Drive Me Crazy (21 page)

“What?”

“Well, Mr. Agnostic, everybody serves somebody. Man, woman, Gold’s Gym ... everyone has a master. Who do you serve?”

I didn’t answer. Wasn’t in the mood for a survey.

She started back walking, went back to moving her sugar like it was so sweet. I reined in my temper, followed her lazy tempo. She was messing with my head, trying to control the pace of the meeting. Good salespeople were taught to manipulate the customer.

Halfway down the long corridor she slowed down, pushed open a brown apartment door. Classical music and the scent of cloves met us. The music was playing low. I followed her into the unknown, the weight in the small of my back told me we could handle it. Lamps in the front room were on low. Everything beyond the bedroom door was a shadow. Nobody was in the small kitchen or living room, didn’t hear anybody talking. She locked the door behind me.

She asked, “Something to drink?”

I licked my lips. “Any JD?”

“Don’t think there’s much more than water here.”

She didn’t know what was in the cabinets. That told me that this wasn’t her nest.

“Water’s nasty.” I shook my head. “Fish have sex in it.”

Then I stood next to the barstool at the kitchen counter. Dirty dishes were in the sink. Linoleum floor needed to be visited by a mop, soap, and water. Headshots were on the counter. The face of the woman I’d seen with Arizona at LAX smiled up at me. A stack of movie scripts, magazines with casting calls, all of that stuff was piled up on the kitchen table.

I motioned at the glossy vain images and said, “The pickpocket.”

“My girl got you good.”

“She got lucky.”

“That’s a Pee-Wee Herman excuse.”

Arizona vanished for a moment, went into the bedroom. My eyes checked out the rest of the room. Stacks of books were on the glass coffee table. Freeman’s
Dawning of Ignorance
was on top, a red bookmark halfway through. Freeman’s other books were on that table too. Heard her in the bedroom opening drawers in the dark. Then another. Searching for something. She came back holding a plastic container, a rectangular Tupperware thing for picnic sandwiches.

Inside were at least twenty wallets.

Arizona said, “Freeman drew a nice crowd. My girl had a good day today.”

“LAX?”

“Yup. She can bump and lift with two fingers.”

I didn’t touch her pirate’s treasure. Didn’t want my fingerprints on the plastic or the merchandise. I asked, “What you do with the credit cards and IDs?”

“Fenced ‘em as soon as we left the airport.”

“That’s why you had to jet away from LAX.”

“Couldn’t let them go cold.”

A folded play announcement slept on the counter. The Graduate. She saw me staring at it, then moved it out of the way, opened a drawer filled with junk, dropped it inside.

I deepened my tone. “Let’s get to the business.”

My tone was rough. Arizona didn’t flinch. I didn’t move.

She gave me a pleasant expression. “I like that about you. So direct.”

She reached into her black purse and pulled out a red box of cigarettes. She lit one up. I expected a stench, but it had a nice aroma. Took me a moment to make out the scent of cloves. Underneath her cool façade, she was pissed off that I hadn’t given in as fast as she wanted me to.

She did the gamming, told me she wanted to get the briefcase Freeman had shackled to his wrist. Steal it. Hold it for ransom. I listened. No more than two minutes went by.

I said, “I mean, if it’s a damn book and ... what, how do you ransom ... ?”

Before she could answer I stood up. I walked to Arizona, moved with intention.

I whispered, “Take your clothes off.”

She looked in my non-blinking eyes, stared deep, and smiled.

She took off her blouse. My eyes went over her honey brown skin, took in her breasts. She dropped her skirt. She wore no panties. Stood in front of me unashamed and bare.

I said, “Turn around.”

She raised her arms over her head, stood on her tiptoes and did a slow three-sixty. A colorful scorpion was on her back, a henna, not a real tattoo. She had soft and sturdy legs, straight with a little bow in them, strong calves, not much in the hips department, a modest ass that would spring to life when she wore heels. Her body was tanned like she’d just got back from someplace tropical. Her breasts were firm, the left one pierced, a small golden hoop on the nipple, both nipples erect. She didn’t have any body hair, not even over her pussy. That part of her was as bald as my head. Decent proportionality. Everything about her went together like Dolce & Gabbana.

