Incriminated (18 page)

John-Michael spoke quietly. “Now what?”

None of them could reply. A paralytic dread had seized them. They stared helplessly at the would-be assassin. Even Maya, who'd been so cool up until that moment, so
together
. Over the next few minutes, however, John-Michael saw all that resolve evaporating.

The man was alive. He would talk.

Maya groaned, “The gun . . .”

Then they all saw it. The fingers of his right hand were tightening around the handle of the revolver. Collectively, they recoiled as slowly the man began to sit up. He led with his gun arm, which he lifted high enough to be a threat. The rest of him followed in a disjointed, strenuous pattern of movement, like a puppet being slowly dragged upward by invisible strings. When finally he was sitting upright, one shoulder leaning against the red sofa, the man seemed to notice his own blood and cursed roundly, adding, “Which
one of you bastards did this to me?”

No one moved.

He raised the gun, this time pointing unsteadily at John-Michael. “I said which one?”

No one spoke.

The hit man swore again, and stared each one of them in the eye. The gun stayed where it was, aiming right at John-Michael's chest. Finally, his eyes settled on Paolo. John-Michael saw Paolo's Adam's apple bob up and down, but otherwise his friend gave no indication of fear.

“You with the tattoo. You're gonna tie up your friends. You make one false move and your boy here takes a bullet to the heart.”

The man reached into his leather jacket with his free hand and after a few seconds of fidgeting removed a roll of silver-gray duct tape. He rolled it across to Paolo. “Now.”

Paolo picked up the duct tape like it was radioactive waste. With one final, hesitant look at Maya, he began to tape her wrists together.

“Do everyone's hands first,” the man said. His voice sounded faint, exhausted. “But the other boy, you do his legs first. Then he does . . . does your hands,” he managed to say with effort. “And then . . . then you do his . . .”

The voice trailed off, but still the gun aimed at John-Michael. A sweat broke out all over John-Michael's upper body.

Moving slowly, practically robotic, Paolo moved to Lucy and began to tape her wrists.

The man wiped his free hand across the back of his head. When it came away smeared thickly in his own blood, he gasped. He sounded less angry than resigned. “You stupid children. You have no idea what you've done.”

“It was self-defense,” Lucy said. And then repeated it over and over, like a mantra.

“Yeah?” the man snarled back. “Maybe you should've killed me when you had the chance.”

“Let us call nine-one-one,” John-Michael said urgently. “You're bleeding a lot. You . . . your head looks pretty bad. I think you need an ambulance.”

The man sniffed. “Not yet. We got unfinished business.”

“Look, we know you didn't intend to kill anyone,” John-Michael continued. “You fired a blank.”

“I can assure you, son, there'll be no more blanks fired today.”

But John-Michael didn't stop. “So why
start
with a blank?” There had to be a reason that he'd begun by trying to scare Lucy. If he could get the guy back into that mind-set, maybe they'd get out of this intact. “Let me call nine-one-one?”

“You touch a phone and I'll kill you,” the man said, almost casually. He waved the gun, urging Paolo on. “Hurry or my focus might slip. I might let a bullet go, by mistake.”

Maya and Lucy were tied up now, wrists and ankles taped together. They were still upright, and looked utterly lost. Finally, everyone was tied up except John-Michael,
whose hands were still free. He could barely stand to look any of his friends in the eye.

Why did the guy want them tied up? Obviously it made sense not to let them outnumber him. If he started firing now, he might get a round or two off before they overwhelmed him. But that wasn't likely to happen, John-Michael guessed. Not one of them had the guts to tackle an armed man.

Tying them up would put them entirely at his mercy. Would he kill them, then? Pick them off carefully, clinically, with the five remaining bullets? The more John-Michael thought about it, the harder he felt his heart pounding, until he was certain that the man would hear it, too.

The man's free hand was once again jostling inside his jacket. After three attempts, he managed to extract a small, black, plastic-cased cell phone.

