to the limits of fate
6
Cop killer. I didn’t need Serena to explain the implications of that for my safety.
“What the hell is going on?” she said.
“You’re asking me?”
“What’re you gonna do?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Where are you?”
“At the Slaughterhouse,” I said. “I was about to go home, but now I’m not so sure I should.”
It was true that my Crenshaw apartment wasn’t traceable to me through any kind of bill or rental contract, but my neighbors had seen me coming and going, and I’d introduced myself to several of them by name. More than that, I stood out in Crenshaw. I’d known that before, but it hadn’t bothered me. Now I had to worry about it.
“I’ll come get you,” Serena said.
“No,” I said. “Hold that thought. There’s someone else I want to call.”
After we’d hung up, I scrolled through my list of old calls, finding a number I didn’t use enough to know by heart. Tess answered on the third ring, her voice, as always, slightly British-inflected.
“It’s Hailey,” I said. “Have you seen the news?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you believe it?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t.”
“Then I need your help.”
Tess D’Agostino, the biological daughter of San Francisco organized-crime figure Tony Skouras, had already saved my life once. Last winter she’d called off her father’s henchmen and brought to an end the torture session that otherwise probably would have ended with me floating facedown in the bay; more than that, she’d brought me back to her hotel and overseen my recuperation herself. At first I hadn’t known how far to trust her—she was a Skouras, after all—and I’d been brusque to the point of rudeness, but Tess had been serenely polite in response.
A few days later, she’d called me to suggest that if I stayed in San Francisco and if she in fact took the reins of the Skouras syndicate—which officially was a shipping line and several related import businesses and unofficially brought Asian heroin, stolen artworks, and illegal Eastern European and Central Asian immigrants into the ports of San Francisco and Oakland—she would have use for me. In other words, she wanted what I’d gone on to provide for Serena: a right hand, protector and sounding board.
When she’d called me, I’d been walking on the Golden Gate Bridge. It had been a bright and promising morning, I still wasn’t quite used to being alive when I was supposed to be dead, and despite the rough treatment I’d just suffered, my life at that moment had an anything-goes character, and I’d agreed to meet with Tess that evening to discuss her offer further.
That night she’d bought me dinner on Fisherman’s Wharf. In the intervening hours, my mood had shifted a bit. The bright hour on the bridge was over, and the ghost of my newly severed finger had ached increasingly throughout the day. Over dinner, made more frank than I might have been by a martini and pain meds I’d taken for my hand, I not only turned down any potential job, I discouraged Tess from taking over the Skouras empire altogether.
“You seem to look at me as some kind of hero because I took it on myself to protect a baby whose parents I hardly knew,” I’d told her, “but I didn’t volunteer for that—it chose me. I’m not a hero. Me, my closest friend, most of the people I know—we’re like an evolutionary chart of morally compromised people. I might be a little farther to the right on that chart than most of them, but you, you’re not one of us at all, and I can’t think why you’d want to be. And you will be if you take over your father’s businesses. You won’t change them. They’ll change you. It’s inevitable.”
I don’t kid myself that my advice could have had any effect on someone as self-assured as Tess D’Agostino, but she’d apparently come to the same conclusion. She sold nearly everything, keeping only her father’s minority share in a film and television studio here in Los Angeles. Then she’d used the proceeds of the sale of the other Skouras businesses to buy a majority share. In short, Tess had become a studio head, and she lived locally.
I was reaching out to her now because she had no discernible link to me. No one knew that we knew each other, and thus no one would expect me to be with her. And her home, I felt certain, would be safe from close observation; every rich person I knew valued privacy and security.
So I’d given her directions to the Slaughterhouse—actually, to the intersection of two well-marked streets nearby, the neighborhood being somewhat confusing and forbidding to a newcomer, especially after dark. Then I’d collected my night’s pay from Jack, in fifties and twenties that I divided up between my gym bag and my wallet, and left. I had to resist the urge to hurry. No one in the crowd pointed at me or stared. These weren’t the kind of people who checked the news on their smartphones.
Outside, the temperature had dropped to the high sixties. The streets were mostly empty. The occasional car passed, but I was the only person on the sidewalk. A newspaper skated past my feet. At the corner I stopped, shifted the gym bag on my shoulder. Beyond Tess’s hospitality to depend on, I had six hundred in cash, two Vicodin, and the Browning. No change of clothes, but that was a minor annoyance. There were worse states of affairs.
Besides, wouldn’t this be over in a day or two? Somehow the police had to figure out that there was a mix-up, that Hailey Cain wasn’t their suspect. How could they not? I hadn’t shot a cop or anyone else. I’d been in L.A.
One problem with that: I’d been off the grid a long time. No rental contract. No utility bills. No real job with a W-4 or a time card. Come to think of it, who could even alibi me that the police would take seriously? Serena? Diana? I hadn’t even been hanging with CJ lately.
Oh, God, CJ. Had he seen the news yet? Would he possibly entertain the—
That was when I heard the sirens.
Don’t assume they’re for you, I told myself. This is L.A., after all. I looked around for flashing lights and movement and saw them. Two squad cars were heading my way.
I set the gym bag down, sat on my heels, and quickly retrieved the money from inside. I didn’t want to run with the bag. I didn’t want to run at all, because if there was any chance these squad cars were on an unrelated call, I didn’t want to give myself away. Nothing gets a cop’s attention like someone who runs away from the sight of him.
The two cars turned onto the street I was on.
Tess, dammit, I trusted you.
I abandoned the bag and sprinted, looking as I did so for an alleyway or any tight space I could disappear into. I didn’t want to stay in the open. If I turned this into a footrace, with obstacles, maybe I could win.
The sirens grew louder behind me. Ahead I saw a narrow driveway between buildings and headed for it. When I dived between the buildings, I was almost in full dark while I ran about twenty yards, and then I emerged into moonlight again.
Dead end. I was in a paved area where several buildings backed up to each other. There were two Dumpsters and about several dozen cigarette butts from a legion of workers taking breaks, so many that the ghost of nicotine hung in the air. The doors that I saw were solid windowless double doors, almost certainly all locked. There were no open windows.
“Damn,” I said. “Dammit.” The sirens were growing louder. What now? Climb up on a Dumpster and jump for a low-hanging rain gutter, try to make the roofline?
The cop cars were so close that I could hear the engine noise under the sirens. I turned, resigned, to look back at the driveway I’d run along, saw a brief flash of black-and-white as the cars swept past. Then the sound of the sirens began to lengthen, stretching out in that Doppler fade.
False alarm. I took a breath and began to walk back down the driveway. The sound of the cop cars was still receding. Broken glass crunched under my boots.
Out on the street again, I saw nothing but a dark gray Chrysler Crossfire, the little coupe with that funny, rounded European shape, parked at the curb. The driver’s door was open, and Tess D’Agostino was sitting on her heels outside, examining the gym bag I’d left pushed behind a trash can.
“Hey,” I said when I was close enough, my breathing back to normal. I bent down to pick up the bag. “Thanks for coming.”
Tess straightened up. She was wearing a dark pea coat, heavier than the weather called for, over a collarless white shirt, black trousers, and black stack-heeled boots, the same kind she’d worn the first time I saw her. She’d cut her bronze hair back to chin length since I’d seen her last.
“Did you run when you heard the sirens?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I thought maybe I was too late,” she said. Then she nodded toward the Crossfire. “Let’s not linger here longer than we have to, shall we?”