The Dismantling (30 page)

“Fine.” He stirred his drink. “What do you want to talk about?”

“What happened in Santa Cruz? What are you doing now?”

“That's a long story.”

“I want to hear it.”

He started to talk. He was wary at first, and she suspected that he'd only agreed to stay because he was scared she'd cause a scene if he tried to leave. She must be crazy—who knew what she'd say! But after a while, after she kept up with the charm and he kept up with the drinks, she could sense him relaxing. She'd learned to never underestimate how much people love talking about themselves. And what did he have to be afraid of, really? She'd kept quiet for five years; surely she wasn't about to start blabbing now.

He finished his drink and went up and got them another round. She set the new Tecate next to her last one, which she'd barely touched. When Thomas got up again to use the bathroom, she reached inside her purse and popped two Rohypnol pills out of the blister pack. She dropped them into his rum and Coke and stirred the drink, watching as the pills dissolved.

He returned from the bathroom and sat down, and she could smell the gum on his breath as he started to talk again, that same cinnamon-flavored crap he used to chew around the house in San Gabriel, and she flashed to the evening when he'd tried to kiss her in the garage, his face hovering above hers like a crater-ridden moon about to crash into the earth, and then her mind zoomed forward to the afternoon she'd spent five years trying to obliterate, and the fact of its recurrence—here, now, in the bar—only proved to her, all over again, the necessity of what she was going to do: no forgetting, no acceptance, no
process
or
method
. Just revenge.

“Maria?” He was looking at her strangely.

“Yeah, sorry.” She shook her head and smiled. She saw that he'd finished half of the spiked drink. “Spaced out for a second. I suppose it's my turn now.”

She talked about what she'd done over the last five years, a blend of truth and fiction. She kept an eye on his drink as she spoke. He sipped it without comment until, finally, it was finished, just a few half-melted ice cubes and—
shit
—a residue of white powder. She interrupted herself: “One more?”

“I shouldn't, I gotta—”

“Come on. Who knows when we'll see each other again?”

Before he could protest, she grabbed his glass and her beer, and carried them to the bar. By the time Thomas finished his last rum and Coke, she could see the roofie working in his glassy eyes and gluey movements. She had to get him out of the bar before he knocked something over or passed out.

He didn't protest when she suggested they leave.

“Not feeling so hot,” he announced. He sagged against the wall. “Fucking strong drinks.”

She got him out into the parking lot without too much difficulty, trying to keep her head down as she moved through the bar.

“Which one's yours?”

He waved at the black Jeep. They made their way over to the car, Thomas weaving and stumbling.

“You're not driving like that,” she said.

“I'm fine.”

“Give me the keys.”

“Gimme a fucking break, Maria.”

“You want a DUI? Give me the keys.”

“Where's your car?”

“Over there.” She waved vaguely at the other end of the lot. “I'll come back for it. C'mon, you live nearby, right? I'll drive you home.”

“She can't see that.”

“What?”

“June can't see you drop me off.”

“Your girlfriend?”

He nodded.

“Whatever. I'll park it a block away or something. Just get in.”

He sighed heavily, unlocked the Jeep, and gave her the keys. He climbed into the driver's-side seat and slumped over. “Embarssin',” he said.

“What?”

“It's embarrassing. Don't understand . . .” He shook his head. “Fuck, I'm hammered.”

“Happens to everybody.” She started the Jeep and pulled out of the lot.

Suddenly he sat up straighter. “But why aren't
you
so drunk?”

“'Cause I was drinking beer.”

He pointed a wavering finger at her. “You
meant
to get me wasted.”

She flushed. “Nah . . .”

“Yeah, you did.”

But when she looked over, she saw he was grinning, slackly and stupidly. He thought it was funny.

“Okay,” she said, “maybe a little bit.”

“Get me drunk and take 'vantage of me. Ha!” He slouched against the window. “Can't believe you're even
talking
to me.”

She kept silent. She felt an enormous pressure building up inside of her. The gun seemed to pulse with radioactive heat from inside her purse.

Thomas narrowed his bleary eyes. “Hey,” he said. “This isn't the way to my place.”

“It's a shortcut.”

“Did I even . . . ? I didn't tell you where I live, did I?”

“I know where we're going.”

She drove them west, away from the commercial strip and toward the Los Angeles River. She'd memorized the directions and knew exactly how long it would take to get to the place she'd chosen. The lot was next to a shuttered warehouse, adjacent to the river and a few blocks south of the PCH. It was enclosed by a chain-link fence, but the fence's gate was busted and hung open. She drove into the lot, to a corner tucked behind the warehouse and hidden from the street.

