by Rob Thomas
She’d known Dick since high school—for a while, after her father’s fall from grace, he’d been one of her tormenters. After she started dating Logan—who just happened to be Dick’s best friend—he’d eased up, and over time they’d made a kind of peace, though she wasn’t sure she’d call him her friend. He was rich and careless and had the emotional depth of a chunk of concrete; the only real goals that registered for him were surfing, drinking, and screwing.
In other words, she really shouldn’t have been so surprised to see him at a party run by the offspring of cartel kingpins a half mile down the beach from his own house.
“Hi!” she said, in her clipped, bright Amber-the-Coed voice. “Isn’t this party amazing?”
He gave her a confused, blank look. “Um, yeah? That’s kind of why I’m shocked to see you here.” He turned back to his audience of bikini-clad girls. “We went to high school together. I guess you girls would have been in, like, fifth grade? Crazy.”
She glanced at the girls—a few of them stared daggers at her, territorial aggression alight in their eyes.
“Anyway, Ronnie here’s a private dick,” he said loudly, gesturing at her. He leaned toward one of the girls, chortling and nudging her with his elbow. “I’m a not-so-private Dick, if you get what I’m saying.” The girls giggled as he thrust his pelvis at them.
Veronica grabbed him by the arm and pulled him, staggering, a few feet away from the little entourage. She threw a big, shiny smile over her shoulder at the girls, then turned back to Dick.
“Whoa, whoa. I know Logan’s been gone for, like, weeks, but I can’t go all the way with you, no matter how lonely you are.” He smirked affably. “Bros before hos, you know what I’m saying? Handies only.”
“Shut up,” she commanded. She kept a smile frozen on her face, her eyes darting over the patio. “I’m here to work, Dick.”
His gaze moved up and down her body. “Nice uniform.”
She punched him in the arm. From far away it might have looked playful. Dick clutched his bicep, groaning.
“Jeez, Double-O-Psycho, what’s your problem?”
“Listen, just keep your voice down, okay?” They were walking back along the edge of the patio now. On their left, a set of stairs led down to the dark beach. The ocean glowed gently beyond, the tidal roar completely swallowed by the noise from the party. She rummaged in her straw beach bag and pulled out her phone. “I need your help. Have you seen this guy here tonight?”
He glanced at the picture on her screen, frowning. “That guy? Yeah, I’ve seen him. He’s always hanging around Rico and Eduardo.”
She blinked. “You know the Gutiérrez cousins?”
“Yeah, kind of. I’ve played squash with Eduardo a couple times. He’s a poor loser, so I stopped.” He shrugged. “He’s got a bad temper. Broke a two-hundred-dollar racquet last time I beat him. But dude knows how to throw a party.”
“And Willie Murphy is a friend of his?”
Dick snorted. “Friend? No. I think he’s, like, an errand boy or something. He rounds up people for the parties and stuff.”
She stood for a moment, her mind processing all this. What if Willie was working for the Gutiérrez cousins? What if he’d gotten rid of Hayley and Aurora on their orders? Then, trying to cash in another time on the crime, he’d taken Hayley’s necklace and sold it. Not exactly criminal mastermind behavior—but then again, Murphy wouldn’t be the first guy to screw himself over that way.
“Have you seen him here tonight?”
“Sure.” He pointed up toward the terrace. “Right over there.”
She looked up to see a scrawny form in oversize patchwork pants, his dark blond dreadlocks bobbing around his shoulders as he walked through the doors into the house.
She released Dick’s arm. He rubbed it again, frowning. “Thanks, Dick. I’ve got to run.” She walked a few quick steps away from him, then turned around. “And, Dick?”
“Yeah?” He frowned.
“If anyone asks, my name is Amber.”
He blinked, then shrugged. “Whatever you say, Rons.”
She turned and walked up the steps, as quickly as her heels—and her bikini’s precarious arrangement with her anatomy—allowed. By the time she reached the door he’d vanished into the house.
