Ransom River

by Meg Gardiner

“In that case, I’ll lose him.”

  He pulled into a left-turn lane. The light was red.

  Traffic was skimpy. He checked the cross street. There were no oncoming vehicles within two hundred yards. He jammed the pedal down and ran the light, swinging the truck sharply around the corner.

  Rory’s grabbed the window frame. “Dammit, Seth.”

  “Oops.” He accelerated up the street. “Color blindness comes on suddenly sometimes.”

  He glanced in the mirror. “Yeah, the wrecker’s stuck behind cars at the light. Boone can’t get around without looking like an absolute maniac.”

  The truck gained speed. A block farther on they reached the Westside Shopping Center. Seth practically skidded into the vast parking lot. He got among the rows of parked cars and accelerated, revving the engine. He zeroed in on the farthest corner of the lot and squealed around a corner to the alley on the back side of the mall. He floored the pickup past Dumpsters and loading docks, blew past delivery trucks that were unloading merchandise. In his wake trash blew into the air.

  Rory held on to the frame of the cab and braced herself. Her mouth was dry.

  Not this again. “Seth.”

  It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t exciting anymore. She gritted her teeth. “You don’t need to do this.”

  He raced to the end of the alley, braked sharply, and rounded a corner to the exit. He bounced out onto the street and punched the accelerator again.

  “Do you see him?” he said.

  Rory could barely see anything through her nerves and anger.

  “Rory.”

  She looked in the side mirror. “No.”

  “Do you see any vehicles at all following us?”

  He took the next corner hard, swinging wide into a residential neighborhood.

  “No. For God’s sake. Stop,” she said.

  Seth raced to the end of the block, screeched around another corner, and kept going. Ahead was a city park, with playgrounds, a wooded picnic area, baseball diamonds. Seth sped into the parking lot, floored it to the far end, and swung the pickup behind a maintenance shed. He rocked it suddenly to a stop and pulled the parking brake.

  He glanced around. His face was calm but his eyes were bright. “We’re completely out of sight of the road. If he doesn’t pull in here in the next thirty seconds, we’re clear.”

  Rory gripped the frame of the truck. She was pressing her feet hard against the floorboards and leaning back against the seat, like she was braking. Like she was falling and bracing herself against a calamitous stop.

  She opened her mouth to speak and thought better of it.

  Seth glanced at his watch. “We lost him.”

  She unbuckled her seat belt.

  Seth had his hand on the gearshift. “Rory?”

  She opened the door and climbed out.

  “Where are you going?”

  She bent and put her hands on her knees. After a second she heard Seth’s door open. She straightened and walked to the maintenance shed. It was a faded wooden structure painted dull red. Seth rounded the truck toward her, his face concerned but wary.

  She put up a hand. “Don’t.”

  He slowed. “You all right?”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  She leaned back against the shed. She locked her knees so he wouldn’t see them shaking. From the playing fields came the sound of a bat connecting with a baseball, then cheers and laughter.

  She glared at him. “You can’t help yourself, can you?”

  “Do you think Boone just happened to be behind us? Do you think it was innocent?”

  “This isn’t Operation Ratchet, Seth. It’s my life. And I don’t want to think about what Boone was doing following me,” she said.

  “You’d better.”

  “I don’t understand why you behaved the way you just did.”

  “I wanted to get you out of a threatening situation.”

  “If you wanted to have a car chase, you could have let me out first.”

  “In the middle of the street? Alone? With somebody after you?”

  A vast and heavy silence descended on them.

  Seth tried to hold her gaze and couldn’t.

  He looked angry. Maybe at himself. Maybe at her. Maybe at the situation. His hands were clenched, like he wanted to punch something. And the pain was back in his posture.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She could barely see straight. Her heart was pounding. Sorry—for what? This? For all of it?

  “Rory?”

  “I heard you.” She leaned her head back against the shed and closed her eyes. “I heard.”