“The hell is this?” Thomas said.

“Listen, I have something to tell you.” She stopped the Jeep. “Meeting you in the bar? That wasn't luck. It wasn't random. The truth is that I can't seem to get you out of my head these days.”

His glassy eyes stared at her. “You knew I'd be there?”

“I wanted to see you, Thomas.”

He looked outside the car, at the deserted lot, the forlorn warehouses. “What are we
doing
here?”

“I needed some privacy.”

“I don't understand. You wanna . . .” He rubbed at his face. “I mean, I can't really believe . . .”

“What do you think I want to do, Thomas?”

“I'm saying, you don't have to get me so
wasted
, take me all the way out here, if you wanna fuck, you know?”

Maria unfastened her seat belt and reached into her purse. Her fingers found the SIG, cool and solid in her hand. “Right.” She thumbed the safety. “But I don't want to fuck you, Thomas.” She pulled out the gun and pointed it at his face. “I want to kill you.”

She'd expected him to gape and cower while she made him listen to her pain, while she enumerated the reasons he had to die. She'd envisioned a sort of dignity for his killing, something ritualistic, sacrificial. But he didn't cooperate. Instead of cowering, he fought through the sedatives and slapped at the gun, almost knocking it out of her hand. He reached for her throat, and she twisted awkwardly in the seat, trying to turn the weapon on him. He went after the gun again, and this time she pulled the trigger, not bothering to aim.

“Fuck!” he screamed. She looked down and saw blood staining his thigh. “You bitch!”

She raised the gun again, and this time he struggled to open the door and, half-tangled in the seat belt, stumble out of the Jeep. She fired, catching him in the lower back. He fell to the ground, wheezing. She got out of the car and ran around the hood. He lay sprawled on the concrete, breathing with a wet rattle. He tried to get up, failed, and then began to pull himself forward with his arms, leaving behind a smeared trail of blood.

“There's nowhere to go,” Maria said.

He looked up at her. His eyes were wild, rolling around in their sockets. He wheezed louder, as though he was trying to say something.

“Try again,” she said.

Finally he got it out: “Why?”

“You know why.”

“Don't deserve this,” he whispered.

“I decide that.”

“Please.”

She couldn't talk to him anymore. Couldn't look at him like this. She raised the SIG and shot him in the head. He jerked violently, his skull bouncing off the concrete. She fired into his head three more times, emptying the clip. The shots echoed off the warehouses and up into the sky. Thomas lay motionless, facedown, a pool of blood spreading around his ruined head. Maria looked down at his body, fixing the image in her mind: the position of his limbs, the shape of the blood pool, the texture of the moonlight on concrete. Then she turned off the Jeep and ran out the back of the lot, sprinting up the embankment to the river. She scrambled down a rocky and trash-hewn slope, threw the gun into the water, and then walked quickly south along the path. After half a mile, she turned in toward her car, walking along a different route from the one she'd driven. She heard the sirens just as she reached her Civic, what sounded like two or three patrol cars speeding over in the direction of the river. They didn't scare her. She was nobody, getting into her nothing car—a nonentity, a person about to disappear.

She drove back to Venice, along the PCH, and parked in front of her bungalow. She had three hours until her red-eye to JFK. She took off all her clothes and inspected them: only a few drops of blood on the cuff of her jeans. She stuffed the clothes into a garbage bag, walked to Washington Boulevard, and dropped the bag into a dumpster behind a Del Taco. Back at her bungalow, she showered for half an hour, standing under the scalding hot water until it turned lukewarm and then cold, getting out only when she started to shiver. She dried her hair and dressed. Her duffel bag was packed, her taxi to the airport booked. She looked around the bungalow: she wasn't going to miss this place, not for a second. She felt blank, but that blankness was itself a relief from her usual gnarled and agitated inner state. Her mind felt clean and smooth and featureless, like a pebble washed for thousands of years in the ocean. She sat on the edge of her bed and waited for her taxi to arrive.

 • • • 

“
So.” Maria looked sideways at Simon. “Do you believe me now?”

“Jesus Christ.” He thought of the Mori folder, all those photographs of slaughtered young men. Maria couldn't capture the scene of Thomas's death, so she'd assembled a collection of its analogues in bits and pieces: the corpse's posture in one, the lighting in another, the character of the gunshot wound in the next. Within each one of these scenes, she'd located an element of what she'd done to Thomas, how she'd left him. Encoded within the collection of photos was the precise expression of his killing. “Yes.” He cleared his throat; his voice was hoarse and ragged, as though he'd been the one telling the story. “Yes, I do.”

