23
“Insula? Insula, wake up, it’s four-thirty.”
No fair. It’s only been a minute since I closed my eyes.
Reluctantly I rolled over toward the sound of Diana’s voice. She was standing at my bedside, still in jeans and her Army jacket. She looked alert. I felt like I’d been lying in a grave, like the grit in the corners of my eyes could be cemetery dirt.
“I made coffee,” she said. “Extra strong.”
“Thanks.” My voice was a raspy stranger’s.
“Do you want milk? I didn’t put anything in it.”
“No, just sugar. Two spoonfuls.”
She sat on the end of the bed while I drank it. She was right, she’d made it strong. Strong and sweet. I was awake enough now to realize that my head didn’t hurt any longer and the pain in my foot was a low-grade, tolerable ache.
“Did you have any trouble getting the bike back here?” I asked. “Did the cops bother you?”
“No, it was fine.”
I nodded.
Then she said, “I was listening to the news. They know about your new hair color. That and the bruise.”
“I figured as much. That cop in the alley made me so quickly.” Had Joel Kelleher reported that? Or was it Pratt, the officer who’d seen me point-blank in King City? “What else are they saying?”
“That you were spotted in this neighborhood, that you should be considered armed and dangerous.”
“Armed I’m not, except for Trippy’s knife.” I frowned. “Serena keeps a weapon here, doesn’t she?”
“A couple.” Diana pointed toward the tall dresser.
I set down my coffee and reached for my cell phone, flicking it back on. It came to life, but the message-waiting symbol didn’t appear on the readout.
“Did Warchild call you?” Diana asked.
“No.”
“Is she okay?”
“Warchild can take care of herself,” I said, “but this is a strange time for her to go incommunicado.”
I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, then gingerly put my weight on my injured foot, checking to see if this would bring on a fresh wave of pain. It didn’t. Mostly the bandanna wrapped around it made walking feel awkward, so I bent down to take it off.
I went into the bathroom and surveyed my face in the mirror. Already the caffeine and sugar were beginning to filter into my bloodstream, and I was feeling better, but my face hadn’t caught up. The cosmetic bruise was faded and smeared. I set my coffee cup down at the edge of the white porcelain sink, turned on the cold water, and bent to splash my face. The bruise, of no use to me now, began running down my cheek in gray rivulets. I picked up the bar of soap from the soap dish, worked up a lather between my hands, and scrubbed my face until all that remained was a faint outline of thundercloud gray at the edges of my birthmark. The rest of my skin looked clean-scrubbed and fresh. Better, I thought.
Serena had two guns in the dresser: the old TEC-9 that she used to keep on the nightstand while she slept, and a Beretta 92F. I chose the latter, checking that it was loaded, and went out.
In the kitchen my motorcycle helmet and keys waited for me on the table, as well as a pair of energy bars—food to go.
Diana was at the stove, fixing herself a cup of instant hot chocolate.
“You don’t drink coffee?” I asked.
“Sometimes, if it has a lot of milk.”
It was easy to forget that she was only fifteen. She was like her aunt, steady and serious.
She poured the cocoa into a mug, blew on it, and looked at me over the rim. “When you go back up there, to find the girl who was pretending to be you, are you going to kill her?”
“What? No.”
“She did kill two people, and she tried to set you up for it.”
“I know,” I said. “But I think Serena might have built up my reputation for bloodthirstiness to an exaggerated level. I could have killed Trippy last night, and I didn’t.” I paused, swirling my coffee to make the sugar mix through. “Also, if I kill her, that would make it kind of hard to prove it was her and not me who shot those two people. It’s not like she’s going to confess from a drawer in the morgue.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
I drained the last of my coffee and set the mug down in the sink. “Listen, while I’m gone, there are two more things I need from you. First, I left my Browning under a Dumpster when the police were on my tail. I need you to go get it before some kid finds it.” Briefly I gave her directions to where it was.
“What’s the other thing?”
“Try to get in touch with Serena,” I said. “She can take care of herself, I said that already, but I just want to be sure.”
“I will, I promise, Insula.”
I picked my keys up off the table. “After tonight,” I said, “you can call me Hailey.”
24
On the drive back up, I was feeling better. I had both caffeine and hope in my system, a Beretta 92F, and Dexedrine in my pharmacy bottle for when my energy started to fail. Maybe that’s why, after parking the Aprilia two doors down from where Brittany and Quentin were, I had the strength to scale the big shade tree outside the house instead of hiding in the oleander bush. Grabbing the lowest branch, I put my good left foot against the trunk and hiked myself up. I found a place in the branches, well obscured by leaves, and straightened out my right leg and elevated the right foot on a neighboring branch. Then I settled in to wait. From my perch I could see the whole house and most of the backyard.