  She wanted to tell him. She felt such a swell of emotion that she nearly was lifted off her feet and pushed toward him.

  Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.

  She opened her eyes. He had drawn close to her—closer than he’d dared come all day. He looked familiar, and beautiful, and such an obstacle. She held herself against the wall. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to tell him everything.

  She said, “It’s over, Seth.”

  34

  Then

  “I need to tell you about my job.”

  They were lying on the beach in Malibu on a hot Saturday afternoon. Under a pale blue sky, sunlight fried the surface of the Pacific. Sand was stuck to Rory’s shoulders. Seth’s hair was wet and tangled. He rolled over.

  “I’ll need to be gone for a couple of weeks at a time,” he said.

  Only a few people on the Ransom River police force knew he was undercover. The rest thought he had quit the force for a regular job.

  “And some people think I’ve become a small-time hood. You get to be one of them—in public.”

  Operation Ratchet, it was called. Later, Rory called it Operation Fucking-You-Up. It was an investigation into illegal gun dealing in Ransom River and northwest Los Angeles County.

  “Fine,” she said. “I think you’re a hood. I don’t know you. I never saw you. We didn’t have this conversation. Who are you?”

  “When I’m on duty I can’t see you. I can’t call you, and you can’t call me.”

  He had a separate cell phone for when he was working. A separate driver’s license and credit cards, with another name. He had a cover legend.

  She said, “Okay. I’ll play.” She should have known better. She’d always been lousy at games.

  And later, at his apartment, he got dressed—not in jeans and a T-shirt, but in a black suit and blue dress shirt, sunglasses, and a Rolex. She drove him to a storage locker. By the time they arrived, his grin was gone. His face looked like glass—smooth, blank, and sharp-edged.

  In the storage locker, instead of his old Yamaha bike was a Mercedes. He didn’t look at her after that.

  It thrilled her. It thrilled her so much, she didn’t see that it was a game she was destined to lose.

  Seth’s real and covert lives first collided on a Thursday night on Sunset Boulevard, to the soundtrack of indie rock. The club was Hollywood loud, shiny with tourists and hustlers and wannabes. He and Rory should have been anonymous. They should have been far enough from home.

  The club was dank, except when it turned dingy. Seth sat with his back to the wall, as always. He had one hand on Rory’s leg and the other on a cold bottle of Carta Blanca. The band was a second-generation knockoff of Joan Jett and the Runaways.

  Seth saw the guy come in. He set his beer on the sticky table and leaned over to kiss Rory’s neck.

  “Get out,” he said. “Look shocked.”

  Her lips parted in surprise. He ran his fingers into her hair and held her close and murmured in her ear.

  “Get up and leave. And act like I just grabbed your ass and asked for a three-way with you and the singer.”

  “What…”

  “Catch a taxi to the Beverly Center. I’ll pick you up there.”

  She shied away from him. He pulled her back.

  “Slap me. Give me a dirty glare. Stare all you like as
long as you look royally pissed off. But leave.” He squeezed her to him. “Go.”

  They had discussed this. If he told her to split, it was because somebody from his other life had shown up. She didn’t need to pretend to be disoriented or upset. She disentangled herself from him with a flat slap across his cheek.

  She stormed toward the door and shot that dirty glare back at him. He was leaning forward, hands loose around his beer bottle, talking to a man who looked like a human knife, ready to stick you.

  Standing behind the man were two others. They looked like they expected at any second to fight off weaker, stupider people.

  Rory walked out of the club into a thumping night, cold air, headlights, neon, billboards. Her palms were sweating. She was nearly sick, and blinking with amazement. She walked three blocks before she flagged down a taxi.

  She slammed the door and the cab pulled into traffic on Sunset. A strange electricity swept through her.

  The voice in her head sounded like Seth’s. That was some mad shit.