She whispered, “I’m not wired. Relax. No entrapment. I’m legit.”

I motioned toward the darkness resting in the other room. “What’s back there?”

“Bedroom.”

I crept toward the bedroom door, hit the light switch.

The bed was made up, but a ton of clothes were on the covers. Everything was new and still in plastic. The bathroom was on the other side of the bedroom. I went to the bathroom, pushed the door open, looked inside. The room was humid, mirror damp in the corners. Scented soaps and potpourri were in a basket. Wigs were on a stand. One was in dreadlocks, another a pageboy cut, one long and brunette, one a short red mane with blond highlights. A wicker bowl filled with makeup and lipsticks was on the counter. Tools of the thieving trade.

She called out, “Make sure you look under the bed.”

“After I check the shower.”

I went back to the bedroom, then stopped by the bed and read a few of the labels. Versace. Yves St. Laurent. Armani. Prada. Herrera. Narciso Rodriguez. Zac Posen.

The merchandise was hot enough to burn down half the valley. She was a legit thief.

I went back into the front room, my expression hard. Nothing I’d seen had distracted me.

Arizona was still naked.

She asked, “Satisfied? Or do you need to do a cavity search?”

“Looks like some things fell off a truck.”

“Trucks are sooo throwback. It’s all about cyberspace. It’s a new day, all about fake IDs and credit cards, all about hijacking the Internet from the comfort of your own home.”

She eased her skirt over her frame, then put her blouse back on. She left buttons undone, more cleavage this time. I guess she figured I’d seen all she had to offer, so it was no big deal.

She asked, “Now where was I before your paranoia kicked in?”

“Having a little book club meeting.”

“We hold it hostage.”

“It’s a book, not the Lindbergh baby.”

“The laptop it’s on is priceless. To him if nobody else. What’s on it is worth a cool million. No different than stealing a company’s master documents. We get his intellectual property, he’ll freak out.”

We moved back into silence, her seven-figure words the bench we were resting on. If she was talking about diamonds or government secrets I would know where she was coming from. It was a stupid book. I didn’t understand where she was going with this, so I listened.

I asked, “You fence it ... what?”

“We steal it, then go right back to him with a ransom demand.”

“I’m not feeling this.”

“What’s the problem? Too simple or too complicated?”

“It’s not like doing a bump and lift to get credit cards.”

She drew her smoke, the popping and crackling sounding like music. Arizona frowned and blew the fumes away, then studied me. Her sweet-smelling smoke clouded the room.

Arizona nodded like she had figured something out. She asked, “Gambling debt?”

“Why you ask that?”

“Last night your head wasn’t busted. And yesterday it didn’t seem like you could be persuaded to help me out with this job.”

My head wound sang a brief song of pain. I studied her the way she studied me.

She said, “And you don’t have the same disposition you had at Back Biters last night.”

“Likewise. Same goes for that cute little message you left on my machine.”

“Oh, I’m the same.” She winked. “You’re tense.”

“I’m tired. I’m the one with the day job.”

“Last night you were easygoing.”

“JD gets me in that frame of mind.”

“Horny and easygoing, I might add.”

“Your point?”

“You just saw me naked. No reaction. I won’t take it personal.”

She headed toward the kitchen. Her oversized slippers flip-flopped against her feet. She went to the sink and ran water over the tip of her smoke, then tossed it in the trash.

She asked, “That fresh gash in your head, something to do with Hummer Girl?”

“What, you trying to get the Sherlock Holmes award?”

“Hummer Girl hopped out of her ride like she was a vigilante, marched up on you and frowned at me like she wanted to stab me in the throat with a steak knife.”

“Told you the bitch was looking for her husband.”