Lights bloomed behind the windows of the earliest-rising homes, and the sky lightened as if in competition. Dawn had cracked on the horizon when I saw the shutters of a room in the house open. A man was briefly visible behind them, black-haired, olive-complected.
He seemed to be the first one up; I saw only him moving behind the windows. In time the garage door went up and a black Porsche Boxster eased down the driveway, then into the street.
Before the garage door slid down behind him, I noticed that the Boxster’s stablemate was a small silver car, not a make I recognized. An Acura, maybe, or a late-model Honda. It wasn’t the Miata that “Hailey Cain” had reportedly been driving. If it was Brittany’s, I wondered where she’d acquired it.
As the morning wore on, I came to regret my choice of hiding place. There aren’t that many different ways you can shift around when you’re sitting on a tree limb that’s about seven inches across. Still, I was glad I’d chosen the tree over the oleander bush. It was better cover. People look around more often than they look up.
About midmorning Quentin walked out from under the overhang of the back patio and into my line of sight. He was unshaven, in yesterday’s trousers and a white tank undershirt. He strolled casually to the edge of the pool, taking in the yard and its good, manicured landscaping. Then, standing at the pool’s edge, he unhooked his belt. I snapped my head away, not wanting to see the man’s dick again, but then I did look, just to be sure that he was doing what I thought: urinating in Brian’s pool, marking the other man’s territory as his own.
A few moments later, Brittany came out as well. She was wearing the same boots I’d seen last night, but with a pair of cutoffs and a baby T that showed a flat line of abdomen. She’d appeared on the scene too late to see what he’d been doing to the pool, and if she’d seen from the window, she didn’t care. She went directly to him, and they kissed.
I had very little doubt that if they hadn’t already, very soon they would have sex on Brian’s bed. More territory marking for Quentin.
He went inside, but she stayed out, sitting at the pool’s edge, drinking her Coke apparently for breakfast. She was the picture of leisure. Up in my perch, I watched her and tried to understand her.
I wasn’t a noble person; certainly my actions of the past few months attested to that. But since my high-school days, I’d always worked. The kind of academic and athletic efforts required for West Point admission were a job in themselves, and in addition to them I’d had summer and part-time jobs. Even West Point, later, had been employment; cadets at the USMA are paid. Then I’d returned to California, where the work I’d found had been subsistence-level—first merely dangerous, then illegal.
It would never have occurred to me to want what Brittany seemed to: to lie around by a pool or a television set like a college girl on summer vacation. Was that what her crimes, the money she’d gotten from Eastman, had been all about? Not having to work? No ego needs beyond that to be fulfilled, no concern for how the world at large perceived her? No dead parent’s memory to live up to, no great failure to live down?
Whatever else you could say about me, I’d felt obligation. I’d felt shame, and I still did to this day, which was why I was up a tree, stiff and uncomfortable, having gotten about three or four hours’ sleep in the last day and a half. Because from what I knew about the legal system, I thought it likely that there wouldn’t be enough evidence to charge me or, if so, to convict me. But it wasn’t enough that I escape charges. If no one was ever caught and convicted, if Brittany went free, there’d always be a question mark over my reputation. It’d linger in the minds of people who’d known me briefly or not well—instructors and cadets at West Point, old classmates and people from Lompoc, which I considered to be my hometown.
So it wasn’t enough that this shit not stick to me; it had to stick to somebody else.
Brittany finished her Coke and went back inside. About thirty minutes later, Quentin emerged from the front door, clean-shaven and fully dressed, and headed off down the street, toward the car he’d moved last night. He passed the Aprilia, at the curb, without any sign of interest.
Time passed. I shifted in place, trying to keep my ass from falling asleep. I was getting tired. If I didn’t take a Dexedrine for it, I might nod off, fall out of the tree, and break a few limbs. If I did take one, I’d be twitching with amphetamine needs, the desire to move and to do something. Sitting still would feel like a punishment.
I chose the latter, dry-swallowing the pill with two more ibuprofen to keep the pain of my wounded foot at bay, and ate one of Diana’s energy bars so the pills weren’t going down on an empty stomach.
Quentin did not return, but when the sun was high in the sky overhead, maybe noon, someone else came along, a young man on foot. He wore a yellow T-shirt, cargo shorts, and hiking boots, and he carried a piece of paper in his hand; he looked like a campaign volunteer going door-to-door for a candidate. His red hair was pulled back once again.
When Joel rang the doorbell, I leaned forward on my branch as though I’d reached the particularly interesting point in a movie, willing Brittany to open the door. And she did.
