Follow Her Home (28 page)

We were slipping down Beverly now, cutting the miles back to the Marlowe like so much silk ribbon. I watched Luke drive, looking straight ahead, but the corners of his eyes told me they felt mine.

“It bothered him enough that Greg Miller was a major problem. Blackmail only works when the target has a secret worth keeping. What Greg had was explosive enough to take out his family and his career in the click of a mouse.” I swallowed again. “And I'm worried about Hector. He was collecting dirt—Chaz found it on his computer, and there was plenty of it. He may not have had the gumption to go after the boss directly, but if I'm right, he got a piece of the punishment just the same.”

We took the road in seasick silence. Luke's Adam's apple quivered now and then like a shy student raising a hand to just below the desktop.

He piped up, his voice uncertain: “But where does Diego come in?”

“I don't know. I don't think we have all the info we need. I'm terrified we never will.”

“I don't feel like talking anymore. Can we stop?”

I heard the pleading note in his voice. “Okay.”

We parked in the Marlowe garage and rode the elevator yet once more to the third floor. Luke keyed us in and flipped on the light as we took off our shoes.

Then there was a sound I'd never heard before. It was dry and metallic and decisive.

“Hello, children.” John smiled as he pointed the barrel at Luke.

 

Fifteen

He was sitting with an ankle resting on the opposite knee, loafered foot rotating slow and smug as a rotisserie chicken. His suit was a coffee-nut brown, lightweight but wrinkle-free, newborn. The shirt underneath was beige linen, the necktie rouge textured silk. One hand cuddled a felt fedora on the table, but his hair held the same stiff crest as the other day. It was past four in the morning.

The other hand held a handgun. Marlowe would've identified the make and model, but all I knew about handguns was that they could kill. This one was small, probably five, six, seven inches long. It was jet black from nose to tail, hard and without luster. It took the humor out of his old-time costume.

I was about to comment on our reunion when Luke stepped toward him. “How did you get in?”

He reached into his breast pocket with his unarmed hand and withdrew a set of keys. He tossed it to Luke, underhand. “Like a civilized man.”

His face was calm and, despite a jovial tone of voice, utterly lightless. I couldn't see Luke's face, but the back of his head was expressive enough. “Why are you here?”

“Look, Luke. The girl's mom called your pop. Your pop called me. So I came. See?” He gestured with one hand, wrist turning, explaining, reasoning. The other held the gun steady.

“You can't hurt Song. You can't do it.”

“Son, you have to see it from your father's perspective. He doesn't want to hurt her, and he even told me to stay away, he really did. But he can't very well have her stealing Lori from her bed in the middle of the night, can he? Everyone is very worried.”

“I won't let you.” His voice came out choked and shaking and I saw the wobble in the backs of his knees.

“Careful, junior. I may not have the okay to kill you, but your father will forgive me if I take out a knee.”

“I'll go to the cops.”

“Your father has chosen to take that gamble. The stakes make one a bit hot around the collar if you ask me, but your friend seems to have made things difficult. And besides, what's one more secret among family?”

Luke was shaking all over now, a volcano on the verge. “I'll fucking kill you, don't think I won't.”

I touched the narrow part of my hand to Luke's shoulder in a light karate chop. “I didn't think your dad would let you see me die, but I must have miscalculated.”

His shoulder tensed. “Nothing is going to happen here.”

“Look. If he's going to kill me anyway, there's no sense in you being heroic. There's no one to impress here. Anyway, he has a gun. I'd say that narrows down your options.”

I turned to John. I felt suddenly drunk, like I was experiencing the scene through layers, like Tom Sawyer watching his funeral, all truth and all farce. I knew there was real fear somewhere, but it was on ice, dredged in alcohol or morphine, to be dealt with later. The man with the gun was just a character in a play, and I was standing stage right, remembering my lines. “Well, hi again. What do I do?”

“I'm going to need Luke's phone.”

