that kind of crap. Girls have to—they don’t have the nerve for big crimes like robbing banks, stuff that takes planning and guts. So they’ve gotta do little shit.”
I didn’t respond to that. If making sexist comments was what he needed to do to soothe his ego and justify telling us this stuff, fine.
He said, “We didn’t hook up long-term. But later I had stuff to sell, the stuff from Mexico.”
He didn’t say, your stuff, and that irritated me, though I knew it was typical of career criminals. They stuck a gun in the face of their victims and said, “Where’s the money?,” not “Where’s your money?”—psychologically divorcing the victims from what was theirs.
“The problem was, both the driver’s license and the passport had your photo on them, and there’s not a lot of people who look like you that’re also in the market for ID papers. So I had this stuff and no one to sell it to, and then I remembered Brittany. She could pass for you. So she bought the stuff. I didn’t offer to sell her the gun. Her tricks were all nonviolent. I figured she’d be scared and say, ‘Oh, no, I hate guns,’ like most girls do.”
“Yeah, whatever,” I said, feigning irritation. If thinking that he was getting under my skin would make him run his mouth more, I could do that. “But at some point, you changed your mind about the gun.”
“Yeah, in February I sold her the SIG.”
“What happened that made her want a gun?”
“I don’t know.”
I looked at Serena. “I sense bullshit.”
“Fine with me.” Serena put her hand on his foot again.
“Okay, okay,” Quentin said. “It was kinda me. We didn’t really keep in touch, but in February I saw her outside a bar. I thought she was you at first. She even had that ugly thing on her face, like you’ve got. When I saw who it really was, I got it: She was using your ID to do a real con. This wasn’t just that she’d gotten a credit card in your name—she was really being you, in public. I thought that took a lot of balls, so I went and talked to her. We had a beer together, and she started telling me about this long con she was doing. She’d moved into a rich old woman’s house, a woman who couldn’t see well enough to drive anymore. Brit was running errands for her, getting groceries, taking the dog to the vet. The old lady liked dogs, so Brittany was pretending that she wanted to be a vet student at Davis someday. She even got a city-college ID card to make it look like she was in school. The old lady was completely snowed. Meanwhile Brit’s getting access to everything—all her account numbers and paperwork, everything.”
I said, “What was she really living on? Was the old lady paying her so much that she didn’t have to work at all?”
“Credit cards. She took out four in your name. She was just paying the minimum so they wouldn’t cut her off.”
“Great.” Now my credit was going to be wrecked, on top of everything else. “Get to the part about the gun.”
“When I saw what she was doing, I told her that someday there might be a relative or old friend that drops by unexpectedly and figures out the situation. What if it’s a guy, I said, and he gets angry, and the situation turns physical? I told her she needed to be ready to defend herself. Just in case.”
“You knew it might be a lot more serious than that,” I said. “You knew it might be the cops.”
“I didn’t want to scare her.”
“How much money did she pay for the gun?”
Suddenly Quentin looked uncomfortable, more than he had before. Then I understood why: because this was where the story took a turn from being about simple greed to setting me up for death row.
“It was free, wasn’t it?” I said. “You just gave it to her.”
“Yeah.”
“Because you knew if I’d loaded it, my prints would be on the casings. Did you tell her not to clean up the brass if she had to fire it?”
“I might’ve said something like that.” He looked uneasy. “It wasn’t like either of us thought this would ever happen.”
But if it did, so much the better, from his point of view. I said, “Let’s get to the day Brittany shot the cop. What’d she tell you happened?”
“She’d heard someone at the door, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t even look. She was so close to being done with … with what she was doing, that she didn’t want to mess around with any visitors who might get suspicious.” Quentin paused. “But then she heard these noises from the living room. That idiot cop climbed in through the window. Brit was coming downstairs. She was about to go out shopping, so she had her purse, and the SIG was in there. Then when she went into the living room and saw a cop seeing the old lady like that … bang! That was it.”
“So Brittany called you,” I said.
“Yeah. She was pissing herself, she was so scared. I came over and helped her out. She wanted to try to clean up her fingerprints and maybe loose hairs, for DNA. I knew you can never really get rid of all of that shit, but I did the best I could while she was throwing all her stuff into bags to split.”
“Where’d she go?”
“Los Angeles,” he said.
“Quentin,” I said, “this is the other million-dollar question: Where, exactly, in L.A. did she go?”
“To a friend’s, that’s all she said. I f*cking swear.”
“Fine,” I said. I paced a little, trying to decide if there was anything else I needed to get out of him. I couldn’t think of anything.