She looked around the kitchen. The strip poker game had deteriorated, the boy who’d been shirtless just a few minutes ago now in nothing but boxers and a single white sock. The girl in the necktie had a rancid-smelling cigar clamped between her teeth. “Did you guys see a boy with dreadlocks come through here? Which way did he go?”
The girl gestured with the burning end of her cigar toward the hallway that led to the front of the house.
Veronica pushed into the hall, into the depths of the crowd. In the front entryway, kids gyrated and screamed like the world was about to end, climbing on top of one another. She couldn’t see anything at her height—but looking up, she caught sight of Willie Murphy heading upstairs.
By the time she got to the second-floor landing, he was disappearing through a pair of wide double doors at the end of the long hall.
When she finally fought her way to the doors, they were locked.
She pressed her lips together, glancing around. The hall was filled with people, and while none of them seemed to be paying attention to her, she didn’t want anyone to suddenly look up and see her trying to get access to a locked room. Especially not those guys, she thought, noticing that in the crowd there were a few granite-faced men with suspicious bulges beneath their armpits. More heavies, in case crowd control was needed.
She staggered back downstairs with a ditzy, drunken grin on her face. She paused for a moment on the lowest stair, pretending to clutch the banister for balance. There would be only one shot to make this work, and it was a long one. She had to pick her target carefully.
Then, before she could talk herself out of it, she plowed into a bull-necked guy in a University of Washington football jersey as hard as she could.
The size discrepancy between them was vast, to say the least. Veronica barely came up to his armpit. But she threw her weight low in his center of gravity. He staggered forward a few steps, then turned to see who’d hit him. She could have sworn she saw steam coming from his nostrils.
She’d always been able to summon a few thin crocodile tears. Now her lip trembled, and she pointed at another man, a big guy with a ponytail and a shirt that barely buttoned over his massive chest. “That guy just threw me down,” she whimpered. The football player’s eyes narrowed. He chivalrously helped her to her feet. Then he strode over to the other guy and started shouting in his face.
She couldn’t hear what they were saying over the sound of the music, but it was easy to piece together what was happening when the football player started to shove the other guy with sharp, taunting pushes. Ponytail didn’t back down. His lip curled up in a savage sneer. Then he swung a punch.
It happened quickly. Everyone moved to the edges of the room, trying to get out of the way while still securing a spot to watch the fight. People coming in from other rooms craned their necks to see over the crowd. Johnny Football had a nasty uppercut and could take a punch like a pro—but it turned out Ponytail was some kind of mixed martial artist. His leg lashed out in a sweep beneath the football player’s knees, and suddenly both men were on the floor, rolling around in a tangle of limbs. The music drowned out the dull, fleshy sound of punches landing. The crowd cheered.
A stampede of footsteps, and five enormous bodyguards came running down the stairs. Three of them worked to try to herd the crowd outside, away from the fight. Two moved in to try to get the guys off each other. Veronica didn’t stick around to watch who won.
It was just as she’d hoped—the upstairs hallway was almost empty. She heard predictable sounds coming from some of the bedrooms—moans, shrieks of laughter, catcalls—but the double doors she’d seen Willie go through were unguarded. She pressed her ear to one side. Then she knocked. When she wa
s sure there was no one there, she pulled the hairpin she always kept in her wallet and jammed it in the lock.
Interior locks were usually pretty easy to get into. She felt the pin moving at the end of the pick. Then the door swung inward. She slid the pin into her hair, stepped in, and locked the door again behind her.
She stood at the head of another long hallway, the walls painted peacock blue and wainscoted in dark, glossy wood. An end table beneath what looked like a signed and dated Picasso sketch held an enormous urn of roses in white and yellow, and stained glass sconces gave off a mild glow up and down the hall. From somewhere inside one of the rooms she could hear a low rumble of music. She froze for a moment, straining to hear where it was coming from. She couldn’t tell.
Several doors stood open along the hallway. Moving as quietly as she could, she started to look around.
The first door led to a bathroom, lined with shining green tile and dark slate. The drawers beneath the sink were empty, but in the medicine cabinet there was a cornucopia of pill bottles—Dilaudid, Percocet, Oxy, and some others she didn’t recognize—and an antique snuff case, full of loose white powder. She carefully put everything back where she’d found it and shut the cabinet.
