9
A half hour later, I was safely on the other side of the locked door of my Crenshaw place. Tess and I had carefully cruised past the building and then around the back, scoping up and down the street for anything that looked like police activity. Nothing had struck me as suspicious.
Just before getting out of the little Crossfire, I’d leaned back in the open door and said, “I already owed you before this, Tess, and now I’m in twice as deep.” I’d looked away, into the sun, and then back down at her. “I pay my debts. I’ll pay this one, too.”
I’d expected her to say something characteristically generous, like, Just come back alive, but she’d assessed me with serious gray eyes and simply nodded.
Tess hadn’t been fooled by my little “Nothing’s planned just yet” speech. I was going to San Francisco, because there were two people up there I needed to see, for vastly different reasons. One was Quentin Corelli, who had tortured me for Laska last year and would have been happy to kill me. The other was Jack Foreman, an Associated Press reporter, who had liked me and, I hoped, still believed in me.
The sky was clearing fast, and I shaded my eyes against the sun as I waited at the edge of the parking lot for a family returning from church to cross to their first-floor apartment. They were in the kind of Easter finery you didn’t see much anymore, not in California: Mom in a wide-brimmed hat, father and son in clean-lined summer-weight suits, the little girl in a blue lace dress with a skirt splayed wide by an under-layer of tulle.
When they’d passed without seeing me, I climbed the stairs to my second-floor place, unlocked the door, and went inside.
My apartment always greeted me with the sort of spare quietness you felt when you’d been away for weeks. I wasn’t there enough to make the kind of welcoming, personal messes that reminded you of what you’d been doing before you went out, nor had I put any effort into making the place look like it was mine. Here it was now, an unloved and unlovely place, with worn-out lime green carpeting, a heavyset Zenith TV, my few books on cheap secondhand shelves.
In the bedroom I threw my gym bag on the bed, unzipped it, and took out the things I wouldn’t need: my fight clothes and mouth guard. Then I packed. I pried up the carpeting at the corner of the living room and retrieved my emergency fund, five hundred-dollar bills, to add to the six hundred I’d carried away from the fights. Then a change of clothes, the baby Glock and ankle holster, soap and toothbrush and toothpaste in a Ziploc bag, as well as the makeup Tess had given me to re-create the fake bruise at will. A mini-flashlight and a little digital camera: I wasn’t entirely sure I’d need those, but I was going to be doing some surveillance on Quentin, and they might come in handy.
My cell phone, lying on the center of the bed, buzzed, and I reached over and picked it up. I’d had this phone only since January, after losing the last one in my confrontation with Skouras’s guys. I’d given the number to almost no one, which explained why I hadn’t already been flooded with calls from people saying, Hailey, have you seen the news, what the hell? I expected that this was Serena, wanting to know where I was and what was going on.
Then I saw the number on the screen, and my heart stopped.
CJ was calling me.
Immediately, before he could speak, I said, “CJ, I didn’t do what they’re saying. I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do. Please believe me.”
The voice that answered was male, and it was slow and calm and unhurried, like my cousin’s. But it was clearly older, with a rasp at the edges. “Miss Cain,” it said, “I’m sorry, I’m not your cousin Cletus. Please don’t hang up. You’re talking to one of probably two cops in America who don’t think you killed those people up in San Francisco.”
“Who is this?”
“My name is Magnus Ford.”
The hair prickled on my arms and the back of my neck.
He cleared his throat. “This must be confusing. The call registered as from your cousin’s phone because we got his account information from his cellular company and cloned a phone with his number.”
“But how did you get my number?” I said. I had a cheap, pay-as-you-go phone and bought airtime cards at convenience stores. There shouldn’t have been account information for him to access.
He said, “Before I answer that, Miss Cain, can I ask you one question? Are you missing a finger on your left hand?”
That was the last thing I’d been expecting him to ask, and that was how I knew the question was important.
“Yes,” I said. “Can I ask you how—”
Then I stopped. I didn’t like this. My phone might not have had an airtime plan with account information for Ford to access, but it did have a GPS system. As long as it was activated, Ford could track me.
“Miss Cain?”
I said, “Give me your phone number and I’ll call you back.”
