“I’m fine,” the doctor said. “The situation you just relieved me of hasn’t been that ‘hellish,’ at least not in my experience.”
Baby and I looked at each other.
“This isn’t my first incarceration,” he said finally.
“Excuse me?”
“The first time I was abducted, a cartel in Mexico City put me in a basement under a steelworks factory. It was hot, loud, damp. They kept me in the dark, like a mushroom. I caught a foot fungus down there that took me three months to get rid of after I was released,” he said.
“How long were you down there?” Baby asked.
“Five months,” he said. “It was my own fault. I kept resisting cooking the meth for them. Trying to escape every chance I got. Attacking the men who were guarding me. Now I just do what I’m told. I usually get let out or sold to another cartel after a couple of weeks when I’ve made more meth than the gang can sell. So when I get an opportunity to leave, I try to make myself difficult to find.”
The car filled with silence.
Baby adjusted the rearview mirror so she could see his face better, then took out her phone and started tapping. I drove on through the dark, trying to process all this, trying to envision my father as a cartel man. I had just come from his inexplicably lavish dwelling on the sand in Manhattan Beach. My heart sank in my chest.
“He’s telling the truth,” Baby said, flashing her phone screen at me. “There are tons of missing persons alerts on this guy. Look. ‘Dr. Perry Tuddy, last seen at Walmart in Studio City, missing two weeks.’ ‘Dr. Perry Tuddy missing three weeks, feared dead.’”
“What makes you such hot cartel property, Dr. Tuddy?”
“Perry is fine.” He was watching the desert roll by the windows, the distant highway a string of gold lights. “They want me because while I was studying for my PhD at Claremont I developed an alternative to methylamine, which is essential in the production of crystal meth. The cartels were having trouble getting hold of pseudoephedrine, so they started using methylamine because it’s cheaper and easier to get. My alternative is even cheaper and easier than that. Things are getting competitive for meth dealers with fentanyl use on the rise.”
“Fentanyl is stronger and cheaper than meth,” Baby said, pulling a vape from her purse. “I saw that on Dateline.”
“I was studying the effects of methylamine and some other chemicals on the brain in pursuit of a cure for Alzheimer’s, not illicit drug production,” Perry said. “But my discovery was culture changing. The LA Times ran a story about my work and how pharmaceutical companies were bidding for the patent. I was abducted for the first time a week later.”
“Why the hell don’t you just leave the country?” I asked, reaching over and flicking Baby’s vape from her hand. She squealed and punched the dashboard. “Why stay here and keep getting abducted over and over?”
“Because Los Angeles is my home.” He snorted as though the suggestion was preposterous. “I won’t be driven out of my own city.”
“Well, if you’re so desperate to stay here, why don’t you hire a team of bodyguards with all the money you made selling your recipe for metha…meffle…” Baby looked at me for help.
“Methylamine,” I said.
“Meth…” She thought for a moment. “Metha-lama-lama-whatever-whatever.”
“Because this is my life,” Perry said. “I’m not going to go into hiding like a criminal just because I’m a genius. I’m not going to have goons shoving people out of my way everywhere I go.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but I couldn’t decide what to think of his comment about criminals and his own genius, and his apparently casual acceptance of regularly being abducted because of it.
A purple chrome Subaru WRX roared past us on the highway, heading in the opposite direction, green lights under the rims making it look like a spacecraft hovering just above the surface of the road. Cartel men? I quickly took the next exit before they could realize they’d just passed the women they saw on the shipping container camera liberating their captive genius.
Chapter 28
At the Miffy’s in San Bernardino, Dr. Perry Tuddy wrangled his tall, gangly body from the back seat of my car and walked off toward the brightly lit restaurant without saying good-bye or thanking us for releasing him. Baby hung an elbow out the window and watched him go, shaking her head in disbelief.
“Maybe he just likes being abducted,” she said.
“You think so?”
