The Gray Zone (20 page)

“A little risqué music, maybe.”

Kelly blew some air out through her mouth. “I don’t know—”

“Come on.”

“Todd could have someone out there watching us … Something weird happened to my car right after I left Vegas.”

Jake waited for her to continue.

“Someone moved it while we were eating in a diner. Left a note on the front seat with a smiley face on it. Just the type of thing Todd would do. Or have someone do for him.”

“But nothing’s happened since?”

“He’s playing cat and mouse. Like I said, someone was on my tail just before the Long Beach bank job.”

Jake thought for a moment. “I have an idea.”

* * *

An hour later, Jake drove alone out of his building. He circled a few blocks, then pulled behind a gas station. A man in an overcoat and baseball cap got into the passenger’s seat. Jake peeled off and headed toward the freeway.

“See, that worked,” he said, excited by the deception. Kelly smiled indulgently and pulled the cap down over her eyes. They drove silently over the Sepulveda Pass. Ventura Boulevard, a disconcerting combination of suburban chain stores and hip boutiques, took them to Studio City. Jake pulled into a gravel parking lot next to what looked like a shack. The skinny black guy at the door jerked his chin up at Jake. Jake gave him a ten-dollar bill and held the door open for Kelly.

A blast of music rushed over her as she stepped inside the crumbling club. A man was moaning his way through “Welfare Woman” in a gravelly voice that had seen more pain than Kelly had. She was surprised to see that the singer was white, wearing black Ray-Bans.

“Bryan Lee,” murmured Jake. “From New Orleans. Blind.”

Kelly nodded, taking off the cap, and followed Jake to a corner table by the stage. From the waiter’s body language, she figured it was Jake’s regular table. She was intrigued but didn’t want to show it. A couple of people waved as Jake passed. Before they’d even sat down, a waiter brought a bottle of Chianti and poured it. Kelly watched the waiters weaving around the tightly packed tables, slapping down huge, stuffed baked potatoes in time with the music. Before long, two plates descended on their table, each potato nearly the size of a loaf of bread. Steam curled up from the fluffy, mashed insides, glistening with cheese and vegetables.

“Is that a prop?” Kelly peered. “Grown and bred for Holly-weird?”

“Eat it. You need it.”

They ate and drank and listened to the music. Jake stole a couple
of looks at Kelly. Even wearing almost no makeup, and with her hair in a ponytail, she pulled every eye in the place. She moved like a cat: nonchalant yet purposeful, disdainful yet aware of others’ eyes. But at this place, no one looked for long. It was one of the reasons Jake loved it.

When the song ended, one of the musicians jumped off the stage and shuffled over to Jake. He handed him a saxophone, inviting him onstage. Jake feigned resistance, then followed the man up toward the band. When he closed his eyes and started playing, his music was enticing and emotional, his fingers touching the instrument with the precision of a surgeon and the sensitivity of a lover.

As Jake drowned deeper and deeper into the music, Kelly felt herself becoming numb. She gulped her wine.

The crowd clapped and whistled.

“Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for the down and dirty sound of Jake Brooks!”

After the set, Jake came back to the table. He was flying.

“Where’d you learn to play like that?” Kelly asked politely.

Jake started his humble routine. “Picked it up, here and there. Lessons since I was six. Minor in music. Hours of playing-to-stave-off-loneliness masquerading as practice.”

“You’re lucky you have a place to do it.”

Jake stared demurely into his wineglass but caught the tone in Kelly’s voice. Was she sober? Her eyes had moved out of the solar system; her face looked dead.

“Let’s get out of here.” Jake took Kelly’s hand and led her out of the smoke.

They drove up the hill at Griffith Park, barely uttering a word. Jake pulled over and they sat in the car, the glowing spider’s web of the lights of Los Angeles spread out below them.

“You know, the DA is nothing more than a politician. The cops are just snooping coyotes in heat. We’ll find a way out.”

Kelly snorted. “Nice people you play with.”

“The accused are entitled to a competent defense. I defend them with every skill I have—charming the jury, playing the media. I’m a performing media litigator.”

“So you publicly manipulate loopholes in the law?”

