by Avery Duff
The Bronco drove past him, but before Stanley could follow, the Bronco stopped on a side street.
Stanley thought, Man, oh, man. Bet they’re going at it right there, and cut his engine.
He got out with his burner phone, lit a Lark, headed their way. Walked past them and heard them fucking like minks inside. Probably a screamer, he guessed, and crossed the road fifty yards ahead of them. Acting like he was on a phone call, he came back their way, far side of the street. There she was, on top of him, really going to town.
Oh, yeah, Stanley was thinking.
Maybe he’d bullshit Jack a little, give him his money’s worth, and tell him he batted off the Bronco’s side mirror in Shutters’ parking garage. Jack would start in on him about surveillance, but he’d tell boss man, “It’s Stanley, Jack. I always check.”
Tonight, Stanley wondered how this pair had crossed Jack. Didn’t they know Jack always got even? No, not even. He always wound up on top, same as at Venice High all those years ago.
Good-looking as Jack was, it took the cool high school crowd a while to figure out how tough and vindictive the new kid was. Not too long, though. Not the way Jack punched, fast and hard with bad intention, like the boxers say.
Getting back in his car, Stanley wondered if Jack had nailed the lawyer’s girl. Who knows? He’d laid everything with a pulse since they were kids, Jackie had. Like the hairdresser in that old Shampoo movie.
No one really knew Jack, but Stanley felt like he came as close as anyone, going back as far they did. When he got caught breaking and entering those times, it was lawyer-friend Jack who got him into diversion, twice. Third time, Jack let him do eighteen months in County, but even then he hadn’t quit shooting up.
Couple times, with Jack’s wife out of town, Stanley had driven up to the mansion on Stone Canyon. Sitting around the kitchen bullshitting with Jack, him drinking carrot juice and Jack with that single malt he liked drinking now. Like old times, except Jack’s slut of a mom wasn’t asking her ten-year-old son to zip up her dress and tell her how young and pretty she looked before leaving on another sleepover. And up on Stone Canyon, Jack’s mom didn’t leave behind his beat-down dad, sunk into the living room sofa, hacking Viceroys on disability, and mainlining whatever vodka quarts had been cheapest down at Mercado Diego.
Stanley knew Jack hadn’t forgotten all that early life mess, either. Once, old man Brightwell starting barking phlegm upstairs, and the sound carried down to them in the kitchen. Hearing it, Jack had raised his glass to Stanley.
“Cheers, Stanley. To old times.”
And Stanley was thinking, My pal made it all the way up the hill to the big leagues. Effin’ Jack Cross Pierce.
He flicked that NA bracelet on his car’s mirror. Going on two years sober. Before that, he’d slipped up, started running that shit again. He knew he could keep it on the straight and narrow if he did one simple thing: Stay away from smack. Don’t get anywhere near smack. No way could he handle smack. No way could he do just a little smack. Not ever. Not even a little skin pop, or he could OD again.
“I am a junkie,” he said in his car. And like he told Jack last week: “The thought of it, the idea of running smack, starts me fiending for it.”
Like he was fiending this very second, Jesus. He already knew what those horndogs in the Bronco were up to, rest of the night and then some. So instead of following them, he drove over to his regular meeting, a church up on Colorado, and sat himself down for some bitter coffee and fellowship.
CHAPTER 27
Alison lay across Robert’s bed, blissed out, wearing nothing but a distant smile. Stretched out across from her, he was naked, too, and immobile. On their way home from Shutters, between more gropes and probes, he brought her up to speed about keeping quiet about the case—keeping mum forever. About how they were obligated to meet Leslie at her bank on Monday, keep their money there for at least one month. How the cash payout would be delayed for a little while. But she had no real questions or problems with the scenario—she got it.
Now, in his apartment, he tried summoning the energy to grab a champagne bottle on the bedside table. A bridge too far at the moment as a loud series of knocks landed on his front door. Neither of them moved.
“Food’s here,” he said.