Although I could clearly hear the noise of a television set from somewhere inside the house, I couldn’t make out anything Joel was saying to Brittany. His posture, though, was that of the earnest volunteer he was apparently pretending to be. He held out the piece of paper. Brittany took it and peered closely, the way people do when they’re demonstrating that they’re paying attention to something you’re showing them. Then she shook her head and handed it back.
Joel shrugged and spoke again, clearly something like, Thank you for your time.
No, Officer Kelleher, I thought, thank you. Because I understood what I’d just seen. Joel had gotten not just an up-close sighting of Brittany but her thumbprint on a piece of paper.
She closed the door, and he headed back down the walk. I held myself very still in my perch. This would be a bad time for Joel to prove extraordinarily observant. But he continued down the sidewalk. I turned my head to watch as he went back to a white sedan, a nondescript, powerful Chevy. He slid behind the wheel. Craning a little to see around a branch, I saw him slide the flyer Brittany had handled into a manila envelope. Then he drove off.
25
The temperature rose steadily, though I was fairly comfortable, sheltered by the same abundant leaves that were hiding me from prying eyes. School broke for the day, apparently, and a pair of boys bicycled down the street and stopped to get off their bikes and circle the Aprilia on foot, admiring it. I watched them a moment, then turned my attention back to the house.
Perhaps another hour passed. I texted Serena: ARE YOU AROUND? WHAT’S GOING ON? I got nothing back.
At maybe eight hours into my stakeout, I was developing a fine tremor in my legs from holding my position, and despite the Dexedrine, I was becoming sleepy again. Sleepy didn’t quite say it, implying a pleasant somnolence. I felt instead heavy-muscled, heavy-headed, drained. This was bad. If I fell asleep and tumbled out of the damn tree, I’d probably break a limb or two, knock myself out into the bargain. Then Quentin could come along and scoop me up and drag me into the house, and it’d be over. He could set up his grisly suicide-confession scene at his leisure. I didn’t want to think—
A scream from inside the house interrupted these thoughts. I lifted my head, newly alert.
It wasn’t a piercing, horror-movie scream. It was short and sharp and followed by some unintelligible words, sharp and startled and angry. But loud, loud enough that I was hearing them through the walls, or the sound had carried through an open window on the back of the house. Whatever the situation, Brittany was clearly upset.
Yet alone. Who are you yelling at? The TV?
Maybe that was the case. Something tugged at the edges of my mind, something Ford had said about the student newspaper and Brittany’s ID photo. A fed went over to their offices and rattled his saber pretty hard for them to sit on the photo, as well as the news about the discrepancy. They didn’t like it, but we’re hoping they’ll do it.
What if they hadn’t? What if the student newspaper had run a story and released the photo? Maybe Brittany was seeing her own face on the news, linked to the Eastman-Stepakoff murders for the first time. That would be scary enough to merit the kind of response I was hearing. I leaned forward, watching the house intently, but my angle on the front windows wasn’t great, and I caught only brief flashes of motion from inside.
Then, a few moments later, the garage door began to roll up.
For the first time that day, I heard Brittany’s voice clearly. “No! You said that already, and I’m not … I … Quentin, I don’t care!”
She came into view, holding both a suitcase and a half-full pillowcase in one hand, letting them slip to the garage floor as she unlocked the silver car. I had enough time now to see the silver Acura symbol on the trunk.
Brittany threw the passenger door open and flung her suitcase and the pillowcase inside. “It’s not just Brian I’m worried about,” she said, slamming the door. “There was someone else here. This guy was taking around a flyer about a missing kid who might be in the area.” Another interruption on the other end. Then, “What I’m trying to say is that he was part of some f*cking missing-kids foundation, an anticrime group, and he looked right at my face. Not in a crowd, but from just two feet away.” She moved back from the car. “Do you understand what that means?”
She disappeared from view, obviously into the house.
Time, Hailey. Stop her now.
Somewhere the fingerprint that Joel had obtained was making its way through the system, undoubtedly expedited, and when it matched prints taken from the Eastman home, everyone would be interested in the pretty young blonde staying in this house. But that would be utterly useless if she wasn’t here to be arrested.
So I touched the Beretta in its holster, checking to be sure the safety was on, eased myself to a lower branch, and swung down to hang by my hands. My feet were maybe twenty inches above the ground, and I raised the right one slightly higher, to spare it from the pain of impact. The idea was, I’d drop to the ground and run to the garage to stop Brittany in her escape plans.
Instead I dropped to the ground, hitting first with my left leg, and that knee gave way underneath me like it was made of cardboard. I collapsed onto all fours, the soft springiness of lawn beneath the heels of my hands, and swayed dizzily.