“If that’s the way you want to look at it. Another way to see it is this: The shades of gray are infinite. Some people are most comfortable with black or white. The law is really much more suited to gray. That’s where I belong, in the gray zone. I actually like to settle cases behind closed doors or outside the courtroom whenever possible. There’s more truth there, really, than in the black and white.”

Kelly watched his face in the moonlight. The side of his nose bore a small scar she hadn’t noticed earlier. He looked like a cowboy, or someone else who’d seen a lot—an old soul. There was no question: Women must find him magnetic.

“I have a feeling Todd had something to do with Porter’s death.”

His eyes lingered on her throat. “Then help me get him.”

“You can help with the law. But only I can get Gillis.”

Jake squeezed his teeth together. She was maddening. Normally he would start badgering at this point, pouring on the logic and the drama. But he knew it wouldn’t work with her.

“Okay, Kelly—or Natalie—or whoever you are.” He saw her eyes flick minutely. “I’ll help you as much as you’ll let me.”

“Fine. That’ll work.”

Jake noted that she didn’t thank him. They drove home without speaking, trying to talk themselves out of feeling a new intimacy in their silence.

FRANK PULLED HIS JEEP ONTO THE GRAVEL outside his small ranch house. Exhausted from a busy night tending bar, he approached the front door sluggishly, fishing for his keys, feeling each one with his fingers before selecting the right one.

He started to put it into the lock when he realized the outdoor light was on. Was Holly back with the kids? Nah—when she’d taken Kelly’s kids in the RV north, she said they’d be gone for a while. You could disappear just about completely in the anonymous trailer parks of the Nevada desert. Still, Frank felt a twinge of hope: Maybe things had worked out for Kelly. Maybe Holly had come back. Even after just one night, he missed her. All their years together, and she still turned him on like no other woman ever could. He loved his wife and desired her at the same time. He knew that this was rare, that it made him a lucky man.

He sensed more than heard the crunch of gravel behind him. Whipping around, he saw, illuminated by the porch light, the huge
form of a man. One of the man’s hands was hidden in his jacket. Frank knew better than to move.

“Mr. Gillis is waiting for you inside.”

Frank stood still while the bodyguard pushed open the front door and motioned him in. He forced down the rage and fear that surged simultaneously in his stomach.

Gillis was just as Frank had pictured him, just as Kelly had described. Manicured, handsome, as alert and strong and dangerous as a mountain lion. He was sitting on Frank and Holly’s comfortable old couch, arms outstretched across the back of it, one ankle draped over his knee. He held up a syringe.

“Where are my kids, Frank?” he asked, his voice completely relaxed.

Frank remained silent, judging his options.

Gillis jiggled the syringe. “Poor kid. Maybe someday they’ll come up with better ways of getting the insulin. Kelly”—he said the name with a sneer—“tries so hard. But it can’t be easy to be a working mom with a diabetic kid.”

Gillis tossed the syringe on the coffee table. “Still, you’d think she could get her on a pump.” He leveled his cold eyes at Frank. “You going to tell me where they are?”

Frank was actively forcing back his desire to tackle Gillis and pummel him. Tending bar, he had met thousands of people. The toughest and loudest were disarmed by his silent glare, by the suggestion of menace rather than the practice of it. But Gillis was completely different. It was as though he was beyond fear. Frank had seen that only once—in a man high on PCP who had sailed over the bar in a fit of rage and smashed him against the mirrored backsplash. It had taken the help of two bouncers to subdue the man, whose wild eyes never did succumb to force, even when, battered and bloodied, he was loaded into a cop car.

Gillis’s eyes were clear, and he was obviously sober. Frank ran the options through his brain. Lie? Tell Gillis that Holly took the kids to California? Stay silent? How much did Gillis already know? No wonder Kelly always looked like a hunted animal. That’s exactly what she was.

Gillis was watching Frank’s face. Suddenly he started chuckling. He shook his head as though admonishing a child.

“Decisions, decisions,” he smirked. “Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m not going to kill the messenger. You, that is. You just tell Holly to take good care of my kids.” He stood up abruptly and growled the next words right in Frank’s face. “And tell Kelly that I’ll slap her with kidnapping charges if she even breathes the wrong way. I can put her behind bars in less than a day.”