  She smiled and couldn’t stop and, for the first time, understood what caused Seth to grin that pirate grin. It was the blood; it was a thrilling sting in her muscles that said, Yeah. This.

  He picked her up thirty minutes later at the Beverly Center, and they didn’t talk about it, didn’t remark on the encounter, though he told her, “You did good.” They went back to her cheap student apartment in west L.A. and made crazy love. And while they clutched each other and she bit his shoulder and they stood against the wall, in the dark, desperate and wild, she thought, It’s dangerous. It hit her and didn’t seem strange—What he does is dangerous. His job could get him killed.

  The people he dealt with were criminals. Real, in-the-flesh criminals, not dumb kids caught joyriding. Not ne’er-do-well relatives nabbed with too much dope or stolen stereos, people like her dear, misguided uncle, who was born with an excess of charm, joy, and poor judgment. The criminals Seth dealt with sold guns to other criminals and to criminal organizations in the U.S. and Latin America: automatic weapons, in bulk, at discount, and they didn’t take well to bad-faith negotiation. They would kill a snitch. What they would do to an undercover cop, she didn’t want to imagine.

  And Seth was worming his way into their business stream. He was trying to bring down the people at the top of the supply chain.

  He held tight to her legs and hoisted her against him and shut his eyes. But he said, “God, Rory…”

  It’s dangerous.

  She tightened her arms around his shoulders, loving the sound of her name on his tongue.

  It was only later that a new fear began to seep into her thoughts.

  He’s dangerous.

  The kick she’d felt in Hollywood lingered. It was a tangible rush: the Sunset Boulevard Express. But gradually, things got off-kilter.

  It went wrong like a gear loosening and getting out of balance. Seth not coming home. Not answering her calls. Not returning her calls even when he was off duty, because he was exhausted and stressed out. The job engulfed him.

  To infiltrate networks that were selling significant firepower to criminals in Southern California—and exporting arms by the truckload to even deadlier criminals in Mexico—Seth became another person. And the person he became was troubled and frightening. Undercover work, he claimed, was like creating a character in a video game. But that life was lonely, isolating, and psychologically perilous. Righteous justification powered him. As did the thrill. But the longer he played the game, the deeper he went. The more dim and distant the exit signs became.

  And to most other cops on the police force, he didn’t exist.

  Before being accepted as a probie undercover officer, he’d had to go through psychological testing, to ascertain whether he could live a lie without losing his mind. He aced it.

  It worked, he told her, because he stuck to the rules. He never went into a situation without knowing exactly what he was after: evidence of the crime he was investigating. He couldn’t go fishing or lure innocent people into committing crimes. He had to slide into a target’s world and watch events unfold. To assuage Rory’s worries, he explained that he had clear guidelines from the PD. Most important was to remember that he was first and always a police officer. And his training provided him with principles for situations where his actions were, unavoidably, ambiguous.

  Except it didn’t. He was intense, inventive, and young. That made him rash.

  And, as Operation Ratchet drew closer to the point where arrests would be made, he withdrew into himself under the pressure.

  Then came Rory’s second ride on the Sunset Boulevard Express.

  35

  Seth pulled away as though she’d backhanded him.

  “No,” she said. She saw that he had misconstrued her words. “That’s not what I mean by It’s over. I mean the past, everything—”

  “I get it.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  Her phone rang. She let it.

  “I mean what’s done is done. Let it go. I don’t want to get caught up in an endless loop, repeating history,” she said.

  “Don’t worry. That’s not going to happen. I’m clear on that now.”

  The phone kept ringing. The sun felt unnaturally bright.

  “Can we stop for a minute and back this conversation up?” she said.

  Seth nodded at her ringing phone. “I imagine that’s relevant.”

  She looked at it. Local number. Familiar. She answered. “Amber?”

  “There you are, honey. I was worried for a sec.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I just got a call from Boone. He said he saw Seth Colder here in town.”

  “That may be the case. I didn’t see Boone—is he downtown?”