“You weren't supposed to get involved. I'd make my money, and then I'd use that money to disappear, forever.” She paused. “It can be done, Simon. And we're going to do it. Today.”

“I don't . . .” He stood and walked to the window. He lifted the shade and looked out over the motel parking lot. The lot's churned-up slush had hardened overnight into ridges of icy mud. Pure white snow covered Katherine's RAV4. The sky was a rich, deep blue, scrubbed clean by the storm, and the morning sunlight fired the frozen lot with gold. He turned back to Maria. She sat on the bed and looked at him calmly, watched him work through it all. It still didn't seem quite real, this talk of murder. It was as though he'd slipped, unwittingly, from one parallel reality to the next, from the world he'd inhabited his whole life into a shadow world animated by violence, betrayal, revenge. He was sharing a room with a murderer, but the truth was that he was not afraid of her. He knew, intellectually, that maybe he should be, but he didn't feel it. He wasn't repulsed or outraged either. Instead, he felt fascination and a touch of awe. And he'd thought he could save her! He had nothing to offer her; she was beyond all that now.

“Simon.” She tapped the bedside clock. “We need to do this. Now.”

Maybe she'd stepped fully into that shadow world, but he didn't have to. He shook his head. “I can't do it, Maria. I
won't
do it.”

“You don't get it, he's going to kill—”

“I said no. We have to find another way.”

“Come on, Simon.” She gave him a disappointed look, as though he were a soft-brained pupil with difficulty remembering even the simplest of facts. “Don't you understand? It's him or you.”

“Maria. Stop.”

She stared at him, biting her lip, as though willing him to change his mind. Finally she sighed and turned away. “Fine.”

He picked up the transfer form from the bed and held it out to her. “You'll help me sell this back to him?”

“Yeah. But we can't do the exchange here. We need somewhere hidden.”

Simon thought for a moment, his mind churning. Then he remembered: “All right.”

“All right?”

“I think I know the place.”

T
HEY
waited at the foot of the bluffs, on the beach where Simon and Kippler had competed in the surfing contest seven years before. The geography of the cove fit their plan well enough, and the chances of any random beachgoers turning up were slim on such a frigid afternoon. Today the waves were flat, the Atlantic a bright, limpid green; sunlight glittered fiercely on the ocean's surface, shattered and strewn about like broken glass. The path, a steep and slippery mixture of sand and snow and crumbling limestone, ran down a hundred feet from the dirt lot. The beach was about two hundred feet long and less than twenty wide now, at high tide, the cliffs at its east and west edges extending all the way to the ocean, pinching off the sand. At the eastern end, an archipelago of rocks draped in beard-like seaweed stepped out into the ocean. The path up the bluff was the only way out, besides the water, and the bluffs were steep enough that the beach was concealed from anyone who wasn't standing right at the cliff's edge.

Maria looked at her phone again. “He should've been here an hour ago.”

“He's coming.” Simon stared up at the lip of the bluff. “I'm sure of it.”

All morning they'd worked through their plan, but the whole thing still seemed depressingly contingent to Simon, the least bad among a wilderness of terrible options. Somehow he'd put himself into a situation in which his freedom—and, if Maria was right, possibly his life—depended upon a rickety blackmail plot hatched in a motel room with the help of a violent and damaged young woman he still couldn't say he truly knew or completely trusted. It was insane, ludicrous, but inarguably his reality.

They would ask DaSilva to hand over the money first. After he gave them the cash, Maria—she'd volunteered for the task—would hand over the transfer form. And then they'd be gone, up the path to the lot and Katherine's RAV4. They'd drive north, deep into New England, to some place Maria had chosen, although she wouldn't yet tell him anything more specific about it.

“If everything goes to shit, just run,” Maria had said. “He's a fat bastard. He won't catch us.”

“But your sutures—”

“I'll fight through it if I have to.”

First, Maria texted DaSilva the photo of the signed form. Peter's number was locked inside Simon's dead phone, but they found it written out on the document itself, right below Health Solutions' account information. Maria waited about a minute and then handed Simon her phone. “Call him.” As Simon started dialing, he experienced a strange sort of calm, a numbness settling onto his chest. This was fatalism, he realized. The sensation of having made a choice and having committed to playing that choice all the way out to its end. He hesitated, his finger hovering over the final digit, and when he at last entered it into the phone, the action felt almost involuntary, as though he were being manipulated by forces greater than himself or, rather, as though he'd suffered a sort of schism, and the self who commanded his finger to move was entirely different from the self who carried out the command.