His motor skills are deteriorating
, John-Michael noted. “You gonna call nine-one-one?” he asked.

“Everyone, siddown,” the man said, ignoring John-Michael's suggestion. This time, his speech was noticeably slurred. He peered at John-Michael, as though staring at him through dark glass. “You. Get over here and kneel down beside me.”

John-Michael hesitated. Mercy was their only hope now. “Excuse me, sir, but I think you need a doctor
real
bad.”

This time, the hit man exploded. “Shut your mouth and get down on your knees, punk!”

But as John-Michael began, slowly, to fall to his knees,
a sharp cry came from the hit man, followed by a faint groan. Then he clutched both fists to his eyes. Over the next few seconds he began to jerk violently, until his entire body was in spasms.

The housemates looked on, aghast.

“He's having some kind of seizure!” John-Michael gasped.

The air cracked. It took a second before John-Michael realized that the gun had been fired. It was still in the hit man's right hand.

“I'm okay!” Maya called out breathlessly.

“Yeah, me too,” said Paolo. “And me,” Lucy said.

John-Michael watched in appalled fascination as the man continued to flip and twist like a freshly landed fish.

“What should we do . . . ?” Maya breathed.

An idea was crystallizing in John-Michael's mind, taking form within a cage of icy, implacable logic. The idea became bright and terrible in his mind; irresistible. The answer to so many problems had been within reach—the hit man himself had said it. Who knew where the next bullet would go?

John-Michael moved smoothly. In one swift motion he'd rotated his taped ankles behind him, picked up a large cushion from the back of the red couch, and was on his knees next to the injured man.

He looked at Paolo, who sat helplessly taped up on the floor next to the green futon. Their eyes met with an intensity that made John-Michael shiver. Paolo's lips moved in
response to John-Michael's unspoken question. His reply was barely audible.

“Yes.”

John-Michael closed a part of himself away as he leaned over the man on the floor, reaching for the flailing hand in which the gun was clenched. He held the cushion firmly over the man's face, jaw clenched tight as he struggled to hold the man down, aware of the man's chin beneath his own shoulder. It wasn't easy; the man's movements were powerful, violent. He shut off his feelings as the man continued fiercely to jerk beneath him. He ignored the objections from Lucy. Maya and Paolo, he noted, made no sound at all. They simply watched as John-Michael held the man beneath him, slowly extinguishing his life force.

It took less time than John-Michael remembered. A sure sign that the hit man had already been on his way out. John-Michael had merely nudged him along.

The silence that followed was lengthy. Heavy and profound. John-Michael released his grip and rocked back on his heels. He glanced first at Paolo, then Maya. They both sat motionless, their eyes full of him. He couldn't look at the dead man; those lifeless eyes would have chilled him to the bones. But he made himself look at Lucy. She was gasping for air, trying to speak words that wouldn't leave her throat. Finally, a strangled cry escaped her and they all realized that Lucy was hyperventilating.

With great difficulty, she choked out, “What . . . what . . . have you
done
?”

Paolo's skin felt hypersensitive. Looking down, he noticed that all the hairs on his arms were standing up. He felt every whisper of air that moved across them.

We killed him.

Next to him on the floor, Lucy was beginning to squirm, trying to get her fingers to the tape that bound her ankles.

“Let me, it's faster,” John-Michael said without emotion as he fiddled with the tape around his own ankles. Paolo watched John-Michael move silently from Lucy to Maya and finally to him, laboriously removing the tape from their wrists so that they could pull off the ankle tape themselves.

Lucy pushed away until she was sprawled on the living room rug, just a few feet from the dead body. The temporary effects of shock that had held her for the last few minutes seemed to be fading. Defiance had returned to her eyes.

“You've ended us
all
,” she stated, loud enough for
John-Michael to hear that she included him in the accusation. As if to be certain that he'd understood, she turned to him with a penetrating glare.