From the garage, Brittany’s boot heels were noisy as she walked, quickly now. I raised my face and caught a glimpse of her, back turned to me, putting a large forest green shopping bag with twine handles into the trunk of her car. I struggled to make my stiff, weak legs hold me. Come on, dammit. Get up.
There was the sound of a car door slamming, and the Acura’s engine came to life. By then I was halfway up and staggering. I willed Brittany to see me and stop the car, exhibit curiosity, get out.
But she didn’t. She was so wrapped up in her personal crisis that a UFO could have landed in Brian’s front yard and she wouldn’t have seen it. She backed fast out of the driveway, made a looping turnaround in reverse, put the Acura in drive, and rocketed away, not up the street toward Mulholland but down, toward town and the 101.
No. This will not happen, she will not disappear again. I forced myself into an awkward lope, across and up the street to where the Aprilia was. My legs were tired, and running woke up the pain in my wounded right foot, but I got there. Then I pulled up short and stared. My helmet was missing.
What else could go wrong? Those goddamn kids, they’d taken the helmet, because that’s what bored middle-class kids do when no adults are watching: They steal things.
There was no time to be angry. I swung my leg over the saddle, inserted the key, and pressed the starter. The engine roared to life. I put my sunglasses on and spun the bike around in a hard circle.
Brittany had about a minute on me, and she was moving fast, but there was only one road down. On it I caught sight of the Acura’s silver body disappearing around a switchback, and I leaned forward, deeper into my fetal crouch position, and gave chase.
26
It was a steep, sharp descent, the wind playing with my hair. I was going fast enough that an old man doing yard work at the edge of his property looked up and scowled, but I couldn’t slow down. If Brittany got to an intersection and I didn’t see which way she went, I’d lose her. I shot past lovely homes shaded by oak trees, past kids on bikes and women walking for exercise. Then the street leveled out, and up ahead I saw Brittany’s silver car, turning at a traffic light onto the main street. I knew where she was heading: to the 101.
By the time she got there, I was right on her tail. I didn’t care if she knew she was being followed; I could drive up her tailpipe if I wanted to. I knew her problem now: She was a coward. She had served Eastman something like tea, spiked with sedatives, and the woman had slipped away into a fog, never aware enough of what was happening to confront Brittany. After the murders she’d fled San Francisco. Now she was running again, not waiting to see if Brian had seen the news or if the young volunteer at her door would remember her face. She never faced opposition straight on. If Brittany could have, she probably would have shot Stepakoff in the back and never let him see her face at all. She felt uncomfortable without her mask—either the mask of my stolen identity or that of the sweet girl who people like Brian seemed to take her for.
So if she looked back and realized that a motorcyclist was following her, she’d probably fear the worst: that I was someone who’d seen the news and knew who she was. In that situation Brittany would stay true to form. She’d panic and try to outrun me, and that wouldn’t work. Everyone knows who wins car-versus-motorcycle chases.
We ascended the ramp onto the freeway. I stayed close as we merged. It was only about three-thirty in the afternoon, so the worst of the evening congestion was yet to come; we’d both have room to maneuver, if it came to an outright chase. Brittany didn’t seem worried yet, if her speed and the way she was handling the car were any indication. She was going about seventy, which despite the posted limits is considered a sane and civil speed by L.A. motorists, when traffic allows.
We were heading north, away from the city proper, where the congestion would have been thicker. Brittany signaled and eased into the left lane, bumping her speed up to seventy-five. After a second I did the same. As I did, I caught the eye of a man driving a midnight blue Saab; his eyebrows jumped at the sight of me, and I knew why: my bare head. California has a helmet law, and while there’ll always be hardcore bikers who flout it, you generally don’t see them on the main freeways, courting arrest.
Finding a hole in traffic, the Acura eased over into the farthest-left lane, the passing lane. I followed, bumping my speed up to eighty to match hers, keeping my eyes on her rearview mirror. As I watched, she lifted her eyes to the mirror, and then she knew.
Without signaling, Brittany cut recklessly across four lanes of traffic, toward an exit. I leaned my weight to the right and followed, hearing an angry, shrill horn behind me.
We were moving so fast that I didn’t catch the sign for the exit ramp Brittany dived down. The light was green at the foot of the ramp, and she went left, me on her tail. Strip-mall businesses flashed past in the periphery of my vision; it was a shopping district, but I sensed open land ahead. Brittany was looking for a place where she could run. She gunned the Acura’s engine, racing for a yellow light. It turned red as we shot under it.