DaSilva answered on the first ring: “Who the fuck is this?” His voice was strangled and scratchy, as though the words were being yanked from his throat by a fishhook.

“Peter, listen. It's Simon.”

A long pause followed. Maria leaned close to Simon, listening in. A door shut somewhere behind DaSilva, and when he spoke again, it was with a slight echo, as though he'd moved into a large, empty room. “What the hell are you thinking?” he hissed. “That bullshit with Katherine, are you out of your fucking mind? She was trying to help you.”

Maria caught Simon's eye, shook her head. “You saw the photo,” Simon said.

“The what?”

“The photo. Of the transfer form.”

“Yeah, I saw it. Where'd you lift that from, you prick?”

Simon hesitated. He had no idea how to do this. Maria flapped her hand at him:
just keep going.
“You want it back, right?”

“What is this? You're going to blackmail me?”

“I'm with Maria. We need—”

“Where are you?”

“Listen to me!” Simon snapped. Maria jerked her head back, eyes widening. A smile crept onto her face. Simon had surprised both DaSilva and himself into silence, but he quickly plunged onward to cover it up: “We need $40,000 in cash and your guarantee that you will not try to come after us or contact us ever again. Otherwise, I'm handing this form over to the press, to the people who are already sniffing around Cabrera.”

“Have you gone completely insane?”

“I'm done, Peter. We do this deal, and then I'm gone. You'll never hear from me again.”

“You think it's that easy?” DaSilva said. “You think you can just disappear like that?”

“It's what you wanted anyway, isn't it? You give me this money, and I'll do it myself.”

“What, you really think I have $40,000 in cash just lying around?”

“Maybe. Or maybe it's in Health Solutions' bank account. Want me to read off that account number for you?”

Maria put her hand over her mouth, suppressing a laugh.

“You're a real motherfucker,” DaSilva said.

“I'm sorry. I didn't want it to be like this.”

“What about the girl?”

“Maria and I leave together.”

“There's a fucking
investigation
going on here, Simon,” DaSilva snarled. “People need to talk to her. Do you know what it'll look like if she's just gone?”

“I don't care. And neither does she.”

A pause. DaSilva hacked out a cough, the sound of a busted generator struggling to catch. “What's gonna stop you from sending that photo around?” he said. “Even if you give me the original form?”

“You know a photo like that doesn't count as evidence.” Simon was guessing, but it sounded right. “It's too easy to fake. But the real thing? That's completely different.” He paused. “Maria will delete it from her phone if that's what you want. She'll do that right in front of you.”

There was a long moment of silence. Maria stared at the phone, biting her lip. Simon wondered if he'd somehow screwed up, if he'd said the wrong thing.

“You think you're some kind of hustler?” DaSilva finally sneered. “You don't have a fucking clue.”

“But you'll do it? Forty thousand.”

Another pause, then, “Yeah, forty thousand. So where the fuck are you guys?”

 • • • 

T
hey'd made the call almost five hours ago. DaSilva had told them he'd be there in less than four; he needed an hour to get out of the hospital, another to gather the cash, and then not quite two to drive out to Montauk. But he was late, and Simon could see Maria's frustration blossoming. She hunched against the chill in her leather jacket, her gloved hands stuffed into her armpits. He was trying to figure out what to say, how to convince her to be patient, when he heard the crunch of tires over dirt echoing down from the top of the bluff.

“Maria,” he said, but he could see in the way she stiffened and tilted her head toward the cliffs that she'd already heard it too.

The sound of a car door slamming. Nothing for a few moments, and then DaSilva appeared at the edge of the bluff, a dark smudge against the snow and pale limestone. He carried a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Simon lifted his hand in greeting, and after a brief pause, DaSilva returned the gesture. Peter started to pick his way down the trail, gingerly transferring his bulk from foot to foot. He steadied himself against the bluff with one hand while the other, carrying the duffel, waved wildly in the air. Simon felt the sudden, deeply inappropriate impulse to laugh. The sight was so incongruous, so ridiculous: DaSilva in his black slacks and black coat and black leather shoes—his Cabrera work clothes—his imperious gut, his giant square head; his awkward, painstaking movements along the path.