John-Michael reacted with a calmness that Paolo couldn't help but admire. “He was dying,” John-Michael said. “A seizure like that after a severe blow to the head—you don't go to the emergency room, you die.”

“Lucy,” Paolo said reasonably, “who knows where his next bullet would have gone? John-Michael saved us.”

“Good,” Maya said. She sounded relieved. “That's what we'll tell the cops—the truth. They'll call it Stand Your Ground and you'll both go free.”

“Actually, in California we have ‘castle doctrine,'” Lucy murmured. “Which I guess is the same thing, so long as the attack is in your home.”

“I'm
in
my goddamn home!” Maya hissed.

Paolo began to think about that, began to think about the questions that would be asked. How far back would they go? A good prosecutor would dig up everything they could on him. The con. The blackmail. A good investigation might even put him in the car when Meredith died. Maya didn't realize how bad the truth actually was.

“But I hit him,” he said, unsure. “When he'd only fired a blank.”

“Yes, but you didn't know it was a blank,” Maya said. “The other cartridges have real bullets.”

“Still . . . I'm not sure we should take this to the cops,” began John-Michael.

Paolo, Lucy, and Maya turned to him. Paolo swallowed, his tongue like sandpaper. Yes. Don't tell the cops. That would save him a lot of difficult questions.

“They won't even know he finally died of suffocation,” Lucy said. “It'd just be the seizure.”

John-Michael barked with hollow laughter. “We have to work off the assumption that they will know. Forensics can tell when someone's been asphyxiated.”

“You sure know a lot about this kind of stuff,” Lucy observed. “Is this what you did to your father?” Her words practically froze in the air. Paolo watched John-Michael. He visibly reeled for a second, as if absorbing the impact of a shock wave, but said nothing.

“Why is this happening to us?” Paolo asked. It seemed almost redundant, given the heights of terror they'd recently scaled, to be asking such a logical question. But now that he thought about it, he actually didn't know the answer.

“My guess is, he was trying to scare Lucy,” Maya said tersely. “But like he said, the other bullets are real. The question is who would try to threaten her. I'd say it's Dana Alexander.”

In a small voice, Lucy said, “You really think Dana Alexander might try to have me killed?”

Maya nodded. She bit her lip. “I do.”

“This Alexander woman must be a lot worse than I thought,” Paolo muttered.

“Lucy went to the cops today to schedule an interview to tell them that she has testimony that could open up an
eight-year-old murder case. Dana Alexander might wind up as the prime suspect. If she were trying to avoid death row, I can see it going as far as this,” Maya concluded.

“You think the cops told her?” Lucy said anxiously.

“More likely Ariana told Dana the game was up when Lucy kicked her out,” Maya said with surprising confidence. “I bet it takes time to organize a hit. More than a few hours, at least.”

“Whatever we decide,” John-Michael said thoughtfully, “we need to do it now.”

Maya shrugged. “Call the cops.”

“I'm glad you're so confident that I'd get off with no charges,” John-Michael said. “But I'm not.”

A tense silence followed. In John-Michael's eyes, Paolo recognized a similar fear to his own.

The police meant questions. Questions would open up the past. John-Michael was already on perilously thin ice with the cops, as far as his father's death went. Maybe he'd get away with dealing with a dangerous hit man, but would it make them reconsider what had happened to his father?

“It's a good point,” Paolo acknowledged. “You never know how things will go in a court of law.”

“Says the wannabe lawyer,” Lucy said.

“A good lawyer can win any argument,” Paolo said. “But winning this one might cost some of us.”

“A good prosecutor,” John-Michael pointed out, “could say that
we
fired the second bullet, to make it look like the guy was a threat.”

Paolo and Maya absorbed this quietly, nodding.

“What if we got rid of the body?” John-Michael suggested. “I'm guessing no one is going to report him missing.”