Another door looked in on a small suite that could have come straight out of the Playboy Mansion. A huge round bed took up most of the room. Red and green neon lighting ran around the walls in abstract shapes, and a bar stood in one corner. In an adjoining room, a huge Jacuzzi-style tub sat bubbling quietly, already warmed up.
A set of wide French doors stood open to show a circular library beyond. Built-in wooden bookshelves lined the walls, filled with heavy leather tomes and fronted with glass. The books seemed to be actual collectors’ items, carefully curated. She saw Aristotle, Erasmus, Machiavelli. Someone was a classicist—or had the money to look like one. A fire crackled in an enormous stone hearth, and the furniture was glossy and dark.
She moved quickly and quietly, her high heels dangling from one hand so they wouldn’t make a noise on the hardwood. It wasn’t until she turned the corner in the hall that she saw where the music was coming from. It streamed out of a partly open door, an ominous electronic thud. Veronica’s heart hammered in her ears, asynchronous with the music’s rhythm. She held her breath and crept toward the open door.
It led to a den. Framed movie posters—Scarface, The Godfather, GoodFellas—hung around the walls; track lighting generated a warm, indirect glow. A wide scarlet couch sat in front of a plasma-screen TV mounted on the wall. Two men were sitting on the couch, playing a video game, their backs to the hall. One had short, shiny dark hair.
The other sprouted with wild dirty-blond dreadlocks.
The dark-haired head bent down for a moment. The smell of pot suddenly filled the air. She could hear the gurgling sound of someone taking a deep, committed hit.
“I’m not complaining, man,” said Willie Murphy. He talked quickly, in a lilting, urgent patter, never taking his eyes off the screen, where the burly army guy he was playing let loose a hail of bullets at an alien. “You guys are like family to me, you know? I mean, anything you want, anything I can do, I’ll do.”
She watched as Rico Gutiérrez Ortega tilted his head back and exhaled.
“Anyone ever tell you you talk too much?” he finally asked as his lungs cleared.
Pulse throbbing in her ears, Veronica took a few steps back from the door. She pulled out her phone with shaking fingers, and then, covering the speaker with her thumb to mute it, she dialed Lamb’s cell.
It rang six times. She clutched the phone with white-knuckled hands, wondering if he’d seen her name on the caller ID and was screening her out. She didn’t want to just call 911—there wasn’t an emergency to report, and by the time she convinced dispatch that this was related to the missing girls, it might be too late.
Just as she was about to give up, he answered.
“What is it?” His voice was brusque and dismissive. She closed her eyes, mentally thanking whatever higher power had talked him into answering.
“Lamb, it’s Veronica Mars. This afternoon I got a lead on a suspect who was caught on camera selling Hayley Dewalt’s necklace two days after she disappeared. A small-time crook named William Murphy—Mac can get you the details. I’m at the Gutiérrez mansion on Manzanita, and he’s here. He’s in one of the back rooms playing video games with Federico.”
For a moment there was silence on the other end of the line. Back in the den something exploded on screen; the boys both groaned loudly. Veronica waited.
“So you want me to bust into private property, without a warrant, because someone may or may not have stolen a necklace? You’re out of your mind, Mars.”
She gripped the phone tighter. “There’s a huge party going on downstairs. I counted about fifty laws being broken. You have plenty of probable cause to get you in the door.”
“How do you even know this guy got the necklace from Hayley? How do you know—”
“Lamb, this is your chance,” she hissed, losing her temper. “I can prove that Willie Murphy had a missing girl’s necklace. Do you want to let that slip right through your fingers? Or do you want to be the big damn hero that bags the bad guy? I don’t know how long he’ll be here. You have to move.”
He was silent for another second.
“Okay, keep on him. We’re coming.”
Then he hung up.
She made her way back around the corner. Willie was still talking: “… you ever think we might all be some kind of livestock for aliens? Like maybe Earth is just a big wild game reserve and aliens come back from time to time to make sure we’ve got enough to eat and we’re healthy enough to propagate, and to pick off a couple million of us for food? I saw a program on the Discovery Channel about people who think they’ve been, like, abducted and shit. But maybe the anal probe is, like, their version of a brand. You get the old double bar up the ass, and it’s their way of marking you as theirs.”
