Mortal Faults (16 page)

She didn't like his inquiring stare. It was hard to know what secrets he might draw out of her. He knew her so much better than Tess did.

She broke eye contact, moving quickly to the door. “Thanks, Vic. I owe you.”

He showed her an unreadable smile. “I'll put it on your tab.”

24

Reynolds had spent the night in his home office, a small, private retreat on the ground floor of his house. Nora knew better than to disturb him there. He’d microwaved a frozen fettuccini dinner and forced himself to eat it, the meal washed down with more than one glass of Scotch. At ten p.m. and again at eleven, he turned on the local news to see the story of the home invasion in San Fernando. He learned nothing from the accounts except that the reporters and a few onlookers had remained outside the house late into the night. He knew that Shanker’s men could do nothing until the media left.

By midnight he had to assume that the goddamned reporters were finally gone. They wouldn’t linger after doing their live stand-ups for the late local news. When the TV vans left, the neighborhood curiosity seekers would leave, too. And Bethany—Andrea—would be alone.

He had no doubt she would stay in the house. She would not trust the police enough to accept their protection. And if she was as paranoid and hostile as Abby Sinclair said, she wouldn’t have any friends she could go to.

She ought to be easy prey.

He waited, nursing another Scotch. Shanker’s boys would get it done this time. Hell, they might have done the job already. Andrea could be dead, even now. Or dying, her blood draining onto the floor as she lay helpless. He hoped she knew who was responsible. He wanted her to know who killed her.

His cell phone rang. He snatched it off his desk. “Yeah.”

“It’s me.” Shanker’s voice.

“You get it done?” Reynolds licked his lips and realized the old expression was true—he
could
almost taste it.

But Shanker took a moment too long to answer. “No,” he said finally. “We didn’t.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“She’s being watched.”

“What?”

“I went up there to scout the area. Figured I would do the job myself. No more delegating. I hung out in a park across from her house. Nobody noticed me. I was wearing grungy clothes, looked like a homeless guy. I waited till after the TV assholes left.”

“And?”

“A little later I saw somebody go into the house next door to the target’s residence. It’s a house that’s supposed to be unoccupied. Abandoned. Windows boarded up. But people are in there. And there’s another thing. A van.”

“What kind of van?”

“Cargo type, no rear windows. Got the name of a plumbing company on it. Parked down the street. It’s been there all night.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“I got close enough to see some light from the front compartment. There’s people inside the van. It’s a stakeout, Jack.”

“Who? Cops, feds?”

“I don’t know. Cops, I assume. Home invasion’s not a federal crime. Undercover cops are probably waiting to see if anybody comes back for a return visit.”

Reynolds gripped the phone too tightly. “Fuck it. Send them in anyway.”

“I can’t do that. The cops—”

“Get some backup. Three, four of your guys. Go in with shotguns. Kill the fucking cops. Blow them the fuck away. With enough firepower and the element of surprise, you can do it.”

There was another long silence. “I don’t think that’s too realistic, Jack.”

“Realistic? You don’t think it’s fucking
realistic
? How about your ass in a concrete drum? Is that
realistic
? How about what happened to Joe Ferris?”

“I’m just trying to look at the situation as it stands. I’m already on my way back to Santa Ana. I gave it my best shot, but for tonight, it’s a no-go.”

“Fuck that bullshit. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Jack, what can I tell you?”

“You can tell me you got results. That’s what the fuck I hired you for. I even gave you a second chance to make good. That’s not something I would offer to just anybody. Now you’re jerking me off and making excuses—”

“It’s not excuses. She’s under surveillance. She’s a hardened target. I can’t touch her.”

“God damn it, you listen to me. I want that woman dead. Now. Tonight. I don’t care what it takes, I want you to make it happen. You hear me, you dumb dogshit cocksucker? You
hear
me?”

“I hear you, Jack. But I can’t help you. Maybe in a day or two, if the heat’s off ...”

“I ought to cut your fucking balls off. Except you don’t have any. No cojones, Ron. Even a damn lettuce picker has more guts than you.”

“Jack, we can work something out.”

“You’re a dead man,” Reynolds said, ending the call. “Fucking dead,” he added to the empty room.

He threw the phone away. It clattered in a corner. He took a step in one direction, then another, unable to select any course of action, even where he wanted to walk. Then he turned and moved behind his desk, threw a row of books off the shelf onto the floor, and exposed a wall safe. He dialed the combination, opened the safe. Inside, among other valuables and secrets, there was a handgun. He pulled it out. Fully loaded. Spare clips in the safe.

He could do the job himself. Take the gun, drive to San Fernando right now, sneak unseen into Andrea’s yard, get into her house. Shoot her dead. But the shot would draw the undercover cops. And he had no silencer. All right, so he would kill her some other way. Smother her, strangle her, drown her in the fucking toilet. A silent kill, then an escape into the shadows—

Bullshit.