“Nigga, please.” Arizona didn’t back down. “My first guess was her husband found you and beat your ass, but you don’t have the kind of damage from a hand-to-hand. Spin the roulette wheel. I’m dropping my stack of chips on black and betting it all on the bitch in the Hummer.”

The edges of my lips moved up again, then moved right back down, then back up, riding my irritation like a roller coaster, trying to settle on a mood. They stopped moving midway.

She asked, “Am I wrong?”

My expression remained cold and impenetrable.

She gave me a half smile, thickened her tone, asked, “So, do we do business together?”

“If I’m compensated to my satisfaction, we might be able to do something.”

“Because you have a debt to pay.”

I answered with a stiff look that told her to mind her own business.

She talked on, “What if you’re not, as you say, compensated to your satisfaction?”

“I walk. You go your way, I go mine.”

“And we’re free to run this without your interference?”

“If it goes down on my watch I want a cut.”

“Blackmail.”

I shook my head. “Business.”

“Sure you want to go out like that?”

“That a threat?”

Her eye contact was strong. “Like you said, business.”

“If you want this ship to sail, tell me who threw my name in the hat.”

She shook her head in a gentle way, that long hair doing a soft dance. “Can’t.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just call it a confidentiality agreement. I’ll protect my contact the same way I’ll protect you, the same way I protect all of my employees. If something goes wrong they can’t drag you down. And you can’t drag them down. Don’t take it personal. Business.”

She was reading me; the blueprints to my troubles were etched on the surface of my eyes.

Arizona asked, “How deep of trouble are you in? How much you owe?”

I took a pen out of my pocket, the same pen I had borrowed from Wolf’s office this morning. Heard his voice telling me to put the pen back. He had been specific, said Pilot pen.

I hesitated and read the brand. It was Pilot.

That stopped me, had me sitting like a statue for a moment.

There was a snitch in the office. Somebody was watching my every move. Even knew when I borrowed a pen from Wolf’s desk, down to the brand.

I pulled out a business card and wrote 50 on the back of it, then handed that number to Arizona. She read and whistled, leaned back and served me that ambiguous smile again.

She blew air. “You’d best keep playing the lottery.”

“Tell me something, stop yanking my chain and talk to me.”

She smiled, waited a good ten seconds before she spoke again. “My idea was somewhere between fifty and seventy-five for the job, a reasonable amount that could get us a quick turnaround, but even that depends on what information I can get about his banking accounts.”

“Banking accounts. You can get that information?”

She didn’t answer, just kept talking. “It’s good to know how much cash the mark has access to, how liquid he is, that way we have the upper hand and the mark can’t bullshit us.”

I said, “If he’s a money-smart man, he won’t have that much cash on hand.”

“True. If he’s money smart. Most people aren’t.”

“What would my cut be?”

She told me, “I get fifty percent.”

“Fifty?”

“My operation. The lion’s share is mine.”

“I see.”

“The rest is an even split.”

“How many people?”

“When it’s time to disclose that ...”

“I see. Back to the banking information.”

She steepled her hands, sat back. “If I can get that information, and his accounts reflect that kind of a balance, we’ll be in a better position when it’s time for negotiations.”

I said, “That’s a lot of dead presidents to ask for and not expect him to call in the police.”

“That’s a lot of cash to ask for without the possibility of hurting somebody.” “

I nodded my understanding. “That’s why you want me on your team.”

“Part of the reason. But we need an inside man, in case something goes wrong, in case plans change. Eyes and ears. But with those muscles and fists you have, you look like you could put a serious hurting on somebody. Sometimes that kind of labor is a requirement. Most of the time it’s not, but there are too many variables involved, too many ways shit can go wrong.”

“Better to hurt than get hurt.”

“And I thought you weren’t a poet.”

She lit up another cigarette. Took two puffs and did the same routine, ran water over the tip and tossed it in the trash. She saw me watching, looked at me like she was a mind reader.

She said, “Hate the smoke. The smell brings back memories.”

“Good or bad?”

“The same kind that were in your eyes when you were sipping your drink last night.”

“You’re a regular Miss Cleo.”