Luke took his phone out of his pocket and approached the table. As Luke took slow steps across the carpet, John moved the gun just a few degrees to the right. It was only a couple of inches, and his hand moved steadily, with aching, deliberate speed. But even in those few moments, the intention was clear. As Luke moved closer, the gun moved from his face to mine.

At the same time, John's expression shifted. The change was quick but unmistakable, like a last gesture seen through the shrinking screen of closing elevator doors. A tightness came over his features, a tightness and a wild mirth. One corner of his mouth lifted, then the other, and the lip in the middle leaned toward his nose like a flower to the sun.

Luke snatched for the gun, but John was too fast. He snapped to his feet and as Luke reached him he grabbed his wrist and twisted him backward. I had seen that move before, in a women's self-defense seminar somewhere. Now Luke was facing me and his eyes were wide and bright. Then the hard sound of metal on bone, and they went half shut, like the rocker eyes of a porcelain doll. He folded forward, an empty shirt sloughing off its hanger.

“Tsk-tsk.” John shook his head. I watched as he gathered all seventy-four inches of Luke's body in his arm as if Luke were the diminutive Christ in Michelangelo's
Pieta.
He placed him on the couch, on his back with one arm dangling over the edge and bent where the wrist kissed the floor. As he did so, he knelt, and he stayed for a long minute on his knees.

I watched him in profile, staring at Luke lying there unconscious. He was still shaking his head, heavily, like the pendulum of a very large clock. He lifted one hand and moved it toward Luke's face and I felt myself go stiff, but he only brushed the blond hair off his forehead.

He got to his feet and picked up the phone where it lay on the floor. He looked at it with interest before dropping it into a jacket pocket.

When our eyes met, he seemed almost startled to see me. He straightened his tie and the dark glinting green of his eyes went smooth, like the sea unwrinkling at the end of a storm.

“He'll wake up soon enough. Though I suppose you'd know better than I would.”

“We're not taking him to the local chicken joint?”

He picked up his hat and held it to his chest. “He'll stay home. Now, Miss Song, if you would please come with me.”

*   *   *

There was nothing else to do. I followed him into the garage. He'd parked and walked in just like any of the residents.

I pulled a Lucky out of my back pocket and lit it. I breathed it in and tried to taste every strand of flavor. I cherished the harsh orange glow of the embering tip.

Survival had never been such an urgent and difficult project. Marlowe could get out of a situation like this. Marlowe had a gun, the experience to use it, and physical prowess to boot.

I thought about it—the big sleep. It wasn't the first time, but it had more shape and more promise than it ever had before. Rimless, dark, silent, like the spaces between stars, shorter than staples from the ground, longer than planets once you left Earth. Maybe it wasn't so bad. I pictured the scene of Diego's funeral, Jackie sobbing, clutching her womb, hating me, blaming me—and I remembered, too, without context, struggling, drunk, with the buckle of a shoe, when Diego bent down and undid it for me. If there was ever a time to punch out early, it might just be right now.

On the other hand, if I were to choose a last face to see before dying, John's was only preferable to Freddy Krueger's because I preferred his bone structure.

“You're really going to kill me this time, aren't you.”

“That depends, Miss Song. It won't hurt you to do as I say. For instance, don't try to run away from me.”

“Do you see me trying?”

“Wonderful. Now.” He produced a familiar car key.

There was my Volvo, smiling at me, and for a moment I felt true affection for my prodigal machine. “My car.” My lips spilled the words like dribble, chewed, watery, and discolored, dumb.

“Your car.” He nodded and pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his breast pocket, a clean, cold pair of metal jaws. “And when you're done with that cigarette, which you'll note I haven't begrudged you, I'm going to ask you to loan me your wrists.”

“Do they just let anyone buy these fucking things?”

He smiled.

I shimmied a spare Lucky out of the pack and handed it to him, mouth-side forward. “Do you smoke?”

He took it between two fingers. His nails were clipped short and square but the cuticles were bitten and red. “That's friendly of you, Miss Song.”

“What's my angle?” I flipped on the lighter and he took it from me without disturbing the flame.