“Could be kind of exciting.” She shrugged. “Not knowing when you’re going to get grabbed next. Always looking over your shoulder. I can see how it would make life interesting.”
“Your life is pretty interesting already, Baby, from what I can tell.”
“Wrong.”
“You might be right about Tuddy, but those cartel guys don’t mess around,” I continued. “It’s only a matter of time before they stop playing catch and release with the good doctor. You know what they say. It’s all fun and games until someone winds up in a mass grave outside Tijuana,” I said.
“They say that? Who says that?” Baby said. “Anyway, he’s wrong about Dad. He was a genuine asshole, but he wasn’t a crook.”
I didn’t have the heart to break it to Baby that clearly our father was as much a stranger to her as he was to me, even if she had spent the last thirteen years living with him. Instead, I rolled out of the parking lot and switched on the radio. A news broadcast was just beginning.
“…of the eighteen-year-old has not yet been ruled a homicide, but LAPD officers have issued an urgent call for witnesses who might have seen a white van in the area of Trousdale Estates.”
“Trousdale Estates,” Baby said. “That’s in Beverly Hills.”
“White van,” I said, turning up the radio.
Chapter 29
It was the moments before the raids that Vera liked the most. When all the preparation had been done, when she had run the choreography through in her mind a hundred times and had nothing more to do than enjoy the beautiful dance as it began on the stage.
Vera had recognized the same electric excitement in her father and his friends on the nights he held meetings beside the pool at their lavish home. Vera wasn’t stupid. She’d known from age thirteen that her father was in the Russian mob and those meetings were probably about killing someone. Those were the only times when a bunch of guys ever got together so quietly, without drinks, without food, without women. She’d watch from her bedroom on the second floor, but never heard anything. She just knew. It was the whites of their eyes, their heads bent close together, mouths working fast as a plan was formed. A week later, there was always a funeral. Big floral wreaths and lots of serious handshakes.
The whites of their eyes. Ashton’s were big and almost blue against his dark pupils in the night. They were gathered at the back of Vera’s car in the dark beneath a huge oak tree as she handed out the voice-distorting mouthpieces, which they pulled over their heads and tightened with straps behind their ears like gas masks. They always distorted their voices when they hit the house of someone they knew.
“Where’s Benzo?” Vera asked, switching on her headpiece. Her voice came out deep and robotic. “Did anyone get an answer yet?”
“He probably just forgot,” Penny said. “Benzo’s been sweating over some stupid yacht he’s trying to buy from up in San Fran. I told him two yachts is enough for anybody, but he wouldn’t listen. Nobody ever listens to me.”
“What?” Sean nudged her. Penny slapped at him.
“He’s never missed a Crew meeting before,” Ashton said. “And he always answers. I think we should abort. This isn’t right. And hitting one of our teachers? It’s too risky right now. It’s too close to home, and with everything that’s been—”
“We’re not aborting,” Vera snapped. The other three watched her, eyes bugging. “I’ve been looking forward to this one. We’ve done all the research. If Benzo misses out, that’s his fault. Bitch needs to learn how to set
an alarm.”
“Yeah, let’s do this.” Penny high-fived her twin brother. “I’ve been ready to hit that smart-ass prick Mr. Newcombe forever.”
Vera pulled a skull mask over her mouthpiece and tightened the straps on the wrists of her gloves. The excitement was hammering in her now, a hot, heavy thumping of her heart behind her ribs. Her Midnight Crew had hit twelve homes, and the raids were always good—but they were even better when she picked the target.
Vera’s science teacher, Mr. Newcombe, was constantly dropping hints that he knew about Vera’s father. Asking if Vera’s dad had any tattoos, if that old Viggo Mortensen movie Eastern Promises was accurate. A couple of months earlier, Mr. Newcombe had been reading a newspaper while the class worked through exercises from their textbooks. On the front page had been a story about a cocaine shipment arrest at LAX linked to the Russians.
“How are things at home, Vera?” he’d asked, grinning, flipping the page of the newspaper suggestively.