  She eyed Seth. He became alert.

  “I just wondered if you knew Seth was around. I thought you might want to know. Because. So you’d be prepared, in case.”

  “In case?” Rory said.

  “In case you ran into him. I didn’t want it to be a hurtful surprise,” Amber said.

  “That’s thoughtful of you. I appreciate the heads-up.”

  “We all know what a…troubling time you had, honey. I don’t know what he could be doing here. Do you?”

  “I’ll figure it out. Thanks, Amber.”

  She hung up. Seth stared at the keys in his hand.

  “You willing to get back in the truck?” he said.

  He didn’t say, Have I blown it all over again?

  It happened three days before she was scheduled to take the bar exam. Seth came home and stripped off the clothes and jewelry and washed off the cologne of his assumed persona but couldn’t shed his apprehension. Unease hung in the air around him like an almost-visible cloak. And with the bar exam looming, Rory was under serious pressure. Three years of education, tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, and her job hung in the balance.

  He was jumpy, far focused, quick to anger. She was short-tempered and touchy. She should, maybe, have cut him some slack. But life didn’t come with a Rewind button.

  She couldn’t say whether it was a mistake, a slip, or bad luck. Or even a tip-off. Later, she knew, people had made inquiries. They’d grilled Seth. Still, nobody knew for sure.

  She and Seth had dinner in the San Fernando Valley, a Mexican restaurant across the city limits from Ransom River. The place had twinkly white Christmas lights strung around the walls and garish paintings of matadors. The food was cheap and plentiful, and the beer was colder than snow.

  And it had a jukebox. Seth was standing next to it, one hand braced on the wall, choosing a song to buy for his quarters. His back was turned. Rory held on to her Diet Coke, wondering if he was turning his back on her as well. Whether he was losing his grip on his own life. She was watching him so intently that she didn’t see the door open. She didn’t realize she had been approached until the man was standing next to her table.

  It was the human knife.

  He was short and wore a w
hite turtleneck and a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, as though he were a history professor. But his eyes were like a doll’s: round, all pupil, no expression. One of his goons stood behind him.

  “Imagine seeing you here,” he said.

  She stared at him, quietly. Every synapse in her body shouted, Run.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “You must have changed your mind about my friend Hollis.”

  He didn’t look at Seth. Neither did Rory. She was trying furiously not to say the wrong thing. The next words out of her mouth needed to be the right ones.

  She held the man’s lifeless gaze. “Could be.”

  “How long you two been seeing each other?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

  “I didn’t offer it.”

  At the jukebox, Seth dropped in his coins. “Sweet Home Alabama” began to play. He turned around.

  He didn’t even hesitate. He walked back to the table. And his walk was not his walk; the look in his eyes was not Seth Colder’s. He approached smoothly, like a cobra.

  “Dobro,” he said.

  The man smiled. It was a waxen, humorless grin. His eyes stayed round and predatory.

  “So you managed to corral her after all,” Dobro said.

  Rory had never believed in guardian angels. If anything was hovering over her shoulder, breathing down her neck, it didn’t have wings and a halo. She hoped her heart wasn’t pounding so hard it was visible through her chest wall.

  Seth put himself between her and Dobro. Not to protect her, she thought—Dobro didn’t seem overtly aggressive. No, Seth was claiming her.

  “The beer’s good,” he said. “Enjoy yourselves.”

  The man’s waxwork smile remained. He looked at her. “Your mister’s not being polite. What’s your name, sweetheart?”

  “I’m the goddess Wanda,” she said. And she smiled at Seth, coldly, a flash of teeth. “You better treat me like a goddess if you wanda get anywhere with me.”

  Dobro snorted. He said to Seth, “We’ll see you around.”

  He and his man walked to the bar. Seth sat down. His face was blank, but his eyes were wired. He drank a long swallow of beer. “Sweet Home Alabama” rocked from the jukebox.