“That's just great,” Lucy said, her voice thick with sarcasm. “I guess now we're gonna break out the hacksaws and the garbage liners and turn into a bunch of butchers, is that your plan? Or were you thinking of hiring a boat and dumping his ass in the ocean? Without anyone noticing you strolling up to the pier with a big ol' dead body under your arm?”

Paolo licked his dry lips and shook his head. “Neither of those ideas sounds good.”

“You got something better?” Lucy flared up, her eyes dark with anger.

John-Michael said, “The best thing for all of us would be if this body and everything that happened here tonight just went away.”

“Nothing like this ever
just goes away
,” Lucy snarled, her tone suddenly vicious. “If there's one person in this room who should know
that
particular piece of
truth
, it's me.”

For a moment, they all paused. Their eyes met above the man's body . . . No one, it seemed, was willing to take the lead.

“I may have an idea,” Paolo began. Gooseflesh broke out all over his body as he shivered under the sudden, focused attention of his three friends. He stepped forward. Ignoring the vacant terror of the corpse's wide-open eyes,
Paolo examined the dent on the side of his head. Yes. So familiar.

Just like Meredith's in Malibu Canyon.

Paolo stretched a hand across the man's still-warm chest and into the right-hand pocket of his jacket. His fingers closed around a remote key for an automobile. He stood and addressed all three housemates.

“This head injury. What if it came from a car?”

“A car,” Lucy said flatly.

“People get hit by cars, they get this kind of injury. They die by the roadside. It happ . . .” Paolo paused, correcting himself. “It
must
happen.”

John-Michael's expression shifted slightly, probably not enough for anyone else to notice, but when Paolo finally allowed himself to glance at his friend, he saw that John-Michael suddenly seemed to let go of some of his tension.

John-Michael understands.

“Sure it does,” John-Michael agreed slowly. “Some SUV hits you while you're taking a whiz beside your vehicle on a country road, suddenly you've got a major dent in your head.”

Lucy seemed incredulous. “What kind of imbecile stands where a car can hit them?”

“I think JM means, who's to say for sure? A man goes out somewhere like, say, Malibu Canyon.” Here Paolo threw another hard glance at John-Michael, who nodded in affirmation. “Gets himself killed by a hit-and-run driver
out there with no witnesses. Body rolls down a ravine, maybe? Coyotes and buzzards eat most of the skin off the face before any cop gets a chance to photograph it.”

“Malibu Canyon,” Lucy repeated. “That's your plan?”

Paolo unfurled the palm of his right hand to show the key he'd taken from the shooter's leather jacket. “His car key. Car's gotta be outside, close by. We drive the shooter up there in his own car. We lay out his body, as though he'd been hit by some truck coming along out of the blue and thrown clean off the side of the road. We leave the car there, key still in the ignition. We drive away.”

A long silence followed. Maya eventually spoke. “That's not a bad plan.”

“Thank you,” Paolo said, relieved. He could feel the creeping reminders of all possible consequences of what had already happened tonight. He wasn't willing to face any of it. Nor should he have to. Just because some murderer wanted Lucy out of the way, just because Paolo had stepped in to help, why did that mean his private life would now be fair game? Why would stupid incidents that had not been Paolo's fault in the first place—Darius blackmailing him into hustling Jimmy out of a Corvette, Meredith threatening him into driving to her country house, the hit-and-run driver killing Meredith on the way to Malibu Creek—why should these things impact him now?

It was like Paolo had stepped into the quicksand again. Struggling wouldn't help. He'd understood pretty quickly that he couldn't just rely on luck and good fortune to twist
him out of there. Hesitation and struggling had only pulled him deeper into the mire. No, to get out of that quicksand, he'd had to get down and dirty. He'd gotten onto his belly to spread his weight over the mud and sand. He'd gotten his entire body coated with all that muck and grime, even his face.

That's how you got out of a situation like this. You slithered and crawled like a beast until you finally reached dry land.