Vera didn’t know if the teacher wanted to be a part of her father’s world or if he was simply lording over her that he knew about her criminal family. Whatever the case, she didn’t like it. She had the feeling Mr. Newcombe wanted her to feel small. She’d known teachers like him before, men who’d been picked on in school and who now spent their days punishing the popular and powerful kids in their classes as revenge. Vera was going to make him feel small that night. She was going to make him feel like the lowliest of creatures.
Chapter 30
They turned onto Mr. Newcombe’s street and approached his home. Vera nodded to Sean as he clipped the wires on the neighbor’s surveillance camera, so the device wouldn’t catch them going in. Ashton and Penny were breathing hard, making their voice-distorting devices growl quietly. Vera led them down the side of the teacher’s house to the back porch, where Ashton set up a mobile jammer on the railing to block the signals of any devices on both floors of the house. Vera took the key she had copied from Mr. Newcombe’s set, which he regularly left on his desk in the classroom throughout lunch, and slipped it into the lock of the back door.
This wasn’t like the jobs they’d done in rich suburbs like Palos Verdes or Brentwood, where they’d had to overcome security patrols, infrared cameras, guard dogs. Darrel Newcombe’s teacher’s salary provided locks on the doors and not much else. Their biggest obstacle had been ensuring Newcombe’s neighbors on all sides would be out on the night of their entry, so no one would hear their activities and call the cops. Having each household coincidentally win tickets to a one-night-only performance by Neil Diamond at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre had taken care of that.
The house was dim and silent. Ambient light that would usually have been generated by electronics was gone, but Vera had cut school the day before and taken a tour of the man’s house, memorizing the path to the stairs. She’d stopped to look at a framed photograph of Newcombe and his boyfriend on a skiing trip in Austria on the walk up the stairs. She tapped it gently as she passed now.
“I want this,” she said. She glanced back. Ashton’s silhouette nodded in the light from the porch window. The four of them slipped quietly into Newcombe’s bedroom and stood around the bed where two sleeping men lay, one of them snoring raggedly. Vera inhaled. She smelled skin lotion and used sheets, air freshener from the adjoining bathroom. Intimate smells. She had invaded Newcombe’s most private space and stood now relishing what was about to happen as something instinctual roused the teacher from his sleep and his figure twisted in the sheets.
“Wha—what?”
The crew pounced on the men in the bed.
Chapter 31
In Vera’s experience, most people didn’t try to flee or fight when presented with a situation as sudden and terrifying as a home invasion.
They froze.
Mr. Newcombe and his boyfriend did just that. Vera ripped the sheet from the bed, exposing their naked bodies, and after some initial surprised yelping and scrambling, the men went stiff and silent as Penny, Sean, and Ashton dragged them out of the room and down the stairs. They hardly resisted being cable-tied to the heavy dining room table. When the men were secured, Penny and Sean dashed away to indulge their violent fantasies—Penny grabbing objects off the shelves and smashing them on the tiles, pulling down curtains in the living room, while Sean crudely scrawled “FAGGOTS” on the wall with black spray paint. Sean probably thought he was being clever, seeing as he was gay himself, throwing the authorities off the trail by making it look like this was a hate crime. Vera decided any opportunity Sean got in his life to feel clever was a rare occurrence, so she let it go. Ashton smashed open the frame on the wall in the stairwell and ripped the picture out, stuffed it into his backpack.
The men were splayed across the tabletop, one at each end, their wrists bound to the upper joints of the table legs. Vera watched Mr. Newcombe struggle for a while. His body was smooth and hard, surprisingly beautiful, something that had always been a mystery to her in the classroom, underneath his boring plaid shirts and Walmart trousers.
“Darrel Newcombe,” Vera said, leaning on the table. The two men looked at her, wide-eyed, and she smiled beneath the mask. “Yeah, this is about you, asshole. This is about you believing you’re better than the people who have to obey you. We’re here to teach you that you’re a lowly little worm. At any minute one of us could decide to squash you.”