“Can’t get up,” she said. “But food . . .”
They both lay there.
“All right, I’m going,” she said. “Like this.” She started to get up. He pulled her back down, giving her the point. He grabbed a towel, wrapped it, and walked out.
As he paid the delivery guy at the front door, he heard her call out, “Which one is it?”
“Sushi,” he called back, closing the door.
She joined him in panties and one of his Hastings Law hoodies. “We can’t eat sushi in bed, right?”
“Bad idea,” he agreed.
So they mixed the wasabi and soy sauce and sat at his dining-room-table-slash-desk, feasting on brown-rice sushi—salmon and yellowtail—and soft-shell-crab hand rolls.
“You’re incredible, you know that?” she said.
“C’mon, who’s counting?”
She jabbed him in the arm with a chopstick. “Not that. I mean, I never thought we’d beat him. That we’d win.”
He reminded her about Jack’s weak alibi, his overall weak position, and she said, “Not the case so much. It’s more the way I think, the way Brian thought, too. We were the little guys, and my dad used to say little guys always lose. Get hosed is how he put it, and he said it all the time, even before his business went belly-up.”
“Little guys, they lose a lot. He’s right.”
“I thought about my dad lately—before today, even—and I decided all that losing was his fault.”
“How so?” he asked.
“He took out a loan on our land and put it all back into the kitchen showroom, then he doubled down again. Three years later, too late, our land was worth real money—again. Developers were all over it, paying top dollar—again.”
“But you did win today. You have the check. It’s for you. You won.”
“I know I did, but . . . wait.”
She went back in the bedroom and came back with one of his bedside photographs. In it, Robert’s mother and father sat tandem on a racehorse in a corral. Mom proudly held a blown-up check, beaming for the camera.
“Look at your mom and dad. Is it just me, or do they look like movie stars? They look like sky’s-the-limit people. See what I mean?”
He nodded. “I took the picture, and I see how it looks, but it wasn’t like that. That filly was Sweet Lorraine. She placed in the money that week.”
“Meaning?”
“She finished third—finally in the money. And that check on steroids Mom’s grinning about? It barely covered the feed bill that year. Then there’s the trainer, the vet bills, and all the rest. If you’re really, really rich, and we weren’t, it’s cool and it’s glamorous. But what horse racing is mainly? It’s expensive. And it’s risky, and the farm lost lots of money doing it before we quit.”
“You’re saying everybody fucks up?”
“No. I’m saying people who have money? Especially them.”
“Come on,” she said.
“Seriously. People with money can afford to make bigger mistakes, and they make ’em all the time.” He told her about the family vineyard. “End of the day, that was a bust, too.”
“What are your parents like, besides being craps-shooting maniacs?”
Smiling, he said, “When you get past that big farmhouse, I guess they’re like anyone else.”
“Anyone else? I don’t know about that. I . . .”
Another knock on the door. He grabbed some cash off the table to pay the next delivery guy.
“Pizza and sushi? What were we thinking?”
“We weren’t,” he said.
After he paid for the pizza, he asked her, “Bedroom?”
“Pizza? Definitely bedroom.”
Back on
his bed, between slices of cheese, pepperoni, and mushrooms, they kept talking. Seemed like the words flowed easier with the lawsuit behind them.
“You like it over in Culver City?” he asked.
“At night, when I open my windows, if the wind’s blowing right, I can hear big-rig blowouts on the 405. Urban, cool—I’m sick of it.”
“Lot of things in storage?”
“Some, over in the Valley. It’s probably been on Storage Wars Tarzana by now.”
“On what?”
“Storage Wars, that cable show.”
“Show about what?”
She told him how they auctioned off unpaid storage lockers to a cast of regular bidders. “You missed a lot of epic TV working so hard,” she said, kidding around.
“Got some catching up to do,” he said. “You know, I’m thinking about getting a new place. Something bigger.”
“Me, too, now. A lot bigger.”
Silence as they kept eating.