Serena said, “So now what?”
“Now he takes a little nap while we split for L.A.”
If it had worked with Joel, it’d work with Quentin. I needed some lead time in my search for Brittany Mercier. As soon as he could, Quentin would call her and warn her I was coming to L.A. No matter how little he might care about her, he hated me, and he’d help her out for that reason alone.
But when I shook out the pills from the bottle into my hand, I had only one Ambien left. I’d given two to Joel yesterday, and Serena had taken one the night before. One would make Quentin sleepy, but it might not knock him out.
I told Serena, “Go see if he’s got anything like sleeping pills in his medicine chest.”
“I don’t,” Quentin interrupted.
“Check anyway.”
She said, “Come with me. I need to talk to you.”
“Yeah, okay, in a second.” To Quentin, “Don’t let me hear you fooling around out here, trying to get loose. You don’t want to make me mad right now, because you have no idea who my friend really is. She doesn’t work for me, I work for her. And right now she wants to kill you, and I have to go try to talk her out of it.”
I’d known that was what Serena intended when she’d asked to talk to me out of his earshot. She was cold, but not cold enough to discuss Quentin’s murder in front of him. She wanted to put a round in the back of his head, execution style, before he even knew what was happening. That was the quality of her mercy: quick and from behind.
For once Quentin didn’t have anything to say, so I stood up and went into the bathroom a second time, where Serena was waiting for me. I shut the door behind us. There were no windows, and the overhead light was harsh. I thought of hospital physicians making a quick, private consult.
“We’re not killing him,” I said flatly.
“He’s gonna tip her off,” Serena said.
“I know, but we can buy ourselves some lead time. There’s no sleeping pills in the medicine chest?”
“No.”
“Dammit.” Of course he didn’t have any. Bastards are the only people who never have any trouble sleeping. “I wanted to put him down for a good seven or eight hours.” I reconsidered. “Okay, we’ll get him in the closet, tied up, brace the closet door with the couch. It’ll be a while before he gets out.”
“ ‘A while’? You know how long a phone call takes? We’ll be driving through Salinas and she’ll already be out the door. We’ll never find her. Not to mention, he’s not just gonna let today go. He’ll look for you. Me, too. He’ll want to kill both of us.”
She was right, and I knew it. “I don’t care. We’re not killing anyone.”
“Why not?” she demanded. “For God’s sake, Hailey, look what he did to you. You never told me about that, that last year he made you—”
“I remember, I was there,” I said sharply. “Maybe we’re thinking about this wrong. We could take him with us. Late tonight, when everyone’s asleep. We’ll put him in the trunk of the car, and he’ll be with us the whole time, until we find Brittany. He won’t have a chance to—”
“Hailey.”
It was the exasperation in her voice, more than anything else, that shut me down. Serena didn’t even sound angry anymore, just frustrated with my lack of logic. Of course it was a ridiculous plan. The long-term kidnapping of an adult male, one who was strong and crafty if not particularly smart … it would be a logistical nightmare. What were we going to do, drive to L.A. and go around looking for Brittany with Quentin in the trunk of the car? Ludicrous.
Yet something tickled the edge of my mind. Riding in the trunk of the car.
“Wait,” I said.
“Wait for what?”
He’s not just gonna let today go. He’ll look for you.
“I have an idea,” I said. “Go keep an eye on him. Don’t, whatever you do, kill him. Quentin being alive is the key to everything.”
“How?”
“Just go watch him. Let me think about this, and I’ll tell you later.”
After she left, I put my hands on the sink, arms braced wide, head down, thinking. It was a crazy idea. The odds were against it all working the way I hoped. But it was the best plan I had.
I used the toilet, then rubbed the sore spot on my shoulder again, where Serena had yanked me off Quentin. Then I emerged from the bathroom and looked at him. His face was reddened again; clearly he’d been fighting to get loose of his bonds, but he hadn’t made any headway. I gave him an assessing look.
“Quentin,” I said, “you want to know the difference between you and me? No, scratch that. If I started to list the differences, I’d have two problems: I wouldn’t know where to start, and I wouldn’t know where to stop.”
Serena, sitting nearby, tilted her head, surprised at the brisk ease of my tone, after our hushed and frustrated planning session.
I went on, “Let me put this another way: You want to know the reason I’m not going to kill you? Other than morals?” I stepped closer and leaned over him, looking down into his dark, mutinous face. “I don’t care that you’re going to tip Brittany off. If she runs, so much the better. A moving target is easier to spot than one that stays still.”
Then, to Serena, “Check the knots, make sure he can’t get loose.”