Rico laughed wildly. One of the soldiers on the screen exploded in a shower of blood, and half the screen went black, the words GAME OVER in red. Neither one set down his controller—both seemed to think they were playing the surviving character.
The minutes crept by. She stood at the door, hoping that in the middle of their stoner ramblings they’d say something about one of the girls. Any minute she expected to hear sirens, shouts through a bullhorn, the party being invaded. Willie and Rico kept jamming the buttons on their controllers, shouting whenever one of them died.
“Shit, son, I fucking pwnd you,” Rico jeered.
“The controller wasn’t working. It was, like, stuck or something.”
“Sure, sure.” A machine gun blast, then: “Damn, man, I keep thinking of that little Puerto Rican girl in the pink bikini.”
“The one with the bangs?”
“No, the one with the pierced belly button. Cute, cute, cute.”
Willie laughed so hard he started to cough. “Dude, she called you a douche bag. I don’t think she’s that into you, man. Plus she’s here with, like, twenty girlfriends. No way can we get her alone.”
“No, man, look—here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna go to the garage and get the Ferrari. Then we’re gonna drive it around to the patio with the bass thumping. They are gonna swarm us, man. Bitches love Ferraris.” He held up his controller and jammed over and over again on one of the buttons. “Then we’ll load up the honeys and take ’em to Taco Bell.”
“Taco Bell? Man, there’s, like, smoked salmon and asparagus in truffle oil and, like, crudités downstairs. Why the hell do you want to go to Taco Bell?”
Rico shrugged. “I like their chalupas.”
Willie’s voice went dreamy. “Oh, yeah. Those are awesome.”
Rico stood halfway up, then fell back into the sofa, laughing hysterically.
Oh, shit. The stoners are on the move. Willie was helping Rico to his feet. Not very quickly, or efficiently … but on the move nonetheless. Time to exit.
<
br /> She backed up a few steps, then turned on her heel and went back the way she’d come. If she hurried, she’d have time to duck into one of the other rooms, hide behind the door until they passed. She rounded the corner and pushed her way into the library …
… and right into Eduardo.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A short, shrill scream burst out of her throat before she could stop it. Eduardo grabbed her by the bicep, his fingers digging into her bare flesh. He dragged her farther into the library behind him.
“How the fuck did you get back here?” Spittle flew from his mouth. She instinctively shrank away from him, but he had an iron grip on her arm.
The sound of footsteps pounded along the corridor outside. Rico burst into the room, Willie on his heels.
“What’s going on?” Rico stopped in his tracks and stared. Behind him, Willie went pale, his eyes round.
Eduardo shook her roughly back and forth. Her teeth clattered against one another with the impact. She gave another little cry of pain, her breath short and shaky.
“This little bitch is wandering around where she shouldn’t be.” His words came in a wild cascade, tumbling in rapid-fire bursts out of his mouth. He sniffed loudly. “What the fuck, Rico? She one of yours? You can’t just let people wander around this place, ése.”
He sniffed again, as if he were allergic to something in the room.
Dilated pupils, runny nose, diarrhea of the mouth: someone’s been sampling the company product. Her eyes fell on an ugly gilded clock on the mantel, naked cherubs gesturing toward the face. It was just after ten thirty—almost fifteen minutes since she’d called Lamb.
Rico held up both hands. “It wasn’t me. I’ve never seen this chick.” He gave her an appraising look, his lids heavy. “I’d remember.”
“Eduardo, man, I think you’re hurting her,” Willie said, his voice uneasy. “Why don’t you let her go?”
“Shut the fuck up, Willie.” Eduardo jerked Veronica close to his body, his face only inches from hers. The smooth-talking flirt of the night before was gone. This Eduardo was taut and aggressive. Tendons strained in his neck and arms, and his hair stuck up where he’d been running his fingers through it. Between that and his bulging eyes, he looked quite mad.