He wasn’t going to do any goddamn thing like that. He didn’t even know how to do it. It wasn’t part of his—how would Stenzel say it?—his
skills set
. Not one of his
core competencies
.

“Fuck,” he snarled, tossing the gun back inside the safe and slamming the door. He left the books in disorder on the floor. He poured himself another Scotch from the minibar and downed it fast, hoping the burn of alcohol would calm him, but if anything, it made him hotter than before. The situation was insane. He knew her name and address. He ought to be able to stamp her out as casually as he would tread on a cigarette butt. Instead he couldn’t get to her. She was closed off from him, protected by an unbreachable barrier. She might as well be in hiding on another continent. Yet she was so close—

He punched the oak-paneled wall. Pain flashed through his hand. He thought he might have broken it, but no, he could flex his fingers. The raw pulse of pain in his knuckles felt good somehow. Better than the Scotch had tasted. He didn’t need Scotch. He needed pain.

Not his own pain, though. His own pain was never the answer.

He found his car keys and left through a side door, taking his Mustang coupe. He drove fast on the surface streets and reached Rebecca’s condo in Costa Mesa. It was past one o’clock by now, and she was asleep, of course. At the front gate he buzzed her unit until she answered.

“Me,” he said. “Open up.”

She did, but only after she hesitated. He made a mental note of that. She would pay for hesitating.

She met him at her door. He pushed her inside and shut the door behind him.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, seeing his face, and from her expression he knew he must look like a wild man.

He didn’t answer. He pushed her down, and she fell on the floor in a confusion of long limbs and the tissuey folds of her nightgown.

“You bitches,” he said.

She stared up, uncomprehending.

“Dumb fucking bitches, playing your games.” He thought of Andrea. And Abby Sinclair, who’d walked out on him.

“Jack?” Rebecca whispered.

He struck her in the face. Her head snapped sideways and she groaned and there was blood on her mouth, and it was all good.

25

Abby left the station house and caught the Hollywood Freeway, speeding south into Orange County. The day’s traffic had finally cleared, and the Mazda could go all out. Putting the pedal to the floor relieved some of her tension, but not much.

Along the way, she stopped first at a large discount drugstore, then spent ten minutes in the bathroom of a fast food joint. When she emerged, her hair had been moussed and slipped back, her pageboy ’do transformed into a tight skullcap. Tacky oversized earrings, maroon lipstick, and glue-on fingernail extensions completed her makeover.

She didn’t think the bad guys at Andrea’s house could have seen her. If they had, it couldn’t have been more than a glimpse. She looked sufficiently different to pass unrecognized now.

One thing was for sure. She could change her appearance a lot more easily than the man with the scorpion tattoo could change his.

At eleven thirty she arrived in Santa Ana and cruised down South Grande Avenue until she found Fast Eddie’s.

Wyatt’s info had been correct. The Scorpions did hang out here, or at least some biker club did. Choppers, all of them American-made and none boasting engines smaller than 900 cc’s, were parked out back in the deadpan glare of a mercury-vapor streetlight. The bikes were unguarded, their owners apparently known in the community—known and feared.

Abby didn’t leave her car in the lot. She didn’t want anyone seeing the Mazda and remembering it from Andrea’s neighborhood. Instead she motored down another block and found a space at the curb, then walked briskly to the bar, her purse in hand with the gun inside.

Fast Eddie’s was a clamorous hellhole. Some kind of noxious hip-hop was banging out of the cheap sound system. A woman who was high on more than life gyrated on a pool table while some guys yelled catcalls, and others shouted at her to get off the table so they could play pool.

Those guys weren’t Scorpions, though. The Scorpions were seated together in a corner of the bar, ignoring the bedlam.

She knew them at once, not from the tattoos, which she couldn’t make out at a distance, but from the air of masculine camaraderie that defined any wolf pack.

There were two dozen of them occupying a nest of corner tables. They wore their colors, sleeveless leather jackets with scorpion insignias on the back. A few female hangers-on, ranging in age from jailbait to over-the-hill, petted and fondled and looked bored. The men were loud and drunkenly obnoxious, their blurry stares daring any patron to start something. It was a safe bet that every one of them was packing a gun.

Although Santa Ana was largely Hispanic, the Scorpions were all Anglos. Most gangs formed along racial lines. Probably this one had originated as a way of defending a slice of this miserable turf from the encroachment of immigrants.

Abby went up to the bar and got the attention of the slow-moving, heavy-lidded bartender. He was wiping a glass with a hand towel that looked dirtier than the dishware. On the wall behind him was a sign: PARKING FOR HARLEYS ONLY—ALL OTHERS WILL BE SHOT.