“Something like that.”

“I'm curious.”

He nodded and let out a spiral of smoke.

“I don't think you have a damn thing against me, not personally. What's in this for you?”

He frowned. There was something genuine in the brownness of this expression, a sudden shadow, even surprise. “I realize you think you're in the right here, but you've been a great source of stress to Bill, which makes it personal. For me.”

“Why? Because he's your boss? Because he lets you run around in your get-ups wreaking havoc with his money?”

“I don't—” He peered at me with curiosity, like one might stare at a “spot the difference” exercise. The affect was exaggerated, with a tilt in the neck and stress in the brow, but it struck me as more pure and less theatrical than everything else about him. He dropped his shoulders. “Bill is my brother.”

I slurped smoke down the wrong tube and coughed. My throat felt thick and slathered with grit, and it spit out with a hacking, cacophonous sound.

“William Cook? Luke's dad?”

He nodded, slowly.

“So Luke is—”

“My nephew, yes.”

“And he knows this?” I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth.

He laughed, short and humorless. “Of course he knows. Why wouldn't he know?”

“Because—” I was about to say,
Because he didn't tell me.
The logic didn't hold.

“I'm surprised he didn't tell you.”

“
You're
surprised?”

“No.” He shook his head, big swoops like a child. His hair didn't move. “No, I suppose I'm not.”

“No one told me. Not Luke, not his dad. You're his brother by blood? How old are you?”

He took a greedy drag at his cigarette and gleeked out the smoke through closed teeth. “Thirty-nine. Forty this year.”

“And Cook is fifty-five? Fifty-six?”

“Fifty-four.”

“So you're closer in age to Luke than you are to your brother.” Luke said John hated him. There was, then, a breed of sibling rivalry. “Same father?”

“Same father. Different mother.”

“Right. Of course. What's the story?”

“Bill is a good person, Miss Song. He didn't know about me until I was thirteen years old. My mother drank herself to death. It was just the two of us, and then it was just the one of me. I found my father. He didn't care—but Bill did.”

Against my will, I felt his words pierce my sympathies. “And then what, he took you in?”

“He wanted to. Erin said no. They were married just a year or two, and she was pregnant.”

It was no wonder he resented the privileged son, born guilty to his father's love. “Where's the happy ending?”

“Bill looked out for me. Took an interest, is the word. I went to college because of Bill. He found me my first apartment. He gave me my first job.”

“I heard about that. I also heard you were fired.”

He tugged at the hem of his jacket. “It wasn't Bill's fault. And it didn't matter. I only work for him now, and that's okay.”

“He called you troubled. A troubled young man. Like you were someone unfortunate. Unfortunate to someone else.”

He sighed and fixed me with a smile that was downright magnanimous, like that of an adult too tired to indulge a child. “Well, that's enough chitchat, Miss Song. If you think you're going to ruffle my feathers and run away, you'll find I'm less stupid than I am troubled. Now are you about done with your cigarette? I'm afraid I rushed through mine.”

He dropped the stub to the concrete and crushed it out with a quiet turn of the heel. I took in the last length of cigarette with the bitter love of a last kiss and followed suit.

He took my right hand in his and held it between us. His palm was warm and dry. He looked straight into my eyes. I saw the green-black eyes, and now they were familiar, a dark-forest version of a pair I knew so well: lush, wet vibrancy crossed with branches and spiderwebs, wide, trembling pupils caught like flies.

I didn't like any of it. I looked away.

Still holding my hand, he arced around me and stood just short of a foot from my back. With the solemnity of a prom date, he looped my wrists in the cuffs. I heard the grind of metal and felt it cool against my skin. I thought I might cry.

He took me by the shoulder and led me to the passenger side of my car. He opened the door. He even buckled my seat belt.

He walked away from my car, and for one stupid second, I thought he had changed his mind, that a witness had come to my rescue. I craned my neck to watch him as he walked to the Dumpster and threw Luke's phone in with the week's trash. I looked away before he could see the hope in my eyes turn to cinders.