Sean and Penny raced up the stairs, laughing. Vera heard the floorboards creak above her as they jumped from one piece of furniture to another like little children, springing onto the bed, playing games.
“See,” Vera said, drawing a small silver revolver from the back pocket of her jeans, “there are people who have power, Darrel. And there are people who think they have power.”
“Whoa,” Ashton said. He was frozen midstride in the kitchen, the broom he had been using to knock items from shelves gripped in his hand like a club. “What the hell is that?”
Vera released and pushed open the revolver’s cylinder. She drew a small handful of bullets from her front pocket, showed Mr. Newcombe the objects in her hand. She loaded one, two, three bullets into the six slots in the weapon and spun the barrel.
“Hey, hey, hey.” Ashton rushed toward her. “Where did you get that?”
Vera held the gun to Darrel Newcombe’s temple. Ashton stopped. The teacher was sweating and whimpering. Across the table, his boyfriend had burst into sobs behind his tape gag.
“We’re not doing this.” Ashton’s robotic voice was deep and hard. “We never—”
Vera pulled the trigger.
Chapter 32
The gun clicked.
“Oh, my God!” Ashton dropped the broom.
Vera laughed. Her voice came out through the modifier in a terrifying cackle. “Ah, God! Did you feel that?”
Ashton watched in horror as Vera spun the chamber of the gun and snapped it shut again, held it to her own temple.
“We have the power, you understand?” she asked Mr. Newcombe. “We were born with it. It’s real. You want to see it again? Watch this.”
She pulled the trigger. The gun clicked. Her whole body twitched with excitement, terror, a relief that was almost sexual.
She spun the barrel again.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” Ashton grabbed for the weapon as she put it back against the teacher’s head. He managed to knock it away as she pulled the trigger, and a bullet smashed into a cabinet by the stairs. Ashton let Vera’s arm go, and she pointed the gun at him, his black mask identical to the cardboard targets she was so used to obliterating at the firing range.
The room was swirling, dancing in her vision. It was joy. Pure joy, the unpredictability of it all, the clash of possibilities. Live. Die. Kill. Spare. Destroy. Consume. Burn. The wheel was going round and round. What would happen next? She was shivering with excitement, just trying to account for all the possibilities. This was what Vera had come here for. The punishment and the possibilities. The game of chance and will.
“
What the hell is going on?” Penny asked from the stairs. She and her brother had barreled down at the sound of the shot.
Vera lowered the gun. A decision made. A path chosen. She was ready for her next ride.
“Let’s go.” She swung an arm and they followed, as she knew they would.
Chapter 33
Morning came too soon. At the Denny’s on West El Segundo, I ordered the Grand Slam with extra pancakes and sat making phone calls, one after another, dealing with my suddenly abandoned life back in Colorado and the present situation in Los Angeles. Baby ordered black coffee. She sat sipping it while I smothered my pancakes with maple syrup.
“You eat this kind of thing every day?” she asked when I was off the phone, her eyes wandering over the spread in front of me.
“Only when I’ve just had a 120-pound orphan dumped on me.”
“Excuse me?” She scoffed and looked around in case someone had heard my overestimation of her weight. Baby turned her phone camera toward her face and touched a hand to the fashionable headscarf that dangled over her shoulder.
“I’m adjusting to my life as a mother,” I continued, ignoring her. “I need the energy.”
“You’re not my mother,” Baby said.
“I’ve got a piece of paper that basically says otherwise.”
“If you skipped breakfast a few days a week you’d lose weight,” she said. “Intermittent fasting. Google it.”
“Did you body-shame Dad too, or am I just lucky?” I asked.
“That’s different,” Baby said. “It’s okay for guys to be fat.”
“Excuse me,” I said to the server as she topped up my coffee. “Could you please tell me what year it is? My daughter here thinks it’s 1959.”
The two of us shared an eye roll.
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