Fast Eddie’s, it would appear, was not aiming to reproduce the social atmosphere of the Algonquin Roundtable.

“What?” the bartender said. His lower lip was set in a permanent curl.

“Vodka rocks.”

He grunted and poured. She slapped a bill on the counter and told him to keep the change, advice he accepted without gratitude.

Abby wasn’t a believer in drinking on duty, but if she’d ordered anything nonalcoholic, she might have called attention to herself. She sipped the drink. The cheap vodka burned with a sour aftertaste.

Her barstool afforded a good view of the Scorpions’ conclave in the mirror behind the bar. She watched the rowdy crew, her gaze moving from one man to the next, dismissing anyone without a tattoo on his neck.

She spotted him at the second of the three tables. She hadn’t expected to feel anything when she saw him again, and her reaction surprised her. She felt a sudden jolt like a fist in the stomach. Her eyes watered. She brushed them dry with the back of her hand.

For just a moment she was trapped in the bedroom again, taking fire from front and back, with no way out and only five bullets in her gun.

She shook off the memory. She took another sip of vodka, which wasn’t tasting quite so bad now, and studied the man who’d tried to kill her.

He was in his mid-twenties, muscular and hard-eyed, but his face was softer than it should have been, almost feminine in its contours. He reminded her a little of Leon Trotman, who had stalked the schoolteacher in Reseda until Abby put him back in jail.

She had nearly killed Leon. And she hadn’t had anything personal against him.

She watched him listlessly downing a stein. He was flanked by two sidekicks. One of them looked sleepy, and the other one looked restless. His two partners in crime, she guessed.

The man she recognized was paying little attention to his pals. His eyes were downcast and worried. No doubt he was concerned about his future. He’d failed in his assignment. Abby didn’t know the Scorpions’ penalty for failure, but she doubted it was anything to look forward to.

The rest of the gang weren’t shunning him, though. Either they were exceptionally loyal or they didn’t know he’d screwed the pooch. The best guess was they didn’t know about the assignment at all. The whole thing had probably been kept on the q.t.

Abby had spent much of the ride from L.A. reconstructing how the hit was arranged. Reynolds grew up in Santa Ana and had been the D.A. there. At some point, either in his youth or on the job, he came into contact with the Scorpions. Probably he did them some favors as a D.A. In exchange, they would do his dirty work. Every successful leader needed operatives at the grassroots level, and not all the operatives were the fresh-faced variety she’d seen at the campaign office.

The three men she was looking at weren’t old enough to have been in the gang when Reynolds was a district attorney, let alone when he was a kid. Most likely, his personal allegiance was to one or more of the older members, the ones in leadership positions now. In a sensitive matter it would be smart to limit the people who knew the details. Reynolds probably approached one of the leaders in the bike shop, and that man in turn arranged the hit with a phone call.

She nursed her vodka for long time, brushing off occasional come-ons from other patrons and ignoring the bartender’s perpetual scowl. She was patient. The man with the tattoo was drinking a lot of beer, and as her dad used to say, you don’t buy beer, you only rent it.

Not long past midnight the guy finally left the table to use the can. Abby vacated her barstool and followed him into the alcove where the restrooms were located. She pretended to use the pay phone while keeping an eye on the door to the men’s room.

After only a minute, he emerged. She doubted he’d had time to wash his hands. Drunk, homicidal—and unhygienic. This guy had it all.

She stepped away from the phone, timing the move so he collided with her from behind.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Didn’t see you there.”

“Should watch where you’re going,” he growled.

He started to walk on.

“I wasn’t thinking,” Abby said. “Guess I’ve had too much to drink.”

This piqued his interest. An intoxicated woman was an easy lay, or so all males assumed. He turned to look at her. His glance rested only briefly on her face before checking her more important assets.

“My name’s Sandi,” she said. “Sandi with an i.”

She’d made up the name on the spot. It wasn’t one of her aliases, and she had no fake ID in her purse to back it up, but she didn’t expect to be showing anyone her creds tonight.

He burped. A real charmer. “Dylan,” he said.

“That’s a cool tattoo.”

His hand went to his neck, tracing the insectile shape. “More’n a tattoo,” he said. “It’s a ...” He searched for the word. “You know, insignia.”

“You mean, like a sign?”

“Sign, yeah. It’s a logo. Our trademark.”

“Whose trademark?”

He shook his head, pissed off at her ignorance. “Shit, you live around here, you’ve gotta know.”

“I live in Mission Viejo.” A safe suburban town to the south.

“Mission fucking Viejo?” He hawked up a gob and spat in the general direction of a potted plant. “What the fuck you doing here?”

She showed him a provocative smile. “Looking for adventure.”

He considered this, his narrowed eyes coldly thoughtful. “You might find more’n you bargained for.”

“That so?”