Run, baby, I thought. Run baby run baby run. That was just what I wanted. Sooner or later we were going through a speed trap, and boy, were we going to set it off. At last I wasn’t hiding from the police anymore. I wanted them to chase me, because I was chasing the Eastman-Stepakoff killer.
In a moment or two, the businesses and gas stations fell away and grassland opened up on the edges of my vision. I lowered my head and watched only the license plate on her car; to me it was the mechanical rabbit at the dog track. Brittany swerved left again, diving at the last minute for a side road in hopes of losing me. I leaned on the left handlebar and followed her, catching only a glimpse of the green-and-white sign on the corner: Something Canyon Road. She’d led us to about where we would have been had she gone uphill from Brian’s place onto Mulholland Drive: headed into the open, chaparral-filled wilderness of the Santa Monica Mountains.
The Acura tried to pull away from me, and the needle on my speedometer twitched steadily higher: 95, 100, 105. The wind was no longer just pulling at my hair; it was pulling at my scalp and the skin of my face. Some of my hair had come loose from my ponytail and was fibrillating wildly around the lenses of my sunglasses. My body shook in sympathy with the Aprilia’s efforts, like amphetamine tremors. Maybe I was having those, too.
Then I heard a siren behind us.
Brittany didn’t stop, so I couldn’t, either. In fact, I smiled. This was another chase that individual motorists never win, trying to outrun the cops. Run, baby, I thought again. Because you’ve got a signed confession at every fingertip, and there’s no way you’re not getting arrested now, no matter how much you point at me and scream about the crazy girl chasing you.
When I dared a backward glance, the cop car behind us had multiplied into several, though they had to follow in single file.
The Acura’s brake lights flashed briefly as Brittany made another last-minute turn, scaring a red-tailed hawk from a fence post, and I swung after her. The road she’d chosen was old, paved in sun-cracked particulate. Though she quickly picked up speed again, I eased back on the Aprilia’s throttle. Roads this old were prone to gravel and loose stones. At high speed, without a helmet, being hit by a stone the Acura threw up would be almost like taking a bullet to the head.
What happened next happened too fast for me to understand right away. I no sooner saw the tumbleweed ahead of Brittany’s car than she saw it, her brake lights flashed, and then sparks flew from the Acura’s undercarriage as she lost control of the car. I veered left, hard, and then for a minute I didn’t think of anything else as I fought for control of the skidding Aprilia, which was in a locked-rear-wheel slide. Unemotionally, I thought, I’m going down, and then I felt the bike get its footing under me again.
I braked to a standstill and swung off the saddle. And for the second time that afternoon, my legs betrayed me. I fell to hands and knees, my sunglasses dropping from my face onto the road’s edge.
For a moment the silence that replaced the battering of the wind around my head was all I could hear. Then I became aware of a familiar sound: a helicopter hovering overhead, its blades chopping the air. To the right, about fifty yards from me, the Acura sat in a cloud of dust in the center of a field, like a sentient thing in shock. On the shoulder of the road was a large, mangled coil of baling wire—the thing I had taken for an unlikely Southern California tumbleweed, that had thrown up sparks as the Acura dragged it at high speed along the road.
Behind me the police cars had come to a stop.
No one did anything. No doors slammed, no one shouted commands, the helicopter simply hovered. I could see the shape of Brittany’s head and shoulders in the car, but it wasn’t clear if she was conscious. She couldn’t be dead, could she? The car had run off the road at high speed, but it hadn’t hit anything. Surely she couldn’t be dead. Could she?
Then the driver’s-side door opened and Brittany stumbled out and began to run across the field.
I don’t know how she could believe that she’d get out of this on foot, but she was trying. Running was just what she did. And chasing her had been my job up until now, so I did. I got to my feet and ran after her, ignoring the pain every time my right foot hit the ground.
She wasn’t running very fast. She was wearing cowboy boots and going over rough, uneven soil, and her gait wasn’t that of someone used to running. The only hard part was making up the distance she already had on me. Twenty feet, fifteen feet, ten, five … I reached out and caught her shoulder. She shrieked and stumbled, then fell on her stomach. I dropped to my knees and then got my weight on her, straddling her lower back and keeping her arms pinned. She twisted around but couldn’t dislodge me. My heart was pounding from the chase, and the stab wound in my foot was throbbing in time with my heartbeat again.
I leaned down, my mouth close to her ear.
“Brittany, I know what you did in San Francisco,” I said. “After the cops fingerprint you, everyone’s gonna know. And when you’re on death row, I want you to remember one thing: None of these officers here actually ran you to the ground. That was me. Turn around and take a good look at my face.”
When she did, when she saw my birthmark and knew who I was, Brittany Mercier began to scream.