Gillis turned on his heel and took two steps toward the door, then seemed to change his mind. He flicked his fingers, and before Frank knew what hit him, he’d slumped to the ground, too groggy to resist when the bodyguard who stood behind him took him by the neck and dragged him to the Mercedes at the curb.

SOMEONE WAS POUNDING ON THE DOOR.

Where am I? What time is it?
Kelly scrambled out of bed. She glanced around the black room for a clock. Four thirty. Jake’s apartment.

“Kelly? Kelly?” Jake hammered again on the door.

“What?” Kelly blinked as she opened the guest room door and looked into the lit hallway.

“Everything’s okay, but—”

“Oh, God, what’s happened?”

“Everything’s—”

“Don’t … just tell me.”

Jake stood in the hall a little way back from the doorway, like a kid selling magazine subscriptions. “They roughed up your friend Frank. He didn’t tell them anything. But they had his cell phone and forced him to call Holly. They found the RV at a trailer park north of Vegas.”

“Oh, God …”

Jake held up a hand. “It’s alright. Two of them broke in, scared the shit out of Holly. They had Libby in the car when my guys got there.”

“Your guys?”

“I posted a couple of retired cops out there.”

“How did you even—”

“I traced your call to Holly … At my office yesterday. I called the phone company.”

“Are Kevin and Libby—”

“They’re fine. We’ve moved them to a safer place, the home of a friend of mine—”

“Where?”

“Remember the Platinum Widow?”

Kelly sighed a tiny sigh of relief. “The bombshell that had her husband killed.”

“No one will look for them there. She’s got a huge compound in Lake Tahoe. The place is so wired, a butterfly couldn’t enter without getting someone’s attention. Really. They’re safe. I promise.”

Kelly whirled back toward the bedroom. “They must be terrified. I’ve got to get there.” She grabbed her duffel bag, which was luckily left intact when Jake’s guys retrieved it and the Rent-A-Wreck she’d left behind. She made several passes around the room, looking for things to put in it. She turned to Jake, her face streaked with anxiety.

“What do I do?”

Her helplessness punched him in the stomach.

“Give them a couple of hours. It’s still the middle of the night. You can call them in the morning. You can’t go there. It could be seen as evidence of flight. We can’t bring them here—too dangerous. I
promise, they are completely safe. And as soon as we can get you all back together, we will.”

She closed her eyes, pained. “I need a cup of coffee.” She strode toward the doorway but, before she could cross it, fell into Jake’s arms instead. He was ready for her.

Pick her up, put her on the bed, lie next to her, and hold her in your arms.
Jake tried to get his body to follow his heart, but it wouldn’t. Instead, he tightened his arms around Kelly and stood there awkwardly until her trembling subsided.

As quickly as it had come up, it was over. She pushed him away. “Thanks,” she said curtly.

He followed her into his blue-and-white kitchen, where she started opening and closing doors.

“You ever cook in here?” she said abruptly.

“Does microwaving count?”

“Coffee?”

“Look in there.”

Kelly opened a cabinet and pulled out a grinder and filters. She found beans in a jar on the counter. Jake was watching her, mindlessly chatting as his eyes took in the way her body moved around the kitchen.

“I defended this kid once,” he said, sitting down. “He was only eighteen. No priors, up for grand theft. The DA was saying that they got him dead bang. But I wasn’t about to surrender him to the Nazis. By the time I was through with the psychobabble, the jury was ready to send the DA up for life for being so abusive to this poor, misunderstood child. So, what does the kid do when the trial is over? He walks right out to the parking lot and steals the judge’s car!”

Kelly laughed. It sounded like a puppy yip. “I hope these eggs are fresh,” she said, cracking one into a bowl.

As Jake talked, Kelly made cheese omelets. She found hash browns in the freezer and thawed them. She assigned Jake to wash berries and cut some fruit. It helped to have a project. They maneuvered politely around each other—and around the five-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, the undeniable strings that had begun to attach them.

Kelly served the food at the kitchen table, with paper napkins. They chewed silently. Finally, she lowered her fork.

“Why did you choose crime as your life’s work?”

Jake swallowed. “Why did you?”

Kelly speared a blueberry on each tine of her fork. “Let me put it this way: It was a means to an
end.
You?” She curled her lips around the four blueberries.