“Yeah, it’s so.” He seemed to reach a decision, and the decision was that he wasn’t horny tonight. “Best skitter on home, Li’l Bo Peep. Ain’t none of your sheep around here. You’re way out of your element.”

He took a step away.

“It’s not the first time,” she said.

The words stopped him. He gave her a grudging glance. “You been here before?”

“Not in this place. But I’ve been ... around.”

“Have you, now?” He found this amusing. “Like, where?”

“Like, all over. Up and down this part of the coast. Venice, Long Beach, Oceanside. I’ve hit some hot spots in San Diego, too.”

He shrugged. “So you’re some rich bitch who goes slumming.”

“I’m not rich.”

“You ain’t poor, neither. College?”

She was hardly going to admit to having a psych degree. “Two years.”

“That’s two years more’n I got.”

“You didn’t miss anything. It was boring.” She let a tone of seductive languor steal into her voice. “Of course, I’m easily bored.”

“No, you ain’t.”

“Aren’t I?”

“Nah. If you was, you would’ve offed yourself by now. ’Cause you’re the most boring goddamned cunt I ever met.” He snorted laughter. “Mission Viejo. Fuck.”

He swaggered off, and she was left alone and frustrated. She’d sent out every sexual signal in her repertoire, and he’d blown her off. She had to assume he had other things on his mind. The alternative was that she was losing her allure, a hypothesis too far-fetched too entertain.

She returned to the bar and ordered another vodka. In the mirror she saw Dylan rejoin his buddies, his expression more sour than before.

Her best bet now was to tail him when he left the bar, which would probably be around closing time. She would leave shortly before two and watch the parking lot from her car.

Tailing a motorcycle would be tough. The chopper could cut through traffic in ways no car could match. There was a good chance she would lose him.

Damn. She was so close, but she hadn’t gotten him to bite.

But maybe there was still a chance. She saw Dylan’s nervous-looking friend pointing at her and nudging. Apparently he’d seen them talking in the alcove, and he was prodding Dylan to go for it. Dylan brushed off the advice, but the other guy was persistent. Abby silently encouraged him. Peer pressure could be a potent force.

She watched the pantomime show in the mirror. From Dylan’s body language, she could tell that his resistance was breaking down. He had gone from arms crossed—a defensive posture—to arms open.

The friend’s voice rose above the general din. “Fuck it, man, she’s
hot
!” Abby almost smiled, even if the compliment did emanate from a sociopathic scumbag. Then she remembered that if Dylan and his crew had been better shots, she wouldn’t be so hot right now. She would be cold, morgue-cold.

She felt another twist in her gut and found herself taking a bigger swallow of vodka.

In the mirror, Dylan rose from his seat. His friend’s final line of argument seemed to have closed the deal. The biker came toward the bar, carrying his beer.

She looked away from the mirror and nursed her drink until he sat down on the barstool beside her. Then she glanced at him.

“That wasn’t very nice,” she said coolly. “What you said about me back there.”

“Yeah. Well—I’m feeling kinda snarky tonight.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Bad day at the office.”

“What sort of work do you do?”

“The sort I don’t like to talk about.” He gulped a swig of beer. “You ain’t Mex, are you?”

“What?”

“Dark hair, brown eyes. You a Latin?”

“Anglo.”

“Good thing.”

Yeah, Dylan was a real catch. “So, that matters?”

“Fuck, yeah, it matters. Goddamn taco benders are taking over this town. Before you know it, they’ll be all over Mission Viejo, too. You just wait.”

“What have you got against Mexicans?” she asked, her voice neutral.

He regarded her as if she were mentally defective. “What do I got against ’em? Well, they’re fucking scum, to start with. And illegal. Not one of ’em has a green card.
They take work away from Americans, too.”

“Most of those jobs aren’t so great.”

“You wait. Before long, goddamn border jumpers’ll be taking everybody’s job. Like yours, maybe. What do you do?”

“Secretarial work.”

“One of them strawberry pickers could do that job, at least one that can read and write and speak English. And he’d do it cheaper than you. Then you’re out on your butt with not so much as a thank-you for your years of loyal service.”

“Something like that happen to you?”

“Not me. I got a skill, see. I’m a mechanic. I know my way around an engine. Those campesino assholes—half of
’em
ain’t never even
driven
a damn car.”

“You’re safe, then.”

“Not hardly. I can’t charge what I used to. Wetbacks come in and lower the pay scale for everybody. You got an American who was trimming trees for fifteen bucks an hour. Speedy Gonzales shows up and says he’ll do it for half that much. American is either out of work or he has to cut his pay to compete. Then he can’t spend so much on getting his car fixed when it breaks down, so I gotta charge less if I want to get his business.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot.”

“When your livelihood’s at stake, you got to think about it. And find ways to bring in extra money.” He turned pensive.

“You mean, doing some repair work on side?”