10
I’d left the Aprilia parked near the Slaughterhouse last night, thinking it too much a risk to be on the roads on something with a license number traceable to me. Now I wished I had it, as I slung my bag over my shoulder and locked my apartment behind me. The helmet would have been ideal to hide my features behind. Or I wished that I lived back east, where in early April the weather was probably still cold enough to justify hiding under a cap, behind a scarf. Instead I was in L.A., where the mercury was climbing steadily toward a hundred degrees at midday. I touched my fake bruise for reassurance as I headed down the sidewalk, much as I used to touch my birthmark out of self-consciousness in my younger years.
A tall woman, addict-thin and with acne scars under her chestnut-colored skin, was doing some kind of personal business on the pay phone four blocks from my house, and she glared at me when I lingered too close, waiting for her to be finished. It was nearly fifteen minutes before she finally hung up and walked off without a backward glance at me.
The handset of the phone was warm and almost slippery where she’d been holding it. Ford answered on the first ring. Instead of hello, he said, “I’m not trying to track you, Hailey.”
He was showing me he’d known that any unidentified pay-phone number was going to be me. All right, you’re clever, we knew that, I thought. I also didn’t believe him and knew I couldn’t extend this conversation too long. Pay phones could be traced, too.
“Are you there?” he said.
“I’m here.”
“I’m being up front with you, because I meant what I said about thinking you might be innocent. That doesn’t mean I’m sure. It’s a working hypothesis.”
“How’d you come up with it?” I asked.
“You’ve been seen on several occasions in East Los Angeles, most recently the day after the Eastman and Stepakoff murders.”
“By you?” I said. “Have we met and I don’t know it?”
“No,” Ford said. “This was an associate of mine.”
I am a goddamn idiot. “The blind guy in the park, Joe Keller,” I said. “He’s one of yours.”
“Yes.”
“And he’s obviously not blind.”
He laughed, a short, rusty sound. “Are you kidding? Joel Kelleher was the best shooter in his academy class. Kid could hit the ten ring standing on a water-bed mattress.”
That explained why he’d reacted so quickly to the prospect that I might reach for his sunglasses and try to look at his eyes. Even an experienced actor would have difficulty faking the sightless gaze of a blind person; a young cop would have known that it was beyond his skills.
It also explained how Ford had gotten my cell number: I’d written it right on the skin of a police officer.
“So it was your little joke,” I said. “Your ‘eyes’ in the field, faking blindness.”
“Not a joke,” Ford said, “a tactic. Of course, we were looking for drug and gang activity—we never expected to net a suspect in a high-profile double homicide. But when the APB on you came in, Joel took one look at it and said, ‘I was just talking to her in the park this morning. Something’s not right here.’ He said he’d spoken to you on two prior occasions within less than two weeks. Then your fingerprints came over the wire, and Joel said, ‘This is screwy, too. There’s ten fingerprints here, but this girl has only nine fingers.’ I suggested maybe you were just one of those rare flukes, a dead ringer for someone else, but Joel said no. He’d seen your birthmark. And he said you’d told him that your name was Hailey.” He paused. “Of course, that doesn’t mean you weren’t dividing your time between San Francisco and L.A.”
“I wasn’t,” I said. “Mr. Ford, if you’re serious about believing I’m innocent, try this: My DNA’s in the Pentagon’s battlefield registry. Ask the SF forensics guys if they found a single piece of DNA that matches mine. They won’t have.”
“What about the thumbprint on the casing?”
“It was a stolen gun,” I said. “I should go. I’ll call you again.”
“No. No more game playing. You want my help, come in.”
“I can’t. Not yet.”
“Hailey, do you want some nervous rookie cop to smoke you on the street? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you stay out there.”
I hung up and stood a moment, thinking.
Magnus Ford, the Shadow Man, had a guy in the field doing his spying and his legwork. I needed someone like that on my side. I went to another pay phone and made a second call.
“Hello?” Serena said, cautious as always when the readout on her cell said UNKNOWN CALLER.
“It’s me,” I said, “and I can’t talk long. I think I know how I got set up. You want to ride on a mission with me?”
“I’m in.”
“Wait, you need to understand what I’m asking. Yeah, I need you, but I don’t like it. This could get dangerous. Remember last year?”
“How could I forget that shit?”
“This might come down to the same stuff: some surveillance, some lawbreaking, possibly a throwdown or two.”
“I’m good with that,” she said. “Warchild and Insula, kicking ass again. It’ll be fun.”