“Listen,” he said, “we don’t know each other as well as . . . as well as some people who . . . you know, decide to . . .”
For once, he was lost for words. She didn’t help him out.
“What I mean is, the last five years I worked hard, worked too much, especially the last two years, and I put off making any commitment for a long time except for work, and what I’m thinking . . .”
She finally let him off the hook. “Hey, I know, let’s get a place together.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Like I was saying.”
He told her about a builder down on the Peninsula that was in over his head. Once he had his certificate of occupancy from the city, he found termite damage in his treated floor joists and was wrestling with vendors over who was responsible for repairs.
“What’s it look like?” she asked.
“Like this,” he said, pulling a brochure from a bedside-table drawer. “Right on the beach.”
“Love it,” she said, reading. “I’m in if you are.”
“Let’s check it out first thing,” he said, and leaned over to kiss her.
She slid an arm around his neck and didn’t let him go. “When you first walked in that conference room, I could tell you weren’t like those guys.”
“Not an asshole?”
“No, really. You didn’t like what was going on, but they were into it. Then later you helped me out in the garage. And what’d I do? I got you in trouble, but you still made it all work out, and honestly, I don’t know anybody else like you.”
Before he could thank her, she pushed him down and got on top of him. He swept the pizza box onto the floor.
“Staying over tonight, right?” he asked.
“Let’s get something going,” she said. “That’s what I want.”
He leaned up and kissed her. “Yeah, let’s do that.”
“And by the way,” she whispered, as he went inside her, “you are incredible . . .”
At 12:15 a.m. Robert bolted up in his bed, disoriented. Across his bedroom, he caught a female form in the darkness. It was Alison, getting dressed.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “You leaving?”
“Get dressed,” she said. “We won. Move your ass.”
A half hour later, after sneaking over the locked gate of the Venice Pier, they leaped from its railing, holding hands, and hit the dark Pacific Ocean, screaming.
CHAPTER 28
Present Day
“Need you to drop your pants, Mr. Worth.”
Robert had been dozing off and on in his jail cell when the doctor spoke from his cell door. Now the doctor was coming in, along with the same cop who’d locked him up—what was it, two, three hours ago? He rolled himself over and up into sitting position, slid his legs off the bunk, and put his feet on the floor.
Standing stiffly, he unbuttoned his jeans, dropped them to his ankles. His right thigh was wrapped in surgical gauze, his dried blood dark where it had seeped through.
“How’s it feeling?” the doctor asked, unwrapping the gauze.
“Hurts.”
“Hurts or throbs?” the doctor asked.
“More hurts.”
When the gauze came off, Robert saw the wound: about four inches deep, one inch wide.
“You mighta gotten lucky,” the doctor said.
In jail? Stabbed? Lucky? Looking back on it, he thought, Yeah, maybe I was lucky. So far, anyway.
“Want you to take all these,” the doctor said. He handed Robert a white pill packet and a small bottle of Arrowhead water. “Two more Augmentin, three extra-strength Tylenol with codeine for pain. That makes six Augmentin taken so far, and I’m leaving you two of each if you need them. I’m not seeing any redness, nothing out of the ordinary, anyway.”
“Thanks,” Robert said, and gulped down all five pills.
The doctor handed him another packet and said, “If you get an increase in pain or swelling, either one—and I mean if it hurts like hell—take the other two Augmentin and Tylenol right then and get somebody in here, ASAP.”
“What’s wrong?” Robert asked.
“Knife was clean, that’s not my concern, but a sewer drain empties seven, eight hundred yards up the beach from where you were. Never know what kind of bacteria’s floating around. Surfers pick up hep C, but MRSA’s my primary concern.”
The badass bacteria that put you in intensive care on an IV? No, thanks, Robert thought.
“Any word from Officer Sedgwick?” he asked the cop.
“Told you before, don’t know him.”
Seltzer? Segway? Schwartz? Robert wondered if he had the name wrong. But Sedgwick had been ready to shoot him on the dark beach, and that made him all the more memorable.