Finally he reached the foot of the bluffs. He paused for a moment, turning his head to take in the dimensions of the beach, its geometry. Then he walked toward where they stood, near the waterline, and stopped about ten feet away. Simon and Maria had kept five feet between them, at Maria's insistence, and so the three made a triangle with DaSilva its apex. He stared at Simon, his chest heaving, eyes crinkled almost entirely shut against the brightly reflecting ocean. He glanced at Maria briefly, with something like contempt or at least dismissal, and then he returned his attention to Simon. “So where is it?” he said.

Maria reached into her jacket pocket. “Here.” She took out the carefully folded sheet of paper and held it up.

Peter dropped the duffel onto the sand with a heavy thunk. “How do I know that's the real thing?”

Maria stepped closer, unfolding the paper.

“Wait,” Simon said.

She waved him off. “It's fine.” She stopped a few feet from DaSilva and held the paper out in front of her. “Take a look.”

Peter leaned forward and scanned the paper. “All right.” He squatted down in the sand next to the bag, opened its zipper, and yanked back its top flap. “It's all here.”

Simon looked down into the duffel: a layer of banded bills lay tight across the top of the bag. Simon's ears prickled. Peter had actually brought the money; this absurd plan was actually going to work.

“Here.” DaSilva reached into the bag. He plucked out a banded wad and tossed it to Simon. Simon caught the bills and flipped through them quickly: ten hundreds, all fresh and uncreased. As he counted them, DaSilva stared at him with a fury that was only more obvious for how hard he was trying to suppress it. Simon looked over at Maria. “Okay,” he said. “Get the rest.”

She nodded and moved toward DaSilva. She handed him the form with one hand, the other stuffed inside her jacket's pocket.

“Maria?” Simon said. What was she doing? This was all out of order. “The bag?”

“It's all right,” she said.

DaSilva took the paper from her and looked down to read it, the duffel still at his feet.

“I don't—” Simon began, but before he could finish, Maria's hand darted out of her pocket, a glint of metal winking in the sun.

DaSilva saw it too, and he hunched away at the last instant, enough that Maria's switchblade struck him in the shoulder instead of square between the ribs. He staggered sideways, bellowing. The transfer form fluttered to the sand. As she pulled back the knife for a second blow, he lifted his arm to block it. The blade caught on his jacket fabric, tearing through the wool, revealing a bright flash of blood. With his other hand, he shoved Maria backward and gained some distance. He reached inside his coat.

Simon sprang forward as DaSilva drew a handgun from a holster against his ribs and raised it to Maria's face. He slammed into DaSilva's side just as he fired, the gun's report like a crack of thunder inside Simon's skull. Maria collapsed, screaming in pain, clutching at her foot.

Simon and Peter fell onto the sand in a tangled heap, Simon swinging wildly. He connected with DaSilva's wrist and knocked the gun loose, the pistol skittering away across the half-frozen sand and into the water.

They rolled, locked together, into the shallows. Icy water filled Simon's jacket and soaked through his shirt, water so cold it felt hot, burning and prickling against his skin. He pushed free of DaSilva and thrashed his way to his knees in time to greet Peter's fist as it smashed into his jaw, knocking him back into the water. He staggered to his feet and saw Maria crumpled on the sand, blood soaking the hem of her jeans. And then Peter was on him again, sputtering and snorting, huge and relentless, his wounded arm hanging awkwardly against his side, blood leaking from gashes in his shoulder and forearm, as he tried to pull Simon under.

Simon's ears filled with the ragged huffing of their breath, the desperate sucking and hoarding of oxygen. “I didn't know,” he gasped. It didn't matter anymore, but he couldn't help himself. He stepped backward and the seafloor fell away, the water quickly up to his shoulders and then his chin. “She wasn't supposed to do that.”

“Fuck you both,” DaSilva hissed.

There was nothing more to say; they were beyond talking, beyond explanations.

Now
,
Simon thought, and he took a breath and dove.

He opened his eyes and saw, through the murky green, DaSilva's pillar-like legs. Simon drove himself into the knees, wrapping his arms around the thick calves and rolling his body to the side. Peter's dress shoes scrabbled for purchase on the seafloor, and then he toppled over and joined Simon underwater.

Simon grabbed DaSilva's jacket, yanking at the lapels, pulling the collar over the big man's blocky head and twisting it around his face. Simon's mind was filled entirely by bright, white-hot rage, more a primal state of being than an emotion: survival was all. He kicked hard, pinning DaSilva against the bottom, driving himself down on top of the giant head. Peter's fists battered Simon's back, but his left arm was ruined and the blows fell weakly.