“What about the body?” Robert asked. “At the coroner’s, right, Doc?”
“Yep. They’re telling me the wounds to—”
“Hey!” somebody shouted.
A man in a suit leaned on the cell door, looking in. His left eyelid drooped under scar tissue, and his cheeks bore old pockmarks. “Plenty of time for that coming up,” he told the other two, but he was looking at Robert.
The cop said, “I hear you, Detective.”
“In the morning, then.” And this time the detective was talking to Robert, without the pretense of a smile.
After the detective left, Robert couldn’t pry anything else from the pair in his cell, other than the detective’s last name: DeGrasso.
Once the doctor cleaned Robert’s wound and rewrapped his leg, he left his patient on that cold metal bunk, his features drained. The heavy metal door slammed shut at the end of the hall, echoing. A bad sound, even when you’re getting top-shelf treatment.
Made sense they’d treat him like a VIP. Innocent man lands in jail, loses a leg? No, wait—innocent lawyer lands in jail, loses a leg. Sounded like a lawyer joke: Hey, you hear the one about the innocent lawyer losing a leg in jail?
A little too close to home. He threw an arm over his face, tried to forget about DeGrasso’s hard look, and tried to fill in the blanks in that number sequence he’d traced in the dust under his bunk.
“La, la . . . nine, eighteen . . . da, da, da, da, da . . . La, la . . . shit.”
That’s as far as he could take it. Same result as earlier, but now the codeine mercifully buzzed his brain.
Looking back, he wondered, What if none of it had happened? Maybe he’d be sitting in the conference room with his law partners, offering to take the lead in firing Chase for padding his time sheets. Then again, here in the real world, Chase wasn’t the one in jail.
He considered his options. Hire a criminal lawyer to tell him his Miranda rights? To tell him not to speak to anyone about anything, then hold out his hand for a fat retainer? Call his father, his mother, his uncle, middle of the night? God knows what that would stir up at the farm. If he needed anybody from there, it would be Luis, the farm manager, but about all Luis could do is find a criminal lawyer in Gilroy.
Doesn’t matter, he convinced himself. He didn’t need he
lp.
So far at least, nobody had said a word to him about the gun. Had Sedgwick—whatever his name was—seen it last night? He didn’t mention it if he had. With everything that had been going on, it was hard to know exactly where it might have landed below those cliffs.
He remembered the pay-phone call he’d made earlier that night: she said she would come for him, didn’t she? And he asked her to bring his laptop, didn’t he? And he’d been careful along the way, right?
Have I left enough bread crumbs? he finally wondered as that codeine took a firm hold and breezed him away . . .
CHAPTER 29
Thirteen Days Earlier, Santa Monica, California
Robert’s and Alison’s dealings at the bank had been straightforward so far: opening their new accounts with Leslie and endorsing the law firm’s settlement checks for deposit only.
With Alison beside him at Leslie’s desk, Robert now watched Leslie inside the manager’s glass cubicle across the lobby. Jerome, she said his name was, and from over in the cubicle, Leslie was waving at them. So was Jerome. Robert nudged Alison and they waved back.
According to Leslie, the standard bank drill was this: it would put a bank hold on their funds for ten days. Their debit cards would be available in fifteen days—no exceptions. Until the ten-day holding period passed, there would be no funds available. Hearing that from Leslie, Robert balked at 100 percent of their funds being held up—especially on the law firm’s local check. Leslie agreed with him and was still talking to Jerome about cutting them some slack.
That was the beauty of a certified check, he was thinking: the whole amount available today. But had he insisted on it with Philip, who knows? The whole deal with the other partners could have come unraveled for no reason, or for any reason at all.
“This whole thing blows my mind.” Alison squeezed his hand.
“I know,” he said, staying cool but thinking, Yes!
Leslie walked back across the lobby and took a seat at her desk. “Sorry that took so long, bank stuff, but I have good news. I told Jerome exactly how you and I feel about the one hundred percent hold on your funds.”